The Newman Rambler

The History of the Newman Chapel Choir

Spring/Summer 2021 ‖ Veronica Tarka

Veronica Tarka '22 studies neuroscience at McGill University. She is a classically trained pianist and church musician of over a decade. Special thanks to Peter McNally, John Zucchi, Fr. John Meehan SJ, Fr. Francis McKee, Wendy DeSouza, Heather Skublics, Brian Butcher, Matthew McKernan, Martin Andrews, Daniel Cere, Josh Abrego, Sean Mangahas, Terrel Joseph, and Holly Ann Garnett for their contributions to this article.

“IT IS FAIRLY SAFE TO SAY that liturgical music in self-styled ‘developed’ countries simply has collapsed.” This provocative take, penned by Fr. Neil J. Roy,  appeared in The Newman Rambler nearly ten years ago in a retrospective on the Second Vatican Council.[1] Today, debates about the proper role of music in the liturgy continue to roil parishes and student chaplaincies across the globe. While scant consensus has emerged, many Catholics share the suspicion that our music is not what it once was, or what it could be. Fr. Roy’s Rambler article argued that the decline of Catholic liturgical music could be traced to the reforms of the 1960s—that the admittedly admirable goal of making the Mass legible to the common man had overshot its mark and done damage. What Fr. Roy does not mention is that the pre-Vatican II Church had already lamented the decline of sacred music for almost a century before the Council even began.[2] The conciliar documents themselves, far from calling for guitar Masses and tambourines, argued that “Gregorian chant… should be given pride of place.”[3] How did the message of Sacrosanctum Concilium go largely ignored? Why were many of the changes that followed the Second Vatican Council so alien to the reforms the Council had been called to implement? And what are we to make today of the ongoing debate over the Church’s musical future?

These questions have been central to the liturgical life of McGill’s Newman Centre for decades—in fact, the Centre has in many ways been a microcosm of wider conversations in the North American Catholic Church. As we look to rebuild our chaplaincy in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, the question emerges: rebuild what? What has been the musical tradition of the Newman Centre over the last 50 years? Is our history primarily one of Low Masses, reverently spoken? Or was the chapel filled with singing? Did we have a praise band? Did we have a Schola?

To answer these questions and attempt to untangle the threads that have woven together Newman’s musical life, I sat down with past musicians and Directors of Music to ask them about their work. From Peter McNally, who served the chaplaincy in the early 1960s, to Adam Wills Begley, our incoming Director of Music come September 2021, a fascinating and complex narrative emerged that mirrors wider musical trends across North America.

All of the directors I interviewed emphasized the centrality of music to Catholic worship. Indeed, music is—like religious belief—a human universal. In our current climate of mistrust and polarization, what better than music to unite bickering factions into a renewed Church? And yet music has been caught in the crossfire of a debate that falsely pits “tradition” and “inclusiveness” against one another. As a result, Catholic liturgical music has not only been partitioned into two camps, but has, as an edifice, begun to crumble at the corners. While many in the West are aware that the music (and art) of the Church reached a pinnacle during the Renaissance, few realize how little of that musical tradition survived the voyage to North America. The United States was founded by Protestant colonists, and harbored widespread anti-Catholic sentiment until the Kennedy presidency and beyond.[4] Canada, while colonised initially by French Catholics, came under British (Protestant) rule in 1763. Waves of Irish immigration in the 19th century began to increase the Catholic population in the US and Canada, but Ireland lacked a literate musical tradition due to the centuries of English rule that had forced the Church underground.[5] While “Trad” Catholics today often assume that North America had a flourishing musical culture that was trampled by the reforms of Vatican II, the sad reality is that many Catholic parishes in the early 20th century, especially those on the East Coast, had very little liturgical music of any kind, opting at every opportunity for the spoken Low Mass.[6]

Out of this musically barren landscape came the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, which aimed to increase lay participation by ensuring that worshippers “take part fully aware of what they are doing” and are “actively engaged in the rite.”[7] Though these aims were admirable, the remedies suggested by the Council were followed with varying degrees of conscience. Documents like Sacrosanctum Concilium and Musicam Sacram emphasized the centrality of chant and organ music, and reiterated the necessity of training seminarians in music.[8] Yet many of these recommendations were neglected, and heterodox liturgical changes justified by recourse to the nebulous “Spirit of Vatican II” became widespread to the point of notoriety. Without a doubt, however, the post-conciliar world saw a period of renewed lay engagement, a surge of musical composition, and an enthusiasm for liturgical music that had long been regarded in North America as “too Protestant.”[9]

The Newman Centre of McGill University has weathered these cultural changes, from the early decades of the 20th century through Vatican II and up to the present day. Liturgical music at Newman has not escaped the proverbial tension between “tradition” and “relevance,” and the musical history of our chaplaincy parallels the larger story of music in the Church. In the wake of the Council, Newman’s leaders were quick to embrace new freedoms, and student musicians began to offer guitar-centered music in the style of the American folk revival that had peaked in the mid-1960s. Folk-inspired hymns and mass settings caught on like wildfire in an America swept by anti-war and civil rights movements that understood folk music as the music of social progress. The 1970s and 80s saw prolific output from Catholic music groups like the St. Louis Jesuits, witnessing also the rise of annual gatherings like the Steubenville University Conference, where “charismatic” music was (and still is) central. Musical staples of these decades were collected in hymnals like the Catholic Book of Worship (CBW) (1972) and Gather (1988)—hymnals that continue to form the backbone of liturgical music in many parishes today.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, music at Newman was informal and spontaneous—perhaps around six singers accompanied by guitar or piano. In the early 1990s with the arrival of chaplain Francis McKee (himself a musician), music at Mass became more structured, with a consistent core group of musicians and regular rehearsals. In keeping with previous decades, Gather classics on piano and guitar still comprised the bulk of the repertoire, but occasionally more traditional sounds like Taizé and chant were heard. This trend accelerated when Brian Butcher took over the music direction in 1996. A convert with an Evangelical background, Butcher was a quick study in Catholic liturgy, but his self-education didn’t stop after attaining familiarity with the CBW and Gather. He began to discover ever-greater depths in the Catholic musical tradition, from polyphony to hymnody—and the congregants, trusting his direction, experienced sounds which after decades of the music of the Charismatic Renewal were truly foreign to their ears.

Butcher’s influence continued after his graduation under the leadership of Martin Andrews, who took the helm through the early 2000s. By the end of the decade, however, music at Newman had returned to a state reminiscent of the 1980s—a small group of talented students playing mainly from the CBW and Gather on piano and guitar. (Not, however, without the occasional striking flourish, like one year’s performance of Handel’s Messiah on Easter Sunday.)

In 2012, Ph.D. student Holly Ann Garnett assumed direction of the choir. Armed with training in sacred music from the Newman Centre in Kingston, ON, Holly brought to McGill her love for chant, Taize, and polyphony—broadening the range of music heard at Newman to the widest scope in its history. “There’s just such a beautiful diversity of music that’s available to us in the Catholic Church,” Holly notes, “everything from Renaissance polyphony and chant to a lot of really nice choral settings of contemporary Christian music. I’m not opposed to anything on the gamut as long as it’s done well.”[10]

Holly and her colleagues at Newman became passionate about improving the quality of the liturgy—about bringing an atmosphere of gravitas and reverence to the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. She began organizing structured rehearsals and encouraging Newmanites with musical training to join the choir. After an initial period of foundation-building, the quality of the music spoke for itself: musicians of increasing skill began to flock to the budding ensemble. Music became an integral part of the wider Newman community, spreading from the Mass to gatherings like Adoration nights or sight-singing marathons.

With deep roots put down, musical leadership passed from Garnett to Genevieve Vuksic (née Mays) in 2014 and on to Katrina MacKinnon in 2016; both were choristers under Garnett. The Newman Chapel Choir’s current director, Ariel Pan, sang under MacKinnon and assumed leadership in 2018. Garnett’s standards for reverent liturgical music set precedents that are still felt today—over a decade later.

Music at Newman has followed a trajectory one might expect in a place where students hail from around the globe and few remain longer than four years: many peaks and troughs in musical excellence, student participation, and variety of repertoire. Notably, the troughs have been characterized not so much by lack of student talent or drive as by neglect of music ministry by the Centre’s leadership.

The customary arm-wrestling between advocates of “tradition” and “relevance” in the Church often calls to mind scenes of dramatic resignations from the Parish Council, but this tension has played out in a far more subtle way at Newman. Hostility to musical excellence and to the treasury of Catholic sacred music has not chiefly manifested as aggression or micromanagement but as willful indifference. In the many decades of Newman’s musical history one is challenged to find a single overt attack on liturgical music, but evidence abounds of a prolonged neglect of the resources vital to making music: namely, a dedicated music director, proper musical instruments, and continual investment in community-wide music education.

The most vibrant eras of music at Newman emerged under directors who dedicated hours equivalent to a part-time job immersing themselves in the Church’s tradition, devouring encyclicals and musical masterworks, crafting rehearsal schedules and training their peers. In a university chaplaincy, an environment that should by rights offer musical training, mentorship and community, there was to be found only the tireless work of the (often unpaid) Director of Music. According to Brian Butcher, this was the blind spot during his time at Newman—an era which happily boasted multitudes of courses and discussion groups on theologians such as St. Thomas Aquinas. “Is sacred music somehow less complex than the theology of Thomas Aquinas?” Butcher challenged. “It is, if you only think it was invented with Glory & Praise and Gather; like yesterday. If you understand that there are 2,000 years of Catholic tradition, you might realize that somebody needs as much education to teach this as they do to teach Aquinas.”[11]

Opportunities to be trained as a musician in the Church are few and far between. Numerous Catholic institutions in which musical training should be fundamental—seminaries, universities, and local parishes—have abdicated responsibility without evident remorse. Possibly their guilt is assuaged by the idea that the music of the modern Church is simple—who needs extensive training to play three chords on a guitar? This continued neglect has rendered the talents of highly skilled musicians obsolete, pushing them at best out of the choir loft and at worst out of the Church. The burden of providing dignified, reverent music has instead fallen largely on musicians without extensive musical or liturgical training, snaring these often valiant individuals in a trap where they cannot explore chant and polyphony even if they wanted to because they simply do not have the training. This was the diagnosis offered by Josh Abrego, a musician at Newman in the late 2000s, explaining the era’s dearth of repertoire outside of the Gather and CBW—“We just didn’t have the capacity for that.”[12]

The musical tradition of the Church is the rightful inheritance of every Catholic, but it is naïve to think this tradition can be self-taught. The perceived fight for “relevance” over “tradition” is too often a red herring for the pursuit of convenience over excellence. Scorn for chant and polyphony emerged centuries ago as an (often justified) suspicion of indulgent liturgies hardly focused on Christ, and, ironically, scorn for contemporary Christian music often comes from the exact same place. Both sides in the liturgy wars are duped by a common enemy: neglect for the dignity of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. McGill’s Newman Centre has been blessed to find in many of its musicians a commitment to fighting this neglect, but the crisis will not be truly averted until institutions like Newman and its peers shoulder the responsibility they have abdicated and make excellence in sacred music the default—instead of a happy accident.

Notes

[1] Roy, Neil J. “The Church’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.” The Newman Rambler 11, no. 1 (2014): 33–45.

[2] Pius XII, Musicae Sacrae, encyclical letter, Vatican website, December 25, 1955, §18-19.

[3] Second Vatican Council. Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Sacrosanctum concilium (December 4, 1963). In The Sixteen Documents of Vatican II, ed. Marianne L. Trouve, 47-83. Boston: Pauline Books, 1999. §116.

[4] Beau, Bryan F. Le. A History of Religion in America: From the First Settlements through the Civil War. Routledge, 2017. p. 238.

[5] Gillen, Gerard. “Congregational Singing Deserves a More Prominent Role in Worship.” The Irish Times, July 31, 2006. https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/congregational-singing-deserves-a-more-prominent-role-in-worship-1.1263716.

[6] Day, Thomas. Why Catholics Can’t Sing. Crossroad Publishing, 1992. p. 14-16.

[7] Sacrosanctum concilium. §11.

[8] Second Vatican Council. Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy Musicam Sacram (March 5, 1967). In The Sixteen Documents of Vatican II, ed. Marianne L. Trouve, 47-83. Boston: Pauline Books, 1999. §52.

[9] Saltzman, Russell E. “Catholics Don’t Sing Like Lutherans.” First Things, February 12, 2015.

[10] Garnett, Holly Ann. (Director of Music, 2011-2016), in discussion with the author. December 11, 2020.

[11] Butcher, Brian. (Director of Music, 1996-2000), in discussion with the author. March 4, 2021.

[12] Abrego, Josh quoted by Garnett, Holly Ann, in discussion with the author. December 11, 2020.