by Wilfrid Jones, delivered to the Institute of Liturgical Music’s study day on the 23rd May 2015, the Vigil of Pentecost.

The Second Vatican Council was certainly a momentous event within the history of the Catholic Church. For the first time in the history of the Church, a Council was called, not to declare a dogma or reproach a heresy, but to form policy. The first policy to be formed was that concerning the liturgy and within that context music was discussed. These discussions, after much wrangling and even manipulation, were eventually synthesised into Chapter VI of Sacrosanctum Concilium.

The Council has left an impression on all Catholics who remember it and this collective memory has had significant effects for those who were not alive, such as myself. The images we have of it today have, for some, created an image of the past which, though not a true history, but which has enormous force. A false collective memory in the model described by Maurice Halbwachs.

The cadre of Catholic who was at the Second Vatican Council is vanishingly small since it was attended mostly by senior clergymen who were already of an advanced age. Today, those who have memories of it going on are already one step removed from the event itself, hearing about it in the national and Catholic press and having clergy preach about it in their home parishes, preaching which tended to see the changes as liberation from the old constraints of rubricism.

The other main source of information given about the Council were the liturgical changes themselves that were implemented following the Council. Altars were changed around, liturgical rites simplified and, perhaps most noticeably of all, the Latin language was replaced with the vernacular. This went for music too.

As part of my research I asked some parishioners in a local church who had been alive during the Council “what do you remember Vatican II doing?”. None mentioned music. However, comments flowed thick and fast about the liturgy, “they changed the altar round”,[1] “the mass went into English”,[2] “it became more approachable”[3]. Some comments were to do with broader attitudes: “it opened the windows for the Church”[4]. Some comments were deeply personal: “it was one of the main things that made me become a Catholic”. Although on closer questioning that parishioner was not consciously aware of it, he was referencing a comment attributed to John XXIII: “I want to throw open the windows of the Church so that we can see out and the people can see in”. This quotation has survived despite the fact hat there is very little evidence that John XXIII ever said it because it neatly summarises a change of attitude which did take place in the Church though not as a result of anything the Council did itself, but rather the aspirations Catholics held for it. Se non è vero, è ben trovato.

This shows up the fact that the collective memory of the Council is not particularly accurate despite its power. With the exception of converts, parishioners who had lived through the Council focussed entirely on liturgy without mentioning any of the other issues it went on to discuss. Similarly no cradle Catholics mentioned of the key project of the Council, how the Church was to relate to the modern world. Several commented on post-Conciliar liturgical changes not mentioned at the Council.

My research has shown that there is some awareness of this potential fault in collective memory. For example, when I asked one of the ladies of the parish, who knew that I study the Council, what she remembered Vatican II doing, she replied nervously “you tell me” scared of saying something incorrect. This is interesting when put in the context of Halbwach’s views on collective memory because she is in the cadre of those practicing the faith during the Council and while she remembered it as a time of great excitement, but was unsure of putting any specifics on what the Council actually changed. It might be that this lady is more reflective than most others who participate in the collective memory of the Second Vatican Council or it might be that the collective memory is in fact quite vague.

Unsurprisingly, little to none of the collective memory of the Council is formed by the documents it produced, but “even those who have little understanding of the specific documents of the Council can remember the excitement and turmoil of the period between 1959… and 1978.”[5] People, as you can imagine, tend not to develop the powerful bonds of memory with policy documents that they do with events.

Take this book for instance. Colleen McDannell takes a snapshot of small-town-America’s collective memory of the Council by way of her own mother. She terms the collective memory “The Spirit of Vatican II”. In its exploration she draws the contrast between the life of the Church before and after the Council, making it clear that it represents a watershed, particularly for women in the Church. For McDannell “The Second Vatican Council stimulates changes that brought her [mother] more intimately in contact with the ritual and theological life of her church, by allowing her to “[join] with other men and women to distribute Communion at Mass, sing folk songs, and call their pastor by their first name”[6] and for McDannell herself Vatican II is represented by musical experiences: “I grew up after the Second Vatican Council, playing guitar music at English-language masses.” Her involvement in the ritual life of the Church was characterised not by an increased prayer life but by increased activity. Her agenda concerning the sexual politics of the 1960s and 70s gets in the way of a critical appraisal of the Liturgical Reform. I have no problem with the fact that I’m a feminist, but I can see that it’s an agenda that has, for my feminist cadre, had a detrimental effect on their collective memory of the Council.

Yet there are those who do remember the pre-Consiliar liturgy fondly. One local priest who remembers being aghast during the changes which he, at the ripe age of eight thought “took all the mystique out of it”. Ex ore parvulorum veritas. Another parishioner remembered learning to pray using chant. Another the time that he was allowed to pray in his heart without having to worry about what to do or say. This nostalgia has been forbidden by the prevailing norm of the collective memory of the pre-Conciliar period as a spiritual and liturgical dark age. It’s produced a suppressed, even repressed, collective memory.

However, more recently the New Liturgical Movement’s aims have brought this repressed collective memory to the surface. Young priests in particular are freed from the constraints of the negative collective memory of the “Latin Mass” by Summorum Pontificum, the letter issued motu proprio by Benedict XVI in 2007 granting permission for all priests to celebrate accurding to that use. For many their only experience of the usus antiquior is one in the context of and formed by the Ordinary Form of the Mass. Only one parishioner spoke of indult masses (that is, Tridentine masses celebrated with the permission of the local ordinary between the Liturgical Reform and 2007), even though they had taken place regularly in his parish, and he spoke them fondly. Significantly, he was also the only parishioner to have any knowledge of the content of the documents of the Council.

The other day though, I saw a Facebook status with this image attached. The status read “I was in Cambridge yesterday, and stumbled across this young priest quietly saying the EF. I reflected how thrilled I would have been in the 1980s to have been there. How the world has changed! This is no longer a criminal act, but simply part of the Church’s worship once more.” It seems times are changing and the collective memory, though not fading, is being transformed by the reinterpretation of the Council in the Hermeneutic of Continuity.[7]

You will have noticed that thus far I’ve talked almost exclusively about the Liturgical part of Liturgical Music. Quite so. Well, the fact of the matter is that in the course of my research very few people volunteered accounts of the changes in the liturgy’s music until I prompted them to do so. Given that they were going from a position where there was very little music and certainly almost no congregational music at mass before the Council to the present situation where all the music at the Sunday morning and evening masses is congregational seems to be a very large shift indeed. Of course they may have had ideas around the area when they talked about the congregation being “more involved” in the liturgy since the Council, but that there was little specific mention of the fact is noteworthy: one must surely wonder whether the music they sing at Church on a Sunday has really had much of an effect on them and if so, what is it in the music that is so lacking in profundity that parishioners don’t think it worth mentioning?

In order to look at how music effects people’s spirituality let’s turn to St Thomas Aquinas. The first thing to do though is to establish that we should pray out loud at all. After all, prayer and praise are interior actions of the soul.[8] Aquinas notes three objections to praising God with the lips.[9]

1.That God ought to be accorded something greater than praise since he is “above all praise”[10],

2. That one may glorify God with the lips while not glorifying him in the heart

3.That praise is given verbally to people in order that they might be encouraged to do better.

Aquinas responds to these by explaining[11]

1. That we owe God praise because we are commanded to praise Him by Scripture and Tradition[12] and thus, being as hired servants (“λατρεία”) to the master, we obey God’s word.

2. That spoken praise is not for the benefit of God, since he does not need it, but that we ourselves who praise him verbally and those who hear us might grow in reverence for him. The exterior action of praise promotes the interior love of the praised one.

3. We, not God, are encouraged by our verbal prayer.

From this position Aquinas addresses the question of whether God should be praised in Song. This is much more contentious because of Aquinas’s background in Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy in which art of any kind is seen as problematic when it imitated the world of appearances rather than the world of the Forms. When art imitates the world of the Forms it is morally uplifting but when it imitates that of Appearances it is detrimental the moral character of the one receiving the art. Plato proposed that in the perfect society the modes that promote sorrow and relaxation ought to be banned while those that promote courage ought to be permitted for the benefit of soldiers in time of war.[13] Fr Guy explained the modes last time, but they’re basically the way pitches were organised in western music before the 17^th century.

Aquinas goes on note the objections from Scripture and Tradition.[14]

1. That the canticles ought to be spiritual not corporeal.

2. That Jerome reprimands his clergy for performing theatrical music during the Divine Office.

3. That Gregory the Great orders the clergy of the Diocese of Rome not to sing at the altar.

4. That singing in the liturgy was imported from Jewish ritual.

5. That interior prayer is the object of the liturgy and that since musicians must devote their attention to the technicalities of performance they are distracted from prayer.

Aquinas is notorious for arguing for the status quo[15] and as a Dominican friar bound to the choral office it is hardly surprising that he comes down on the side of those in favour of singing in the liturgy responding to the objections with arguments saying[16]

1. That corporeal canticles arouse spiritual canticles.

2. That Jerome is condemning showing off in the liturgy rather than singing per se.

3. That major clergy have the office of teaching and preaching which is a greater way of sanctifying the faithful, but that those who do not have that office ought to sing.

That the objection ought only to be directed towards music played on man made instruments since they represent the voice, something of the World of Appearances, not towards unaccompanied song which represents the music of the World of the Forms.

That by lingering on the text longer when it is sung rather than declaimed, the singer pays more attention to it, not less. The listeners too have their devotion aroused even when they do not understand every word of the text.

1. That by lingering on the text longer when it is sung rather than declaimed, the singer pays more attention to it, not less. The listeners too have their devotion aroused even when they do not understand every word of the text.

This understanding of music in relation to prayer and praise must underpin all liturgico-musical reform. The problems that have arisen in liturgical music are “symptomatic of a more profound question: what is worship?”[17] Finding solutions to the problems of liturgical music may well suggest paths for broader liturgical renewal. By taking a step back from academic liturgical studies to consider those principles that underpin the reason liturgy exists, one finds compelling arguments for liturgical renewal, principles clearly present within the Constitution on the Liturgy that the Council produced.

It promotes music as a means, not an end, just as the liturgy itself is a means not an end. To treat liturgical music as a cultural artefact to be polished and admired is to entirely miss its point. Its purpose is to promote piety in the singer and hearer. To veer dramatically away from Aquinas I’ll quote you a verse from a Praise and Worship song that gets sung far too often in my local parish.

When the music fades

All is stripped away

And I simply come

Longing just to bring

Something that's of worth

That will bless Your heart

I'll bring You more than a song

For a song in itself

Is not what You have required

You search much deeper within

Through the way things appear

You're looking into my heart

I'm coming back to the heart of worship

And it's all about You,

It's all about You, Jesus.[18]

This coming back to the heart of worship is something profoundly unifying, something that goes to the most intimate part of who and what we are as creations, as humans and as Christians. In the earliest Christian worship the Pauline epistles suggest that there was a great deal of ecstatic babbling in tongues which we tern xenoglossia, but as worship become more structured the babbling transformed into something more profound, a Pentecostal glossolalia, something unifying where all understand in their own language. Indeed The Liturgy itself has a profound glossolalia, communicating to each equally in a language personal to their own soul. Augustine finds himself at the cusp of this change where xenoglossia is beginning to transform into glossolalia. The babbling is being replaced by ululation which in turn is replaced with song.

Behold, he gives as it were the tune of your song; seek not words as if you could explain whereby God is pleased. Sing with jubilation: for this is to sing skilfully unto God, to sing with jubilation. What is it to sing with jubilation? To be unable to understand, to express in words, what is sung in the heart. For singers, either in the harvest, or in the vineyard, or in any other busy work, after they have begun in the words of their hymns to exult and rejoice, being as it were filled with so great joy, that they cannot express it in words, then turn from actual words, and proceed to sounds of jubilation. The jubilee is a sound signifying that the heart labours with that which it cannot utter. And who can look on that jubilation, but the Ineffable God? For He is Ineffable, to  whom you cannot speak; and if you cannot speak to Him, and ought not to keep silent towards him, what remains to do but jubilation ; that the heart may rejoice without words, and the boundless extent of joy may have no limits of syllables? Sing skilfully unto Him with jubilation.

This is worth pondering on. How do we express liturgical glossolalia today? This is a communication that at once leaves the Christian to the mysticism to which we are each called whilst uniting them to one another in the face of the three that is one. Each summer I have the pleasure of taking young singers to the South of France, spitting distance from Saint Tropez where there is a lovely and tiny monastery. Well, someone has to be a monk on the Côte d’Azur. There the monks’ glossolalia is plain for all to see. They sing in this strange song unlike any other on earth. Their movements in the sanctuary are the dance of David. They are the madmen who could be mistaken for drunks at nine o’clock in the morning.[19]

The young singers, knowingly or not, contribute to this. I am careful to take people who actually need more than a week’s singing holiday but who need time in a monastery having a singing holiday. The ecstasy of the monastic glossolalia is heightened by the choir. Think of a Second Viennese School mass setting, Mozart’s Coronation Mass or Haydn’s Nelson Mass or even a non-liturgical setting like Vivaldi’s Gloria or Bach’s Mass in B Minor. These are not just pieces of art, these are a form of communication which speaks directly to the heart of the individual Christian, by passing all barriers of language. This is the glossolalia proper to music.

It’s dependent on our collective memory of other music, we get a general sense of what a piece is communicating by reference to other music with common elements. To make a rash generalisation to explain my point. A major key with a fast tempo and lively rhythms is happy. We know this from music we have a collective memory of dancing to as much as praying to. Slow music in a minor key is for funerals because the rest of slow music in minor keys we know is sad. It’s a web of associations deep in our subconscious. But those are only generalised ideas. Music really speaks to us on a much more personal level. Here’s the reflections of one individual I interviewed for my research.

• “My one big favourite [hymn], is “Oh Lord, my God when I in awesome wonder” and my mum loved that. She loved the singing. She was always in the Liturgy Group, always part of everything. She died when she was ninety four, my mum. She was a great parish member who cleaned the Church for years; always been a hard worker. That was one of her favourites, but particularly in our old hymn book there were three verses and they put in the second verse, “when through the woods and forest glades I wander”, it was added and that verse, I mean we had it while mum was alive, but it was certainly [could have been] written for my mum’s funeral. Church was my mum’s life, she had a pretty hard life, my dad wasn’t the perfect dad, he used to drink quite a bit, and mum had four children, there were four of us. She worked hard. The church meant a lot to mum. I remember when she’d be falling out with something or other and she was really not going to keep this going but she’d have to stay till the parish football pools had finished because she used to collect the money in! The priest was a great friend to me at that particular time because he liaised with my brother which was a hard job for anyone and celebrated my mum’s funeral. We’ve got a video of it actually. At the time I though ‘a video? Of a funeral?’ but it was beautiful, it really was and that verse [the second of “O Lord, my God”], it described mum’s funeral. ‘through the woods and forest glades’ and the birds singing sweetly in the trees, and we carried mum to be buried on the hillside. It was a wonderful event which could have been a very upsetting family time. But she had everything. She had everything she would have wanted, and it was lovely”. And back to mum’s favourite hymn. When it comes up and the planning group will probably say ‘I’m not sure about that second verse’ I say ‘that second verse was written for my mum. It describes the day to a ‘T’ and obviously I love it.”

There is the general idea of that hymn “O Lord my God” that anyone could pick up from the unity of words and music, but for this individual it goes so much further. It speaks directly to her. She is left to her own Christian mysticism, the memory and love of her late mother, whilst at once partaking in the collective worship of the subject of her own mysticism, Jesus. This is really the heart of worship, my relationship with Christ whilst being part of the community of faith He founded, the Church which encourages me by the spoken and sung prayer, as Aquinas was saying earlier. Now with truly liturgical music you have all of this effect going on in its fullness. Not only am I united with my immediate community of faith, those participating in the same mass as I am currently attending, but untied with the community of faith all over the world and, indeed through all time. Music, that art form which exists in time not space allows that unity which transcends boundaries of language. It gives us the space for divine lunacy. Corporeal canticles give way to spiritual canticles: canticles of the Holy Spirit. It gets to the point where it is not so much us singing, or monks singing, or a choir singing, but the Holy Spirit singing to me.

I’m going to leave you today with what sounds like a weird theory from Plato about disrupting musical traditions.

“They must throughout be watchful against innovations in… counter to the established order, and to the best of their power guard against them… For a change to a new type of music is something to beware of as a hazard of all our fortunes. For the modes of music are never disturbed without unsettling of the most fundamental political and social conventions”[20]

Music forms part of the fabric of our experience of time, a vast array of experiences that make up individual memories which mesh together to form collective memory. Music has a particular ability to stir the emotions, to be a technology of the body and psychology by which we regulate our actions by physical entrainment and our moods by emotional entrainment, syncing up with the mood of the music. But it also has the potential to profoundly improve or disrupt our spirituality. Which have we done in the last fifty years?

Think of the time the Second Vatican Council took place. Twenty years after the height of World War II. Those who were teenagers and in their twenties during the War and had an overpowering collective memory the evil of their immediate past were at the height of their influence. The younger generation was seeking nebulous liberation from anything and everything in their collective memory. The past had to be got rid of and we needed a brave new world, we had to break the strands of memoy. Well that brave new world is what brought about the architecture of the civil centre here in Wolverhampton and the same spirit as motivated the Liturgical Reform. Out with the old, in with the new. The past could not be allowed to survive. We have to ask ourselves now, fifty years on, when the Liturgical Reform is now our past and our collective memory, how much of it was the spirit of the times and how much of it was the Holy Spirit?