Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2007
Some Catholics say they sing in church, but stumble because the music is difficult to follow. Others don’t sing at all because they’re self-conscious around others in their pew.
It’s a serious question of musical quality that one Silver Spring group hopes to gauge with a survey about what Catholics think of the voices, or lack of singing, coming from their fellow congregants.
The National Association of Pastoral Musicians, a group headquartered on Wayne Avenue in Silver Spring, is looking to (unofficially) rate the quality of singing in Catholic churches with a national online survey for Catholic singers and non-singers.
The survey, titled ‘‘Can Catholics Sing?” includes such questions as ‘‘How would you rate the congregational singing in your own parish or worshiping community?” and ‘‘Based on your own experience of participating in the liturgy of other parishes and communities, how would you rate congregational singing generally in the United States?”
‘‘I would say good and improving,” Paul Szczerowski, music director at St. Michael the Archangel, said of the singing of the assembly at the parish. Szczerowski, a Bethesda resident, took the job at the Silver Spring church about a year ago for the challenge of rebuilding the music program of the multicultural parish. More than 80 percent of the members in his choir, he said, are from outside the United States.
‘‘I’m definitely excited about re-establishing this key component of worship there,” he said. ‘‘It’s definitely a work in progress.”
The six-question survey is a play on the 1991 book ‘‘Why Catholics Can’t Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste” written by Thomas Day. The book was a fairly controversial work that blamed Catholics’ aversion to church singing and singing quality on cultural reasons, said J. Michael McMahon, president and CEO of the National Association of Pastoral Musicians, whose members aim to serve the Catholic Church by fostering musical liturgies.
McMahon, the music director of St. Agnes Parish in Arlington, Va., rates his congregation’s singing ‘‘about average.”
Singing in Catholic churches is also a fairly new addition to the Mass, McMahon said. The Second Vatican Council instituted changes to the structure of the traditional Sunday Mass in 1964, when congregational singing became the norm. In those changes, the council identified singing as an important way to participate.
Charlene Dorrian, a Silver Spring resident who has been coordinating folk-style music at St. John the Baptist Church for nearly 30 years, said congregational singing was an ‘‘uphill kind of singing,” and getting people to sing while going up to the altar for Holy Communion, for example, was still difficult.
‘‘You’re going to have people who say, ‘I can’t sing. Someone told me in third grade not to sing, so I don’t do it.’ ... Some people are embarrassed,” Dorrian said.
Her church has seven Masses over the course of a weekend, and music at all of them. Participation varies, said Dorrian, who rated her church ‘‘somewhat strong” for the survey question ‘‘How would you rate the congregational singing in your own parish or worshiping community?” when she took the survey.
‘‘It’s especially difficult in the United States,” Dorrian said of singing in church. ‘‘Once you get past ‘Hail to the Redskins’ and ‘Happy Birthday,’ you don’t sing.”
A survey by the group last year that netted about 1,000 results looked at what made singing in church easier for American Catholics. The results showed that familiar melodies that were easy to sing made congregants more comfortable singing in their pews.
‘‘The average person does not sound like an opera star,” Dorrian said. ‘‘Some people are embarrassed.”
Szczerowski said the key elements of encouraging singing include having adequate instruments for the size of a church, a concerted effort to train cantors in the art of communicating to the assembly through hand motions and making music choices that resonate with the parish.
Michele Marchica, a Silver Spring resident who attends St. John the Baptist’s 9 a.m. Sunday Mass and has sung there since 1973, said congregants seemed to participate more when acoustic and bass guitars replace the typical cantor and organist setup.
But she said she has noticed a difference when she attends churches of other denominations.
‘‘They’re very musically oriented, and everybody sings, and it’s just wonderful,” she said of a Methodist church she has visited.
Judy McPhie, a Wheaton resident who sings at Northwood Presbyterian, said the quality of the music brought her there. She described the congregation as ‘‘very much interested in music,” and hymns chosen by the choir.
‘‘In the summer, when the choir isn’t singing, people volunteer to sing, in groups or solo,” she said. ‘‘Sometimes they outsize the actual choir. ... It’s really quite nifty.”
Dorrian said for the Protestant churches, ‘‘singing was just what you do.” For now, she said, the responsibility of making singing at Catholic Mass appealing often falls on the church leaders.
‘‘Forty to 50 years isn’t really a long time to change a culture,” she said.
Talk about it
How would you rate the quality of singing at your house of worship? Do you sing at church? Tell us about it by sending an e-mail to talkaboutit@gazette.net.
To learn more
To view the survey, visit www.npm.org. It will be available through the end of November. Results will be available in early 2008.
