How trendy 'liturgists' tried to stop
my Mass being performed for the Pope
By James MacMillan
October 27th, 2010
The Mass in Bellahouston Park, Glasgow
Writing music for the recent visit of the Pope to the UK was one of the most exhilarating but strangest experiences of my life. I was initially contacted by Archbishop Mario Conti, on behalf of the Scottish Bishops who had decided they wanted a new setting of the Mass in English for the huge celebration in Bellahouston Park.
Also, it was to be the new English translation of the Mass which will be introduced, more generally, in the Catholic anglosphere next year some time. In the wake of this, the Bishops of England and Wales came on board so that the new setting would be used at the Beatification Mass at Cofton Park too.
There was not much time. A meeting was called in Glasgow where a group of clergy in charge of planning the papal visit and liturgical music for Bellahouston spoke with me and outlined the task at hand. I had to start quickly and, more or less, deliver immediately! This I did, after using my church choir as guinea pigs for the first drafts. Then the problems began.
Unknown to me the new setting was taken to a “committee” which has controlled the development of liturgical music in Scotland for some time. Their agenda is to pursue the 1970s Americanised solution to the post-Conciliar vernacular liturgy, to the exclusion of more “traditional” possibilities.
They have been known for their hostility to Gregorian chant, for example, but have reluctantly had to get in line since the arrival of Benedict XVI. They also have a commitment to the kind of cod-Celticness that owes more to the soundtracks of The Lord of the Rings and Braveheart, than anything remotely authentic.
There has also been a suspicion of professionals with this committee, and many serious musicians in the Church in Scotland have felt excluded from their decisions and processes, or have chosen not to become involved in territory which is felt to be hostile.
It became clear that my new setting had not gone down well with this group. The music was felt to be “not pastoral enough” and there were complaints (yes, complaints!) that it needed a competent organist. The director of music for Bellahouston, a priest and amateur composer, whose baby is this committee, was also informing all who would listen, that the music was “un-singable” and “not fit for purpose”. There seemed to be ongoing attempts to have the new setting dropped from the papal liturgy in Glasgow.
However, spokespeople for the Scottish Church had already been talking to the press about my new setting, and the English were gearing up to use the music as well, at the Birmingham Mass. Any retraction of the new setting was going to fly in the face of the Bishops’ wishes and result in an almighty media car crash, which would not just be humiliating for me, but for the Scottish Church too.
Fly-on-the-wall reports from the committee meeting confirmed that there was general anxiety of the consequences if the English went ahead with the setting at Cofton Park, and the Scots dropped it or reduced it drastically for Glasgow.
When word of this reached me and my publishers (who had negotiated with Church representatives in Glasgow) we were astonished. There had been no mention of a “committee” which was to pass judgement, aesthetical, liturgical or musical, on the Mass that had been requested by the Bishops.
An almighty row erupted behind the scenes. The men who had met me hastily in Glasgow to initiate the whole thing now seemed to be backtracking. The Bishops didn’t know anything about it – until we raised it with them. Obviously, not having heard the music, they were in a quandary.
What if the “liturgists” were right? What if the new music couldn’t be sung by ordinary people? What if the organ accompaniment was, in fact, a concerto for organ? What if the pastoral concerns of God’s people had been totally ignored by this elitist composer? MacMillan might know how to write operas and symphonies, but congregational music was totally different. (I have, in fact, written simple music for Catholic congregations for the last 30 years).
But they had put their faith in me, knowing what I had done for the Church so far, and they were to continue in that faith. I was contacted, separately, by four members of the Scottish hierarchy, directly or indirectly. The one who phoned me allayed my fears and confirmed their full support. Another met me on occasions to communicate the trust and goodwill of the Conference.
Only one of them seemed to have fallen to the subterfuge of the ideologues, and he sent me an upsetting letter. It was similar to another from the original meeting who blamed me for manipulating the media and using the whole episode as an exercise in self-glorification. I
n all their years of facilitating the commission of new music, Boosey and Hawkes [music publishers] had never dealt with such rudeness and shoddy behaviour. They were deeply shocked; and I was embarrassed because of how my Church was being seen by my professional representatives and colleagues.
I had dealt with all of them in good faith from day one. I worked professionally, delivering the music in days and continued to offer the Church my services to see the project through to a fruitful conclusion.
To further allay any bad feeling, I waived my fee. I love the Church and was determined that the papal visit should be a success. It was!
Now we wait for the various Bishops’ Conferences to ratify the new translation [of the Missal]. Then my publishers hope to get the music out and about the parishes of the English-speaking world. It is a relief that it will now not be known as “The Mass the Scots wouldn’t sing!”
In retrospect, it does seem a sad business, and I can’t quite get to the bottom of all the shenanigans which nearly scuppered the new Mass setting. I had to pinch myself on occasions when I was being accused of obscurantism. Were they right?
But I rehearsed the work on many occasions with ordinary people in the pews in various parishes. They all picked the music up gradually. Not all parishes in Scotland could introduce the setting, I suppose. It requires competence in the accompanist and music leader.
But this was a papal Mass – it had to be special. I can also imagine it being used enthusiastically in many countries around the world.
There is a different “sound” to the new setting, which perhaps owes something to my love of chant, traditional hymnody and authentic folk music, and nothing at all to the St Louis Jesuits and all the other dumbed-down, sentimental bubble-gum music which has been shoved down our throats for the last few decades in the Catholic Church. And therein might lie the problem…
James MacMillan is a Scottish composer whose symphonies, concertos, operas, sacred music and many orchestral and instrumental works are strongly influenced by his Catholic faith. His St John Passion was premiered by Sir Colin Davis and the LSO in 2008; his specially commissioned congregational Mass was performed when Pope Benedict XVI beatified Cardinal Newman during his visit to Britain in September. He and his wife are lay Dominicans and live in Glasgow. He also blogs at jamesmacmillaninscotland.com.
Damian Thompson comments on the above:
The enemies of traditional Catholic
worship are starting to panic
October 27th, 2010
I’m so glad that James MacMillan has used his Telegraph blog to reveal some of the bullying and skulduggery of Scottish Catholic liturgists who wanted (but failed) to stop the Pope hearing his specially composed English Mass at Bellahouston.
The story sits neatly with my post about Bishop Kieran Conry’s snide attack on Martin Baker, the director of music at Westminster Cathedral. The bishop suggested that Mr Baker went out on a limb by arranging for the papal Mass at Westminster to be sung in Latin; but, as Baker told the
Catholic Herald, he did so with the full backing of Archbishop Nichols and the Pope. +Kieran, by the way, is furious that his criticism of the Cathedral Mass came to light.
There’s a liturgical culture war going on here and, for the first time in 40 years, the liberals sense that they’re on the losing side. Bishop Conry makes it sound as if the casus belli is the use of Latin, and indeed he’s been very thorough indeed in discouraging the use of the ancient language in his diocese of Arundel and Brighton.
Also, I gather that certain bishops are putting pressure on seminary directors not to teach their students too much Latin. A few years ago, they needn’t have worried: seminarians didn’t want to learn it.
Now the students don’t wait for permission from their seminary to teach themselves the venerable prayers (and, when no one is looking, the rubrics of the older form of the Roman Rite). This is causing dismay verging on panic among the more hardline soixante-huitards of the Magic Circle.
But this is about more than Latin: James MacMillan’s Mass for Blessed John Henry Newman is in English, using the revised translation of the Mass that will come into wider use next year. I wonder if that fact contributed to the foul treatment he and his publishers received at the hands of Scottish “liturgists”, whose preferred style of worship makes a Pentecostal tabernacle look like Brompton Oratory.
Taken as a whole, the bishops of Britain are officially committed to supporting the new translation but privately divided on its merits. Although I sometimes give the impression that the Magic Circle is uniformly liberal, the truth is that it reflects a liturgical spectrum ranging all the way from horrified opposition to the conservative reforms of “Ratzinger” to mild and ineffectual acquiescence.
In many dioceses, the more solemn and accurate English translation will be introduced reluctantly – and I’ll be very surprised if Lefty priests who, ahem, forget to say the new words face much in the way of discipline.
Those who do refuse to use the new English Missal can expect hearty support from the Tabletista “ministers” who crowd around them on the sanctuary and (in their imaginations) co-consecrate the Host.
It’s tempting for me to fall into the trap of over-simplifying the situation. But “culture war” is a fair term for what is going on. Back in the 1980s, the American sociologist James Davison Hunter argued that the liberal-conservative battles would be fought within rather than between religions.
At the time, the Catholic Church in this country was so totally under the sway of Archbishop Derek Worlock’s followers, and traditionalists so bitter and marginalised, that there was no war to speak of. That has changed, and one of the people who is changing it is a lay Catholic who, 20 years ago, would have been a most unlikely champion of conservative tradition, James MacMillan
Earlier, Thompson referred to another kind of fallout from the papal visit:
BBC gave the Pope an easy ride,
says Rowan Williams spokesman
October 26th, 2010
The (London) Times’s paywall is mysteriously down, so I nipped behind it and found a blog post from my former colleague the Rev George Pitcher, now the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Secretary for Public Affairs. Writes George:
I confess to having been bemused by the media treatment of the Pope here in October [sic].
If British society is post-Christian you could have fooled me. He enjoyed comprehensive and largely unmediated and uncritical reportage in the British media. The BBC was especially reverential – wall-to-wall coverage, with little or no challenge in the studio from the usual pundits and antagonists.
There may be good reason for that; the Beeb will have been conscious of Roman Catholicism’s minority status in the UK and its responsibilities to religious diversity.
More cynically, it was an easy hit – the BBC may feel it can have a go at the Pope in future and point to the free ride it gave him when he visited, should anyone claim undue victimisation. But the point still holds: The Pope’s visit was recorded as an unqualified success.
Is that what Dr Williams thinks, too, George?
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 28/10/2010 15:34]