What's old becomes new.
The New Harvard Dictionary of Music defines schola cantorum as "A choir that performs Gregorian chant." A 19th-century French institution founded by composer Vincent d'Indy took up the title to revive the art of plainchant and to "instruct" (not perform) in church music and counterpoint. Sunday's affair at San Francisco's St. Luke's Episcopal church celebrated the 10th anniversary of a curious but highly regarded local institution, the Schola Cantorum of San Francisco. I say "curious" because of the group's unlikely genesis: a church choir without a church.
Schola Cantorum
First, some background. In 1949, Joseph Jungmann, an Austrian Jesuit, wrote a study of the Roman Catholic liturgy so influential that it was rumored to lie on Pope Pius XII's desk throughout the 1950s. According to Jungmann, the ascendancy of the church to political and cultural dominance of Europe led to:
a situation where at our divine services every sharp boundary between church and world is broken down, so that Jew and heathen can press right up to the steps of the altar and can stand in the very midst of the faithful at the most sacred moment.
Jungmann advocated a congregation modeled after the secret societies of early Christians, whose mob passivity Catholics of today will "substantially and actively overcome whenever and insofar as they take up a more active role." The congregation is passive, in part, because music and liturgy was "the art-function of a small group."
This was a principle that lay behind many of the liturgical and musical reforms of the 1960s' Second Vatican Council. Although there are certain exceptions, in America, congregations instituted the reforms by casting aside a thousand years of cultivated repertory in favor of guitar-based folk ensembles. As if to emphasize the discontinuity with musical tradition, congregational music appeared in "missalettes": small, cheaply printed prayer books meant to be discarded quarterly — quite literally, "throw-out music." (A good discussion of the challenges encountered by Roman Catholic music programs can be found in the polemic
"Why Catholics Can't Sing" by Thomas Day; the book bears the subtitle The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste.)
A Star Is Born in the West
In 1998, the San Francisco Archdiocese converted an old vacant church in North Beach to a "shrine," to exhibit some supposed remains of St. Francis of Assisi. It invited choral director John Renke to create a dignified traditional music program involving a professional choir. This ensemble, the Schola Cantorum, quickly became one of the most respected liturgical choirs in the United States, and it attracted a cohort of devoted patrons.
Regrettably, tensions developed between the musicians and the clergy, in part because the practice was so disconnected from the Catholic mainstream. Recriminations escalated on both sides, and in 2005, the entire music program was shut out. The church literally changed the locks, and misalletes appeared in the pews.
Yet the choir, backed by faithful patrons, survived, and it reformed itself into a hybrid: a liturgical and a concert choir. Over the past few years, the liturgical function has gradually waned. Sunday's audience found a professional, secular 13-voiced choir, devoid of its liturgical vestments. Singer Jay Moorehead prepared the singers, whom he loosely directed from the side.
A Litany of Beauty
This ensemble is ideally suited to Renaissance polyphony. Happily, the first half of the concert featured an excellent, pitch-perfect performance of Josquin's Missa pange lingua, as well as flawless readings of motets by English composers Gibbons, Byrd, and Robert Parsons. Although Josquin's Mass was especially suited to the recent feast day of Corpus Christi, the remaining programming lacked a coherent narrative, flitting from one short motet to another.
Anchoring the Schola's sound is the warm, yet vibratoless tone of the choir's four sopranos. The remaining voices tended to accompany these exquisite sopranos, which made for good effect in a work such as Messiaen's subtly difficult short motet O sacrum convivium. A successful performance of this work requires the sopranos to imitate old electronic instruments such as the ondes martenot or the theremin, which these sopranos accomplished without effort or fuss.
The choir was less successful where repertory demanded versatility. Bruckner's Os justi is quite rightly one of the finest short cathedral works ever composed. Although Schola's approach was very beautiful, it requires, in my mind's eye, a slightly fuller Romantic sound. Likewise, I thought the short Poulenc anthem for men's voices, Seigneur, je vous en prie, lacked heft. The Schola replaced Poulenc's top tenor line with falsettists — far too saccharine an effect.
For me, the Schola's transformation into a concert ensemble was confirmed in its performance of Nicolas Gombert's Magnificat tertii/Octavi toni. The Magnificat canticle is performed at weekly vespers, and liturgical choirs know this text intimately. At the words "He hath showed strength with his arm" (Fecit potentiam), countless Renaissance composers pour out correspondingly strong music. Gombert, tightening the harmony with his characteristic seconds, is no exception. Yet the Schola's performance was curiously and almost artificially restrained, sounding no different than in the similarly expressive following line, "and hath exalted the humble and meek."
Schola Cantorum has announced the selection of esteemed Bay Area choral conductor Paul Flight as its new music director. This could be an excellent pairing, as Flight should be able to add a sense of vigor and direction to the Schola's solid foundation of refinement and beauty. I wish them luck for the next 10 years.
