Making music

Joseph Shaw on the importance of training

I write following the LMS Priest and Server Training Conference at Prior Park College in Bath. It was a privilege to be able to attend, and photograph, such a hive of useful activity: groups of priests and seminarians, servers, and singers, engaged in the hard work of learning their roles in the liturgy, and putting what they have learned into practice.

This was our 13th such conference, and was particularly well attended, including fifteen student servers, eleven student priests, four seminarians, and two permanent deacons, along with singers and clerical and lay instructors. (For more on this see page 10.)

Sad to say, the seminaries serving England and Wales have not risen to the challenge of Summorum Pontificum. Even if they had, there would still be hundreds of priests who would need help if they were to avail themselves of the ‘treasure’, as Pope Benedict XVI called it, of the Traditional liturgy. In any case, the Latin Mass Society must do its part in making this help available.

In addition to the Priest Training Conferences, priests and seminarians, and lay people as well, can attend the Latin Mass Society’s annual Residential Latin Course this summer, 30th July to 3rd August, at the Carmelite Retreat Centre at Boars Hill outside Oxford. I am also experimentally organising a one-day Gregorian Chant course at the same venue, for 2nd February 2018, to supplement the three-day Chant Training Weekend which took place with more than twenty singers over Low Sunday weekend. All of these events can be booked through the Latin Mass Society’s website.

A huge amount of training and learning takes place in less formal contexts, but these sorts of courses and conferences are valuable not only for the data transferred from teacher to pupil, but for the opportunity to meet like-minded people, and to feel part of a movement greater than oneself. Again, they are occasions for truly worthy celebrations of the liturgy, of value for its own sake, and as an example of what the training is for.

This is true, indeed, of the Latin Mass Society as a membership organisation: by being part of it, we all able to contribute more to, and benefit more from, the community of those dedicated to the great task of liturgical restoration.

I should like to put on record my thanks to the many priestly and lay volunteers who made and continue to make these events possible. I would also like to thank our supporters who made donations for the Priest Training Conference. Those donations have certainly borne fruit.

In the current edition of Mass of Ages, we are appealing for a related cause: music. A few years ago we received a substantial bequest with the condition that the money be spent on the expenses associated with public Masses, to be said for the soul of the testator and of his wife. This money has made possible a more generous approach to paying for music than the Society was previously able to take.

"I notice they never ask me to sing the Exultet"

From Further Cracks in Fabulous Cloisters by Brother Choleric (Dom Hubert van Zeller) 1957

We would like to ensure that we can continue to sponsor beautiful and appropriate music when this bequest has been used up. We would also like to have a music fund which can be used not only for Masses, but for celebrations of the Office (including, for example, Holy Week Tenebrae), and musical training.

Over the years the Society has gradually transformed its relationship with music and the providers of music. In 2010 we established, with other interested parties, the Gregorian Chant Network, which has put us in touch with a large number of choirs around the country. In 2012 we appointed a number of ‘Patrons’ for the Society, including two Catholic composers of international reputation: Colin Mawby and Sir James MacMillan. In 2015 we appointed our first London Director of Music, Matthew Schellhorn.

We take very seriously the enormous contribution to good-quality liturgical music made by amateurs and amateur groups—I write as an amateur singer myself—and we are committed to supporting these, above all with training. When we do use professional singers we are often able to make this more than a purely mercenary transaction, developing relationships with singers, and facilitating their formation as singers in relation to the Church’s patrimony of sacred music, and in their understanding and appreciation of the Traditional Mass. The existence of a number of first-rate professional directors who share the Society’s aims makes this possible.

I therefore encourage readers to support this latest initiative. If you sing yourself, take advantage of our, and others’, courses and training, to be the best singer you can be. And please contribute materially to the Latin Mass Society’s efforts to support the most worthy possible liturgy, and the human skills and network of relationships which makes it possible.