Musical Roots & Composing

A very impactful influence in my life unfolded when I was completing my undergraduate degree at a college run by Benedict monks. Each week a group of students would rehearse with the Schola Cantorum in preparation for Sunday Mass. This experience helped me to understand more deeply how the Church’s tradition of liturgical chant is at the heart of the classical music tradition, beginning with the polyphonic treasures of the Church.

Creating original music includes finding one’s own voice as a composer. One researcher has recently noted that as a composer interiorizes all the music they have ever heard:

You will intuitively gravitate to the music that connects to your emotions most deeply, and that music will form the environment for your compositional efforts; it’s the music that will allow you to discover your personal musical vision. (Adolphe, 2023)

Rehearsing and singing with the Schola Cantorum was not only a musical experience, but a deeply spiritual one: the union of music making and communal prayer. In addition to interpreting and expressing the music well, a process I was already familiar with, I discovered new avenues to express profound sentiments of the heart.

I noticed that the process of making this music seemed to require less effort than what I had previously been accustomed to as a music major studying piano performance. How was it that I was experiencing such beautiful music with a group of students, the majority of whom were not music majors like I was? David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, describes this experience in a way that resonates with me:

Chant is folk art: Its imperfection is part of its perfection. It accommodates all kinds of voices and vocal skills; in the monastery, chant is sung by whoever happens to be there and enters into its shared spirit. Imperfections are therefore inevitable, as they are in life. And this is the point: A remarkably transcendent beauty is generated when ordinary people, with their shortcomings, give themselves to the chant. (Music of Silence, p. 15-16)

As I continued to participate in the Schola Cantorum, and learn more about the history of sacred polyphony, it was a great joy for me to discover that many of the musical experiences that had inspired me to become a musician also had roots in the music of the Sacred Liturgy. For example, the Preludes and Fuges of Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier and Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony.” These composer’s works would probably never have been realized had it not been for the praying community who preserved and developed chant throughout the centuries; and without composers like Guillame de Machaut (d. 1377), whose early polyphonic settings of the Mass were based on chant.

When I first started composing and writing music for the piano, the lyrical dimensions of chant became more apparent to me as an impactful influence from my own development as a musician. While I do not usually compose with a cantus firmus, or directly quote melodies from the liturgy, the melodies that come to me spring up like a fountain. Today I recognize that one of the main sources of this fountain is the humble but profound “folk art” of chanting the Sacred Liturgy.

Adolphe, B. (2023). Visions and decisions. Imagination and technique in music composition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Steindl-Rast, D. (1995). Music of silence. A sacred journey through the hours of the day. Berkeley, California: Seastone.