Catholic Sensibility

On choirs I was checking my archives from nearly a year ago, noting how I fretted about our initial edition of the parish's Sunday children's choir. What a difference a year makes. I don't fuss much about sports this year, not with our numbers. We're expecting forty kids for Saturday night's Mass. That includes thirteen boys. In my experience, it's unheard of for a children's choir to be 30% male. The energy quality at rehearsal is sure different from last year. I think the lack of cultivation of choirs for young people at Sunday Mass contributes in part to the state of church music being less than most of us would like. The huge advantage of the late 60's and early 70's as I remember them (just one parish) is that teens and young adults were heavily involved--and more of them sing seriously these days than you think. Many folk groups proved to be just as insular as organ choirs. If you can't cultivate for the future, you'll end up sitting in a dust bowl. These days, I see bright things on the horizons: pipe organ experiences for piano students, more children's choirs, and some choirs seem to take seriously the charism of recruiting. I have a great recruiter in the ensemble. Peter seems to just keep bringing good people our way. (He recently tried to recruit the young woman we hired to lead the youth choir into our group.) With a smaller group, there is potential for much upheaval. Three members have moved this past summer, and though all are still active, two are a bit farther away than before. One member might be relocating out of state if things work out. A family member has died. Another singer has been caring for a terminally ill friend. So we had a very small rehearsal last night. The bright side there is that I got to hear a bit more of some people's voices, and we were able to spend some extra time vocalizing and working on technique. (But as I'm an instrumentalist, I pretty much shot my vocal pedagogy wad in one night.) My general parish philosophy is to have a choir at every Sunday and holy day Mass. Every parish needs a big choir. A good age breakdown for non-adults is grades 3-5, grades 6-8, and high school. The minimum rotation for these three choirs would be every third week, so that at least one parish Mass each weekend is led by young people. I've found it's foolish to attempt a high school choir without years of Sunday singing reinforcement on the elementary level. The kids who have danced and played sports all through grade 8 are sure not going to come home one night and say, "Hey dad, guess what? I'm quitting dance to help Todd start a youth choir at church. I'm going to labor in adversity, mediocrity, and anonymity until we can build ourselves up to something to be proud of." Hmm. I've known some heroically faithful kids in my time, but never enough at a single time to fill up a decent-sized choir. Every parish Mass is big enough to recruit some kind of choir. While I have nothing against cantors, I see them as a stopgap until parish music ministry can be built up to the ideal envisioned by the liturgical documents. Meanwhile, I need to find some more singers for 9AM Mass ...