The liturgy is a complex of sacred texts and actions, all imbued with symbolic meaning. That meaning is, at one and the same time, prior to and instantiated by the liturgy. The power and the meaning of the Church’s liturgical celebrations is expressed or instantiated in large part through sacred music, which, as Pope Pius X taught in Tra le sollecitudini, “clothe[s] with suitable melody the liturgical text,” so as to better dispose the faithful to receive the graces that flow from the holy mysteries.¹ Such is the power of this union of music with sacred text that it can move the hearts and minds of the faithful (and even non-believers) toward the things of heaven, even outside of that liturgical context. Here we will examine the source and purpose of that power as expressed in Church teaching and by considering examples from the patrimony of sacred music of both the West and East. In doing so, we may hope to better understand what liturgical music does and why, and how it fulfills the sacred purpose of liturgy. Thus, we may be more open to the graces and fruits that flow from the liturgy and better able to carry out what the Church asks of us.

Because Christ is the true celebrant of every liturgy, the meaning of every liturgy is bound up with the life, passion, death, and resurrection of Christ. The liturgy is the high-priestly prayer of Christ,² and he invites his members and empowers them to participate in his prayer through the liturgy. As Pope Pius XII taught in Mediator Dei, it is “mainly by means of the sacred liturgy” that the Church “prolongs the priestly mission of Jesus Christ” in the world.³ The liturgy is imbued with power because its source is Jesus Christ, with its sacred texts suffused with and expressing the meaning of Christ in his totality: his life, teaching, death, and resurrection.⁴ The sacred texts of the liturgy give voice to the prayer of Christ in and through his Church. The voice of the Church is the voice of Christ’s Bride, and since Christ and his Church are one, the voice of the Church is the voice of Christ, especially in the sacred liturgy.

Christ Wholecloth

Liturgical music expresses and amplifies the meaning and power of the voice of Christ in the sacred texts. It does so at a natural level, as even the pagan philosophers knew. Aristotle wrote that music had the capacity to directly touch the soul and alter it, saying that it can form the dispositions of the soul.⁵ More recently, the philosopher and musicologist Victor Zuckerkandl (1896-1965) wrote that in music “the self goes beyond itself,” lifted up into self-abandonment, making “singing…the natural and appropriate expression of the group, of the togetherness of individuals within the group.”⁶ In the case of liturgical music, this natural “expression of the group” is transformed, because in this case there is no longer merely a natural group: the “group” is supernatural, because the group is the assembled members of the Body of Christ. And as always, we must bear in mind that in the phrase “Body of Christ” we are not merely using a figure of speech. The scriptures and the Church mean what they say: the members of the Body of Christ assembled in the liturgy are Christ present, and, therefore, when praying the liturgical prayer of Christ they are praying in the voice of Christ. In this way the natural expression of the group is sacramentalized in song, because the song makes present the heavenly reality of Christ’s voice praying in and through his Church in the liturgy. Aristotle expressed more than he even realized: liturgical music has the capacity to directly touch the soul in a supernatural way, because that music is the expression of the voice of Christ, who is the author of that soul and its redeemer.

The sacramentalizing power of liturgical music as the clothing of the voice of Christ means that it is not a mere ornament or accompaniment of the liturgical action.⁷ Thus, Pius X established as the first general principle of sacred music that it is an integral part of the solemn liturgy,⁸ and the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy reiterated that teaching, stating that “as sacred song united to the words [of the sacred text], it forms a necessary or integral part of the solemn liturgy.”⁹ As the Orthodox theologian Sergei Glagolev wrote: “Music is not a conjunct to worship. It is the way the Church worships. Music is neither supplementary to nor an enrichment of worship. It is the expression of worship itself.”¹⁰

Since liturgical music, as sacred song united to the words of the sacred text, is integral to the liturgy, the musical “clothing” that the music has can also be considered to have integral importance. An analogy might be drawn from the distinction between form and matter in the sacraments. In sacramental theology the form is that which gives shape to or defines the sacrament and makes it efficacious. In the sacrament of baptism, the form is the sacramental formula, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” The matter is the “stuff,” the material of the sacrament. So again, in the sacrament of baptism the matter is natural water. By this analogy, the matter of liturgical music is the sacred text, e.g., the Gloria in excelsis, and the form is the musical setting or notes, e.g., of the Missa de Angelis. By various musical techniques, such as cantillation (ornament) and tone painting, the composer of liturgical music can highlight various words or phrases, calling attention to or dwelling upon them for the meditation and delight of the congregation. In this way, just as beautiful clothing calls attention to or ornaments the person wearing them, so well-composed music calls attention to or ornaments the sacred text.

Sound Energy

As we saw above, Pope Pius XII taught that in the liturgy, the Church “prolongs the priestly mission of Jesus Christ” in the world. Just as the liturgy prolongs Christ’s mission, so in the liturgy does music prolong the “presence” of the sacred text in our ears, minds, and hearts. In colloquial English usage, the word “prolong” usually does not have a positive connotation. But in this case, a look at the original Latin text is instructive. The Latin verb translated as “prolong” is pergo, -ere, which in turn has its origin in the compound of per and rego, which means “to guide, to steer, to govern.” This compound yields a verb that more literally means “to continue, to proceed, to pursue with energy.” So a more precise translation of the verb might more accurately render Pius XII’s teaching as: “By means of the sacred liturgy the Church energetically continues the priestly mission of Jesus Christ in the world.” It is this “energetic continuance” that informs and inspires liturgical music at its best. In liturgical music, the energy of the sacred text is expressed, heightened, and emphasized, so that the otherwise evanescent sacred speech is kept before us, still hanging or suspended “in the air,” physical yet intangible.

The musical technique of cantillation or chanting is the most ancient and fundamental for continuing the sacred text in music. We know, for example, that the prayers and psalms of the temple in Jerusalem were chanted. So the Church, from her origin, carried on the practice of chanting her prayers in ways that followed from and elaborated upon the models provided by the Temple and Synagogue. By the 13th century, that corpus of chant (which came to be called Gregorian after Pope Gregory I, c. 590-604) had reached its maturity and had displaced other forms of liturgical chant in the West. One remarkable example of that mature Gregorian chant is the Kyrie from Mass V, which is believed to date from the 13th century. It is titled Magnae Deus potentiae (“God of great power”), from the first of the tropes which were commonly sung with it.¹¹ In the pre-conciliar liturgy, it was typically sung on Sundays of the II class, and on 2nd class Feasts, such as those of Apostles. In the Gregorian notation, this is the score:

Here, the sacred text is not only “prolonged,” but is given precisely that “energetic continuance” described above. The melody soars, raising the text aloft (listen here). Though the text is penitential (“Lord, have mercy”), there is nothing mournful or downcast about it. It is a rejoicing over the Lord’s mercy! And in the first phrase, the word Kyrie (“Lord”) has its own meditative quality, echoed and imitated by the second word eleison (“have mercy”). In the second phrase, the first word, Christe, is clearly the energetic focus, rising to an even higher pitch than the first phrase. All three phrases rise and fall with waxing and waning energy, lifting the spirit up into the mercy of Christ, and easing the worshiper into a serene release. This chant takes a phrase that might take all of 10 seconds to recite, even with care and devotion, and extends it by anywhere from 1 ¾ to 2 ½ minutes (depending on whether each phrase is recited/sung two or three times). And this extension can’t in any way be characterized as mere “prolongation” in the negative sense.

Paint by Numbers

Another way by which music clothes the sacred text is with the technique of tone painting. As the phrase suggests, in tone painting musical motives (melodic or rhythmic) are employed to reflect or suggest the meaning of the text. One well-known example of this technique is the antiphon for the Blessing of Palms on Palm Sunday, Hosanna filio David. This is one of the more ancient of the Church’s chants: it is included in the 10th-century St. Gallen Cantatorium (collection of chants),¹² and there are indications that it dates back to the ninth century or even earlier. The text is drawn from Matthew’s gospel (21:9) and is clearly intended to suggest the outcry of that crowd in Jerusalem. Here is the chant score:

“Hosanna to the son of David:

blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord.

The King of Israel: Hosanna in the highest.”

The chant begins with a striking instance of tone painting: the large leap of a fifth is a dramatic suggestion of a horn call (listen here). The Hebrew word “Hosanna” in this context of the Jerusalem crowd cannot help but evoke the call of the shofar, the ram’s horn whose sounding served as a call to prayer and the announcement of sacred times and feasts for the Israelites. Here the call rings out to the faithful at the Palm Sunday procession, summoning God’s people to praise and worship, “like the crowds who acclaimed Jesus in Jerusalem.”¹³ The chant continues to gain energy, ascending on the word “David” and again on the word benedictus, “blessed.” A smaller leap on the words in nomine (“in the name”) leads to a resolution on the word Domini, “Lord.” The horn call is repeated in the final phrase, Hosanna in excelsis. As Dom Johner wrote in his commentary on The Chants of the Vatican Gradual, this “expression of jubilation” is “an exhortation to the inhabitants of the celestial regions to join in the rejoicing of the exultant multitude on earth,” since “in the Son of David all of God’s prophecies have been fulfilled.”¹⁴

Ancient Exemplar

These reflections were inspired in part by a concert of sacred music held as part of the Society for Catholic Liturgy’s 2024 annual Conference, held at St. Mary’s Seminary in Houston, TX, last September.¹⁵ The concert of Byzantine Chant of the 12th century from Hagia Sophia was performed by the ensemble Capella Romana (https://cappellaromana.org). This ensemble was founded in 1991 to preserve and promote the singing and knowledge of Slavic and Byzantine sacred music in their original languages and has acquired a well-deserved reputation for the excellence and historical authenticity of its performances and recordings. The founder and director of Capella Romana, Dr. Alexander Lingas, is Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of London. Lingas presented a keynote lecture for the Society’s conference on the afternoon before the performance.

This lecture and concert was an exemplification of the Society for Catholic Liturgy’s mission and ethos: the Society is an organization of academics, musicians, clergy, and others devoted to the Church’s liturgy, and strives to educate, study, and to advance the understanding and praxis of the sacred liturgy (https://liturgysociety.org). By offering academic presentations about the liturgy, reverent and faithful celebrations of it, and concerts such as this which bring to life sacred music in what might be called a quasi-liturgical context, the Society goes beyond the abstract and furthers the liturgical mission of making the sacred present in the world.

The concert, titled “Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia,” presented an array of chants from the Offices and Divine Liturgy of the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross at Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. The Feast, celebrated on September 14 (the same date as the Western Feast), was one of the greatest solemnities of the yearly cycle of worship at Hagia Sophia. Thus the music of this Feast, which was the culmination of a five day period of public liturgies and ceremonies,¹⁶ might fairly be considered the culmination or climax of Byzantine liturgical music. The music is sung in the Greek of the Byzantine age, which is closer in grammar, syntax, and pronunciation to the Greek of the Classical period than even to the Koine Greek of the New Testament, much less modern Greek. It might, therefore, seem inaccessible to the modern Western Christian. But a brief bit of explanation and background, and some attentive listening might well prove to be a revelatory experience. For the music sung at this concert brought to life a sound and liturgical experience that otherwise might have seemed lost to history, and provides a most striking and powerful example of “music clothing the sacred text.”

The example considered here is the Jerusalem hymn “Your Cross we worship,” which was sung in the Divine Liturgy¹⁷ in place of the usual Trisagion Hymn.¹⁸ It was sung by two choirs in alternation, each choir representing those outside and those inside the church.¹⁹ The text is presented here. On the left side of the table is the Greek text with English transliteration beneath, and on the right side the English translation:

A key to understanding the nature of this musical clothing of the texts is in the accents of the Greek words. Ancient Greek, including patristic and Byzantine Greek, had a tonal accent. This is in contradistinction to the quantitative (that is, of length) accent of classical Latin, and even further removed from the stress accent that characterizes modern languages such as English, Spanish, or German. The closest modern analog would be to the kind of accent one would hear today in spoken Arabic or even Chinese. While the exact sound of spoken ancient Greek has not survived, we know from ancient writers, and from even the ancient Greek grammarians themselves, that the tonal accent of this Greek gave it a melodic quality that we might perceive as “sing-songy.” So, to oversimplify the matter, the acute accent “ ´ ” indicated a rising tone on the accented vowel, the grave accent “ ` ” indicated a falling tone, and the circumflex accent “ ῀ ” indicated a rising then falling tone (this last most commonly occurred on diphthongs and other naturally long vowels).

And if one listens to the music being chanted here with attention to those accents, something remarkable becomes apparent.²⁰ What one hears is that the chant not only usually respects (that is, does not violate), but frequently follows, the word accents of the text.²¹ So, for example, in the first (choral) iteration of the text, on the word προσκυνοῦμεν (proskunoūmen, “we worship”), the melody rises and falls on the accented syllable, noū, in a manner coincident with the accent. And on the word δοξάζομεν (doxázomen, “we glorify”) the melody rises on the accented syllable –xá, gradually falling again through the final two syllables of the word, –zomen. Not coincidentally, in these syllables the word is also extended via melisma. This treatment serves to prolong and call attention to the action of the words “we worship” and “we glorify,” heightening the sense of the choir, and hopefully the attentive worshiper, worshiping and giving glory to God through the sung text. The effect is perhaps even more apparent in the second (solo) iteration of the chant, probably because it is rendered more syllabically. In that iteration, almost every word accent in the text is accompanied by a melodic analog: for example, the acute accent on the second syllable of Staurón (“cross”) has a corresponding rise in pitch, as does the accented second syllable of the word Anástasin (“resurrection”). This latter instance might even be regarded as an example of tone painting, as the meaning of “resurrection” is accompanied by a rise in pitch. In this chant, the confluence of melody with the accent yields the effect of a “melody within the melody.”

A Love for Detail

Now, of course, the composers of the Byzantine chants in the 12th century were native speakers of the Greek language. Therefore, they would have written the music with these accents in mind. But what is striking here is the naturalness of the priority of the text accent in the melodic construction of these chants, and the effortless way the accents are frequently employed melodically to underscore or highlight their meaning.²² Two object lessons emerge from this example: first, in the ideal, liturgical chant is not about beat, but about breath.²³ The texts by and large follow natural speech rhythm, and therefore are marked by natural pauses of breath, not by the imposition of an extrinsic rhythmic scheme, as in modern hymnody. This lends to liturgical chant a naturalness of flow and rhythm, which is conducive to prayer and contemplation. Secondly, this chant, as well as the others sung in the concert, come perhaps as close to the ideal of chant as “sung theology” as anything one might hear in the Western canon of sacred music.

The embodiment in liturgical music of “sung theology” is about the clothing of truth in musical vesture. Not truth in the sense of abstract syllogisms, but Truth in the sense of the person who is truth incarnate, Jesus Christ. That truth can be known, as through a glass darkly, by those syllogisms and theological formulae. But ultimately the truth is known through the experience of the person of Christ Jesus, whom we are invited to encounter in the liturgy. And the truth expressed by the sacred texts of the liturgy is clothed by liturgical music as a bride is clothed by her beloved, that is, with, by, and in love. The singing of the Church comes ultimately out of love. It is the utter depth of love that produces singing. “Cantare amantis est,” says St. Augustine.²⁴ That is, singing is a lover’s thing. The examples given here, and the rationale behind them, provide object lessons in how that love may be incarnate in the liturgy. May they also be examples of how we might go and do likewise.

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1. Pope Pius X, Motu Proprio Tra le sollecitudini, November 22, 1903, I.1. https://adoremus.org/1903/11/tra-le-sollecitudini/
2. CCC 1187
3. Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei, 3. https://adoremus.org/1947/11/mediator-dei/
4. Cf. CCC 1136, 1145, 1150-1151.
5. Aristotle, Politics Bk. VIII, ch. V (1340a).
6. Victor Zuckerkandl, Man the Musician, trans. Norbert Guterman (Princeton, NJ: 1973), 24-25.
7. Marc-Daniel Kirby, O.Cist. “Sung Theology: The Liturgical Chant of the Church,” from Beyond the Prosaic, Stratford Caldecott, ed. (Edinburgh, 2000), 129.
8. Pius X, Tra le Sollecitudini, 1.
9. Sacrosanctum Concilium, 112. https://adoremus.org/1963/12/sacrosanctum-concilium/
10. Sergei Glagolev, “An Introduction to the Interpretation of Liturgical Music,” Orthodox Church Music 1 (1983), 25. As cited in Marc-Daniel Kirby, 129.
11. For a brief introduction to and explanation of the practice of adding tropes to liturgical chants see this article from the Catholic Encyclopedia online: “Trope,” https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/15065a.htm
12. For more on the St. Gall monastery and library, see: https://www.electrummagazine.com/2011/02/mapping-history-the-abbey-library-of-st-gall/
13. From the Roman Missal, Commemoration of the Lord’s Entrance into Jerusalem.
14. Dom Dominic Johner, The Chants of the Vatican Gradual (Collegeville, MN: 1940), 150.
15. More information about the September 2024 Conference, titled “Liturgy and the Human Imagination,” may be found here: https://cdn.ymaws.com/liturgysociety.org/resource/resmgr/documents/conference_schedule_2024_8.2.pdf
16. Dr. Alexander Lingas, “Concert Notes,” Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia (September 26, 2024), 4.
17. A helpful introduction to and outline of the Byzantine Divine Liturgy may be found at the website of the Byzantine Catholic Eparchy of Parma, https://parma.org/the-divine-liturgy
18. A.Lingas, “Concert Notes,” 5.
19. Lingas, “Concert Notes,” 5.
20. Copyright to the music in this recording belongs to Dr. Alexander Lingas and Capella Romana. It is included here under the “Fair Use” provision of US Copyright Law.
21. The nature and importance of the Greek word accents in the chants, and the frequent coincidence of word accent and melody, were confirmed by Dr. Lingas in a personal conversation following the concert. The author is grateful for the time that he took to further elucidate the matter.
22. A comparison and contrast with the issue of the coincidence and conflict of ictus and accent in Gregorian chant might be worthwhile, but is beyond the scope of this paper.
23. This writer first encountered the phrase, “not beat, but breath” in regard to chant in a remark by musician Adam Wood. The context of this remark, however, has been lost in the mists of time.
24. Ratzinger, Spirit of the Liturgy, p. 142. The citation of St. Augustine is from his Enarratio in Psalmum 72, 1 (PL 36, 914).