Resonance: Music in Catholicism

It was an unseasonably cool April morning when I walked up the steep hill from Morningside guesthouse as I had done countless times before. Over the years, brother John and I had often talked about our various writing projects. That morning, we discussed my progress with the present book and his own work to share some of their founder's writings with a new group of oblates. I was helping him with that project, so he handed me a pile of papers. On one of the sheets he had written: “This is the sign of the novice: always to return to the beginning.” I had heard him talk in this way before, about how we are always standing on the threshold of a new beginning, always novices in a perpetual experience of learning and relearning. It was serendipitous. I was struggling through manuscript revisions, trying to establish a sense of direction, and here was brother John telling me: return to the beginning.

That is exactly what I did. I went back to the guesthouse to reflect on the experiences that sparked my interest in my research area. As the chapters that follow attest, I had spent years thinking about issues of ethnography and field research in a monastery. But that morning, I considered that it was not ethnography that pointed me toward Weston Priory. It was music. I knew the brothers’ music well from my Catholic upbringing. The folk-inspired liturgical music of Weston Priory became an important part of the soundscape for generations of Catholics throughout the latter half of the twentieth century as guitars replaced organs and communal singing became the new normal in the post-Vatican II American Church. I wanted to see, hear, and understand the music in its home context. But more than that, I wanted to understand how and why people use music—any kind of music—in their religious practices and what their choices and discourses tell us about why that matters.

During the first year of my graduate work, I did a brief ethnographic research project with musicians in a local Catholic parish with three different Masses featuring either a Gregorian chant ensemble, a choir with organ accompaniment, or a praise band consisting of drum set, electric guitar, bass, and vocalists.