Fascinated by the Mystery

"Sometimes we were treated like a lunatic fringe. A lot thought we were not very 'with it' -- as far as being part of the modern church -- and hoped we would eventually dry up and blow away." So Susan Alstatt told the Dec. 23 San Francisco Chronicle. Alstatt is a 40-year member of a choir with a repertoire little touched by most modern church choirs. That repertoire is Gregorian Chant.

The St. Ann Choir is directed by Stanford University music professor, William Mahrt, who for 44 years has directed this schola of male and female singers. Mahrt is also considered by some to be one of the nation’s foremost experts on Gregorian Chant, said the Chronicle, and has a chant library that rivals, or even surpasses, Stanford’s.

The professor is worried about the survival of Gregorian Chant. Pope Benedict XVI may have ordered the Vatican choir to return to the chant, but there are few Gregorian Chant choirs in the United States. Beginning in the late 1960s, the chant was muscled out of Catholic churches by bands playing popular music-style songs, which, Mahrt said, he “wouldn’t cross the street” to hear. Mahrt said priests who love the chant have told him it is not accessible to modern worshippers.

But to Mahrt, 68, Gregorian Chant is accessible, if it is properly presented. "When you sing it beautifully and when it really works, there's an absolute still in the church,” he told the Chronicle. “That's the kind of silence that's fruitful and it represents a kind of self-awareness that is also aware of the wider realities, and that kind of silence is where you have your best opportunity to speak to God and to listen to God." Read all …