Qui bene cantat, bis orat

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Stanford professor's Palo Alto choir keeps Gregorian chant alive

By Carrie Sturrock
San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, December 23, 200

Gregorian chant has persisted for more than a thousand years, but some fear the haunting melodies are in danger of fading away.

That is, unless Stanford Professor William Mahrt has a voice in the matter. For the past 44 years, this musician and scholar has directed a choir to keep alive the medieval Catholic tradition he believes is a pathway to the sacred and divine.

"When you sing it beautifully and when it really works, there's an absolute still in the church," he said. "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."

It hasn't always been easy. Gregorian chant calls to mind robed monks singing Latin in a Gothic cathedral, and for hundreds of years that's exactly what it looked like. Many in the church considered the sonorous chant a relic and Mahrt's choir odd.

"Sometimes we were treated like a lunatic fringe," said Susan Altstatt, who has sung in Mahrt's choir in Palo Alto for 40 years. "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."

But Mahrt, 68, is not just deeply religious, he's also stubborn. He considers Gregorian chant one of the greatest artistic achievements of Western civilization. So it's in everyone's best interest to keep it around - Catholic or no.

"The stuff is so unique that you hear a snatch of it and you say 'What is that?' " Mahrt said. "It isn't like anything else you've heard."

On a recent Sunday, he stood in the balcony of St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Palo Alto, his tall, slightly bent frame directing the 20 men and women - known as the St. Ann Choir - whose chanting seemed at times to have a mesmerizing effect on the congregation, making everything tranquil and quiet.

"Dignus est agnus, qui occisus est/ accipere virtutem, et divinitatem, et/ sapientiam, et fortitudinem, et honorem."

"Worthy is the lamb that was slain to receive power, and divinity, and wisdom, and strength, and honor."

Chanting was common in churches across the world until the early 1960s, when the Second Vatican Council permitted the Latin Mass to be said in the vernacular and the priest to face the congregation instead of the altar. Chant got the boot as churches turned to pop folk music to try to appeal to a broader audience - music Mahrt says he "wouldn't cross the street" to listen to. Priests who valued the chant yet didn't use it during Mass have told Mahrt they feared modern congregations wouldn't get it. But Mahrt contends that chant is accessible if people are properly introduced to it and persuaded of its worth.

Now, most folks hear it only occasionally - in movies such as "Becket" or if they happen to hear recordings by the Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos, who made it briefly popular.

And although Pope Benedict XVI recently announced that the Vatican's choir would return to Gregorian chant, Mahrt still worries. There aren't many Gregorian chant choirs in the United States and even fewer that have done what Mahrt's has: rehearsed and chanted the entire Mass every week for more than four decades.

Gregorian chant is Latin liturgical texts sung in an unaccompanied melody - so no instruments. Many scholars believe it dates back to fourth century Jerusalem, although nothing was written down until the ninth century. For 500 years it endured through memory, which Mahrt considers astonishing since the chant involves 365 days of the Catholic liturgical cycle. It's called "Gregorian" because legend has it Pope St. Gregory I, the Great (540-604), played a key role in arranging the chants.

The chants may be ancient, but Mahrt's motley crew of a choir looks decidedly modern, wearing everything from Birkenstocks and tie-dye to high heels and suits. Mahrt would love to spiff them up with robes, but the suggestion never seems to go anywhere. And not everyone is Catholic - some chant for the sheer joy of it.

Many view Mahrt as something of a hero, said choir member Roseanne Sullivan. In an age of instant, ever-changing entertainment, his dedication hasn't wavered. The confirmed bachelor shows up almost without fail, always in a tie and jacket, and with a large store of patience. When he's not there and a substitute choir director takes his place, it's often because he's promoting chant in other parts of the country and world.

"He's shown up year after year and week after week ... for 44 years," she said. "Can you imagine?"

Mahrt, an associate professor of music, began his undergraduate education at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash., but graduated from the University of Washington. He then earned his doctorate at Stanford. Friends say he's one of the world's foremost authorities on Gregorian chant and one of Stanford's best music professors.

He guides his graduate students deep into their intellectual arguments until they've mastered the material and "will invest an almost unbelievable amount of time into things," said George Houle, a Stanford professor emeritus. Mahrt has been slow to publish in an academic world that highly values that practice because, as Houle put it, "everything he does has that deep perfection and thought" and he wants to own a subject before writing about it.

Much of his spare income goes to collecting books on Gregorian chant, and he had to specially brace his extra bedroom's floor when he turned it into a library with stacks. Friends say his collection, which includes a 14th century chant book that he likes to show visitors, is more extensive than Stanford's.

Nothing about his upbringing on a wheat farm in Spokane exposed him to Gregorian chant, but he did have a devoutly religious mother who required all her children to take up a musical instrument in the third grade. It wasn't until Mahrt was an undergraduate at the University of Washington that he was introduced to Gregorian chant by a Dominican priest in the community.

He likes to say that someone once defined the sacred as "doing the right thing at the right time and in the right place." Gregorian chant is just that, he said: putting to music all these Latin liturgical texts that form the backbone of the Catholic faith.

"It adds something beautiful," he said. "A religious service ... should be beautiful because beauty is an attribute of God."

-- To hear the St. Ann Choir perform Gregorian chant, go to sfgate.com/podcasts.

The St. Ann Choir will chant the Christmas Eve midnight Mass as well as the Christmas Day noon Mass at St. Thomas Aquinas Church. The church is located at 751 Waverley St., Palo Alto.

(Source)

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