(Authors note: Having gotten these thoughts off my chest, I promise to live a more productive and tolerant life, and not make incendiary remarks which might reflect badly on the publisher, my family, or my colleagues. The real work of the Manifesto I leave to another more articulate than I, as Marx left the phrasing of his oeuvre to the more verbally adept Engels. First, I must find someone who agrees with me, and I hold out little hope for that in this life. RC)

I have attended all the national conventions and many of the regional conventions of the National Association of Pastoral Musicians (NPM) since 1981. There is a strange dichotomy at work in that group, a group in whose number I am proud to count myself. On the one hand it espouses, even subsidizes a healthy diversity in praxis among pastoral musicians. But it inevitably happens that in (especially the regional) convention liturgies (where the truth of praxis is really told), there is an inclination toward the bombastic at the eucharist and an unmistakably monastic quality in the liturgy of the hours, one which alternates repertoires between Notre Dame (of the Fighting Irish) and a community called Taizé, just across the French countryside from Notre Dame (of the flying buttresses). Inevitably, the bombast is well-executed by lifetime professionals, and the contemporary music is pathetically underrehearsed, its performance led by "weekend warriors."

The NPM is in an organization which is made up largely of lay folk like me, with, presumably, similar hopes and aspirations. After convention hours, in the hallways, bars, and conference rooms, not a note of this quasi-anglican stuff is heard; hearts lead elsewhere as the music moves with ease from Joncas to Gigi to the Jesuits to Joni Mitchell--a more intimate musical landscape. True, the omnipresence of "Tho' the Mountains May Fall" has caused many an attending music director to fall off the wagon, or to opt for temporary deafness by stuffing the ears with the olives from double martinis. I myself have had to have pimientos surgically removed on more than one occasion. The point is that as much as we love church music, it is different from the other music we love, music of the people. In the grand terrain of iconography, this puts us much closer to the land of the Gnostics than to the territory of the gospel. And that is dangerous ground.

I wonder why we do this to ourselves? Why this dualism in our music, with one sound here for worship and another here for the rest of life? Do we have such an inferiority complex that we cannot begin to believe that God's gift to us might be delivered in our own language, and not in the language of the dead? More questions! Am I the only one left cold by the stolid and unimaginative music from Taizé, and by most of the liturgical music which has come out of England? Are the vital signs of the church in those countries as strong as those of the American church in all its argumentative splendor? Why did it take a jewish New Yorker to dust off the hymnody of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and give us some sacred music (admittedly theatrical) to get excited about in 1971? Has anyone heard genuine American music in church since "Day by Day" in the mid-seventies? I don't mean music by Americans trying to sound like Britten or Watts or Vaughn Williams, or like the anonymous genii behind the Liber Usualis. I mean American like Woody Guthrie, Carole King, Smokey Robinson, Hank Williams (Sr., of course), Richard Rodgers and Paula Abdul. Yes, it is out there. But it is elusive, and one must be persistent.

About four years ago, some friends and I were providing music at a religious education conference in a southern city whose name is synonymous with American music. We had Sunday morning off, so we decided to walk about and visit some of the scenic points that were close by. The Catholic cathedral was on the route, and since services were in progress, we decided to peek in and get a flavor of the musical liturgy in the southeast.

A bishop was presiding, and the mass was at the beginning of the eucharistic prayer. It looked as though there were a number of concelebrating presbyters in the sanctuary, and though the church was not packed, there was a large assembly. But everyone was just standing there. While the presiding bishop and others in the room waited with varying degrees of patience, the choir was singing a polyphonic "Sanctus" in latin. It was unbelievable, as though twenty years of history hadn't even happened. The assembly's unusurpable part of the eucharistic prayer had been coöpted by the choir in the mother church of the diocese, on a Sunday no less, in a language known by none except the elder presbyters, in a musical style of the courts of the sixteenth century. We shook the dust off our feet as we left the place, not staying to hear if this visionary place would save the Benedictus qui venit. to sing after the minor elevations, perhaps instead of the memorial acclamation.

The sad truth is that the story repeats itself in cities all over the United States. In my own city, on the edge of the inner city barrio, a mission church spent six figures to whiten its façade for the recent papal visit, it pays a professional choir and music director, but remands them to its ancient choir loft, where their baroque strains wash over the assembly, perhaps transporting it to another, ostensibly better world. In a further act of enlightened pastoral liturgy, electronic instruments are banned from being imported to the building at all. Liturgical and diocesan norms do not, we are told, apply to a basilica.

What is the American sound? When I try to define it, it evades me. But I think of the songs that embody what I mean: "Zip-a-dee-doo-dah," "Stars and Stripes Forever," "Swanee River," "Do-Re-Mi," "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," "Take the A Train," "Rhapsody in Blue," "Begin the Beguine," "Amazing Grace," "Home on the Range," "Over the Rainbow," "Appalachian Spring," "Get On Your Feet," "Oye Como Va," "When the Saints Go Marching In," "Dock of the Bay," "(You Make Me Feel like a) Natural Woman," "Respect," "Don't Fence Me In," "Blowin' in the Wind," and anything from West Side Story. The American sound is a mirror of the genius of America's melting-pot history and its ideals of democracy, freedom, opportunity. Can the American church give birth to composers who can stand with the likes of Stephen Foster and Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein and Pete Seeger, Gene Autry and Gloria Estefan, Aretha Franklin and John Philip Sousa? Father Greeley points out that it already has. They just haven't opted into the uncommercial world of liturgical music!

Why does so little of our liturgical music imitate the sound of this music, opting instead for the sound of "church music," a brackish menudo of ersatz chant, german hymnody, bad 19th century operetta and Vaughn Williams? It is the music of monarchy. It is (or it imitates) music written under the patronage of the European courts before the "democratic experiment" in the new world swept back ashore in 1789 and raged across Europe throughout the 19th century. Sacred music reflects the operative theologies of an era, and the operative images of God in the era of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution range from the male monarch to the deist's cosmic watchmaker. Interesting that in our day, while one of the last absolute monarchies in the world (gratia Garibaldi) grasps at the vestiges of its power, its music seems so impoverished, driving a wedge between it and the very ones whom it seeks to include and serve. Where is there a Gloria Estefan bringing the rhythms of Cuba and Jamaica to American worship in and out of the barrios? Where is there a Peter, Paul, and Mary inviting thousands into the mystery of life as they accept the invitation to simply sing together? Where a Stephen Sondheim, to see in the tragicomic vagaries of humanity the tracings of the paschal mystery, weave that insight into song and ritual music for the journey of conversion and the breaking of the bread?

Even more important, why aren't pastoral musicians demanding this music of composers? Why aren't bishops demanding it?

Perhaps American music is too frightening: it's too democratic. The possibility of imaging God through its rhythms and melodies lays a short-fused explosive at the foundation of the institutional European church, a church with many American defenders. Our music doesn't fit the ecclesiology that's being crammed down the throat of the church by some of her princely members and their minions whose buttons are pushed by music of the court, music which supports their other-worldly vision of God. Some people in the pew buy into that vision because it's always easier to worship that kind of a god than one who is so utterly immanent that this God names Self "Emmanuel." We still want to believe in an "all-powerful" god, rather than one whose clearest image of godliness was kenosis, utterly powerless self-emptying. At the heart of our prejudice are a false doxology that holds up God-King imagery as normative in blatant antithesis to the incarnational/paschal mystery imagery of the 2nd Vatican Council (and Holy Scripture), and a false mysticism which seeks to replace an incarnational spirituality with one manifestation of spirituality: the monastic one.

Two examples may help demonstrate the prejudice that exists against American-sounding liturgical music. The first example is a composer friend of mine, very talented and quite successful in breaking some new ground in liturgical compositions using reggae, rock, and gospel feels and rhythms. This fellow recently and inexplicably abandoned his efforts in this field in favor of a more "legitimate" (read "churchy") sound, in styles in which a hundred people are doing better work. His vision has been narrowed by the current ecclesiological environment, and his mentors steered him away from his dangerous sound. This is in spite of enthusiastic reviews in Pastoral Music, which expressed hope for his future as a writer. I can't imagine enthusiasm for his newer work, with its interminable lines of faux chant and obtuse choral writing. It does, however, sound like church music, and could safely be sung in the southern cathedral mentioned above.

The second example is a memory I have of the spring of 1985, when the Detroit Free Press reviewed a collection of liturgical music from NALR. The reviewer could not wrap his mind around the fact that the artist had used a saxophone as a solo instrument on one of the songs. Those of us involved in the project were torn between laughter and outrage. Where is it written that the notes of the saxophone or steel drum are less "holy" or appropriate to prayer than the notes of the flute or organ? Could the sound of reggae or gospel-rock possibly do more violence to the spirit of worship than the martial and regal strains of organ and brass choir?

What are some of the qualities of American music and music-making which make it appropriate to Catholic worship? 1) American music is culturally eclectic. The American scene absorbs the rhythms of Brazil and the street sounds of South Africa with equal ease. This is most easily seen in the music of Broadway, where the same mixed audiences of Americans turn out for Pump Boys and Dinettes as for Dreamgirls orSarafina! It is true that the radical ethnicity of the sources gets somewhat homogenized over a period of time, but by the same token the music of the world engages and delights us in a multitude of incarnations. 2) American music is melodically memorable. My earliest musical memories come from the genre of genuine folk as it was taught in school, and of tunes from the pen of Rodgers, Porter, Gershwin, and the craftspersons of the Disney studios. Discarding from the discussion "art music" and the most anarchic forms of rock, we can say that American music is eminently singable for its lyricism. 3) Harmonically, American music is both simple and inventive. Feeding on the creative energy provided especially by jazz, its departure from vertical, triadic harmonies and its use of inventive scales, there is a freshness in the American sound that is tempered by popular taste while constantly pushing the limits of that taste. This is evident both in the composition of Stephen Sondheim and the vocal stylisms of groups like the Manhattan Transfer. 4) Rhythmically, American music is bound to the dance. It is music for movement, completely at home in duple and triple meters, but often drawing both from eastern and southern hemisphere sources for more complex meters and polyrhythmic fabrics. This may be its most dangerous feature to some, who still envision worship as a sedentary act of the mind and not as a holistic act of the person (or rather, of a people.)

Another dangerous feature of American music is its improvisational aspect. The form which the repertoire takes for thousands of "casuals" players as well as ensemble players is a book of melody lines with chord symbols, and the music is shaped as it is played, uniquely, and yet utterly recognizeable. It's a good thing that some professional church musicians are good at this: if they played the accompaniments we find in many of our hymnals of some of the current "pilgrim" repertoire, we would all be in for a good snooze. Or listen to an organist play the Oregon Catholic Press accompaniment for "Amazing Grace," and then hear it played by someone who understands the improvisational character of gospel music. This aspect of our music redefines what a professional church musician is, and some very unconventional musicians are called for!

The task before us remains one of enculturation. For us in the western hemisphere, it means claiming a belief that God's word to us and our praise of God can be mediated in melodies, harmonies, and rhythms as they developed or were born in our own hemisphere. It is time for a manifesto by which Catholic worshippers throw off the musical structures of pre-Industrial Revolution Europe and begin to really believe in the American musical heritage as a mode of sacramentality. In some places they already have: they have voted with their feet, as it were, and left their stuffy churches for communities of various denominations who are less tied to the trappings of the past. There is much lost in their departure both for us and for them. It is a tragedy that for people to celebrate their experience of God and life in language and music which is their vernacular, they have to leave a church which mandated culturally appropriate and vernacular liturgy over two decades ago.

The strongest argument I can think of against this manifesto is the need for liturgy to maintain its counter-cultural stance. In the United States, there are strong cultural biases against which liturgy stands: consumerism, pathological individualism, and manifest destiny are three of the biggies. One could argue that the cultic stance of the church should be as devoid of cultural entrapments as possible, so that the church stands like a St. Francis, walking naked from his father's house into what he saw as his destiny in God. One could thus maintain an argument for Latin as the cultic language of liturgy, so that the language of the stock exchange is not used in worship.

This is not, however, my understanding of the way liturgy nurtures transformation. Its mode is parabolic; its argument is by invitation into a new way that is at once radically new and totally familiar. Just as Jesus used banquets, farmers, shepherds, and lilies of the field to teach about the reign of God, liturgy uses the stuff of ordinary life to make a case for the mystical insight of Christ that all are one, that none is outside the encompassing love of God, and that the reign of God is already present with healing, forgiveness, and liberation for the asking. Rather than placing us in a "holy place" beyond where we really live, liturgy tries to help us find that the place of the holy is where we live, in our shared bread, in our reconciliations, in our encounters with each other.

Music, therefore, should participate in this invitation. Rather than trying to create some kind of musical melange that suggests the royal courts of another era or the angelic choirs of jewish mythology, liturgical music should be completely familiar sounding, challenging and beautiful, with its roots in the music of the people of our time. As American, it should celebrate our diverse cultural heritage and our energy. It can do this without degenerating into the sugary individualism of televangelical singers by being written by composers who are first members of the assemblies they serve, just like other ministers, existing to empower and support that assembly's ministry. It can do it without buying into consumerism by our relentlessly pursuing live performance by ensemble, cantor, and assembly, by rooting out attempts to bring canned music into our services, and by musicians and musicians' organizations continuing to foster coöperation among publishing companies. It can do this without collaborating in the lie of manifest destiny by holding fast to its scriptural and christological mandates. [I recently heard a horror story about a church in the east which sang "God Bless America" on one of the Sundays of Lent this year. Searching my calendar for an explanation, I could only find Girl Scout Sunday as a possible excuse. When I learned that the same Eucharist hadbegun with "Immaculate Mary," I briefly considered changing fields.]

Our manifesto must not create a tyranny of style. I have lived long enough to see that part of the catholic genius is that our church, in obedience to the inclusive love of Christ, is able to accommodate Veronica Luekens and Matthew Fox, William Buckley and Mario Cuomo, Rosemary Haughton and Mother Teresa. I don't use "American music" in an exclusive or jingoistic sense at all. I think that musically speaking, eclecticism is a virtue. Eclectic music in liturgy can help all feel included, while at the same time expanding our vision to help us begin to see as others see. The hymnody and music of other eras can provide perspective and balance in the worship life of the church. It can provide perhaps a metaphor for transcendence, otherness, and mystery in inclusive liturgy, but only if it has been purged of language and theology which, though once perfectly acceptable, is now offensive. Music is a language by which we communicate our experience to one another. By singing together, in different styles, different tongues, we build the bridges between us which will make us truly one. We have a right--even an obligation--to use culturally appropriate music in our worship. To continue to settle for "art" music, or museum music, or "musicians'" music, is for the church to flirt again with irrelevance, opting out of the real world, the only world we have, for a pious construct of some previous culture's imagination.

The 1990's will see the sesquicentennial of the Communist Manifesto arrive, and with it the triumphalistic demagoguery of those who misperceive the fall of this incarnation of communism as the failure of its ideals. The epitaph on capitalism (can its demise be far behind?) will probably say, "Marx was mostly right." As in the mid-nineteenth century a visionary called for ordinary folks to throw off the old economic order so that the world's wealth might not stay concentrated in the hands of a privileged hegemony, the church in America awaits an American Manifesto around which good, faithful musicians can rally and throw off the trappings of unthinkingly monarchical and moribund liturgical music. This will be the beginning of a new age of the western church, because American music, nurtured in pluralism and crafted by an ancient faith nuanced by twentieth century theological insight, will form the next generations of Christians. It will give them lullabyes for their children and songs of farewell for their return to the earth, help cement the relationships in their base communities and move them into, out of, and through their Sunday assemblies. This music may, in fact, be the bloom on that elusive vine of culture for America, providing depth and connectedness to the experience of people in a post national world. And like that venerable document of Marx and Engels, the American Manifesto will be real hope for liberation of....the "masses."