On Choral Music and the Church or Community

Before I start this blog entry, I would like to share with you this song written by Thomas Tallis entitled "If Ye Love Me".

I've been singing in choirs since 2002. Thanks to my friend Eugene who have taught me the basics on how to read choral scores. From there, I improved my craft and learned a lot of things and realizations. And one of my realizations is that the Church or any Catholic/Christian Community is like a choral score.

I can hear clearly the question "WHAT DO YOU MEAN?!?!?!"

Here it is...

For starters, you may have noticed that there are 4 voices: Soprano, Alto, Tenor and Bass. My conductor in one of my choirs gave me this analogy when describing how the melodic line per voice should be sung:

• Basses are like your typical "Santa Claus": jolly, happy and always laughing. They have deep voices which doesn't seem to bring the house into sadness.
• Tenors are like your typical dads: They may be commanding and hard to understand, but they are doing it with care. They command the family, but they do it because they love you.
• Altos are like mothers who sacrifice so much for the family. They are the ones that continuously love without asking for anything in return. Even if the family forgets to give love to their mothers, they still show love to them.
• Sopranos are those jumpy teens that always goes with the flow of the music. They don't mind what's going on as long as all of the attention is on them.

Now with that in mind, imagine yourself inside a room with 4 friends (that is, two girls and two men) then someone starts a melody until this song comes into writing.  Thus the term "Polyphony" came into being.

Now since every voice has it's own melody to share or to sing, isn't this similar to our Church or in a general aspect, our Community?

Whenever we get to meet new people, we recognize that they have a different story to share. They have their own melody. Thus, we "blend in" to their story and create a new, but enticing, song. It also goes for the older people in the organization. Whenever we meet them and get to know them more, we "blend in" our story to them.

So what "gells" us to produce this music? Just as the melodies in a polyphonic music are gelled by formulating a good "chord progression", so does our Baptism in Christ gell us together just as what Cardinal Tagle said during his Chrism Mass Homily. And just as the goal of chord progression is to establish "a tonality founded on a key, root or tonic chord and that is based upon a succession of root relationships", so does our goal is to bring every voice, every person back to our "tonic chord", our "root chord" who is Jesus Christ.

To end, whenever people tell me that choral music is just for wimps or they cannot relate this kind of music to their Justin Bieber, Ne-yo, etc. and that choral music is just for the church, I just smile and say to them inside, "You're missing a lot in this."