By Mary Ann Sullivan
According to Plato, nothing gets deeper into the soul than music. According to the student body of Magdalen College, truer words were never spoken.
They ought to know. They sing in the College choir. Every one of them.
“We take the effect of music seriously,” says Thomas Pendergast, Magdalen College’s choir director and music tutor. “We’ve seen firsthand that participation in choir draws the students into the Sacred Liturgy.”
The school requires choir participation, and wastes no time in orienting students to music most have never heard before. A freshman course on the fundamentals of music provides an introduction not only to sacred music, but also to such Church documents as Sacrosanctum Concilium and Musicam Sacram.
Drina Spalding, a junior from Kentucky, says she listened to ‘70s and ‘80s rock and country music in high school. Now words like neume, podatus, qualisma and punctum – Gregorian chant terms – roll off her tongue with ease.
Spalding has noticed that liturgical music elicits a completely different response than rock does – in the singer as much as the listener. “Hymns and polyphony bring out glory to God,” she says. “And in glorifying God, you get a fullness in yourself.”
Recent graduate John Lindsey, from Pleasant Hill, California, listened to contemporary rock and pop music during his high school years. It took some time for the new sounds he was hearing at Magdalen to get their hooks into him.
“When I was a freshman, I used to dread choir practice,” he admits. “I didn’t sing on key or pitch, and I saw my own deficiencies. But there was one thing I really liked about choir. It’s where all the classes come together. It’s a place where freshmen and sophomores lean on the upperclassmen. When everyone comes together like that, your self-consciousness about singing fades away.
“Singing creates a spirit that brings people together. It’s like a sports team. It helps create a sense of group unity.”
It also helps to have a music director who’s been there himself. In his younger days, Pendergast played lead guitar for a rock band in Albany, New York. When he headed off to Magdalen as a student in 1989, he decided to leave his electric guitar behind. Literally.
Pendergast recalls how his love for liturgical music grew quickly at the school — how natural it felt to trade searing riffs on the fretboard for the soaring sounds of sacred music.
Under his tutelage, the Magdalen choir has gradually expanded to include eight Gregorian chant Masses plus polyphonic motets, Masses by Haydn, Mozart and Palestrina, and traditional sacred hymns including Mozart’s “Ave Verum” and Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”
Magdalen College may be synonymous with music these days, but music is just a part of the college’s story. All courses there are taught as Socratic seminars in small classes. Students study the “great books” — classics of philosophy, math, science, history, literature and art — by reading the works themselves, rather than studying textbooks about them.
The Sacred Liturgy is at the heart of student life, so Holy Week is the high point of the year. Classes are suspended for most of the week and the choir practices in earnest for liturgies that culminate with a rich and reverent celebration of Easter.
The choir also sings at Masses in nearby parishes, performs for local schools and nursing homes, and has sung with the Granite State Symphony Orchestra. Thus, the students are sharing a rich musical heritage with people throughout New Hampshire who themselves might consider making the joyous passage from rock to Bach and beyond.
CDs of the Magdalen College Choir are available at the Catholic Exchange Online Store in the Catholic Mall, and at www.magdalen.edu.
(This article originally appeared in the National Catholic Register, and is posted here with permission. Mary Ann Sullivan writes from New Durham, New Hampshire.)
