Part XXIV (Final): "The Remarkable Sixty-Year Survival of Prof. Mahrt's St. Ann Choir”
Tribute from Ted Gioia and End Notes by Roseanne T. Sullivan
I’m going to give the next-to-the-last word to Ted Gioia, perhaps an even more unexpected person than René Girard to give kudos about a sacred music expert. Younger brother to poet Dana Gioia, Ted Gioia is a noted public intellectual in his own right, an expert on jazz.
He’s so well known for his writings and teachings in jazz, that when he set up a humorous interview with an Artificial Intelligence Music Historian on his Substack, The Honest Broker and asked “What are the best books on jazz?” the AI Music Historian replied, “Some of my top picks would be The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia . . .”
In 2022 the Jazz Journalists Association chose The Honest Broker as blog of the year and also awarded him the Robert Palmer-Helen Oakley Dance Award for Excellence in Writing.
Ted studied at Stanford, where he earned a B.A. in 1979 and then an M.B.A. in 1983, after he earned a second B.A. at Oxford.
He designed and taught a class on Jazz as an undergraduate. In “Changing His Tune: A jazz expert turns to simpler songs” published in the Stanford Alumni Magazine in 2007, Cynthia Haven wrote that he “helped launch the Stanford jazz studies program. . . as a Stanford junior, Gioia taught his first course on jazz, through a special undergraduate program.”
During his Stanford years, he attended Masses at which the St. Ann Choir sings. Bill Mahrt told me he had frequently seen Ted Gioia in the congregation. After I contacted Gioia to ask if he could send me any thoughts about Bill for this history, he generously sent me the following.
“I was a music major at Stanford University for a period of roughly 15 weeks. I was the first person in my freshman class to declare a major. And I was the first to change majors.
“I became an English major with no regrets. That was the right decision for me.
“Well, that’s not entirely true. I do have one regret.
“I wish I’d taken a class with Dr. William Mahrt during my brief stint as a Stanford music student. I would have loved to soak up his deep knowledge of medieval and Renaissance music. Who knows, I might have stayed on as a music major. Perhaps I’d have even found the courage to audition for the choir he led so inspiringly.
“Then again, probably not. I’m still in awe of his choirs. They sing with seraphic authority.
“Years later, I heard his choir regularly at St. Ann’s Chapel and St. Thomas Aquinas Church. Those experiences still rank as my gold standard for liturgical music. I wish everybody could be blessed with the chance to experience this music in person and in the proper setting.
“For the most part I admired Dr. Mahrt’s work from a distance. But my gratitude also extends to a personal intervention he made in my career.
“Back in the late 1980s, I joined the music faculty at Stanford—when the university launched a jazz program. That was an amazing period. Stan Getz also joined the faculty the same day as me. Getz served as artist-in-residence, and I taught jazz history as well as some instrumentalist groups.
“The Department of Music was a little suspicious of these new jazz teachers—perhaps with some justification. I was later told that a faculty member slipped into my lecture class one day to undertake a quasi-secret evaluation. Nobody warned me, and I didn’t even notice it happening. (I taught a very popular lecture class, and it was easy enough to hide in back.)
“That professor was Bill Mahrt. I only learned about his classroom visit some weeks later when I was told that I had passed his inspection and earned his support. That meant so much to me—not just that I had survived an inspection, but that the praise had come from such an eminent authority.
“I’ve gotten to know him a little since that time, but I can hardly claim friendship. He is still my eminent authority. I am still that admirer from afar. And will remain one.
“It’s good to still have role models at my age—and I’m blessed with one who still inspires me in a way that transcends the music.
“That’s what music should always be about—transcendence and reaching beyond performance into the depths of our lives. Most of us, if we’re lucky, get a tiny taste of that on rare occasions. But, as far as I can tell, William Mahrt lives in that realm. His music is an invitation to all of us to join him.”
END NOTES
This series brings together a collection of materials and photos about the St. Ann Choir’s history that I had already and more that came into my possession after I told Prof. Mahrt and the choir I was going to give a talk about the choir’s history at the Musical Shape of the Liturgy conference that honored Mahrt’s work in November 2023. This labor was self-motivated. (I have no one to blame but myself :-)) After the conference, I continued working for more than two months to incorporate a lot of information and photos I didn’t have time to include in my talk, because I didn’t want all this material to be lost to researchers who may be looking into Prof. Mahrt’s life work in the future.
I still have hundred of other photos and other anecdotes about the choir, which I didn’t include. I’ll attempt to upload them all to an archive along with the enhanced slide presentation. Many other events could also be documented. But now I need to bring this task to an end.
I want to close with a few reflections about how important it is that Prof. Mahrt’s choir persisted in singing the Church’s traditional sacred music, specifically the Latin Gregorian chants and polyphonic settings of the texts of the Mass, in the liturgy where it belongs—many decades after that kind of music was out of favor in most of the Catholic world.
As I mentioned in an earlier part of this history, Catholics are not supposed to be singing at Mass. We are supposed to be singing the Mass. Singing a hymn can be wonderful, but only in its proper place.
That means that if there is any singing at a Mass, whether it’s Novus or Vetus Ordo (traditional), the priest is supposed to sing his parts, the congregation is supposed to sing the ordinary, the unchanging parts that belong to the people, along with a choir, and the choir should sing the proper, the texts of the Mass that change every day according either to the saint or sacred event being celebrated or the day’s place in the liturgical year.
A suitable extra-liturgical motet or hymn may be allowed only after the Offertory antiphon and the Communion antiphon, and during the Recessional.
Dr. Kerry McCarthy, who I quoted previously, and who can be said to be Prof. Mahrt’s star pupil, has said that Prof. Mahrt taught her to think with the liturgy, and that phrase sticks with me. In her writings about Renaissance composer William Byrd’s Gradualia, from which the choir continues to sing several Mass settings for special events, McCarthy notes that Byrd’s settings of the ordinary and proper of the Mass were in service to the liturgy, and that phrase sticks with me too. The concept of service is vitally important in this context. With music along with every other aspect of how we celebrate Mass, we must not serve our own whims, we must serve God.
Whether we sing the Mass or we follow the Mass when it is sung, we are participating in the liturgy. We are thinking with the liturgy. Similar to Byrd’s motive behind why he retired from Queen Elizabeth’s court and dedicated the rest of his life to composing awesome music paradoxically for the Catholics of England who were breaking the laws by celebrating Mass in secret, when we sing, shouldn’t our music also be in selfless service to the liturgy?
A lot of Catholics have grown up only hearing four hymns sung at Masses (often referred to as the four hymn sandwich). Most have been led to believe (erroneously) that Vatican II abolished Gregorian chant and Latin and that just any hymns can be chosen by whoever selects the music for the day. People have gotten used to the absolutely whimsical way music is chosen for Masses. What makes it worse is that mistaken opinions about what we should be singing are entrenched in the opinions of laity and clergy alike. For a deeper treatment of this topic, you might want to read this article, written in layman’s language:
Following is an authoritative quote I included in the above article; it came from the Vatican, under Pope St. Paul VI:
“To continue to replace the texts of the Mass being celebrated with motets [hymns] that are reverent and devout, yet out of keeping with the Mass . . . is to cheat the people…. ” — A response from the Consilium (a group of bishops and experts set up by Pope Paul VI to recommend details of the liturgical reform) in response to a question about the continuing applicability of the 1958 permission to sing popular religious songs during a low Mass.
Official Church documents state that we should be singing the highest quality music either from the Church’s treasury of sacred music or in harmony with it. Let’s not cheat ourselves, or cheat God of the right worship due Him in the sacrifice of the Mass.
In persistently programming the type of music his choir sings, Prof. Mahrt illustrates what the real Mass of Vatican II looks like. Recognition for this awesome work has come only recently, and mostly from sacred music aficionados, but his achievement should be widely appreciated by many others. Spread the word!
