“Are you a Benedictine?”

After church last Sunday, a visitor asked me this. He is connected with the Benedictine Abbey of St. Meinrad, in southern Indiana and (I gather) was in town for the week.

I was confused; why would he think such a thing? It turns out that it was because of the Psalm. We had sung a plainsong setting of Psalm 132 in the service, and in his view, we sang it stylistically and well. The choir does good work with the psalmody; it is perhaps the best singing that we do. I do pester them about it quite a bit: shape of phrases (like a wave coming onto a tropical beach, then going back out), pause at the asterisk, diction. But the credit, if there is any, is mostly theirs; they have done this enough so that they listen to each other, and it is sung prayer – as it ought to be.

No, I am not a Benedictine. But my teacher was: Fr. Gerard Farrell, OSB (1919-2000). I am delighted to post a link to this page, which honors his memory.

He was an organ student of Flor Peeters and a graduate of the Eastman School of Music. He became Choirmaster at the great Abbey of St. John in Collegeville, Minnesota in 1951. Among his innovations, he instituted daily Choral Vespers, where it had previously been sung only on Sundays. I suspect that he would be pleased that the pendulum has swung back sufficiently so that a service such as the one I described in the previous essay, most of it in Latin, would again be valued, or indeed permitted by those in authority.

After the Second Vatican Council and the changes to the monastic liturgy, especially the use of the Vernacular and the desire of many to abandon the heritage of Gregorian Chant, he strove to hold the old and new together, as outlined on the memorial page, but eventually in 1969 resigned from the position, like many other Catholic Church Musicians of those dark days. He moved east, and (among other duties) taught at Westminster Choir College, serving also as associate priest in the local parish. I had the privilege of taking his graduate course in Gregorian Chant; I wish I had continued with his advanced class in Semiology and Paleography (that is, working with the original chant manuscripts and grappling with issues of interpretation of the ancient Neumes; he was one of the masters of his generation in that field), but my paths led in other directions.

In the end, he was permitted to return to the Abbey; he taught week-long summer courses in Chant there in his final years, and went there to die, as is appropriate for a Brother of the Order of St. Benedict. He arrived there on December 30, 1999 with terminal cancer, and died on January 9, 2000, with Requiem Mass at the Abbey on January 12.

May he rest in peace. May he remember us his students before the Throne of Grace.