Conference Notes: Taizé

As with my previous essay, this one is an attempt to organize my thoughts about another aspect of the Hymn Society conference: the workshop on the music and worship of the Taizé Community, and the evening prayer service in the spirit of Taizé. I write my notes in this form in order to provide a space for links to online resources.

I wrote last week that my encounter with Taizé last month showed me that there is more to it than I had realized. Taizé was started by Brother Roger in 1940 as an ecumenical community of reconciliation and peace. "The defeat of France awoke powerful sympathy. If a house could be found there, of the kind I had dreamed of, it would offer a possible way of assisting some of those most discouraged, those deprived of a livelihood; and it could become a place of silence and work." Their small cottage in the desolate village of Taizé, where Roger was joined by three others, the first Brothers of the movement, became a sanctuary for many displaced persons during the early years of the war, until the Gestapo occupied it in November 1942. After the war, the four Brothers returned from Switzerland to the village and resumed their life of "simplicity, celibacy, and community." At first, their worship was in the village church. In the early 1960's, the community began to attract large numbers of young pilgrims, and they built their own church, the Church of Reconciliation, with the work of volunteers and pilgrims.

Should the coming decades bring what I expect, the quiet witness of these Brothers, just Brother Roger at first and then for many years fewer than ten of them, stands as a model for those facing times of famine, death, tumult and war. No matter what the circumstances, it is always possible to live the Christian life in community, and to serve as Christ's hands in the healing of the nations.

More specifically, we church musicians must keep the Taizé songs and their manner of worship in mind. There may be more strength to these songs, these prayers, than one might think.

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The workshop and the evening prayer at the Hymn Society conference were led by David Anderson (davida@giamusic.com), who is an editor at GIA Publications. They are the U.S. agent for the Taizé publications, and all of the music is under their copyright for the U.S. and Canada. Several collections of music are available from GIA; recordings as well.

The Taizé website is this:
http://www.taize.fr

At this site, the most useful aspect for our purposes is the menu item "Prayer and Song." This takes you to a page with many subheadings; all of them are very important.

There is a page with mp3 files recorded live and quite unpolished (and thus, more real. For example, the cantors sometimes sing flat, the instrumentalists fluff notes, the congregation coughs and drops things on the floor and is sometimes not "with it." But there are times when it is all incredibly splendid. As with real worship, these moments are unpredictable.) There is a link to a weekly broadcast of the Saturday evening prayer service at Taizé, by a Catholic radio station in Cologne. There are many older services on the page as well as the one for the current week; each of the recordings runs about one hour and fades out in mid-song when the hour is expired.



The basic resources that Mr. Anderson recommended as a starting place are these:
- Songs and Prayers from Taizé (G-3719 for the basic edition) - 50 chants, guidelines, prayer texts and litanies.
- Taizé: Songs for Prayer (G-4956S for the vocal edition)
- Christe Lux Mundi (G-7101S for the vocal edition)
- Prayer for Each Day (G-4918) - this is text only; prayers for various seasons, a general introduction to worship in this manner.

Also two DVDs:
- Praying with the songs of Taizé (DVD-391). This is helpful because it is hard to enter the spirit of Taizé worship without seeing it. And it is done badly in many places, so badly as to turn people away from it. A similar result can be achieved from the broadcast recordings noted above.
- Life at Taizé (DVD-481) - a sixteen-minute video introducing the Community and its life.

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What should I make of all this?

There is already a weekly Taizé service in our community, so it would be wrong to try and start another one at our parish. Besides, we have the form of daily prayer that is proper to our tradition: Rite One Matins and Evensong, and especially Choral Evensong. We should nurture this rather than looking to Taizé for a model.

Still, it is worth noting that the Taizé form of evening prayer is based on the same model of monastic prayer that lies behind Roman Catholic Vespers, Lutheran Vespers, and Anglican Evensong: a beginning, psalm, Bible reading(s), prayers including the Our Father, song [in the basic tradition, the anthem or office hymn. In the Taizé form, this element is considerably expanded]. Perhaps there are lessons that we could carry over into Choral Evensong -- much longer silences after the readings, use of candles and icons, more opportunity for meditative prayer toward the end of the service (where our rubric says "Authorized intercessions and thanksgivings may follow" [BCP p. 71]), including ten or fifteen minutes of silent prayer, and then an open-ended conclusion to the service?

The result would feel very different from a traditional Choral Evensong, and probably very different from anything that is being done anywhere. I surely am not aware of any place where one might hear the Smith Responses, Anglican Chant psalmody, a Stanford Mag and Nunc, and end up with a couple of hours of Taizé songs, prayers, and meditation by candlelight. I would attend such a service; one of my problems with our Choral Evensong services is that when they are finished, what I want to do is to spend another hour or so in the church, in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, contemplating what we have sung and continuing the prayer.

Of more interest is the question of incorporating elements of this into the Sunday morning Eucharist, specifically our 8:45 "contemporary" service. The practice at this service is to sing a Taizé song or other repetitive song during the administration of the Blessed Sacrament. (We use songs from other sources, such as the Iona Community, and more of these than the genuine Taizé songs. But the ones we use are in a similar style, and aim for similar effect.)

There are many problems with this. The most notable is that it requires a mental shift from the discursive to the meditative. And this is supposed to happen in a service where the clock is ever-present. We have to be done by 9:45 so that people can go to their church school classes. A secondary problem is that silence is just as important to the Taizé spirit as the music, and there is often not so much as thirty seconds of silence at any point in the 8:45 service -- again, the clock is the ruling factor. We must press on from one thing to the next in a headlong rush. One cannot easily flip the switch from this mindset to one of stillness. Even if we were not in such a hurry, the people would have to learn to tolerate silence.

A third problem is that the effect of the songs is cumulative. In a proper Taizé service, there are many songs in a row after the concluding prayer -- in the service broadcast that I am hearing as I write this, almost a half-hour of songs. We have time for only one song, perhaps five minutes, eight or nine minutes at the most.

Nonetheless, with all these obstacles, it sometimes works. Or (I am guessing) it works for some people some of the time, while simultaneously for others it falls flat. And on another Sunday, it might work for other people. It depends on what the people are bringing to that day's worship from their lives -- and, very much so, it depends on the work of the Holy Ghost who prays with and among us and can never be predicted or pinned down or planned, and does always what is best, and what we need.

There was a man who is a notable author who used to attend our 8:45 service. He would sit in the back row with his young daughters. In those days, someone else (Thomas W., who reads this blog) was leading the music, and I sat in the back row with them. In one of his books, he wrote of a particular day when we sang a Taizé song -- and how it changed everything for him. I remember that song and that day, and even sitting beside him, I had no idea what was going on in his heart. It is well to remember such things as these. We (especially we who plan worship and music) may think we know what is going on, but we do not.

What I am getting at is this: the Taizé song during the distribution of communion is the most unpredictable part of our 8:45 service. And it must remain so. All I can do is to pick a good song, lead it with some degree of sensitivity to the feel of the congregation, and stay out of the way. When it "works," the song takes on what Brother Robert called "a flow of inner life animat[ing] the singing," and it becomes like a little bird, or a butterfly.

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A practical note: One easily gets the impression that the instruments are more important than they are in fact. There are books of instrumental parts for all sorts of things -- flutes, trumpets, cellos, guitar (classical-style, not the "thrash and bash" type guitarist that so often appears in church settings). Mr. Anderson reminded us that they don't actually make that much use of the instruments at Taizé. In the off-season when there are not so many pilgrims, there may be only the guitar which seems to be their basic instrument, or a keyboard, and this is perfectly legitimate. Even in the peak season, there will likely be only one or two additional instruments at a given service. In the one I am listening to -- in August, a peak time with lots of pilgrims -- there is a trumpet, not very well played, and he or she only plays in perhaps one-quarter of the songs, maybe less.

What there are at Taizé, and what we lack: cantors. We have some people who sing at the 8:45 service, but none of them have vocal ranges that correspond to the written Taizé parts. Many of the songs benefit greatly from the solo descants.

Still, the song can and should be simple. If leading from the piano as I do, a good bit of improvisation is helpful, and it would be quite deadly if the pianist simply were to repeat the written accompaniment, over and over. I begin with the written accompaniment, and after a few times start to play descants, or change registers (e.g., revoice the chords into the tenor register), or reduce the texture to just the bass line, or just a descant line, or stop playing altogether, just giving a hint at the end of each repetition that we should continue. Or arpeggiate, or play what the old composers called "doubles" -- variations in eighth note motion. Brother Robert again: "Variations in intensity are desirable, to match the variations in the prayer itself. At times it will be calmer, and at other times more urgent." The piano and other instruments can give cues as to the changes in intensity -- but the pianist must not force this on the people; he must sense what is appropriate from moment to moment. If Brother Robert is correct (and I think he is), the pianist is sensing "the variations in the prayer itself" and through his playing helping the congregation likewise to sense the variation, the ebb-and-flow of the prayer.

I have tried accompanying the songs at the organ, and it has been a miserable failure. The piano is much better for this - though the organ could work with the strongest and most outgoing of the songs, such as "Laudate Dominum," if there is a large and vigorous congregation.

And the large congregation helps all of the songs. There is a special magic when hundreds of people are singing this music in a good acoustic, as we had at the Hymn Society service. We sang the Magnificat canon, which is one of the older songs, and got the four-part canon going plus the four-part secondary canon, and kept singing for about ten minutes. It was spine-tingling (not at all like the recording, which is a studio recording with a small group of singers -- much cleaner, but not like a real congregation). It is something that is not possible for our congregation of fifty or sixty people, most of them not especially interested in singing.

Here is a song that was new to me. I think it will be effective at our 8:45 service. The YouTube link is more of a real congregation, and shows the use of the guitar to accompany:
Let all who are thirsty, come

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I am left with many more questions than answers.
But that is true of almost every aspect of my work as a church musician, and my life as a Christian.