The Gregorian liturgical chant is Goa's priceless intangible heritage

The unique Goan heritage of liturgical chant has not been listed for safeguarding as a national heritage and something which priests, choirs and congregants value it and revive it.

Published on:

15 Dec 2020, 1:03 am

Since March 2020, several churches in Goa have live streamed Mass, so

it is easy to sample the musical fare across the region. The feast

Mass of Saint Francis Xavier at Old Goa recently featured a

beautifully chanted responsorial psalm, proof that Konkani lends

itself quite naturally to the Gregorian idiom. Sadly, the music at

that Mass was an exception. In most of our churches, the congregations

seem content with ‘praise and worship’ songs at Mass, and possibly

care not at all for our priceless legacy. Maybe secular heritage buffs

could help raise awareness.

India is a party to the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the

Intangible Cultural Heritage, and maintains state-wise inventories as

well as a national one. Goan Christian liturgical chant is not listed

yet, and it never will be, unless priests, choirs and congregants

learn to value it and revive it. The heritage tag is gladly given to

objects of Christian art which fetch a price in the antique market.

Remember the uproar in 2012 over the heist at the Museum of Christian

Art in Old Goa? Gregorian chant is not made of gold or ivory, so it is

hard to convince people of its value as Goan heritage.

The Indian touch in Goan Christian architecture and artefacts has been

the subject of scholarly research for a long while. We need

musicologists who will do the same for Goan church music, especially

Gregorian chant as it took root in Goa. Chant developed differently in

each country, in each medieval monastery. At chant conventions in our

own day, specialists argue fiercely about musical interpretation.

Surely Goan Gregorian was different too. I say ‘was’ because, along

with other forms of traditional Goan church music, much is probably

gone forever. Every time I hear the Song of Farewell, Devachea

Bhagevontanno at a funeral I suspect many equally beautiful vernacular

Gregorian hymns were composed but have not been preserved by constant

use.

The arc of Goan proficiency in liturgical music goes from 1543, when a

choir of Goan boys sang at the inauguration of the College of Saint

Paul in Old Goa, right until the mid-1970s when village congregations

comfortably sang Latin litanies, as well as hymns in Portuguese and

Konkani. The chapel mestres upheld a truly Goan heritage which now

lies gasping. Fr António Da Costa’s painstaking collection Adlim

Kristi Bhogtigitam (published as Songs of Praise) points to a rich

repertoire earlier known by the common people. As for specialists,

Rachol Seminary boasted the only Gregorian schola (choir) in India.

There is surely enough room for the old and new in church music. To

value heritage is by no means to denigrate the oft-sung hymns composed

in the 1960s and 1970s by the prolific Fr Vasco Rego, SJ, and his

pupils, for instance. The two generations born after 1970 are

emotionally attached to those hymns, just as earlier generations were

attached to the church music they grew up with, which happened to

include a treasure of inestimable value, as Vatican II described

Gregorian chant.

From the documents of the Second Vatican Council, it appears the

bishops of the world, after much debate, agreed on a streamlined mass

in Latin, with readings and several prayers in the vernacular. That is

not what came to pass. ‘We will lose a great part of that stupendous

and incomparable artistic and spiritual thing, the Gregorian chant,’

Pope Paul VI lamented at his 26 November 1969 general audience, days

before the New Order of the Mass became obligatory.

Permission to celebrate Mass in the older form was given mostly to old

priests celebrating alone. Many Catholics in those days took the loss

of the Latin chanted Mass to heart. Here and there, small groups

applied to the church authorities for exceptional permission (indult)

for maybe a monthly celebration of the Mass in the old form. As well,

there were non-Catholic and even atheist intellectuals for whom the

Tridentine Mass was an outstanding work of art and their heritage too.

In 1971, Alfred Marnau, a member of the Latin Mass Society in London,

garnered their signatures on an earnest appeal to the Pope for an

indult. He contacted a number of well-known personalities and spoke

personally to Graham Greene, Kathleen Raine, Cecil Day Lewis and many

others. The story goes that Pope Paul VI read through the famous names

with interest, exclaiming, ‘Ah, Agatha Christie!’ before he signed his

permission. It has ever since been popularly known as the Agatha

Christie Indult.

Since most Catholics in Goa seem unaware of the diamonds they have

thrown into the sea, I earnestly hope heritage enthusiasts of whatever

faith will do an Agatha Christie for what remains of Goan Christian

art music.No appeals to the Pope are needed, since every single Pope

since Pius X has encouraged the faithful to regularly sing Gregorian

chant and sacred polyphony. In 1974, Pope Paul VI actually sent every

bishop in the world a copy of Jubilate Deo (Rejoice in God), a booklet

with the ‘minimum’ Gregorian repertoire he felt every Catholic should

learn.

What is needed is to gather, preserve and sing Goan sacred music, and

to use the Gregorian backbone in new compositions. The current form of

the Mass can easily accommodate simple congregational Gregorian – most

obviously the responsorial psalm, but the fixed ‘ordinary’ parts of

the Mass too – and the occasional Jubilate Deo selections. As

envisaged by Vatican II, choirshave a liturgical role beyond prompting

the assembly.

Festivals like the Ketevan Festival of Sacred Music are expensive but

a possibility. More urgently, we need scholars who can record, in

notation and audio, the shreds of repertoire that a few still

remember. Most of all, we need influencers to sell liturgical

appreciation toparish priests, to the singers who would be obliged to

practise, and to those in the pews who think any pious song is

suitable for Mass. Unlike art in gold or stone, chant is exists only

when sung.