 Hi, I'm Mary Harrell for Tan Books. More is at stake in the music we listen to or perform than most people realize. So what are you listening to in your car? What hymns are you hearing at Mass? And are you ever without those ubiquitous little airpods in your ears day in and day out? It's time to face the truth of what we're hearing every day. And here to discuss his new book on this topic is Dr. Peter Questnisky. He is the author of Good Music, Sacred Music, and Silence, Three Gifts of God for Liturgy and Life. Peter, thank you for being here today. Thank you, Mary, for having me. So Peter, you're a philosopher, you're a theologian, but also, I don't know if all of our listeners know, you are a composer, you are a conductor, you're a trained singer, you really, you walk the walk and you chant the chant on this topic, you know it so well. So let's go ahead and start with what the problem is. Do you love a somewhat startling claim early on in the book that you say that just as great classical music is morally and intellectually good for us? Conversely, certain forms of music can actually be harmful and downright sinful. Tell us why you make that claim. Yes, so in the moral life, there are many, many influences on us and music is one of them, not the only one. However, it's a particularly important influence on our moral life because music as all of the philosophers from ancient times through modern times have recognized has a peculiar power to get under our skin, so to speak, and get right into our emotions, our feelings, our passions and form them in a likeness of the character of the music itself. We see this because dance music makes people wanna dance, march music makes them wanna march, church music at its best makes them want to pray. The way the music itself is, and I don't just mean the words, I mean the music really shapes our character. And that's a truth that nobody has ever denied, but a lot of people become very uncomfortable when you emphasize that point to them. And yet it's really kind of obvious, if you look at the people who listen to heavy metal music, they dress and they act and they talk a certain way, the people who listen to jazz, dress and talk and act a certain way, the people who listen to classical music perhaps, there could be some stereotypes in there, but there's also just a truth that we see about the formative power of music. And there are definitely types of music, I would say heavy metal is one of them, rap is another one, where there are serious ethical questions here about what kind of spiritual food are we taking into our souls when we listen to this music? We're asking it to shape us to make us like itself. And the sentiments conveyed in the lyrics especially, they kind of drill into the soul even more deeply when they're combined with music. I think parents find that when they maybe turn on a song that they listen to in their youth or even currently, and then you turn it on and your children are listening and you think, oh my gosh, this is wildly inappropriate and I just have heard it for so many years, I didn't even notice anymore, absolutely true. And I don't wanna paint that with too broad of a brush, you do make allowances for folk music, for music that is appropriate to certain instances or cultures, right? It's not just totally its Mozart all the time, even though that wouldn't be a bad thing. Yes, I would say that part of my goal in the book is to encourage people to broaden and deepen their musical culture, their musical experience because we as Western Christians, Catholics, we inherit the greatest musical and artistic culture that the human race has ever seen. There isn't even anything close to what Christendom has given us. And I'm talking now about everything from Gregorian chant and Byzantine chant through the polyphony of the Middle Ages and of the Renaissance, Palestrina, Victoria, Bird, Talas, these wonderful composers, unequaled at writing sacred music. And into Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn, Mahler, Bruckner, Brahms, I mean, there are so many great composers, each one of these you could devote your entire life to because they left a corpus, a body of work that is comparable, say, to the work of Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo or Shakespeare or Dante, right? So these are, this is a great heritage we have. And yet the musical taste or the musical habits of most people is like a tiny thin line of this whole heritage. And in fact, when you look at it, that is when you look at a lot of contemporary or popular music, it's extremely simplistic as music. It has very repetitious rhythms. It has really dumb lyrics. The melodies are not at all interesting. Sometimes there isn't even a melody. And oftentimes the styles are one of sort of grinding almost bestial repetition. This is what you hear thumping out of the woofers of so many cars in cities. And this is like people eating a musical diet only of sugar candy or worse, even poison perhaps. Fast food, I compare it at one point to fast food. If all you ever ate was Burger King, you're gonna be a very unhealthy person, right? And this is true psychologically and spiritually as well. Well, and so let's go to the converse of that. The opposite of that would be Gregorian chant. You go into great detail in the book about the incomparable art form. And I love that you call it an art form. I don't think people always look at a musical category and say, yes, that is art as well. So what about Gregorian chant? It sets it apart as being uniquely suited to divine worship. You go through eight points that I thought were wonderful. Yes, exactly. Well, I do talk a lot about chant in the second part of the book. The first part is about classical music. Although as you say, I talk about folk music there too, which I think is a very important genre or genres multiple. But in part two, where I'm looking at sacred music, what's appropriate for the liturgy? There I really, I just start where the church herself starts in so many magisterial documents that Gregorian chant is the norm, is the perfect exemplar and example of sacred music. Why is that the case? Well, as you said, there are eight characteristics. The first is the primacy of the word. Gregorian chant gives primacy to the word of God, to the word of God in scripture. It's a musical lexiodivina, a musical interpretation of the word of God as given to us through the liturgy. In other words, the music doesn't draw attention to itself, but it draws attention to the sacred words that are being sung. And it does though, because of the, in a sense, the purity or the chastity of the melodies. It's not music that jumps up and down and says, pay attention to me. It's music that says, submit yourself to the holy word of God and let it form you and penetrate deeply into you. And the chant, the peacefulness, the tranquility of the chat helps that word to penetrate into our hearts. This is something that happens over a long period of time. We're meant to be hearing this over a long period of time, not just once. If you hear chat once, you might think, oh, that's strange and interesting, but it won't really have an effect on you. It's supposed to be a habitual exposure. The second characteristic is free rhythm. The chant doesn't fit into a system of beats, like duple or triple time. You can't put a meter to it, like three, four or four, four. If you have musical training, you know what I'm talking about. It's not like a waltz or a march or a dance. It has a free rhythm that follows the rhythm of the words themselves, usually from scripture. And this gives chat, it's sort of ethereal, free-floating character, right? It sort of meanders and almost soars like a bird in the sky, right? And that's part of the, it has this effect on us then of liberating and freeing us from worldly concerns. That's very much the effect of this free rhythm. Unison singing, typically Grimory and chant is sung, everybody is singing the same melody at the same time. It's not music in parts, like polyphony or just about every other later form of music, but it's music, it's unharmonized, unaccompanied often, and just one unison voice. Well, what's important about that? That represents the one holy Catholic and apostolic church speaking and praying una voce with one voice, right? And that means everybody can sing along with the chant either in the choir or even in the congregation. So that's important, the unison singing. The unaccompanied vocalization, I kind of touched on that. The fact that oftentimes there are no instruments involved. It's just the God given instrument of the human voice that is meant to be emitting the chant. And that's how it was for many, many centuries. There was no organ accompaniment. And still to this day, I would say in most churches when the chants are sung, there's not organ accompaniment. It's just the sound of the human voice. The only instrument God created every one of us with, right? I'll just mention the others briefly. Modality is unusual about chant. Chant isn't written in major keys or minor keys, but it uses an older system of tonality by which the melodies themselves have a unique set of shapes that we call the modes. And major and minor keys are like modes, but there are eight modes, not just two. And so a chant then has a kind of strange sound to the modern ear because for hundreds of years, we've been using only major and minor keys in Western music. But chant comes from an ancient culture that used eight different scales for the music. So that gives it a unique aspect or frame. And these modes have different emotional characters as well. Some of them are more bright. Others are darker. Some of them seem very incomplete. They frustrate in a way our musical expectations. And so what they actually lend themselves to is conveying something like the longing for eternity or the longing for the divine, precisely because the chant doesn't end in a sort of neat and tidy cadence, the way that a lot of later music does. You know, anonymity is a trait of Goraine chant. We don't know the names of, well, with very few exceptions, we don't know the names of any of these composers who wrote thousands of these gorgeous chant melodies, right? So there's no cult of personality. There's no celebrity status that somebody gets to have as a performer or as a composer of chant. It's just a big anonymous body of work produced by countless monks over all of these centuries. And what a wonderful thing that is too. It's like the liturgy itself. So much of the liturgy, we don't know where it came from. It just sort of, it was there. It emerged from faith and from prayer. Emotional moderation, this is very important about chant too, that it is emotional, it's not devoid of emotion, but the emotions are subtle and calm and pure. It does express joy, it does express sorrow, but it doesn't express, the extremes that say a romantic opera or perhaps a modern pop song is trying to get at, right? It's more subtle. And the last thing is maybe the most important in a way, the last trait of chant, which is that it's unambiguously sacred. And the reason I say that is the chant arose exclusively for use in the sacred liturgy of the church. It's never had any other purpose than that for its entire history. And we're going on now, we were talking about a heritage that's at least 1,500 years old. We don't even know when the chants began. They just suddenly show up in the historical record. As long as people have been liturgizing, they've been singing. Well, that leads me to the next question then of another part you had in your book that I wasn't something I hadn't even considered before that we sing liturgical texts. We don't just speak them. And there is a strange disconnected one. If you attend a Nova's Ordo Mass, sometimes the mass parts just spoken if there's not musical accompaniment for the day, the pianist is not there or whatnot. And it sounds rather strange. And I never thought about that, but why do we sing liturgical texts and not just speak them? Could you go into that for a little bit? Yes, for sure. Well, there are many reasons for doing this. And it's important to note that for the first 1,000 years of Christianity in East and West, when there was an undivided church before the Great Schism, that tragic event, all liturgy was sung. Public liturgy was always chanted. And it was only in the second millennium in the West that the idea of a private or a low mass developed. And it developed mainly because in monasteries that had dozens or even hundreds of monks who were priests, they could only do one collective mass per day as a community, one chanted mass. There was no such thing as a celebration, that's a novelty. And so these priests, they wanted to offer the holy mass as a personal devotional act and as an act on behalf of the church living and dead. And so that's how the low mass developed as an opportunity for these monks to pray a private quiet mass in the morning prior to their communal sung liturgy. But why do we sing the texts? Why is that the norm? First of all, it's because it elevates the text to a higher level. Whenever we sing something, we are elevating it. When we sing a song, a ballad, we're elevating the topic of that ballad. When we sing a mass, we're giving a sort of consecrated and ornamented and beautiful costume in a way to the words, we're treating them with even greater love and respect and they move us more deeply when they're sung. They're more memorable to us. People, there have been studies that show that people memorize things 10 or 20 times faster when they're sung as opposed to when they're just merely recited, right? This is why the advertisers love jingles. They know the jingle is gonna get stuck in your head. You'll never forget it for as long as you live. Also, when words are sung, they actually have a way of carrying through a space more. If somebody just says at mass, the Lord be with you and with your spirit, it's kind of stale. The words just sort of drop there like you're just dropping something. But if the priest says, and the whole church chants, that's come spirit to do, very simple. Anybody can chant that. But suddenly it has this monumentality to it, right? It has a real solidity and strength and power that you're not going to get when you merely recite the words. Absolutely. I keep going back to children just cause I have so many of them, but that sticks with them too. When we want our children to memorize something or learn it, we often give it to them in a song. And in the same way, my kids will come home from mass and I'll hear them chanting in the living room. And I love that because something has stuck with them. The book is not totally about music. It is about silence as well. And I think any Catholic reader today is probably familiar with Cardinal Robert Sarah's book, The Power of Silence. And so what is the context of the silence you're writing about in this book and was his book any influence on your own work or thinking on the topic? Yes, absolutely. Well, Cardinal Sarah is certainly an influence, I think on any of us who love the liturgy and who treasure silence in particular. Silence in the liturgy is something that is more distinctive to the Western or Latin tradition. The East, which I love, I'm very familiar with Eastern Christian liturgies, especially the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and its liturgical rites, they sing everything. It's very extroverted. There's hardly any silence. You don't have a moment to think to yourself. And that's fine. That's their tradition. That's their custom. It's very effective because they're leisurely about it and they take lots of time and they sing, they repeat all kinds of songs. And it's like you sort of get steeped in it. You're simmered and stewed in all this chanting. And I think that that has a kind of mesmerizing mystical effect as well. It works within their own heritage. In the West, for various reasons, which I won't go into right now, the liturgy developed more room, more space for silence, for sometimes quite considerable periods of time in which the ministers at the altar, let's say the priest, deacon, sub-deacon, they're busy doing something. They're praying their own prayers quietly. And in the rest of the church, everybody is kneeling and praying silently and uniting themselves in a very deep and fervent way with the overall offering of the liturgy that's taking place. We've all experienced this if we've attended the traditional Latin Mass and we've seen or we've heard, if you can put it that way, the not only the chants and the readings, the antiphons, the prayers, but also this great silence during the canon, during the Roman canon. So from the point when the sanctus dies out to all the way through the peromnia secola secolorum and the amen at the end, it's this oasis of silence. And in that oasis, we find ourselves, I think, drawn even more deeply into the mystery of the sacrifice of Christ on the cross and the love and the mercy with which he offered himself on the cross and the adoration that we owe him in his real presence in the most holy sacrament. All of that is heavily accentuated paradoxically by the absence of speaking and the absence of singing. It's what I call a sonic iconostasis. There's a kind of veil that we lower over this awesome mystery in order, because we almost have a sense that no words could do justice to this and no music either. Even though the Roman canon is full of beautiful and majestic language, we can follow that language if we want to in the missile and I do sometimes and I hope everybody does, but there's something about the experience of that cavernous, awesome silence around the cross at Calvary with Mary and John that I think it's so poignant. And it's one of the things that I think it prompts people to pray with deeper fervor at that point in the mass. You have a line on silence in the book, which I absolutely loved. It said that silence is music's necessary counterpart and prayer's inseparable companion. And I love that dichotomy. Have you always cherished silence in your life and in the liturgy or was it something you came to later on in life when you had a greater appreciation for the Latin mass? That's a good question. And I always want to be careful not to reconstruct past events, to sort of read into the past what I've figured out later. And so I won't pretend that I've always appreciated silence. I don't think, and I actually don't think that human beings can appreciate silence until they've become more mature and had more life experience. Just like little children are squirmy all the time and it's hard for them to sit still and they have to learn how to sit still and then later on going beyond that they have to learn to read a short book then a middle-sized book then a long book and then they need to go from literature to non-fiction and maybe even philosophy. So I mean, human, our education takes place over a long time and it goes from phase to phase to phase and really the sky's the limit because you can keep moving. And I think something similar happens with regard to music and silence and prayer, all of those, in that we start with rather simple maybe almost even animal habits or tastes or inclinations and we have to grow through good habits, through habituation and a good environment to a greater and greater appreciation of beautiful music, of the value of silence, of prayer forms that are not merely vocal. Everybody starts by memorizing the Our Father, the Hail Mary, et cetera, we pray the rosary but we're supposed to eventually without leaving that behind, of course we're supposed to graduate also to being able to sit still in church and not be saying words but just sit there and just be in God's presence and sort of shut, almost to shut off the talking and just be in God's presence. And that's what happens often in adoration and Eucharistic adoration that people can reach a point where they're just content to be there like that wonderful story where the Curie of ours asked that old man, what are you doing here for so long in church? And he just says, I look at him and he looks at me. And so that's why I think all of, that's what my experience has been that it's taken a long time to appreciate certain things in life, including silence. And yet we all need to strive for that. So true and as we wrap up here it's been a wonderful conversation but you attend a strikingly beautiful church in Lincoln, Nebraska. I've been there myself. It's such a beautiful, holy, calm, quiet place to pray. So beautiful. It's served by the priests of the fraternity of the FSSP and it's striking that it's filled every Sunday, every mass with young families. And if you took an average of the attendance of the average age, it would be like five because there's so many babies. There's so many little kids too. So what do you see for the future of the church, for the hope of these families attending the Latin mass and of being simmered in that silence, in that holy music, in that chant, every single weekend and holy day? Does that give you hope for our future as a church? Yes, it does because in fact, what we're seeing in a place like St. Francis of Ceci or any of the parishes run by the fraternity of St. Peter, the Institute of Christ the King or Diocesan priests who offer the Latin mass. What we're seeing there is a rediscovery, a recovery of some of the church's most powerful, evangelistic and missionary and cataclysm and spiritually formative tools. These are tools that the church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit developed over centuries and centuries and they're tested, they're time tested, they've been proved sevenfold like silver in the fire and they work, they work very well. These are the tools with which the Catholic church conquered the world, the Roman Empire, the barbarian kingdoms and all of the continents with the missions, right? So of course they're effective, of course they work. We just have to persevere in prayer, in fidelity and in patience because we're living at a time when there are people who just don't, they have psychological barriers to the recovery of Catholic tradition. They see it as something which is completely passe, something that belongs to the past, that has nothing to say to us anymore. The opposite is the truth, is the truth but they have these barriers or impediments inside to seeing that and we need to pray for them and for ourselves and just keep doing what we're doing, brick by brick, chant by chant, child by child, right? This is how Catholicism will be rebuilt in the future. Amen to that. Again, the book is good music, sacred music and silence, three gifts of God for liturgy and for life. You can find it here on tanbooks.com or at your local Catholic bookstore, a wonderful addition to any home Catholic library and totally accessible to even a regular reader and a mom just like me. Encourage everyone to pick up a copy. Dr. Krasnicki, thank you so much. Thank you, Mary, I appreciate it.