JANUARY 2022
which we begin to prepare the Triduum: sharing meals, nurturing friendships, struggling through a language we do not know, accepting as many invitations as we extend. Indeed, the intercultural relationships we forge throughout the year will shape both the liturgies of the Triduum themselves and the way in which they are prepared. Ten, when we sing the entrance hymn of Holy Tursday, we will truly celebrate an outward sign of an inward reality.
2. Music is not a universal language. Too often conversations about preparing music for a multicultural Triduum start and stop with the issue of language. But preparing music in a culturally diverse context is about more than language alone. Te ways in which music resonates in our bodies are deeply culturally formed and conditioned, regardless of the language in which the music is sung. Mary McGann has reflected thoughtfully on the ways that the European classical music paradigm in which many pastoral musicians are formed—including many of us from minoritized communities—centers on different musical assumptions than those whose musical formation takes place in other cultural traditions and/or in less formal ways.3
Tese assumptions often shape
our musical understandings and our aesthetic preferences so strongly, she argues, that they risk becoming internalized as “right ways” of making music. When this happens, those internalized assumptions can be sites of subtle prejudice that constrain what we understand as both good music and good performance practice. When we too-easily invoke the universality of music without attentiveness to such assumptions, we can unwittingly presume that the hymns we love are the hymns which are universally loved.
When working to prepare an intercultural Triduum, acknowledging the multivalent ways in which music communicates might lead us to consider not only what languages are used at key ritual moments during the Tree Days, but also the communities, cultures, and contexts in which such songs originated. Such an acknowledgment might lead us away, for example, from merely translating into Spanish a few verses of a song beloved by
“Singing the song of others has the potential to be a way of encountering one another, to risk being in relationship with one another. It reminds us that God has no native tongue, musical or otherwise.”
many English worshippers to embracing a song beloved by many Spanish worshippers alongside it. And while it may be the path of least resistance to assign the leadership of the various sung parts of the liturgy to the different cultural choirs in the parish, if we have any hope of modeling true intercultural exchange for the wider community, we need to commit to learning one another’s songs. Singing the song of others—especially when it is not our favorite hymn, or when it is a hymn that does not resonate with our training or cultural heritage, or a hymn that we do not fully understand—has the potential to be a way of encountering one another, to risk being in relationship with one another. It reminds us that God has no native tongue, musical or otherwise.
3. No culture is a monolith. When preparing liturgy in any community—but especially in an ethnically diverse one—I am increasingly convinced that we need richer conversations about what we mean when we invoke “culture”. Too often we reduce the complexities of culture—especially in reference to ones that are not our own—to a
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