Courtney Eschbach-Wells has a “do not play” list for her funeral. Eschbach-Wells, 44, is not facing the grim reaper just yet, but as a lawyer, she likes to have her affairs in order. She’s also of Slavic descent, so she’s “morbid by nature,” she said.
Most importantly, she is a Catholic cantor, and over the last 20 years singing at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, she’s had abundant time to form strong opinions about hymns.
Eschbach-Wells, who has a clear, bright soprano voice, can’t remember a time when she didn’t sing.
“It’s as natural as breathing for me,” she said.
She sings in her garden, she sings to her chickens and her bees, she sang to her baby (now 14), she sings while commuting to work as a bill drafter for the New Hampshire General Court, and she tries not to distract her co-workers at the State House by singing at her desk.
She also has some strong opinions about that age-old question: why (other) Catholics don’t sing.
“We’re not a singing culture,” she said. “We don’t have a sporting culture where we sing; we don’t have a going-out culture where we sing.”
The one exception is karaoke, but that’s mainly something to do with a group of friends who have had too much to drink. Americans simply don’t readily sing in groups with people they don’t know, and that includes at Mass.
The popular recorded music people hear every day is so highly produced, it’s intimidating, Eschbach-Wells said, and makes them think they can’t sing unless they sound like that.
“But a good choir does not need a ton of Taylor Swifts. It just needs people who can try, and who can try to learn.”
That doesn’t mean any liturgical music will do.
“You’re trying to find that sweet spot where the choir serves two functions: song leadership, singing the hymn so you have voices to follow; and also providing something where, at certain points in the Mass, your active participation can be just listening. So the music works two ways,” she said.
And music does work, in a way that nothing else can.
“Music takes you out of yourself. It reaches a different part of your brain,” Eschbach-Wells said. For her, it’s old English hymns that hit the mark.
“There’s something about it that always plucks that perfect chord in my heart, like when you hit a tennis ball with a racket in just the right spot: ‘Ahhh, yeah, that’s it,” she said.
But the words of the hymn are important, too. Hymns are a wonderful way to learn Scripture; and sometimes they can hit an unsuspecting ear with surprising sharpness…. Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.
This profile first appeared in OSV Magazine. Photos by Michael Richards.
As an Irish American, my experience with group singing is very different from Courtney’s. Most of my kids knew all the words to many Clancy Brothers songs, Sweet Caroline, and John Denver’s Country Roads by the time they were three years old. Sure, some of these songs started as drinking songs, but these songs are today sung in groups whether people are drunk or sober. And I’d challenge anyone to go into a room of completely sober 50 and 60 somethings and start singing some old TV theme songs. Brady Bunch, Gilligan, Three’s Company, etc. I guarantee you almost everyone will be singing right along. I recently went to a Sound of Music Sing a Long. So fun! And everyone was singing their hearts out.
Then why don’t people sing at church? In my opinion, there are two main reasons Catholics don’t sing along at Mass. The first reason, as was pointed out, is because we don’t know the songs. The second reason is that many cantors sing at least 3 octaves too high for most of the congregation. I (along with lots of toddlers with their hands over their ears) often find the singing so shrill that it borders on unpleasant. But in any case, the music, as led by many a cantor (at least at my parish), is sung as if it were meant to be listened to and not sung along with. Like Beverly Sills or something.
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I personally like it, but it was getting a bit tiresome and overused.
Oh, I love this! I am in our church choir (because you don’t have to audition…) and it is such a blessing to sing together. People often tell us how good we sounded, which is nice, but we’re not performing for an audience, we want them to sing with us, which only a few people at our parish do (it’s a small parish, to be fair). Our (paid) music director is fabulous and we are so lucky he puts up with us – he has a day job in the investment world so it’s a sacrifice for him to come to all the Masses and rehearsals and select and teach us new music on top of a pressure-filled work life.