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.