Bruckner and Stravinsky are quite different in background, personality, and musical style. Yet the music by these different composers in Chorus pro Musica's April 7 concert shares a common aspiration — to avoid sentimentality and sensuality and to, in Stravinsky's words, “appeal directly to the spirit.”
The Cecilian movement was a nineteenth-century effort to reform Catholic church music by eliminating the influence of secular, romantic, theatrical styles of music which were increasingly upstaging the traditional liturgy. (An example was the so-called Kyrie/Gloria Mass, whose movements took so long to perform that the priest at the altar had to say the Mass independently of the “sacred concert” in the organ gallery[1].) Cecilians regarded “true, genuine church music” as being subservient to the liturgy, and intelligibility of words and music as more important than artistic individuality. The movement took its name from St Cecilia, the legendary patron of sacred music, whose name was adopted by the fifteenth-century Congregazioni Ceciliani and by the Cecilian Leagues founded in the 1700s in Munich and elsewhere. These organizations of church musicians upheld the ideal of sacred music with little or no instrumental accompaniment; the organ was one of the few instruments accepted as liturgically correct.
Some first initiatives to reform church music were seen at the Council of Trent (1545–63). Later, Pope Beneduct XIV's 1749 encyclical Annus qui was taken by some to mandate the exclusion of virtually all instruments from church services. The encyclical did permit the performance of orchestral music in church liturgical services, but instruments were to be admitted only to accompany the singers in a subordinate role, and in particular to reinforce small choirs.
Cecilianism was nurtured by the early stages of industrialization, which engendered a longing for simplicity, unworldliness and the past, and a concentration on essentials, and by the generally historicizing climate of the 19th century. The Cecilians sought to restore traditional religious feeling and the authority of the church. For Franz Witt, one of the most influential of the German Cecilians, the list of acceptable music began with Gregorian chant, followed by a cappella polyphony, organ music and community hymns.
Sacred compositions by composers such as Josef Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were regarded by the reformers of the nineteenth century as the musical antithesis of liturgical music. Exaggeratedly graphic word-painting was to be avoided; expansive modulations and chromaticism — in fact, all characteristics of theatrical music — were anathema.
Like the Nazarenes in the visual arts, the Cecilians took the old masters of the 15th and 16th centuries as models for their own compositions. They viewed Palestrina as the leading figure in church music, and based their criteria on the music performed in the chapels of Rome rather than on the more emotional eighteenth-century repertory. Among the aspects of Palestrina's style that most appealed to the Cecilians was the importance placed on the sacred text. Palestrina's delicate use of dissonance and his avoidance of chromaticism was perfectly in tune with the movement's aversion to accidentals and their equation of any hint of chromatic line with external romantic expression and sensuality.
Prominent composers influenced by the Cecilian movement include Michael Haydn, Franz Liszt and, of course, Anton Bruckner.
“Bruckner approached the liturgical text with a complete understanding of his arts and a deep religious reverence for its meaning, much in keeping with the reforming attitude of the nineteenth-century liturgists. The techniques of sixteenth-cntury polyphonists and the Baroque contrapunctalists inspired him to compose a number of short, quite functional pieces like the phygian Pange Lingua (1868), Locus Iste (1869) and the severely modal Os Justi. Of his more extensive works, the Mass in E Minor (1866) is quite different to his other two Masses in that the orchestra serves only to accompany and give cohesion to the voices and, unlike some of his other settings, which were regarded as beding unliturgical by the Cecilians, the Mass was recommended for liturgical performance.
“Bruckner's connection with Franz Witt's Cecilian reform movement was in reality very tenuous. Although Witt included Pane Lingua in his 1885 Musica Sacra collection, he was critical of some other short compositions. Similarly, while Bruckner was critical of Witt's organization, he was concerned that Cecilian opinion of his works be favorable.”[1]
Bruckner was certainly influenced by the Cecilians and made efforts to write acceptable music. Bruckner dedicated Os Justi to Ignaz Traumhihler, a staunch Cecilian. Traumhihler was the music director at St. Florian monastery, where Bruckner completed much of his musical education before begining studies with Simon Sechter at age 31. Os Justi is remarkable in that it achieves striking harmonic effects without using a single accidental! Also, as Bruckner pointed out in a letter to Traumihler, Os Justi has no seventh chords or six-four chords, and does not have combinations of four or five notes at the same time — all desirable traits for the Cecilians.
The Cecilan League's recommendations led to fierce controversies, and tended to isolate church music from contemporary artistic development. The Cecilians tended to dismiss even sympathetic composers such as Bruckner and Liszt, who only occasionally adopted Cecilian ideas. By the early twentieth century, the influence of the Cecilians had waned.
Stravinsky's comments about his goals for his Mass sound remarkably similar to the ideals of the Cecilians. “My Mass,” he said, “was partly provoked by some Masses of Mozart that I found in a secondhand music store in Los Angeles in 1942 or 1943. As I played through these rococo-operatic sweets-of-sin, I knew I had to write a Mass of my own, but a real one.” Stravinsky's goal was to eliminate that Romantic, theatrical, secular sensuality. Like the Cecilians, he valued simplicity and directness, and he was strongly influened by chant. But unlike the Cecilians, a cappella singing was not Stravinsky's solution — he commented: “I can endure unaccompanied singing in only the most harmonically primitive music.” Because he wanted to include instruments, Stravinsky could not write a Mass for the Russian Orthodox liturgy, where tradition excludes instruments. Nevertheless, in his Roman Catholic Mass Stravinsky follows Cecilian ideals by minimizing the role of the orchestra, which, in his words, serves only to "tune" the chorus.