Answers to Questions about Professor Mahrt
From the editor of the San José Valley Catholic magazine. (This post is a bit serious, but if you read to the very last caption on the last image, you'll find a joke.)
Soon after Professor William Mahrt died on January 1, Erick Arenas, who has taken over directing Mahrt’s St. Ann Choir, spoke with me about how we might notify the Diocese of San José because Mahrt worked and lived in the diocese. I told Erick I would contact The Valley Catholic, the diocese’s official publication, to see if they were interested.
The format has changed significantly after Marissa Nichols, the most recent editor, was hired. Instead of looking like a newspaper, the publication now has a larger format and looks more like a news magazine, with lots of color, lively layouts, and many photographs. Each article is in the three most prevalent languages of the diocese: English, Spanish, and Vietnamese.
When I contacted Marissa Nichols by email, I pointed out that Mahrt was so well known that the National Catholic Register had published an article about him.
The article is reprinted and expanded at my Substack, here.
I also wrote that since he had been a resident of the San José diocese, the Valley Catholic might want to write about him too. Nichols replied she’d caught the Register article, and she was interested.
We’ve set up a ZOOM meeting for tomorrow with the editor, me, and Erick. The questions she sent, and my answers are below.
Getting to Know You - For Professor Mahrt feature
Q1: Tell me a little about your faith background, including how you became interested in Gregorian chant and/or polyphonic hymns as well as how you first came to know Professor Mahrt.
A1: When I was in a parochial school in Massachusetts in 1954, way before the introduction of the New Mass, the religious sister who taught my fourth-grade class started a children's choir and taught us to sing Gregorian chant. Each Sunday, we sang the ordinary (unchanging) prayers of the Mass, such as the Kyrie, the Sanctus, and the Agnus Dei, at the parish church. Many years later, after I had lapsed from the Church in the 1960s and relapsed in the 1970s, I became a technical writer in the 1980s when I was living in Minneapolis. In 1989, I was recruited to work for Sun Microsystems, one of Silicon Valley's big computer companies at the time. After several years living and working in Milpitas, I learned that a friend of mine's husband had joined Professor Mahrt's St. Ann Choir. When I visited where the choir sings at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Palo Alto with the couple, I found the St. Ann Choir was singing Latin ordinary and proper prayers (the prayers that change according to the day's place in the liturgical year) during an English sung Mass. (Now their entire Mass is sung in Latin). I responded to an invitation I saw in the Mass program, which read that interest in singing sacred music was more important than experience.
I have to smile at my conviction at the time that I already knew everything there was to know about Gregorian chant because of my experience as a 9-year-old singing one of the simplest settings of the ordinary, probably Missa de Angelis. I had no idea of the life-changing, intellectually and spiritually gratifying experience of a whole new world of beautiful church music that would open to me when I joined the St. Ann Choir.
Q2: In what capacity did you work/sing/pray with Professor Mahrt?
A2: I sang in the St. Ann Choir for only a few years until I left in 2008 to sing with a new choir being formed to sing at Our Mother of Perpetual Help Oratory, which the late Bishop McGrath had erected to serve as the center for the traditional Latin Mass in the San José diocese; then later I sang with a new Immaculate Heart of Mary Oratory that replaced the first one.
But I continued my connection with the St. Ann Choir ever since. For some years, I joined Professor Mahrt and others who would meet to sing Vespers (Evening Prayer) and to eat and drink good wine at choir dinners prepared on Sunday nights by a married couple who sang with the choir since the 1970s. During COVID, I joined with Mahrt and some choir members and friends who sang over ZOOM. Virtual Compline (Night Prayer) still continues every Sunday with about 16 people and is open to anyone interested. Even former Governor Jerry Brown frequently joins in.
Because I was so impressed with the choir's unique achievements under Mahrt's leadership, I wrote several articles about the choir that were published at California Catholic Daily, National Catholic Register, and Regina Magazine.
At a conference in Mahrt's honor put on in 2023 by the Catholic Sacred Music Institute at St. Patrick's Seminary, I gave a talk about "The Remarkable Sixty-Year Survival of Professor Mahrt's St. Ann Choir" (which is also published at my other Substack.
I did miscellaneous publicity for the choir. I manage the choir's Facebook page, and I created fliers and sent out mailchimp announcements with the choir's schedule.
It was consoling to come across a note on blue paper after Professor Mahrt's death that he'd written a few months ago to thank me.
Q3. What most inspired you about witnessing Professor Mahrt's passion for Gregorian Chant?
A3: I was inspired by how Mahrt's St. Ann Choir uniquely continued to sing Latin Gregorian Chant during celebrations of the new Mass in diocesan churches during the decades during and after Vatican II when the liturgy changed and that kind of music was virtually banned. Mahrt pointed out that Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Vatican II Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, actually referred to Gregorian Chant as “a treasure of inestimable value” that should have first place in the liturgy. The performance by his choir of this music as part of the liturgy—where it belongs—has allowed many Catholics to experience the traditional music of the Church in worship instead of only in concerts or recordings.
Q4. Can you recall an anecdote or two during your interactions with Professor Mahrt that you feel really exemplifies for you the sort of teacher, friend, musician that he was known by others to be?
A4: I attended two of the colloquia put on by the Church Music Association of America (CMAA). Mahrt was the president. The CMAA colloquia are advertised as "Seven days of musical heaven," and I was delighted by the opportunity to learn more about the music and sing to the Lord morning, noon, and night with other Catholics who love the Church's traditional sacred music. Many of the people I met at colloquia are still Facebook friends. I told Prof. Mahrt that the first colloquium I attended was the best vacation of my life. It more than lived up to its advertisement. It was truly heavenly. He smiled and said that it was the same for him. That tells you something appealing about him, that after he taught music all week at Stanford, and spent many hours preparing music for and directing the St. Ann Choir and the Stanford Early Music singers, he spent chunks of his vacations, among others of like mind, teaching and leading the singing of more than a hundred singers, church musicians, and choir directors at CMAA colloquia and at other events.
At his Solemn High Requiem Mass at Mission Dolores, about seventy singers came from all over, many from the St. Ann Choir and the Stanford Early Music Singers, and many from the CMAA, some to direct and the majority to sing the same sacred music that he devoted his life to perform, preserve, and defend.
Q5: How has friendship with the late Professor Mahrt transformed your faith. -or- How has the passion of Professor Mahrt for music, transformed your relationship with Christ?
A5: I was not a friend of his. We sometimes spoke when we saw each other in public or when I interviewed him for articles. But I admire what he accomplished.
I am grateful for all the things I learned through him about the treasury of the Church's sacred music. I am most grateful for learning this, that the Church does not want us to sing AT Mass. Instead of singing hymns, we need to sing the Mass. We sing the Mass when we sing the actual words of the Mass, which we sing when we chant the parts of the Mass not sung by the priest. The Church teaches us what we need to learn about each season and each saint's day through the texts included in the Masses for its seasons and its saints' days.
Singing the changeable parts of the Mass called the Propers helped get me in touch with the liturgical year in a rewarding way. I was also gratified that after I sang through a few cycles of the Church year I came to recognize and love the chants for each season and feast as they recurred. The melodies stay in my head along with the words, and I carry them with me into my life outside of Mass. As I remember them, I pray them again. Chants stuck in your head are much better than your average earworms.
