Returning again to the issue of church music, we build upon our last article, which touched on official Catholic guidelines for liturgical music, to explore specifically why the piano is not a desirable liturgical instrument.
It may seem odd to exclude an instrument that is a touchstone of the musical West, and a king of instruments among the musical tradition that grew organically out of Christendom. The piano is so universal an instrument that many pedagogues consider it as specifically representative of the Western musical system, and music students must all practice theory on the piano and learn to be competent keyboard players. Being a crowning achievement of Western musical and technological development, the greatest composers have composed a wide and dazzling array of repertoire for this instrument.
Yet it is the acoustic nature of the instrument, along with contemporary cultural considerations, that renders it unfit for use in the Mass.
For most of the Church’s history, the development of instruments was pursued to support the singing voice, culminating in that centrally important liturgical instrument, the pipe organ. Where piano is concerned, there is record of a few small chapels and mission churches using piano as a pitch source when organ was not available in the later nineteenth century, though Church teaching at this time declared the instrument profane and not fit for the sacred liturgy (Pope Pius X, Tra le Sollecitudini). It is important to point out that churches lacking the money for an organ did not automatically turn to the piano at this time, especially as the Church’s foundational (and, according to Vatican II, still primary) musical expression—Gregorian chant—requires no harmonic accompaniment. The Church’s guidance, its tradition, and a mature sense of the sacred naturally set healthy limits on music for the Mass.
By way of illustration, we can consider the piano as akin to the modern guitar. Proponents of guitar in the liturgy point out the many mentions of plucked string instruments in the Bible, or the fact that “Silent Night” was originally premiered in a mass using guitar accompaniment. What is missing from this surface-level argument is context: those ancient Davidic-era instruments were gut strings strung over primitive resonators. Therefore, they were by nature very quiet and would require the near absolute stillness of a congregation to be heard. Even then, they would not be able acoustically to fill large spaces. Likewise with the modern classical guitar on which “Silent Night” was premiered: these are very quiet instruments, entirely meant for chamber performance. Furthermore, the playing style of these instruments generally supported harmony and melody and was not primarily for rhythmic drive. They therefore belonged to an involved classical style with which most modern Church players are entirely unfamiliar.
Context, therefore, is quite important in this conversation. Very few people attending a modern Catholic Mass have heard the classical guitar being performed, let alone the old European lute or the types of plucked instruments that would have dominated in antiquity. Rather, today, the guitar is a ubiquitous symbol of pop culture.
Similarly, while the piano is a great cultural accomplishment, most people do not come to mass with Chopin preludes and Beethoven sonatas echoing in their collective memory. For most people in our culture, the piano, like the guitar, is a bright and rhythmic accompaniment instrument for popular song. It is the instrument of “salons” (to use a papal term) and is tied more to entertainment than contemplation.
Piano is furthermore technically a percussion instrument, which lacks the sustain necessary to adequately support voices without playing in a consistently loud and repetitive manner. With its rapid onset attack (again, percussive) and rapid diminution, devoid of a true voice-like sustain, it is further not suitable for the accompaniment of the Church’s pre-eminent music, Gregorian chant, nor for much vocal accompaniment in general.
That being said, a fair examination of the use of piano in the Western classical tradition in solo song witnesses a variety of ingenious approaches, many of which require a virtuosic touch to effectively execute. Take, for instance, the varied accompaniments in Schumann’s masterwork, Dichterliebe:
Another striking example is the simple but penetratingly profound modern masterwork by Orthodox composer Arvo Pärt, “Für Alina.” Coming out of eight years of self-imposed creative silence, Pärt drew on the nature of Gregorian chant to craft a new musical style. The resulting work is haunting in its simplicity, but it also demands a fine technique to deliver effectively. In the end, though not liturgical, it is nothing if not a profoundly sacred work. And yet as a purely instrumental expression, it is not fit for the liturgy, and this music would lose its particular character if a sung voice were added.
Now compare that with the accompaniment style of that perennial post-conciliar favorite (or not-so-favorite, depending on the audience): “Gather Us In.”
The accompaniment to the latter is considerably simple and yet also entirely percussive and pop-adjacent in its execution. This is an appropriate and functional compositional choice, given the setting: to support any congregation —indeed, to not only support, but also urge them forward—musically requires a transparent, boisterous, and (here is that word again) percussive style of playing, reminiscent of pop music. (Anyone familiar with the technical aspects of music production in the pop realm will not be surprised by this, as the bright onset of a piano must frequently be artificially boosted in mixes in order for the instrument to be effectively heard.)
When used in churches large or small, the technical subtleties that make up fine piano playing—the kind of highest expressions found in the masterworks written for the instrument—simply cannot translate or even be heard. What you have left, then, is the musical equivalent of a modern pop guitar, struck loudly, repeatedly, and without nuance, which renders it sonically unsuitable for Catholic liturgical composition.
We must admit that the ears of modern men hear guitar and piano as instruments of popular music. The more our popular culture devolves into profanity, the more inappropriate these instruments become for the liturgy, whereas the traditional sacred music and instruments of the Church simply sound even more sacred to us as a matter of cultural contrast. For instance, the flowing metrical nature of Gregorian chant is foreign to our modern rhythmic sensibilities, making it arguably even more transcendent and spiritually contemplative than back in the early centuries of the form’s emergence, therefore becoming therefore even more spiritually potent and liturgically necessary. The organ, in turn, has no popular style to claim it, and therefore—like Latin itself—it remains a means of communication free from profane pollution.
Finally, there is the nature of percussive instruments in reverberant spaces. The piano generally is intended to be a chamber instrument. Concert halls designed to host great pianists are surprisingly acoustically dry for buildings of their size (this to allow for the clear perception of the musical detail that is the hallmark of the tradition). The piano, in any truly reverberant space, loses the characteristic acoustic details that render it such an expressive and powerful instrument in certain contexts. This is because the reverberant nature of a cathedral, which helps sustained instruments like voice and organ blend and bloom, instead swallows up the dynamic life of the piano. It simply does not work.
Conversely, although one might make a begrudging (and temporary) allowance for a piano in a small or dry church that cannot afford an organ, to do so is still to invite mediocre playing in support of a pop-adjacent musical style that has never been fit for the liturgy.
In an era that encourages us always to turn to experts, we can see that the musical experts of history have spoken conclusively on the topic of the piano with choral writing. Mozart completed seventeen Mass settings and over 200 keyboard works, and a single one of his Masses or sacred choral works includes the piano. Indeed, before 1900, we are hard pressed to find successful works by the great composers where piano is used as an accompaniment to the choir. Starting in the twentieth century, there are some famous examples of composers including the piano in large-scale choral works, but only as percussive support to the accompanying organ or orchestra (Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms comes to mind, or Orff’s Carmina Burana, or Britten’s War Requiem). If piano is employed anywhere in a choral work, it is primarily as a percussion instrument.
If we are to take the greatest composers as our guide, then the use of piano in sacred spaces and for accompaniment in sacred choral works is almost entirely absent. The reason for this is simple: acoustically, it is a clumsy pairing, by its nature an instrumental combination that yields subpar and unsatisfying musical results.
The reason our modern ears desire this combination at all is because of our being suffused in pop culture, and per church teaching, pop (profane) culture is to have no place in our liturgical expression. Taken in turn with an honest consideration of what the Church has traditionally asked for in liturgical music, it seems that a general conversion of cultural preference is in order.