Forming the Next Generation of Sacred Musicians in Rome
A choir rehearses sacred chant in a Roman basilica.
Sacred music survives only when one generation teaches it to the next. Recently in Rome, 110 musicians from 30 countries gathered to receive that teaching, and their experience holds lessons for everyone who serves God through music.
A Week of Study, Practice, and Prayer
The Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music in Rome hosted its first International Week of Sacred Music, EWTN Vatican reports. The gathering drew choir singers, educators, seminarians, priests, religious sisters, and other musicians who share a common call to serve the Church through song.
Fr. Robert Mehlhart, OP, president of the Institute, described the week as an immersion in the full range of the Church's full musical heritage, from Gregorian chant to new works written by the Institute's own students. He explained that the aim reached beyond study. Participants came to pray with this music and to sing it in the liturgy itself.
The Institute carries a long history of this work. Pope Pius X founded the school in 1910, according to EWTN News. He did so eight years after issuing Tra le Sollecitudini, a 1903 document that restored the Church's great musical tradition. Pius X issued it as a motu proprio, a papal document written on the Pope's own initiative. More than a century later, the Institute still prepares choir directors, organists, composers, and singers to serve the Church around the world.
Three Paths of Formation
Rather than offer one program for everyone, the Institute organized the week around the people it served. Each participant joined a track built for a particular kind of service.
Teaching Sacred Music to Children
One track focused on educators and children's choir directors. Luca Buzzavi, a professor of children's choir direction, led sessions on helping young singers discover the beauty of Gregorian chant and early music. Latin texts and unfamiliar musical forms can make this repertoire hard to teach. Buzzavi aimed to spark genuine interest in the music while helping children discover the faith it expresses.
Kirsten Trudeau, co-founder and co-director of the Diocese of Gaylord Gregorian Schola in Michigan, already knew the music well. She earned both a bachelor's degree and an advanced licentiate degree in Gregorian chant at the Institute between 2015 and 2020. Still, she came to learn how to communicate this music to a younger generation. The course gave her practical techniques that make complex music and unfamiliar languages more approachable and exciting for children.
Helping Clergy and Religious Sing the Liturgy
A second track served seminarians, priests, and religious. Through vocal coaching and chant workshops, participants strengthened their ability to sing the prayers of the Mass and the Divine Office, the Church's daily cycle of prayer at set hours of the day.
Sr. Christina Skelley of the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus came from an instrumental background in piano, viola, and organ. She wanted to deepen her understanding of liturgical singing. The sessions taught her traditional chants, ways to express the meaning of Latin texts through music, and methods for adapting chant to other languages. She plans to carry these skills home to enrich her community's music ministry and prayer life.
Choral Singers and the Beauty of Polyphony
The largest track belonged to choral singers. Polyphony is music in which several independent melodic lines sound together, and it forms one of the great treasures of sacred choral music. Under Maestro Walter Marzili, these singers worked through the Roman polyphonic tradition and a broader international repertoire, and they sang in choral settings across Rome. Marzili spoke of the particular joy of sharing these techniques with so many voices.
Ryan Murphy, who serves in the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, came to sing alongside musicians from around the world. He gained practical skills in breathing and vocal technique. He hopes to use them not only in his own singing but also to help others serve the liturgy more effectively.
The Tradition They Inherit
The participants in Rome stepped into a tradition that others guarded faithfully before them. Few figures embody that tradition more fully than Cardinal Domenico Bartolucci, whom many called the musician of the Popes. A priest and composer, Bartolucci directed the Pontifical Sistine Chapel Choir for more than 40 years, the choir that sings for the Pope's own liturgies. He left a body of work published in over 40 volumes.
Bartolucci died in 2013, but the Bartolucci Foundation in Rome works to keep his artistic and spiritual legacy alive. In a recent EWTN Vatican report, journalist Veronica Giacometti spoke with Alessandro Biciocchi, the Foundation's secretary general, about that mission. The video below tells the story.
Bartolucci's life and the International Week tell one story from two ends. One shows the fruit of a lifetime given to sacred music. The other shows new laborers taking up the same work. The psalmist describes this handing on: "We will not hide them from their children, shewing to the generation to come the praises of the LORD, and his strength, and his wonderful works that he hath done" (Psalm 78:4, KJV).
Lessons for Every Music Ministry
Most readers will never study in Rome, and many serve far from a cathedral choir loft. Yet the lessons of this week apply in a parish, a school, a community choir, a hospital chapel, or a family gathered around a piano.
Formation never ends. Myrna Keough, director of sacred music at Mount Angel Seminary in Oregon, came to Rome after two decades of teaching in Catholic seminaries. Long experience did not end her desire to learn.
Teach the next generation on purpose. The children's track shows that young people can love demanding music when someone takes the time to make it approachable.
Every music minister can grow in new directions. Sr. Skelley's path from instruments to chant shows that a new skill can always strengthen service to a community.
Shared song builds communion. Participants from 30 countries found unity in a common faith expressed through music.
Keough named the heart of the matter. She described the week as "a gathering of people who love the Lord," whose music aims to bring glory to His name. Every music ministry, large or small, shares that same purpose. Scripture gives the charge plainly: "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord" (Colossians 3:16, KJV).
For anyone who wants to reflect more deeply on the calling of the church musician, Paul Westermeyer's The Church Musician offers a thoughtful starting point. The Essential Reading for Music Ministry page gathers other trusted titles.
Who taught you the music you now offer to God? Share in the comments the person or experience that formed you, and tell us how you are passing that gift on to someone else.
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