Art & Music Program

The Program in Music and Art at the College of Saint Mary Magdalen includes four years of choir—singing chant, sacred polyphony, and hymns—and the following sequence of courses:
 
Quadrivium: Music & Singing I & II
Freshman Year, Fall and Spring Semesters (2 credit hours per semester)
 
Our first year of musical study prepares us for full participation in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as members of the College choir. Over the next four years, we will enjoy singing a repertoire of sacred music that extends from Gregorian chant, through Renaissance polyphony, to more contemporary compositions.
 
We learn to sing as embodied creatures, recognizing that “the art of singing is the art of breathing.” We learn to sing from both chant notation and modern notation and, in the first semester, we immerse ourselves in the Church’s inestimable musical treasure, Gregorian chant. Recognizing that this treasure—the standard by which all ecclesiastical music must be judged—has been all but lost in our parishes, we seek to understand it and prepare ourselves to find practical ways of restoring it.
 
While continuing to sing chant, we turn our attention in the spring to the study of hymns, the musical genre most familiar to us and the genre most commonly used in our parishes. We trace the history of hymn singing and consider its gradual adoption within the celebration of the Mass. Using the Worship hymnal, we study the variety of hymn styles, and their long history as poetry and music. In this semester we also study the fundamentals of four-part harmony, learning to analyze hymns harmonically, and we compare simple hymns with the more complex harmonic arrangements of Bach and Handel.
 
As an essential part of our musical studies in both semesters, we lay the foundations for understanding the Church’s teaching on Sacred Music by considering the three streams that contributed to the formulation of this teaching: Sacred Scripture, classical philosophy, and classical literature. We build upon this foundation by studying carefully the teaching of the Church Fathers on music as well as the magisterial teachings on music from the last two hundred years.

Each semester culminates in a special project. In the fall, since our focus is on chant, each of us studies a chant from the Propers of the Mass: we translate the Latin text, consider the selection of this text for this particular liturgy, and study how the chant fits within its modal framework. We learn to sing our chant and, inspired by examples of medieval illumination, we create our own illumination for it. As the final project in the spring, we each study a hymn, considering its historical origins, musical structure, and its doctrinal content. In this course, the following texts are read in whole or in part:
 
Sacred Scripture
Missal Gregorién
Jubilate Deo
Homer, The Odyssey
Hesiod, Theogony, Works and Days
Plato, Republic, Timaeus, Phaedo
Aristotle, Politics
St. Clement of Alexandria, “Protrepticus,” “Paedagogus”
St. Basil the Great, “Homily on Psalm I”
St. Augustine, Confessions
Pope St. Pius X, Tra le Sollecitudini
The Venerable Pope Pius XII, Mediator Dei, De musica sacra et sacra liturgia
The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, Sacrosanctum concilium
Sacred Congregation of Rites, Musicam sacram
The Venerable Pope John Paul II, “Chirograph on Sacred Music”
Ratzinger, Selected writings on sacred music and the liturgy
USCCB, Sing to the Lord: Music in Divine Worship
Catechism of the Catholic Church
Worship
Kerman & Tomlinson, Listen
Benward & Saker, Music in Theory and Practice
 
 
Masterpieces of the Musical Canon I
Sophomore Year, Fall Semester (1 credit hour)
 
Building upon our practical experience in music during the preceding year, we now take up a more contemplative position and survey—through guided listening—some of the most significant musical works of western culture. From chant through the sacred polyphony of the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation to the masterworks of the Baroque, we study the compositional principles and stylistic features of western choral and instrumental art-music from the Middle Ages to Bach. In this class we use Kerman & Tomlinson’s Listen and a variety of audio and video recordings.
 
 
Masterpieces of the Musical Canon II
Sophomore Year, Spring Semester (1 credit hour)
Beginning with the operas of Mozart and the string quartets of Haydn, we continue our musical explorations through Beethoven and Bruckner, continuing to the art-music of the last century and of our own time. During this semester we will also listen to performances by professional and (our own) amateur student-musicians. In this class we continue with Kerman & Tomlinson’s Listen and a variety of audio and video recordings.

 
Principles of Seeing and Drawing I & II
Junior Year, Fall and Spring Semesters (2 credit hours per semester)
In this course, we learn to see the world as an artist sees it, translating the fruits of that vision into a given medium. This is a gradual process, unfolding in stages of discovery and invention.
From the beginning, we make the studio our creative space for two hours each week and in the fall, before winter sets in, we often take our portable easels outside for some work en plein air.
 
As a first step in our artistic journey, we identify the basic shapes and forms that present themselves to the eye. We learn how to give contour and texture to images, transforming a two-dimensional surface into the illusion of three dimensions. Initially we concentrate on drawing, with pencil and charcoal, and then with chalk and oil pastels.
 
Gradually, we move from objects to larger compositions. With the help of Arnheim’s Art and Visual Perception, we learn to think in terms of wholes, planning a composition in the same way we would plan an essay, finding the principle focus of attention and then arranging every element in its service. We learn to look past the details in a work of art, to its very bones. We build our sketches and paintings in layers, coming to understand that the first thing to catch the eye is often the last thing to take its place on canvas.
 
Occasionally, we sit at the feet of the masters, copying their work. In this way, their works become analogous to the paradigms and great books we study in other tutorials.
 
As we embrace contrast in tone, texture, and intensity, we see our works come to life all the more. We discover how colors relate to each other by studying the fundamentals of color theory.