This article first appeared in Our Sunday Visitor magazine. Subscribe to receive the monthly magazine here.
Courtney Eschbach-Wells has a “do not play” list for her funeral. Eschbach-Wells, 44, is not facing the grim reaper just yet, but as a lawyer, she likes to have her affairs in order. She’s also of Slavic descent, so she’s “morbid by nature,” she said.
Most importantly, she is a Catholic cantor, and over the last 20 years singing at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in the Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, she’s had abundant time to form strong opinions about hymns.
Eschbach-Wells, who has a clear, bright soprano voice, can’t remember a time when she didn’t sing.
“It’s as natural as breathing for me,” she said.
She sings in her garden, she sings to her chickens and her bees, she sang to her baby (now 14), she sings while commuting to work as a bill drafter for the New Hampshire General Court, and she tries not to distract her co-workers at the State House by singing at her desk.
She also has some strong opinions about that age-old question: why (other) Catholics don’t sing.
“We’re not a singing culture,” she said. “We don’t have a sporting culture where we sing; we don’t have a going-out culture where we sing.”
The one exception is karaoke, but that’s mainly something to do with a group of friends who have had too much to drink. Americans simply don’t readily sing in groups with people they don’t know, and that includes at Mass.
The popular recorded music people hear every day is so highly produced, it’s intimidating, Eschbach-Wells said, and makes them think they can’t sing unless they sound like that.
“But a good choir does not need a ton of Taylor Swifts. It just needs people who can try, and who can try to learn.”
That doesn’t mean any liturgical music will do.
“You’re trying to find that sweet spot where the choir serves two functions: song leadership, singing the hymn so you have voices to follow; and also providing something where, at certain points in the Mass, your active participation can be just listening. So the music works two ways,” she said.
A gift, not a performance
And music does work, in a way that nothing else can.
“Music takes you out of yourself. It reaches a different part of your brain,” Eschbach-Wells said. For her, it’s old English hymns that hit the mark.
“There’s something about it that always plucks that perfect chord in my heart, like when you hit a tennis ball with a racket in just the right spot: ‘Ahhh, yeah, that’s it,” she said.
But the words of the hymn are important, too. Hymns are a wonderful way to learn Scripture; and sometimes they can hit an unsuspecting ear with surprising sharpness.
She remembers singing during Advent, which fell right in the middle of finals season at law school. She’d sung the words countless times, but the lines, “O come, O come, thou Lord of might, / Who to thy tribes on Sinai’s height / In ancient times didst give the law” hit her hard. She suddenly understood the lyric was not only about the Ten Commandments — it was about her.
“My whole professional being is an extension of the Ten Commandments,” she realized. “It just seared me, what a gift the law is.”
Making music that hits the mark this way is a balancing act. While the goal is to cultivate the best musical program possible, liturgical music is not supposed to be a performance.
“There are other venues where I can perform,” she said. “This is something greater. It’s about offering a gift I was given, to glorify God, and to help everyone else do the same.”
Even when Eschbach-Wells is singing a solo at church, it’s not about her, and she reminds herself frequently that this is so.
“You genuflect to the altar, and you think, ‘I’m about to proclaim Scripture. This is not about me.’ I just ask that I do it and do it well,” she said.
“I’m not sitting here thinking, ‘This is gonna be the best dang Psalm 34 they’ve ever heard! It’s going to blow their socks off!’ I’ve been given the opportunity to give this to you, in the hopes it will draw you closer to God,” she said.
She thinks of herself as a conduit; it’s God who does the work.
“You are here to make sure people hear the words. The words are important; the tone is important. Hotdogging is not,” she said.
And to drive home the point that it’s not about her, she sometimes leaves Mass thinking she fumbled a line or flubbed her delivery.
“Someone will inevitably come up and say, ‘I heard something I needed to hear.’ This is clearly not about me,” she said.
Communion through song
But it is about the Church as a whole, both present and past. One of her favorite hymns is from the 15th century: “Verbum Caro Factum Est.” She likes to think there’s a real possibility that her patron, the lawyer St. Thomas More, once sang this very same song. He did sing in the choir (although, according to his friend Erasmus, not well).
“That’s something I love about singing. It weaves you into the whole communion of the Church,” she said.
It’s not only her own congregation that she’s in communion with, at times. Eschbach-Wells is also an organist, although it’s been some time since she played. She took organ lessons while at Notre Dame Law School, while also singing with the music program at Notre Dame’s Basilica of the Sacred Heart. Music became a precious way to decompress in the middle of the day’s studies.
“I would go across the street at lunch and play at the Episcopal church on my lunch break,” she said. Eschbach-Wells is now married to an Episcopal priest, the Rev. Jason Wells, and she occasionally jumps in to play at his church if they need an organist in a pinch.
One thing she envies about the Episcopal Church is how unified they are musically. They all sing from the same collection of hymns, so no matter where a worshiper travels, he will probably know the tune. The same is not true for Catholics, who have many different, sometimes widely varying, sets of music they consider “standard.”
And that’s yet another reason Catholics may be reluctant to sing at Mass: They simply don’t know the hymn.
Eschbach-Wells and her fellow musicians at the cathedral work hard to cover a wide range of music, from Bach to Gregorian chant to more modern selections, and then back to Handel; but they’ve honed in a few dozen familiar hymns that sync up with the readings at different times of the liturgical year. They try to avoid more obscure selections, no matter how lovely or fitting they might be.
“If nobody’s sung it before, even if it’s the most on-point music in the history of Christendom, the effort will be lost,” she said.
Room for improvement
Eschbach-Wells’ tastes may be more ancient, but she understands why people like to hear familiar hymns on any given Sunday.
“Everybody bags on ‘Eagles Wings,’ but everybody knows it,” she said. “The comfortable ‘mashed potato’ set of hymns are the things that unite us, for better or worse.”
Not everybody likes it, and that’s OK, she said.
“It’s great that not everybody likes it. Because guess what? Parish music is not about any one person’s personal preferences!” she said.
But that doesn’t mean lay people can’t take personal action to improve their parish’s music program. Many parishes rely on volunteers, and there’s nothing wrong with that, Eschbach-Wells said. She is a volunteer herself.
“But you do need someone with some training at the helm,” she said.
One thing a parishioner could do, Eschbach-Wells suggests, is get together with a few friends and agree to chip in for the express purpose of building and funding a solid program.
“Talk to your parish priest and say, ‘I want to up my (weekly) donation a couple of bucks, but I want to make sure it’s going to a sacred music program,'” she said.
Although Eschbach-Wells has sung and soloed in choirs around the country, she doesn’t consider herself an artist.
“I’m a lawyer who sings,” she said. But sometimes her two worlds collide, like when she sings at the annual Red Mass; or as in the dream she once had before singing a midnight Mass.
“I moved to the ambo to sing, and when I opened the Psalter, it was nothing but Excel spreadsheets,” she said. “Every now and again, my ecclesiastical and governmental spheres will cross in my head, and it produces crazy stuff like that.”
She has noted other overlaps between music and law in her waking life, too.
“Both music and the practice of the law have a tendency to keep you humble,” she said. “You’re constantly surveying the limits of your ability and knowledge.”
There are so many things, in both music and law, that she wishes she knew more about or could perform better. But there’s one thing they have in common, she said: “If you put yourself first, you’re on the path to perdition.”
Just don’t sing “On Eagle’s Wings” at her funeral.
