19. How can music draw us closer to God?

Introducing: CTS Music – a new liturgical music YouTube channel

CTS Music is a YouTube channel dedicated to offering beautiful liturgical music. As part of the Catholic Truth Society, we are known for our prayer books, missals, and devotional resources. Now, we invite you to explore our growing collection of sacred music.

Here, you’ll find recordings from Psalms for all Seasons, a newly-commissioned psalmody composed by Matthew J C Ward to accompany the Abbey Psalter translations in the new Lectionary.

Subscribe to discover more liturgical and sacred music as we expand our repertoire.

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Five Things You Need to Know About Dr Matthew Ward:

1. Musical Beginnings: Matthew’s love for music started early, singing traditional hymns at church and playing the cello from the age of seven. His first composition, Toy Soldiers March, was written at just eight or nine years old.
2. First Encounter with Chant: At a faith conference during his teenage years, he was captivated by the Salve Regina sung during night prayer, sparking his lifelong love for Gregorian chant.
3. University Choir Experience: At Cambridge, Matthew joined the chaplaincy choir, where he immersed himself in Latin polyphony and chant, singing at weekly Masses and eventually leading the choir.
4. Academic Passion: For his dissertation, he studied 15th-century chant manuscripts found in reformation-era book bindings.
5. Psalms for All Seasons Project: Since Advent 2023, Matthew has been working on a CTS project Psalms for All Seasons, a unique project for the updated Catholic Lectionary, which integrates seasonal melodies to enrich prayer and deepen the Church’s connection to its liturgical year.

The Psalms for all Seasons Project

Matthew Ward’s Psalms for All Seasons project reimagines the responsorial psalms for the updated lectionary by creating seasonal melodies that reflect the liturgical calendar.

Drawing inspiration from Gregorian chant and traditional sacred music, he has composed tunes that are accessible for congregations yet deeply rooted in the Church’s musical heritage.

By assigning consistent melodies to each liturgical season and incorporating subtle references to ancient chant, the project fosters a sense of unity, familiarity, and prayerful participation in the Mass. This approach not only enriches worship but also aligns music with the rhythm of the Church’s year.

“So that when you get to Advent, just like you change to purple vestments, you change to a particular psalm melody that you sing during Advent…  Over time, congregations would come to recognise the melodies, and they become as familiar as the the vestment changes and the other changes in those seasons, so that the seasonality and the living the church’s year becomes embedded in in the Mass and we recognise the tunes.”

Highlights

Here are some of the best parts of this episode:

• Did Jesus ever sing? Dr Matthew Ward suggests that Christ likely sang the Hallel Psalms after the Last Supper, a prophetic set of psalms that foreshadow His Passion and Resurrection.
• The Power of Chant: Medieval chants, especially the long melismatic “Ahs” in Alleluias, were traditionally seen as transcending words, allowing worshippers to join their voices with the choirs of angels.
• The History of Sacred Music: Dr Ward explores the history of Church music, revealing a recurring tension between complexity and simplicity, as composers and reformers sought to balance artistic innovation with the need for music to serve the liturgy and preserve the clarity of sacred texts.