Keep AI Out of the Choir Loft

"Should AI be allowed to write music for the liturgy?" I'm sure traditional composers like Dr Peter Kwasniewski have some strong opinions.

From Crisis

By Aubrey Gulick

AI’s role in the choir loft should never replace the real men and women who sing “unto the Lord a new song” and tell “of his salvation from day to day.”

William Byrd was a bit of an enigma. He was Queen Elizabeth I’s favorite chapel musician and a Catholic during a time when the queen was ordering the deaths of holy men like Robert Southwell and Edmund Campion. For a man whose life, or at least livelihood, depended on staying in the good graces of the queen, Byrd made no secret of his faith.

He was famous for bothering puritanical bishops by playing the court’s chapel organ a bit too flagrantly, and he used the permission he received from the queen to publish music to publish a book of Latin polyphony. While at court, he kept up a lively correspondence with a number of Catholic composers on the other side of the channel (his “Super Flumina Babylonis” was written in response to Philippe de Monte’s eight-voice masterpiece), and after his retirement, he dedicated himself to writing a book of polyphonic texts based on the Council of Trent’s brand new Graduale Romanum. 

For Byrd, music—especially choral music—was fundamentally textual. It was the product of careful consideration and meditation on the texts he chose. As he wrote in one of his dedicatory prefaces for the “Gradualia”:

In the words themselves (as I have learned from experience) there is such hidden and mysterious power that to a person thinking over divine things, diligently and earnestly turning them over in his mind, the most appropriate measures come, I do not know how, and offer themselves freely to the mind that is neither idle nor inert.

In Byrd’s mind, liturgical art was a prayer—perhaps a divinely inspired one—owing its genesis to the Word.

It’s been some 400 years since Byrd set down his pen for the last time, and the musical world looks very different today. Many composers in the modern age don’t compose using ink and paper. A large number of them consign their art to MIDI files plucked out on electric pianos balanced precariously in threadbare apartments. In 10 years, their numbers will become increasingly rare as—like Hollywood actors, dock workers, and computer programmers—they are replaced by artificial intelligence.

On its face, that might sound absurd—how could AI create something as artistically involved as music, much less liturgical music? 

Except that music is uniquely well-suited to AI programming. There’s tons of it in the public domain; it tends to follow well-defined rules; and it’s predictably organized. Even with the rather simplistic models available at the moment, it’s not all that difficult to create music that sounds suspiciously similar to the compositions William Byrd slaved over.

Those recordings were created by Udio, a free generative AI that can be used to create background music for videos (hence the lack of textual clarity). Yes, it has a long way to go, but it’s pretty good for a robot. 

Suppose you’re a choir director of a small parish choir with an odd assortment of voices. Maybe you have a decent bass, tenor, and alto, but no soprano, and you want to do a polyphonic setting of the Mass ordinaries (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei). Sure, there are three-part Masses already written, but what if you could generate a three-voice polyphonic Mass in the style of Palestrina or Victoria? That could be endlessly useful in the awkward parish settings so many liturgical musicians find themselves in. 

This all raises a rather important question that the Catholic Church is going to have to answer for its musicians in the near future: Should AI be allowed to write music for the liturgy? 

It’s tempting to suggest that the question is unprecedented, and in some ways it is. It’s unlikely that former popes could have imagined the possibilities of computational generation, and yet the Church has already addressed the issue at large.

“Art,” Pope Pius XII wrote in his encyclical Musicae Sacrae in 1955, “certainly must be listed among the noblest manifestations of human genius. Its purpose is to express in human works the infinite divine beauty of which it is, as it were, the reflection.”

In other words, there is something intrinsically human about the artistic endeavor. But Pius XII didn’t stop there. He goes on to assert that it’s difficult, if not impossible, for an atheist to compose appropriate music for the liturgy.

He lacks, as it were, that inward eye with which he might see what God’s majesty and His worship demand. Nor can he hope that his works, devoid of religion as they are, will ever really breathe the piety and faith that befit God’s temple and His holiness, even though they may show him to be an expert artist who is endowed with visible talent. 

While in the modern age, for better or worse, we don’t distinguish between atheist and religious composers when selecting music for liturgical use, the principle still stands. The composition of liturgical music is supposed to be a prayer. The atheist is, of course, capable of lifting his mind and heart to a God he says he doesn’t believe in; artificial intelligence lacks the soul, will, and intention to do the same.

Compositional prayer matters because when a chorister sings William Byrd’s “Ne Irascaris,” Mozart’s “Ave Verum,” or Thomas Tallis’ “If Ye Love Me” he is joining in a communion of liturgical prayer that spans centuries. The authors of these texts were praying when they turned ideas into words, the composers were praying when they set the words to art, and we join in their prayer when we turn their art into sound that lifts our minds and hearts to God.

That’s not to say that AI shouldn’t be used at all. Using it to transpose scores or consolidate voices to make a musical setting more manageable for a particular choir seems appropriate. It is to say, however, that AI’s role in the choir loft should never replace the real men and women who sing “unto the Lord a new song” and tell “of his salvation from day to day.”