This college choir forms students in Church’s vision of sacred music

It was still more than a week before most students arrived on campus. Twenty young men and women gathered in the Chapel of Our Lady of the Annunciation at the University of Mary in Bismarck, North Dakota. They were all singers -- sopranos, altos, tenors and basses -- and there were there for what was billed as a 10-day training camp/retreat for a new choir called Cappella. 

After the first day, some of the students, who came from all around the country, began thinking of the “retreat” more as a “boot camp,” the kind of ultra-strict training recruits undergo to turn them into soldiers.

That’s not to say the experience -- in August 2021 -- was unpleasant. Members of Cappella today remember their initial time together as the beginning of special friendships, as getting right to work in learning good habits for professionalism, and most importantly, perhaps, the beginning of a formation in the mission of Cappella.

Before he arrived, Marshall Milless, a communications major, pictured himself spending time in adoration, sharing in small groups, and singing praise and worship music. 

“I thought it was just going to be community bonding,” Milless told Aleteia. 

Indeed, there were community building exercises and the kind of spiritual activities one might expect on a retreat. But there wasn’t much time to rest. 

“We get our folders out and then we have like one piece of music. It's like, 'Well, this is beautiful,'” Milless recalled of the first day. “And then we get more music. More music. More music. More music. I'm not certain how many pieces we had. I don't know, maybe like 20 or 30 pieces of repertoire.”

He estimates that the 20 singers were in the choir stalls once used by the university’s founding Benedictine Sisters for a good six to eight hours a day. 

Milless, who sings first tenor, compared the experience to preseason training for college football players. 

It’s an appropriate comparison, because, like athletic programs at many schools, Cappella members attend the university on scholarship. And, while college football has quasi-religious overtones for many fans, Cappella’s reason for being is to serve the mission of "U Mary" through its campus ministry.

The intensive 10 days of training prepared Cappella not only to sing at the very first Masses of the academic year, as Rebecca Raber, the choir’s conductor, pointed out, but laid the groundwork for a year of music-making for various campus events and appearances in the United States and Europe.

Cappella is the brainchild of university president Msgr. James P. Shea. It was an idea conceived during a time when fear of spreading an airborne disease led to multiple restrictions on public worship, including, in many churches, a “ban” on singing.

“That hope, in brief, was the origin of Cappella,” Msgr. Shea said. 

Raber, in an interview, added, “Because the music of our worship was silenced for so long because of COVID, Msgr. Shea came up with this idea to return back to not only normal, but asked what we could do to bring it to the next level. And he came up with this idea of having a choir where the students came from all around the country, and there would be scholarships like college athletes to come and sing sacred music.”

Msgr. Shea and Raber, who is assistant professor of music and fellow in Catholic Studies at U Mary, had known each other since their own undergraduate days. The university president asked Raber, a veteran music educator, for her reaction.

“I just thought what a remarkable opportunity to be able to use sacred music in such an important way,” she said. “I mean, the early Church Fathers knew that sacred music could send a message. Music could write on your heart the stories of the Old and the New Testament and help those that are worshiping in their spiritual formation and their praising of God. And so it's very fitting that we could devote so much time and energy to a vision for sacred music for not only our church at the University of Mary, but whomever we sing for around the country and around the world.”

Cappella sings at two Sunday Masses on campus and for Solemn Vespers every afternoon. To increase congregational participation and to “heighten our worship,” as Raber puts it, Cappella’s website has the music for services on it, including simple recordings that allow folks who don’t read music to learn the melodies. As well, the choir leads occasional training sessions for the general campus public.

Aside from on-campus singing, Cappella takes its music on the road to places like the Twin Cities in Minnesota, where they perform at an Advent music festival called Luminosa.

The styles of the music Cappella performs range from the chant of the “very early Church all the way to things that have been composed this week,” Raber said, noting Cappella’s practice of commissioning new music. 

Many of those “treasures” have had a focus on the Eucharist, and when the US bishops announced plans for a Eucharistic Revival, Raber was inspired to contribute musically.

“That's where I started the initiative to commission two composers to write us Eucharistic works, so that they can be added as treasures of the Church,” she said. 

In May 2023, Cappella, along with the music department, the concert band, and the concert choir, traveled to Spain and France to showcase those pieces of music – Michael John Trotta’s Ave Verum Corpus, and Philip Stopford’s O Sacrum Convivium. The tour included performances at three sites in Spain of Eucharistic miracles – Montserrat, Zaragoza, and Ivorra. The group concluded the tour by singing them at the tomb of St. Thomas Aquinas in Toulouse, France. Aquinas, of course, penned some of the most beautiful Eucharistic hymns that the Church still uses, including Pange Lingua and Adoro Te Devote.  

“Once the concert was done with the rest of the students, Cappella went in and recorded some of these Eucharistic pieces so that we would have a record of those things,” Raber recounted.

A recording of those and other Eucharistic hymns will be released soon, probably this winter. The collection will feature Eucharistic fervorinos from university chaplain Fr. Dominic Bouck and Msgr. Shea, who spoke at the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis in 2024.

Fr. Bouck told Aleteia that hearing sacred music at Mass “from young disciples who are being introduced to the great tradition for the sake of evangelization and salvation of souls is a source of great gratitude for me to God.”

For Kendall Alexander, a business administration major who sings alto, although being a member of Cappella is hard work, it’s also very much a spiritual experience.

Not every member of Cappella will go into music professionally, but each year, about a dozen alumni will go out into the world with a firm foundation in the Church’s understanding of sacred music. Some Cappella alums, while working at their jobs, might sing in church choirs or serve as cantors. Some, like Mary Scherber, will have a more direct opportunity to influence the kind of music that parishioners hear and sing and pray by. Scherber, who graduated in April 2024 with a degree in music, is director of music ministry at St. Jude of the Lake parish in Mahtomedi, Minnesota. 

“The pastor who originally hired me really had a vision for turning the music back to what the Church desires it to be, in line with Sacrosanctum Concilium [Vatican II’s Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy] and different documents from Vatican II,” Scherber told Aleteia. She was already familiar with that vision from her four years in Cappella. 

Whether they become professional musicians or not, the rigor of the training – from the very beginning in “boot camp” – has paid off for members and alumni. For students like Marshall Milless, who expects to graduate in May 2025, the resources and time spent on bringing beauty to the Church is well worth it.