Catholic Art in a Secularized World: Meet Dana Gioia and Frank La Rocca
(ANALYSIS) In a recent Zoom interview I did with San Francisco’s Archbishop Cordileone about the goals of the Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music and Divine Worship, which he founded, the archbishop posed this question: “How do we evangelize in this hypersecularized world that is imposing its own false dogmas on everyone as if they are irrefutable?”
His answer was, “We hold up another standard.”
The archbishop named both Dana Gioia and Frank La Rocca as exemplars of that standard.
The recent release of new works by both of these seasoned Catholic artists — both acclaimed in the secular world — is a hopeful step toward reintegration of high quality work by Christian artists into mainstream culture.
Dana Gioia’s “Meet Me at the Lighthouse”
The first of these important new works was the publication on Feb. 7 of “Meet Me at the Lighthouse,” the sixth collection of poetry by 72-year-old Dana Gioia, who is an internationally famous poet, translator and cultural critic. You can view a video of Gioia’s performance of the title poem of his latest collection here.
Frank La Rocca’s “Messe des Malades”
Frank La Rocca at panel discussion after Messe des Malades at Mission Dolores Basilica San Francisco.
The second notable work is “Messe des Malades,” Mass of the Sick in Honor of Our Lady of Lourdes, which premiered on Feb. 1. You can watch it here. It is the ninth musical Mass setting by the also highly regarded 71-year-old composer Frank La Rocca.
Gioia and La Rocca similarities and differences
Besides being close in age, Gioia (born 1950) and La Rocca (born 1951) are both half Italian on their fathers’ side, and both are from working class families. Gioia’s ethnic heritage on his mother’s side is Mexican. La Rocca’s ethnic heritage on his mother’s side is Ukrainian. Both poet and composer are roughly of the same generation as Archbishop Cordileone, who was born in 1956.
Incidentally, Dana Gioia told me in an email that one time, when he was at a dinner where he and Archbishop Cordileone had a chance to talk, they discovered their Italian forebears are from Castellamare del Golfo. Gioia quipped, “It’s a small town in Sicily more famous for mafioso than poets or archbishops.”
Both Gioia and La Rocca attended the very best universities.
Gioia earned a bachelor’s in English from Stanford University, a master’s in comparative literature from Harvard University, and a Master of Business Administration from Stanford Business School. (He often quips that he is the first person to have gotten an M.B.A. in order to be a poet, but he adds that he chose that path because he is good with numbers as well as words, and he realized poets have to make a living.)
La Rocca earned a bachelor’s in music composition from Yale, as well as a master’s and doctorate in music composition from the University of California, Berkeley.
Gioia initially went to Stanford intending to be a composer before he decided on poetry, while La Rocca decided on composition as a career only after he started at Yale.
More about Dana Gioia
Dana Gioia’s poetry reading and book signing at Avion Press San Francisco Feb. 16.
Dana Gioia’s intention to be a composer changed when he spent a year in Vienna as a sophomore in 1970. As he wrote in an essay for the Stanford Overseas Program’s publication, Abroad, “Vienna introduced me to three great pleasures and also effected one life-transforming change.” One of the pleasures most relevant to this article was opera, which became one of his enduring passions.
When describing how Vienna transformed his life in the essay, Gioia wrote, “I arrived thinking of myself as a musician,” but, as his return to America approached, he discovered his life’s work: “I would be a poet.”
Gioia continues to collaborate with musicians who set his words to many other types of music, including opera, classical music and jazz. In the long list of his collaborations, perhaps the most impressive are those with prominent classical composers Morten Lauridsen and Sir James MacMillan.
Lauridsen set Gioia’s poem “Prayer” to song. You can watch Gioia perform the poem followed by a performance of Lauridsen’s setting of the song by two singers, with Lauridsen at the piano, here.
Sir James MacMillan’s oratorio, “Fiat Lux” (“Let There Be Light”), is a setting of a five-part poem by Gioia commissioned to mark the consecration of Christ Cathedral (formerly Crystal Cathedral) for the Diocese of Orange in 2019. But then COVID-19 restrictions interfered, and as Gioia wrote me in an email, “The music was ready, but the orchestra and choir could not perform.” The much delayed premiere will happen this coming June.
Gioia is also a public servant who is dedicated to promoting the arts among people from diverse backgrounds and to building communities of like-minded creative people — most especially Catholics and other Christians who often find mainstream literary and artistic culture to be openly hostile (more about that later).
In his 1991 essay published in The Atlantic Monthly, “Can Poetry Matter?” Gioia writes about the decline of poetry in popular culture. He writes that modern poets and academics were interested only in poems whose formlessness and lack of meter and rhyme made them hard to memorize, and whose often-autobiographical subject matter was not worth the trouble.
Narrative poetry with rhyme and meter were out of favor with the intelligentsia at that time, in spite of how most people enjoy poetry that tells stories, rhymes, and has rhythm, and how most are not interested in poetry when it is taught as an academic analytical act.
As Gioia pointed out in an interview with Tyler Cowan, intellectuals took poetry away from common people: “We took rhyme away, we took narrative away, we took the ballad away.” However, he added, “The common people reinvented it,” and it took the form of “what we now think of as rap and hip hop. … There were parallels in the revival of slam poetry, cowboy poetry and new formalism, so at every little social group, people from the ground up reinvented poetry because the intellectuals had taken it away from them.”
Gioia has worked toward bringing poetry back into relevance for all kinds of people with several effective initiatives.
After Gioia became Chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts in 2003, he launched Poetry Out Loud competitions to bring recitation of poetry back to education. In the early days of our nation, all American schoolchildren memorized and recited poetry, a practice that fell out of favor in the 1960s when memorization was rejected as a teaching method. In Poetry Out Loud competitions, millions of high schoolers have vied happily for prizes and recognition and enriched their memories with many of the poems we as a culture should not forget.
More recently, during a term as California’s poet laureate between 2015 and 2018, Gioia completed an ambitious tour of all 58 California counties to appear at literary events set up to highlight work of local poets and musicians from each county.
Gioia is often identified as the central member of the New Formalist movement, which was a movement by American poets to break away from a dictatorship of free verse and bring back narrative and traditional verse forms. Gioia's 1987 article “Notes on the New Formalism” in the Hudson Review described the rationale behind the development, but he does not reject free verse, as he writes, “I have always worked in both fixed and open forms. Each mode opened up possibilities of style, subject, music, and development the other did not suggest . ... Working in free verse helped keep the language of my formal poems varied and contemporary, just as writing in form helped keep my free verse more focused and precise.”
Another quote from the “Conversations with Tyler” podcast clarifies Gioia’s position further: “The whole notion seems to me of art is of conservation, of looking at all the achievements of the past and figuring out what it is we save and what it is that we need to add to move forward.”
Reviewer Kevin Walzer confirms the range of Gioia’s work in an Italian Americana journal article titled “Dana Gioia and Expansive Poetry”:
Gioia’s range, in both style and subject, is unusually broad. In his lyric poems, he works equally well in free verse and traditional forms, and in fact merges them in many cases; he works hard to give his metrical poems the colloquial quality of the best free verse, while his classically-trained ear gives his free verse a sure sense of rhythm that approaches a formal measure.
Gioia’s success in the secular world has been assured for four decades. From the release of his first collection, “Daily Horoscope,” when Gioia was in his 30s, here is one example of how his poetry has been praised:
“Daily Horoscope, in the finest sense, represents the perfect synthesis of maker and object made. It would be specious to praise this volume as a first book. Gioia has given us a book that is more accomplished than recent publications by many more celebrated practitioners.”
—Robert McDowell, The Hudson Review
His poetry has been included in many anthologies. He has also published four prose works, three volumes of criticism and a memoir, Studying with Miss Bishop, as well as four opera libretti, many song cycles, translations and anthologies of other poet’s works, Gioia continues to work toward another kind of success — seeking to bring not only poetry but also the work of fine Catholic and other believing Christian writers back into the mainstream culture.
Gioia’s essay “The Catholic Writer Today” (First Things, 2013) made a strong case for the need for the reintegration of Catholic creative work of the highest quality into the secular mainstream.
"He has said, repeatedly, that he intends to devote the remainder of his life to the restoration of Catholic artistic and literary culture."
— From Coming out as a Catholic poet, by Mike Aquilina at Angelus News
One of the things Gioia did toward that goal was starting the Catholic Imagination Conference, which meets biennually. The conferences have been organized with the leadership of Jessica Hooten Wilson, a professor at the University of Dallas who is Anglican. As she said in an interview conducted with her and Dana Gioia, which was published under the title “Fostering the Catholic Imagination,” “This year, I felt as though we had more Protestants than in previous years, though that might be because I was directing it, and I run in those circles as well.”
More about Frank La Rocca
For La Rocca, becoming composer-in-residence for Benedict XVI Institute has been key to a widening of his artistic reach, as he said in this quote from “Sneak Preview Messe des Malades with Composers Frank La Rocca & Joseph Gonzalez.”
Having been given the great honor of becoming the archbishop’s composer has utterly transformed my life. I mean, I’m 71 years old. I’m finally it seems fully blossoming. Both artistically and in terms of a certain level of recognition. ...
I’m a better composer than I was two years ago. To be able to say that when you are 71 — there’s satisfaction in that. But it wouldn’t be true if I had not received so many interesting challenges from the archbishop for commissions over the years. The commissions put me on a creative spot as it were; if I was going to do something that I could put my name on I was just going to have to up my game. Again, and again, and again. I am now better able to expand the range of my creative vision when it comes to meeting challenges like those.
Before La Rocca became composer-in-residence to the Benedict XVI Institute, he was already a respected composer. In an interview by the institute’s executive director, Maggie Gallagher, published in a three part series titled “Frank La Rocca’s Search for the Sacred” at Catholic Arts Today, Gallagher posed another relevant question, “How Good is Frank La Rocca?” and answered it with excerpts of reviews of his work.
Following are some quotes from Gallagher’s series.
Expedition Audio [in 2013] placed La Rocca among the contemporary sacred music immortals: “Mr. La Rocca joins the company of, among others, Gorecki, Pärt, Schnittke, and Tavener in combining the music of ancient times with current compositional techniques…in his own unique and effective way.”
Frank La Rocca was a good enough modernist composer that when the New Yorker’s Andrew Porter listened to La Rocca’s string trio at a Berkeley concert in 1979, the famous music critic was impressed. “Porter praised the ‘elegant craftsmanship of Frank La Rocca’s string trio,’” Frank smilingly remembered. . . . he wanted to build on that first great success — a favorable review in The New Yorker from the English-speaking world’s most eminent music critic!
La Rocca was happy to have his craftsmanship validated, but as he is quoted in the above-mentioned series:
I really didn’t want to be a wild-eyed modernist any longer . ... What I was trying to do really couldn’t be done — satisfy my inner promptings and still receive all the praise from the elites.
After describing how he gradually began to write music more true to his own vision, even though it meant he had to rebel against the musical establishment, and how he also, along the way, came to repent of the sins of his youth and make a full turn back to Christ, La Rocca concluded, “Somebody once asked me why people describe my sacred music as ‘luminous.’ What is that? And I said, ‘that it is the sound of spiritual sorrow transformed by grace.’”
Another comment about “Messe des Malades” comes from Martin Rokeach, who is a secular composer and music professor emeritus at St. Mary’s College of California. On May 19, the Oakland Symphony will premiere Rokeach’s oratorio “Bodies on the Line: the Great Flint Sit-Down Strike.” Rokeach is not a Catholic, but he has long admired Frank's work, and he attended the Messe des Malades premier at the Oakland Cathedral on Feb. 11.
"The composer’s intimate understanding of the liturgical text, and extraordinary technical facility and musicality conjoined to create a work of exceptional poignancy.” Rokeach concludes, “‘Masterpiece’ is not a word to be used casually, but to my understanding and my ear this Mass stands shoulder to shoulder with the great masterworks of the Renaissance.”
Benedict XVI Institute’s patronage of the arts
During a conversation recorded at the 2022 Napa Conference and elsewhere, Gioia often spoke about how the Catholic Church formerly was a major patron of the arts, but that nowadays the bishops are too busy, and the laity must take on that role. After I heard him say that at the 2022 Catholic Imagination Conference, I pointed out in an email that, in case he hadn’t heard, Archbishop Cordileone’s Benedict XVI Institute, with the help of generous donors, is bringing the church in the San Francisco Archdiocese actively into patronage of works of art that are in line with the best of the church’s artistic heritage.
La Rocca is only one of many Catholic artists who have benefited from the institute’s patronage. As Gallagher writes in the previously quoted series, “To thrive, artists need a community and so does the audience who loves the arts.” Artists need incubators. “Genius cannot be summoned into being, but the conditions of craftsmanship can be.”
The Benedict XVI Institute fosters those conditions in many varied ways, including regularly staging Zoom sessions for artists to talk about their creative processes with other artists and art lovers, and by commissioning new works by established artists and by those just getting started.
For one example of how the institute incubates talent, a Lenten Prayer and Music service, led by Archbishop Cordileone at Mission Dolores Basilica in San Francisco on March 11, four polyphonic works by Renaissance composers were paired with works commissioned from young composers, and a fourth work was paired with a previously composed work by La Rocca.
Breakthrough success of ‘Mass of the Americas’
La Rocca’s “Mass of the Americas,” which was the first he composed for the Benedict XVI Institute, broke through many barriers, the first being that it was commissioned by the church. A second barrier is that commissioned compositions very seldom, if ever, get a second performance. But after the ordinary form version of “Mass of the Americas” premiered in 2018 at San Francisco’s cathedral, it went on to performances in many more cathedrals and great churches around the world, in addition to concert venues.
After La Rocca later adapted “Mass of the Americas” for the traditional Latin Mass in 2019, a standing-room-only crowd filled the 3,500 seats at the National Shrine of the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception in D.C. for the Mass’ premier. There were 221,000 more who watched EWTN’s “Cathedrals Across America” video of the Mass.
Another breakthrough occurred in 2022, when the “Mass of the Americas” was recorded in studio by 11-time Grammy award-winning producer Blanton Alspaugh. The album crossed over into the mainstream in a big way. Soon after its release last year, it hit No. 1 on the Billboard chart for traditional classical music and stayed in first place for two weeks.
The “Mass of the Americas” album’s making the No. 1 spot on a Billboard classical music chart is significant because the music is being judged by the secular world on the quality of the work alone. Talk about a crossover album!
Beauty often reaches the heart when words cannot
As Dana Gioia wrote in a memoir “Singing Aquinas in L.A.” at First Things, it is not always necessary to understand the meaning of the words. Gioia described how he attended benediction with his parochial school classmates every month. With the singing of “Tantum Ergo,” which is one of the hymns of humble adoration of the Eucharist composed by intellectual giant St. Thomas Aquinas, Gioia learned far more than mere words could ever teach. Even though he didn’t then understand the Latin words, he responded to the power of sacred art to call our hearts and prepare our minds to receive truth.
Gioia’s fostering of Catholic arts and artists
Gioia founded the first Catholic Imagination Conference in 2015 as part of his ongoing work to assist talented Catholic writers and other creators — whose work is often ghettoized — toward similar success as he accomplished on his own.
"He has said, repeatedly, that he intends to devote the remainder of his life to the restoration of Catholic artistic and literary culture."
— From “Coming out as a Catholic poet,” by Mike Aquilina at Angelus News.
The poet, the composer and the academic establishment
Neither Gioia or La Rocca began by producing specifically Catholic works, and Gioia’s poetry is not specifically religious. But both were drawn to traditional forms in reaction to the sterility and ugliness of much of modern poetry and music.
As a would-be composer, Gioia had chafed against the modernist restrictions imposed on music composition in this era. In a conversation with John Zheng quoted in Wikipedia, Gioia remarked, “I wanted to compose tonal music, but my teachers believed that tonality was a dead tradition.” But then after he decided to be a poet, he found he had to break away from a similarly restrictive modernistic style dictated by the academy for serious poetry.
"If I go back to 1975 when I was leaving Harvard, I was told by the world experts in poetry that rhyme and meter were dead, narrative was dead in poetry. Form, we are told authoritatively, is artificial, elitist, artificial, retrogressive, right-wing, and (my favorite) un-American.”
La Rocca also had to break away from a prejudice among the music establishment against traditional forms and towards atonal music.
La Rocca told Joan Frawley Desmond in a National Catholic Register article, “After completing my master’s and doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley, I got a position at Cal State-Hayward, where I taught music theory and composition and did what I could on the side to have a career as an artist and a composer — not just an academic composer writing crabbed, obscure music for other academics, but a real public career, writing for classical-music audiences.”
The role of suffering
During the year Frank La Rocca worked on composing “Messe des Malades,” his appendix ruptured, he was hospitalized three times, and he had to live with the pain and the infection in his system for months until he was deemed healthy enough to be operated on. And he still suffers from after-effects.
During Archbishop Cordileone’s homily during the Solemn Mass at which La Rocca’s Messe des Malades setting premiered, Cordileone mentioned La Rocca’s ordeal,
It is the experience of suffering, that creates in us the capacity for creating something beautiful for God, with each of us making our own journey from darkness to light from sickness to health. This journey from earth to heaven is expressed in the beauty of the music of this Mass, made possible in no small part because the composer Frank La Rocca himself experienced his own journey from sickness to health while composing this Mass. What you hear today is a testament to the spiritual reality of what brings us together in this Church. We want to do something beautiful for God. It is sacrifice and suffering that makes it possible when we do it together. ... This is what can happen when we all give to God the absolute best that we can do.
I emailed Gioia to ask, “Would you be willing to say anything about your own sufferings and age and how these affect your work?” He replied:
I feel my age. I have less energy and more pain. But working gives me joy. For most of my life, I had demanding non-literary jobs. I could only write in tiny cracks of time. Now I finally have freedom. I don't want to waste it. I hear a little voice in my head saying, “Work for the night is coming.”
I have severe arthritis and neuropathy. I live with constant pain. Oddly, that makes me focus my energy on fewer things. I still do a lot of outdoor chores, though I have to take breaks for pain. It gives me joy to work with my aged body. Writing feels the same. It’s harder to do, but I love it more.
Writing poetry well is hard at any age, and it gets harder with time. I don’t want to slip into self-parody, which is the fate of so many older artists.
I have never been happier than I am now. I live with the woman I love in a place I love, and I have the impossible, unfinishable, and fascinating work of poetry.
As Cordileone also said in the interview I mentioned at the start of this article: “The presence of such work in the culture is an important way we evangelize. With the prominent work of Dana Gioia and Frank La Rocca, all Catholic artists gain credibility. And so do believing artists of any denomination.”
Roseanne T. Sullivan writes about sacred music, liturgy, art, literature and whatever strikes her Catholic imagination. She has published many essays, interviews, reviews and memoir pieces in print and online publications, such as Dappled Things Quarterly of Ideas, Art and Faith; Sacred Music Journal; Latin Mass Magazine; National Catholic Register; New Liturgical Movement; and Homiletic and Pastoral Review.