Making Monk Music

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

(Editor’s note: The Boy Monk dedicates its April 2021 blogspace to Utah’s Catholic sisters and nuns.)

As a young boy visiting the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, there were many things I saw but did not fully understand at the time. One involved the same two monks and a nun who gathered together regularly over several years in one of the abbey’s Quonset hut meeting rooms. For almost four decades afterwards, I had no idea what they were doing.

One of them was my friend Father Alan (Joseph Francis) Hohl. He was born in 1926 in Chicago, but grew up in Rib Lake, a small town in Northern Wisconsin about halfway between Green Bay and Duluth. Although he descended from German farmers, bakers, and lumber yard workers, he wanted to be a pilot or a priest.

After a stint flying for the Navy to protect the shipping lanes near Alaska, in 1953 he made his way to the Abbey of Our Lady of the Holy Trinity in Huntsville and became a monk. A big, strong, and friendly man, he took charge of the monastery irrigation and water systems and made friends with all the neighboring farmers. He also had a lovely voice, and so was appointed as the monastery cantor.

As proof that opposites attract, Father Alan’s good friend at the monastery was a thin, reserved, quiet, scholarly monk named Father Baldwin (Louis Matthews) Shea. He was born in Decatur, Illinois in 1928. His brother was a parish priest in Illinois, but Father Baldwin took a more contemplative path and joined Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky in 1945.

In July 1947, he was sent west to help start the new Utah monastery, and in 1953 was one of the first priests ordained there. In contrast to Father Alan, Father Baldwin’s work was done primarily indoors. He served for several years as the monastery librarian and as secretary to the abbot. When I knew him, he wore thick dark glasses because of a vision problem resulting from a brain tumor.

For a couple of years in the mid to late 1970s, these two Trappist monks met regularly with Sister Cecile Gertken, a Benedictine nun from Minnesota. One day, I asked Father Alan (now in his 90s) what it was all about. “She saved us!” he said emphatically.

I was surprised to learn that there was no standard Trappist format for chants at the time, and each monastery developed its own. Father Alan explained how Sister Cecile helped them convert and translate the Latin psalms he sang when he started at the Huntsville monastery into the memorable English ones that I (and the rest of the public) heard chanted a cappella so often during visits to the Utah abbey (see: Can’t Sleep? Sing Like A Monk!).

The monks picked the perfect person to help. Cecilia Gertken was born in 1902 in a Minnesota log cabin, the eleventh of thirteen children. Her father Luke was a renowned teacher and organist, and educated the whole family about music. Four of Cecilia’s brothers became Benedictine monks, while she and six of her sisters joined the nearby Saint Benedict’s Monastery for women.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in piano, Sister Cecile taught music and band and directed choirs in various schools and colleges across the Midwest. She also started to study monastic chants and in 1960 published a book, Chant Melodies Simplified. From 1975 to 1993, she published a series of practical booklets about prayers and chants, culminating with Seasonal Hymns of the Liber Hymnarius.

One article about her explains, “Vatican II’s approval of the vernacular for liturgical prayer prompted her to devote her talents to preserving the ancient chant melodies, fitting them to English translations of the new Mass texts, and to translating and adapting antiphons and hymns for the Divine Office. Her goal was to provide assurance that the ancient Gregorian chant would not be lost.” Her work took her around the world, including to Huntsville, Utah.

Over several years, Sister Cecile spent many days and hours helping Father Alan and Father Baldwin. Typically, Sister Cecile sat at a piano playing and composing, or translating with a pencil in hand. Father Alan helped translate, and then chanted to try out the revised tones and words. Father Baldwin recorded the new English psalm lyrics on sheet music using a typewriter and Father Alan filled in the music notes by hand.

Father Alan says he especially liked how Sister Cecile “stayed loyal to the original monastic tones with only slight modifications to accommodate English words.” Together, they produced a new Liturgy of the Hours that the Utah monks sang for forty years until their monastery closed in August 2017.

The three collaborators had some fun too. Like any good musical group, they had a name. They called themselves the “ABCs” (for “Alan/Baldwin/Cecile”). When they needed a break, Sister Cecile would play melodies or an impromptu piano concerto from memory.

They also shared a deep passion for their work. Father Baldwin participated in some 50 years of Huntsville chants before he died in 2009. Father Alan remained cantor for well over half of Holy Trinity Abbey’s seven decade monastic lifespan. Sister Cecile often said that the monk chant was a treasure, with its own distinct charisma: “gentle, moderation, mannerly, loving…what more do you want in a personality?”

Despite my own utter cluelessness about what she was doing, Sister Cecile’s Huntsville Trappist chant project was so important and so well known that it was described in news articles, mentioned in an oral history of her life’s work, and even noted in several tributes after she passed away in 2001 at age 99.

Right under my nose, Sister Cecile was not merely making music with monks. She and the ABCs were helping to preserve one of the great legacies of Western culture—the beautiful centuries old monastic chant—and they did it right here in off-the-beaten path Huntsville, Utah.

*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, will be published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.