(RNS) — One song has been with Julio Cuellar Gonzales for almost his entire life. Among Cuellar’s first memories of the church in Villa Serrano, a small town in Bolivia’s Chuquisaca region in the 1970s, he remembers singing a specific version of “Our Father.”
At the time, Cuellar believed it was written by a priest. Little did he know that the tune to the beloved “Our Fathers” was actually written by Paul Simon for Simon and Garfunkel’s 1960s hit “The Sound of Silence.”
These words are different from typical prayers to the Father. “Our Heavenly Father exists among those who truly love each other. May the kingdom you promised come to our hearts soon. May the love your son left us, may this love always remain in our hearts.” Quelia Er sang the song in Spanish. In the middle of the song, as a samponia (a traditional Andean panpipe) plays the melody, parishioners chant the traditional “Our Father” with lyrics from the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.
From Villa Serrano, “Voice of Silence” our father moved with Cuellar to Santa Cruz de la Sierra, the largest city in Bolivia. “It’s one of people’s favorite songs and it’s our favorite song,” he said.
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Years later, after working as a musician on a Mexican cruise ship and then immigrating to Virginia, he discovered the Spanish Mass and heard it again. “It connects me to my childhood,” he said.
Pedro Rubalcava, record label director for the Oregon Catholic Press, said the “Voices of Silence” version of “Our Fathers” has been widely circulated in Latin America and U.S. Latino communities over the past few decades. The words and instruments vary from community to community.
For Cuellar, even when he finally learned the origins of the piece, he still felt a taste of the Andes: “To me, it sounded like the melancholy, the melody, the sweetness of Andean music. ”
While there is no evidence that Simon took inspiration from the Andes for “The Sound of Silence,” he later sang “El Condor Pasa” on Simon and Garfunkel’s Grammy-winning 1970 album Bridge Over Troubled Water. ” uses tunes from the Andes. ”
Although Simon recorded the vocals under a recording license from the French Andean band Los Incas, he believed the melody came from a folk tune, but the melody actually comes from Daniel Alomía Robles’ 1913 Peruvian musical El Cóndor Pasa.
Valdimar Hafstein, professor of folklore/ethnology at the University of Iceland, writes in his 2018 book Creating Intangible Heritage: UNESCO’s Vulture Pasa and Other Stories, consider Traveling to Robles across the Amazon and Andes to collect mythological music is part of a wider tradition of “collecting composers” and it is difficult to describe this piece as an original composition or an adaptation by Robles.
When Robles’ son sued Simon over the registration of his father’s work in the U.S. copyright system, Simon settled in what the son called “almost an amicable case.”
“The Sound of Silence” Our father came back into Cuellar’s life when he decided to start recording Christian music after years of focusing on secular music. “I feel like I owe God the gift of music,” Cuellar explains. When he told the Episcopal church where he served as music minister that he planned to record a record, people kept asking him for a recording of “Our Father” after Mass.
During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, Cuellar was inspired to ask his wife to film him while he was walking in the woods around Lake Braddock, Virginia, to connect with God and escape fear and uncertainty. Singing “Our Father” by the creek.
“We need something that gives us strength,” Cuellar told her. After his friend with experience in video editing helped polish the video, he posted it to YouTube “as a cover” since he was not the author. Among many other versions of “Sounds of Silence” and “Our Fathers,” Cuellar’s version currently has more than 23 million views.
“I’ve been making music my whole life,” Cuellar said. “I have never reached as many people as this wonderful work from Master Paul Simon has.”
“It’s a miracle from God. It’s a message from God, ‘what’s going on with this song,'” Cuellar said.
But not everyone liked the version of “Our Fathers.” Cuellar said that while the positive comments far outnumbered the negative ones, he heard people call it a “devil’s song,” criticizing everything from the altered lyrics in “Our Fathers” to the Andean instrumentation. Others just said it wasn’t fit for service.
“I’m a child of God and the devil can’t come to my house because God is here,” Cuellar said. “I’m no expert on Christian music, but I’m a resigned person trying to hear God’s voice in silence.”
Rubalcava said Philadelphia Archbishop Nelson Perez taught that Catholics should not sing this version for several reasons. First, the words of God the Father should not change, especially in the liturgy. Second, “The Sound of Silence” was part of the soundtrack to the 1967 film “The Graduate,” which had an extramarital affair as its main storyline.
Ireri E. Chávez-Bárcenas, an assistant professor of music at Bowdoin College and a musicologist who studies the hymns of the Hispanic world, said that the music surrounding “Our Father” and The debate over the melody of “The Sound of Silence” draws on centuries of history. dispute.
Setting liturgical or devotional texts to known secular melodies has been a “common technique used by the Catholic Church since the Middle Ages,” Chavez-Barcenas told Religion News Service in an email, explaining that this This technique is called opposition.
However, Chavez-Barcenas said the technique has always been controversial, with opposition most notably arising during the Counter-Reformation. “In Latin America, Franciscans and Jesuits have always advocated the adaptation of liturgical texts in local languages, songs, and musical styles,” writes Chavez-Barcenas.
“Sounds of Silence” is just one example of Latino Catholics using popular song melodies for devotional and liturgical music, Rubalcava said, citing a devotional song called “Saber que Vendrás” that uses Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” was used as the theme of the song. Its tunes, various liturgical arrangements of the melody “Jesus Christ Superstar” and the Marian devotional song “Mi Virgen Bella” use the melody of Juan Gabriel’s “Amor Eterno”.
“It’s illegal because you’re plagiarizing, probably without permission,” said Rubalcava, who said copyright law is another issue with the “Voices of Silence” version of “Our Fathers.”
Rubalcava said sacred versions of these popular songs were passed informally from one church musician to another without formal approval from the wider church body. U.S. Catholic bishops have been serious about respecting copyright licenses since the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago was convicted in 1984 of illegally copying music by religious composers, Rubalcava said.
Rubalcava said there is an attitude around the world, especially in Latin America, that “everything done for God should be free.” “People don’t think there’s a good reason to pay composers, artists who are trying to make a living or trying to raise money to record music,” Rubalcava said.
Rubalcava said liturgical, musical and theological formation is needed so that Catholics respect “working people getting what they deserve.”
E. Michael Harrington, a professor of music copyright and intellectual property issues at Berklee Online, said what’s happening is “a problem” but “not a really serious problem.”
“Technically, they’re making a spin-off,” Harrington explained. “If you take someone else’s copyrighted material, something they created, they own the copyright, and if you take it and change it, you’re violating their rights.”
Harrington said that to add new words to the “Sounds of Silence” melody, musicians needed permission from the publisher.
But, Harrington explained, publishers likely won’t sue “because it’s an unplanned, organic thing that people are doing but they’re not making a profit.”
Harrington said church leaders took the right step by not endorsing the use of the melody, but he also said they could seek permission from the publisher if they were interested in using it.
After reading the comments on the video, Cuellar believed that his participation in “Our Father” was a service to God. “This is a song that touches people’s hearts,” he said. One comment read: “This song gives me peace. This song gives me hope. It gives me strength.”
