Following the spark of inspiration to compose a song can keep Jacob Flaherty up late at night. But as a father of six, the 41-year-old eventually must surrender to sleep. “It’s hard to give it up,” said Flaherty, director of sacred music at Holy Family in St. Louis Park. “I pray, ‘Well, Lord, you’re the inspiration behind this in the first place, so if you want it to continue, give it to me tomorrow when I’m well rested.’”
For Flaherty and his wife, Esther, balancing their full lives takes patience, perspective and prayer.
Q) What fostered your love of music?
A) I was in fourth grade, and it was Holy Thursday. I was going to Mass with my grandma, and I was about to genuflect, and she looked at me and said, “Not tonight” and she pointed to the tabernacle, and it was open and the veil that’s normally on it was taken off. It was a very stark image. It brought me to the history of that night, and I was caught off guard by the liturgical subtlety. It was beautiful because it was completely synced up. That was the start of a deep curiosity about the faith and getting into Scripture and the liturgical parallels in our Catholic life.
The next year, I entered the choir. We had a wonderful Schola Cantorum program. Diving into these classic, traditional pieces caught my artistic imagination. I was impressed how music could convey the different liturgical and scriptural emotions of the season. We’d be singing this very mournful song at Lent and then this super joyful, almost bursting-at-the-seams song at Easter. I remember it giving me goosebumps as a 10-year-old boy. It awakened something in me. I knew the Lord was working on me through music.
Q) And look at you now!
A) Right! But I didn’t have any plans when I was 10 that this would be a thing for me. I was going to be a fireman, a cook, a priest and a professional baseball player — back-to-back.
Q) Has that early exposure to liturgical music influenced you as a parent?
A) That definitely has trickled through. At Holy Family, we have five choirs and a strings group. I want to cultivate these opportunities where young people can experience something similar. As a dad, I want to put our kids in a position where they can experience beauty. We really care about family time. We try to keep our kids well rounded, so we do some sports, we do theater, we do music.
It’s all too often that people who are interested in something — whether it’s music or sports — they treat their field like it’s the end. It’s the thing. I look to St. John Boscoe, my patron saint, and his way of using things as hooks for getting kids interested in the divine.
I try to be the music guy, but in the hands of a kid who hasn’t been given the same charism as me, it can seem a little dry, so I have this sense that I need to use other hooks. I’ve coached baseball for eight years at various schools.
I want them to love the Lord a different way. I can do so through my joy or my association through other activities — kind of like St. John Boscoe and his tricks or circus acts. I can do other things to be a source of Christ’s light. He was joyful — with direction. In that joy, there was order. Joy is the bridge that connects truth and love.
Q) Do you carry music with you throughout the day?
A) For sure! There’s a tune going through my head all the time. I’m talking to you, and the windshield wipers are going, and I’m hearing the notes of the windshield wipers.
Q) What is your process for composing?
A) For me, the music always starts with the text. That informs the melody. Perhaps we finish the Communion chants a little early at a Mass I’m playing at, and I’ll have my missal open and I’ll be looking at the readings and I’ll see an instance of Jesus healing someone or raising someone from the dead or there’s a reference in the Old Testament to a sound of thunder. I improvise: What could that sound like? What could that feel like? And I try to integrate that. If it’s a trumpet call, there will be a perfect fifth — bump, bump! Something triumphant is happening, something royal.
Q) Tell me more.
A) It’s using main themes and my knowledge of music theory and voice leading. If you’re writing for the voice, it’s very helpful to know what a voice will do and what a voice will struggle with. You can’t keep a tenor up in this particular range for too long. You can’t ask him to sing a huge interval up and then an awkward interval going down, so there are ways to avoid that.
I take themes from events in Scripture and work those out in all the different voice parts at different times, which is what polyphony is, and then that main theme repeats itself in the alto part or the tenor part or the bass part. All of a sudden, you’ve got four different things happening simultaneously.
That’s a bland explanation, but there’s a lot of wonder that goes into the middle part of that process.
Q) How do you get through it?
A) I’m not exactly sure. It’s sort of like the Lord works it out.
It demands a decent amount of time and relative quiet — which is the hardest, being a dad.
On Tuesday of last week, I knew I would be going back to All Saints (in Minneapolis) for a Mass on that Friday for the Filiae Laboris Mariae Sisters who were having an investiture for three of their postulants. I was going to help them out because they’re between music directors. There’s this great text for The Commons of Virgins about the Lord calling these women: “I will give you a crown.” It’s super touching.
We were under-impressed with the options we had, so I got this little bug up my craw: I want to compose something. We had rehearsal the next day, so I sat down at 5:30 p.m. and my wife patiently delayed dinner for an hour and a half. I was sitting at the piano in our living room. The kids were buzzing around — doing homework at the kitchen table, playing with blocks and dolls in the living room. “I’m going to be done in five minutes, honey!”
It was wild, but it was also kind of beautiful. I felt like I was being taken on a ride.
There’s lots of imagery in the song — it was this otherwise quiet, intimate piece with a triumphant moment and then back to the intimate calling of the Lord.
We ended up practicing it the next night and singing it on Friday at the Mass. It went really well.
Q) You also composed a song after Pope Benedict’s death.
A) His final words were: “Jesus, I love you” (in German). That was really inspiring to me because I saw this really well learned theologian who had this complex knowledge of the faith, and in the very end, all of that was one arrow that pointed to the culminating phrase “Jesus, I love you.” That’s what the study of theology should do — to lead to a greater knowledge and love of Jesus Christ.
I read the article about his death on Dec. 31 and was hired to play music at a Christmas party that night for a couple hours. In between Christmas carols, I started improvising on some ways of expressing that –— “Jesus, I love you, Jesus, I love you.” Then I came back to church before Mass and wrote out the basic framework on a little notepad of music paper. We had an 11 p.m. New Year’s Eve Mass, and then after Mass I stayed up until 2 a.m. on the organ sketching it out. It was handwritten for the 9 a.m. Mass and later that day, after our family’s Christmas party, I wrote it out on a computer program. It was later performed in the Diocese of Wilmington, at our Cathedral (of St. Paul in St. Paul) and another place and got quite a few views on YouTube.
Q) How does that initial spark of inspiration feel?
A It’s a little bit intimidating. Do I have the stamina to follow it up to the end?
There have been pieces where you start and then run out of steam or the piece maybe didn’t have as much as I thought it did. There’s excitement, but it’s a bit of a fright, hoping I’ll be worthy of it. “Lord, help me to persevere in this.”
Q) What’s the hardest part of composing?
A) I can improvise fairly well. But the hard part is remembering what I improvised. Sometimes I lack the patience: I know I want to write it down, but the heart wants to just keep making music.
Q) What are little ways you exercise creativity in daily life?
A) When I send emails to parents about choir, rather than just spit out the facts, I try to make it fun. We’re not utilitarian beings. We’re meant to be in relationship.
My kids and I play a lot of board games — Skull King, Splendor, Kingdomino. There’s creativity in that — we’re always coming up with strategies.
I no longer use Twitter — it’s such an awful echo chamber. I know people say social media is inevitable, but couldn’t we just quit? I can see how it really escalates joylessness. For me, that’s a huge problem. My favorite Gospel verse is: “The joy of the Lord is my friend,” Nehemiah 8:10.
Q) And with your kids? Your oldest is 12.
A) We’ve decided we’re just not going to do smartphones (for our kids). I tell them, “We were the first people who ever got them, and they didn’t know how it was going to go.”
Thanks be to God, we’re really close to our kids. We have fun together, we go on adventures together, so building that closeness has allowed us to be trusted and have dialogue about it. I told my 12-year-old daughter about this study that the most depressed group of people are preteen and teen girls, and I’ve talked to her about how social media perpetuates self-doubt and low self-esteem.
This is my chance with these kids. I’m a little more OK with saying no.
Q) Good for you.
A) I’ve noticed how our overuse of technology blunts wonder. I see this even with the silliest of things, like weather apps. As a kid, I remember lying in bed at night, and the windows were open because we didn’t have any air conditioning. In the summer and early fall, you’d hear these rumbles of thunder in the west, and they’d slowly build in intensity, and pretty soon you were in the thick of a storm, and then it would pass. I remember thinking how cool that was.
Today, several times a day you go online to check the weather, and it’s usually pretty accurate and I’m always disappointed to know. There was something magical before: “Ooh! We got a storm tonight!” It was a gift. Now it’s like: “We have an 82 percent chance of storms tonight.” It sucks the joy out of it.
I try to avoid weather apps. Are we really in that bad of straits that we can’t just figure it out as we go?
Q) What do you know for sure?
A) Jesus Christ is proof that God loves us and that we have a duty and the honor of joyfully help others know that. Some people complain about living in these times, but no — you were made for these times! This is your chance for holiness.
