Wikipedia tells us that: “Pope Paul VI promulgated the revised rite of Mass with his Apostolic Constitution Missale Romanum of 3 April 1969, setting the first Sunday of Advent at the end of that year as the date on which it would enter into force. However, the revised Missal itself was not published until the following year, and full vernacular translations appeared much later.”
The new English translation, then, appears on the first day after the close of the 40th year. Call me cranky or crazy, but I’ve never been interested in this numerology stuff, and there is a Biblical significance to the number 40.
Back in 2007 I posted the following on exactly this idea, but with a slightly different conclusion about why.
http://chironomo.blogspot.com/2007/05/forty-years-in-desert.html
In addition to a "biblical significance", there is also a legal significance, 40 years being the time required for a contra legem custom having the tacit consent of Church authorities to attain the force of an ecclesiastical law. Such customs would include many of the current "liturgical practices" that followed the promulgation of the New Missal.
I think the Wikipedia article is mistaken about the timing.
A search on the NY Times site shows that the revised Mass went into use in Italy in late 1969:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40E14F9355E1A7B93C3A91789D95F4D8685F9&scp=4
And New Yorkers apparently got the rollout at Palm Sunday 1970:
http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00E12F93D5C1B7493C1AB1788D85F448785F9&scp=3
RC;
The dates may have varied for a lot of local reasons, but I think the agreed upon "start date" has generally been said to be Advent of 1969. I'm not sure there is much variation from that (well….my home parish when I was a kid continued doing the Mass in Latin until about 1975….!! Looking back, it could have been either NO or EF… I didn't know the difference then!))
The roll outs in the US were in 1970.
1970 – annus horribilus
Well, in my experience, it was an annus mirabilis, as it meant the advent of significant improvements in liturgical music.
Oddly (in retrospect), the first wave was a folk group. The folk group was far more proficient musically than the volunteer organists who played four doleful hymns on an electronic organ using chord keys and lots of swell pedal vibrato. (I kid you not. And my experience was hardly unique, as I've learned over the years.) We also starting singing part of the ordinary.
That folk group didn't last for more than a couple of years – my impression was that people moved (this was suburbia – people were always moving on in the 1970s, or so it seemed). But it did kindle a desire for better music and more singing of the Mass. At that parish, things eventually plateaued with the advent of a pastor who, while zealous for souls, was a liturgical minimalist and he had a tenure of over 30 years….
Liam;
I somewhat question your assessment that these were significant improvements in liturgical music. Sort of like saying that replacing a unicycle with a pogo stick is a significant improvement in transportation. Had the energy exerted by those early Folk Groups been put into enacting what the Council actually had in mind, rather than adopting a revolutionary or anti-establishment course of action, we may well have seen real improvements in liturgical music.
Chironomo,
It was more like replacing a pogo stick with a single-gear bicycle. It was unquestionably an improvement, and, had we had more enthusiastic liturgical leadership from the subsequent pastor, I have every reason to believe it would have progressed further to at least mediocrity (as opposed to baleful – a lot of people don't believe how baleful things were in many places, but they were indeed).
I should add as an important contextual qualifier about this period: this was still a time when pastors could and often did dispense with qualified paid musicians. Why? Because the focus on stewardship of funding was entirely focused on paying down the debt from the parochial school (built in the preconciliar era when pastors still had a primary obligation to provide such a school – something we are not burdened with today, mercifully) – heck, the school was built and paid for before they bothered to build a church a generation later. Liturgical music was an afterthought. Anyone expecting such pastors – who were the dominant type in those years – to serious devote time to investing in a quality program of liturgical music would be setting herself up for disappointment. The oases of good liturgical music tended to be in a handful of old parishes (which had paid for their schools long ago and also tended to benefit from a much finer fabric for liturgical music, being built before the Great Depression, et cet.) from which suburban boom parishes were cut like segments of an orange.
Liam, I think I know what you are talking about. I once went to an indult Mass, some 15 years ago, said as a Missa Cantata. The main players were part of a legacy group, a museum-like leftover from a previous age. It was quite a window into what must have been common – not universal and not even the norm – but common. The music that went on at that Mass was absolutely traumatizing beyond anything I've ever experienced in the ordinary form. I shook me up for weeks, months, years! It was absolutely the worst liturgical experience of my life. I can't even go into details. Too painful.
Jeffrey,
Exactly.
And, for balance, I have been traumatized by folk groups. In particular, a quartet at a church near Rochester NY; which quartet included two guitarists and the tenor guitarist sang about a quarter tone flat and the soprano vocalist sang about an eighth of a tone sharp, and, well, you get the picture.
I didn't stay for the final hymn, Father; for these and all the sins of my past life I am truly sorry and beg penance and absolution.
All humor aside, I think this kind of dynamic is important to capture, as I think it is far more explicative of why and how things developed the way they did than a ginormous conspiracy – though I am sure some places did indeed fall victim to small localized conspiracies of bad taste and anti-liturgical and anti-musical ideologies. My predisposition in analyzing these things is British as opposed to French; that is, I tend to place far more weight on human foibles and local circumstances than on coordinate conceptual ideologies, much more inductive than deductive. Unfortunately, we Catholics have a habit of being overly deductive in our analyses, and we have to strain to balance that habit out.
Well, I was baptized in 1970, so my first experiences of Mass were that year. My parish had a fairly competent folk group, but to the surprise of my godparents, I preferred the organ Mass. Thanks to a musical pastor, our parish attracted the "musical" seminarians for their pastoral year, so the Responsorial Psalm was sung from 1972 onward, somewhat early for that tradition in Rochester NY. So my immediate post-conciliar experiences were fairly good, and likely above average for the eastern US.
It wasn't until I went to Mass at the Newman Center that I experienced the 10-gear bicycle upgrade: St Louis Jesuits (and others) accompanied not only by guitars and an occasional pianist, but at one Mass augmented with a wind quartet. Newman also had a pastor who did graduate studies in liturgy, and urged the students to a higher standard.
Regarding:
"Had the energy exerted by those early Folk Groups been put into enacting what the Council actually had in mind, rather than adopting a revolutionary or anti-establishment course of action, we may well have seen real improvements in liturgical music."
I think I'd have to take exception to pretty much every word here.
Trust me: in 1970 there were no liturgical professionals leading folk groups. In seminaries, perhaps a different story. (And even then …) These were all amateurs of varying talents. Blaming volunteers for the lack of liturgical vision of pastors is somewhat akin to blaming the night shift nurse for the botched brain operation that kills one of her patients at 2AM.
Liam is right. We like conspiracy theories because they're more sexy than earnest and honest incompetence.
PS: I would like to express gratitude to even to the volunteer organists who stamped out those doleful hymn sandwiches: it was partly due to their gifts, balefully limited as they were, that I learned my first hymn (Holy Holy Holy) at the age of five, though the greater part was played by my father's example of singing (he grew in up a German national parish in Bridgeport, CT, where people sang; unless most of the mute fathers in the parish I grew up in….).
Todd; (and Liam)
I think you might be misunderstanding what I said, or else perhaps I am not saying it well. Yes, I am well aware of how things were in 1970… while you were being baptized I was already an Altar Server studying organ. I am aware of the mayhem that was parish music at that time and even slightly before. My question is this…why did these volunteers, who were very obviously dedicated and hard working, direct their energies at what can only be called a "musical revolution" in the liturgy? Are we going to say that they were amateurs so they "just didn't know any better"? If so, then I think we can all agree that we know better now.
I'm not disputing either of your views of what happened then… I think that is well established. What I am disputing is that there was an "improvement in liturgical music" that came about as a result. There was no improvement, only a complete change in paradigm that, at best, serves to define the changes as improvements. That's not the same thing. The 3-chord Folk Group is hardly an improvement over the Old Organ Lady. Different – yes. Better- no.
And neither is what liturgical music was supposed to have been at the time. I'm not blaming the volunteers. The fault (?) lies with those who were supposed to be the "gaurdians of the liturgy" at the time. With all of the energy being put into "change", why was it not put into the right change? I guess that is what I was trying to say.
Chironomo
Our folk group was NOT a 3-chord group; I had indicated they were musically more proficient than the Hurdy Gurdy Player in the back. A lot more. It was a significant improvement, not only in quality of delivery but also objectively in terms of singing the Mass itself, rather than singing at Mass. While it was only a single-gear bike, it was a helluva lot better than the pogo stick. It certainly wasn't mayhem, but embraced rather enthusiastically as a result. (It wasn't until the end of the 1970s that I encountered decent organ and traditional choral music. At the old Benedictine parish that had deep roots and resources that my birth parish utterly lacked and whose pastors had no particular interest in remedying, not because they were interested in a revolution but because they were being minimalists and practical.) I am not misunderstanding you, but disagreeing strongly with you.
Also, think of the resources at hand in 1970. It took a few more years for a new Gradual and other properly Roman books of liturgical music to be produced.
I would also venture that a portion of responsibility can be laid at the feet of organists and chant champions of the period who were passive-aggressive with regard to the liturgical reforms, among them very especially those who were adamant that chant could only be done well in Latin. (Unfortunately, chant champions who enthusiastically embrace vernacular chant, like Dr Theodore Marier, were few and far between from what I have witnessed and read.)
Liam;
So we must agree to disagree. What you call improvement I call a change in paradigm. I otherwise find what you're saying to be pretty much on the mark.
Chironomo, back in 1970, you and I were kids. Our experience was our own home parishes. You were fortunate to get organ lessons. My parents couldn't be bothered with them.
The reality is that each of us has sampled a very small piece of the liturgical spectrum of the time. And we look back on these experiences with a certain bias based on a largely favorable (mine; it drew me into the Catholic Church, in part) experience with liturgical music or a poor one (yours, I presume).
Objective evidence would be nice: how many parishes employed musicians? Lots of recordings of organ choirs and folk groups of the day (we have studio efforts of the latter on vinyl … somewhere, I suppose) could be compared? Articles from serious publications that bemoan the lack of chant, like back way in 1937. Payroll records from parishes to see that as women left religious orders, did pastors cut back on school teachers, or did they shift the non-quitting parish organists to the classroom?
My own experience–and I'm careful to claim it as my own subjective experience–is that the overall quality of Catholic sacred music has been on a steady rise since 1970. In some ways, it's a meaningless statement in that I'm a better musician today than I was in 1970.
However, I'm inclined to think that even the much-pilloried efforts of NPM or MCW raised the bar in more places than it gave license to fire the music director and substitute volunteers. Though some pastors no doubt approached liturgy in that way. But I've known guitarists who learned the piano and chant, I've worked with more than one folk group that morphed into an SATB choir, and more parishes seem to have music directors today than forty years ago.
For the occasional gibe tossed my way about being in a snit, I feel very optimistic about Catholic sacred music. I always have been.
I was of age in 1970 and to compare the music then to what was available in many Catholic Churches prior to the Council, ones with a first rate choir and organist, is laughable on its face. That chant and sacred polphony are on the same level as the whiney music of Suzanne Toolan, for example, is absolutely incredulous. What happened in the late 1960s et seq was that the Catholic musical establishment, with very limited exceptions, disregarded Sacrosanctum Concilium and Musica Sacra, in toto. If your parish isn't doing any Latin Chant today you are in violation of the letter and spirit of the Council.