Adam Bartlett, David Haas, and the Simple English Propers Project

I’ve promised to tell the back story of how the contemporary Catholic composer David Haas influenced the creation of the Simple English Propers Project of Adam Bartlett – though neither one of them knows this story. This is a case study in how a huge variety of influences feed into the emergence of new things in the world of art and liturgy, how a symbioses of people and events can elicit the emergence of an answer to a need that no one entirely knew existed until it became apparent through a circuitous route.

I’ll get to David’s influence in just a bit but let me say a few words about Adam Bartlett, the composer who is busily compiling the Simple English Propers week by week in the hope of going to print with a full edition in time for the release of the new translation of the Roman Missal in 2011. My excitement about this project is no secret. I think it could result in providing that missing link in current resources for Catholic liturgy: musical settings of the liturgical text that choirs can sing every week. It can become a collection that can truly transform the sound and feel of Catholic liturgy in this country, both in the near term and in the long term.

Adam has a praise-music background, playing upbeat popular music in parishes only a few years ago. About the time that the CMAA started putting chant editions online, Adam found himself drawn the chant tradition: its solemnity, integrity, and authenticity. He sought out the mentorship of Fr. Columba Kelly, a chant expert who struggled mightily in the 1960s to provide English settings of chant for use in the postconciliar period. Fr. Kelly’s work never went mainstream due to many circumstances of time and place (the champions of English found his work too stodgy and the partisans of chant regarded it as too progressive). But he never dropped his enthusiasm for the idea, and this has been passed to Adam through careful teaching and instruction.

Adam opened the SacredMusicProject to make Kelly’s settings available and provide a forum for development of several projects to push the chant in a variety of forms. It was only a year ago that the two of us argued incessantly and sometimes very hotly in private emails about methodology in chant, its rhythmic structure, its production, and much more I won’t go into here, but those who know about the old “words vs. music” controversies will be able to imagine the details. At some point this past summer, we both came to a mutual realization: what we were arguing about didn’t matter nearly as much as the larger goal.

We set it all aside, and in August 2010, we started brainstorming about what kinds of editions of English chant could actually work in a regular parish as a means of transitioning musicians and parishes out of one paradigm into another that is much closer to the idea.

It was later that very month that I attended the Atlanta Archdiocesan Liturgical Music program as a speaker. David Haas was also a presenter. We met and enjoyed each other’s company very much, and I recall being stunned at the extent of his knowledge on Catholic liturgy (though I don’t know what I should have been stunned). Then we both went our separate ways and did our respective presentations: he on music for the new translation and I on the role of chant in Catholic liturgy.

We both had two sessions. Neither of us could attend the others’ session because they were simultaneous. My first session went perfectly. It was attended by people who had a preexisting affection for chant, who had CDs at home, who might know a passing Gregorian melody, who had a sense that something was wrong and uninspiring about the mainstream model, and were ready for answers. It was an extremely receptive crowd.

I explained my understanding of the musical structure of the Roman Rite (people’s parts, schola parts, celebrant parts; propers, ordinary chants, and dialogues). I gave a sweeping history of Church music to explain how we found ourselves in the current predicament. I spoke of ways to get from here to there, and otherwise inspired optimism about the future. I then passed out the Parish Book of Chant, a book designed to use traditional Mass ordinaries and Latin hymns to revive interest in the fullness of the Gregorian repertoire.

We sang and sang and it was wonderful. There was a question and answer session that was full of energy and excitement. It was like magic. My presentation ended 90 minutes later, and I received a standing ovation. I left full of confidence and went into the break, where I visited with my colleague Arlene Oost-Zinner, who was attending to lead the closing Vespers in chant.

Now, Arlene has been doing work on English Psalms for several years, writing what is, in my view, the most inspired chant settings currently available. Her interest has been much like Adam’s and much like Fr. Kelly’s: providing music to improve the liturgy with a goal of driving toward the ideal. Her resources are extremely practical and accessible to everyone, and, importantly, point to resource ideals beyond her editions alone. They put the sound and feel of solemn chant in people’s ears, providing a wonderful bridge between readings and inspiring a desire for more music along these lines, integrating particularly well with Gregorian chant.

In any case, while my session was going on, Arlene attended David Haas’s session. She gave me a report that was highly favorable. David focused on the practical issues facing Church musicians with the new translation. He calmed their fears, pointing out that it actually affects very little, that most of what they are singing they can continue to use. He listened to the concerns of those present and dealt with their frustrations over those who do not have enough reliable singers, over obtaining music, over meeting various competing demands in the parish.

The audience was very much at ease, and increasingly trusting of the presenter. Haas then proceeded to work through some possible settings of the new Ordinary text, some of his own music and some by other composers that is very familiar with most Catholic musicians. Again and again, he made them feel at ease and confident about what they were doing as musicians and what they will deal with on the new texts. Arlene said that he handled the scene masterfully and did a fantastic job in dealing with people who had come feeling rather apprehensive.

I was very interested to hear the report, but it never dawned on me that he might have been dealing with a different demographic than I had dealt with in the first lecture I had presented. It is obvious in retrospect that the chant people came to the chant thing first and that the Haas people would likely come to my lecture next. As a result of my neglect of this obvious point, I had done nothing to prepare for what I was about to face.

My second presentation began, and I began with more confidence than ever, giving the same presentation with more flourish. I continued on and on with the history, the structure of the ritual, the nature of liturgical chant, and more. Then I passed out the books and I started flipping through ready to sing. I was completely oblivious to the fact that I had already lost most people in the room and that most of them had no idea what i was talking about. Not even the language I was using was familiar. If anything, I had inadvertently re-instilled in them the fear that Haas had tried to take out of them. I should have seen it in their faces but I did not.

In any case, as I began to sing with them, I was rather taken aback to discover that hardly anyone was singing with me. They were starring at their books with their mouths open with frozen faces of confusion. I pushed ahead, turning to this chant and that chant and continued to try to get them to join me. But it was to no avail. They weren’t against what I was asking them to do; they just didn’t even know where to begin. The longer this went on, the more people grew restless.

Finally, a few people piped up and started asking questions. Is this something we have to learn for the new Missal? How can I possibly learn a language that I’ve studied? How can I read these notes? I’ve never had any training in music so how can I read this stuff? And so on. The questions grew more and more pointed. I tried to answer them but nearly an hour of pent of frustration was coming out and there was essentially nothing I could do to put these worms back in the can.

I kept wondering: what happened to the old magic? Why is this going so wrong when the first session went so right? I was not fast enough on my feet to figure out the story here, which was that my first session was packed with chant partisans and the second session was packed with people who ranged between skeptical and vaguely curious.

These were musicians are of a special type. Many if not most are unpaid. They have no advanced training. They found themselves in a local parish that parish was in need so they stepped up to do the right thing. Most have no instruction or training in Catholic liturgy. In some ways, they are hanging on by a thread, glad to serve, curious about how to do it better, but annoyed by extreme demands without a viable answer to the question of what they are supposed to do this coming week. They are not internet surfers. They do not read chantcafe.com. They do not take off time to attend week-long training sessions. They have full-time jobs and families and much more to deal with. To came to this one-day session on a Saturday on the recommendation of their pastors.

Finally someone asked me the question that stopped me dead in my tracks. Someone raised his hand and said the following:

“I’m beginning to understand your point about Mass propers but my choir is not ready for Latin and the pastor doesn’t want that anyway.”

I said, “oh that’s not a problem. Just sing them in English for now.”

“What book should I use?”

I stood there facing an increasingly hostile audience that was looking for practical answers with accessible music, and now I faced the most obvious question ever. I stood there a few seconds that seemed like hours and went through a list of resources in my mind.

There are probably eight editions of English propers available, most of them becoming available within the last 18 months. Of the two in print, one uses the old calendar and King James English and the other sets only seasonal antiphons. The rest are online. One requires musical expertise. One is missing the offertory chants. Most are set to the old calendar so that requires some fancy manipulation to make them work. Two require competent choral singers. One set is designed for seminaries and not parishes. Only one has pointed Psalms following the antiphon so they are mostly too short to fill the time of the ritual action.

And what was I going to do, stand there and rattle off a bunch of domain names and ask people to use calendar conversions charts, recruit new singers, and learn Psalm pointing techniques?

It was at that point that it struck me. I’m standing here up without a good answer to the most basic question. I had no in-print structural model that I could give these people for the parts of the Mass to be sung by the schola. I never felt that before, standing before an audience, just completely stripped bare and vulnerable, unable to provide a compelling answer to the most basic of all questions.

The session eventually came to an end, and mercifully so. A few people came up to me after to either reassure me or further make the point that what I’m proposing is beyond hopeless.

I had the rest of the conference to reflect on the difference between Haas’s session and my last session. He put people at ease and made them confident, understanding their concerns intimately and dealing with them with competence and finesse. He has worked his whole life to minister to these people and make it possible for them to make a contribution. I had not yet even begun to understand them. And what did I give them in the end? I probably rattled these same people and provided no answers that they could wrap their brains around.

The conference ended and we all said goodbye, but I left deeply haunted by what I had been through. Here I am dedicating myself to the task of doing more than just providing an ideal and a book of Latin chants that they might consider singing someday. As I compared Haas’s expertise in dealing with this area with my own naivete, I was stunned at the huge gap that still exists to give life to the chant in Catholic worship again.

Here it is all these decades later and where do we stand? The majority of parishes are stuck in a rut of endless repetition of music that has no fundamental connection to the ritual except in the most tangential sense. Those who understand the problem have worked extremely hard to draw attention to the Gregorian ideal and show it this music is integral to the ritual. But the distance between the current practice and the ideal is incredibly vast and the differences touch on every conceivable aspects of music itself: rhythm, notation, style, language, purpose, orientation.

Reflecting on this in the days following, the Simple English Propers project was born. So far as I’m concerned, the Responsorial Psalms are taken care of with Oost-Zinner’s editions and the others at chabanelpsalms.org. The missing pieces are clear: entrance, offertory, and communion chants with pointed Psalms in English. I approached Adam, with whom I had shared this story, and the project started falling in place. His training had prepared him for this, and his software skills at setting the chant also made the project possible.

We talked about the need to provide both variety (no repeating Psalm tones every week) and also predictability (so that the music did not devour rehearsal time). The answer was to preserve the Gregorian modes from the originals in the Graduale Romanum while maintaining a formula within the modes. We had many email exchanges about language issues. He and others educated me about the limitations of the traditional office tones and Gloria Patri tones for use in English and hence the need for a different tone structure.

Once the model was in place, he went to work. He laid out a formula for the introit, offertory, and communion, one for each Gregorian mode, so a total of 24 in total. He adapted a variation of Fr. Samuel Weber’s own spin on the Meinrad tones to make it possible to sing the Psalms effortlessly in English. We worked through translation issues, choosing a modernized version of the most traditional English translation for Catholics, and recruited an army of volunteers to start typing in the texts.

It was only a matter of weeks before the entire structure was in place, and the posting of editions began in earnest on the first week of Advent and have continued. Many parishes use them and everyone has posted and reported phenomenal success with them. Jeffrey Ostrowski sends notes every few days about how beautiful and well crafted he finds them to be. David Haas has said that he is very impressed by them as well.

To make sure this was not a temporary matter, the Chantcafe raised $5000 in a mere ten days to underwrite the effort, thanks to many excited donors. The plan is to produce a book that will be some 350 pages and included all that is necessary for any parish schola to sing its own contribution to the Mass from beginning to end every week and for every solemnity.

This is how a 40-year gap is being filled in Catholic liturgy, through the influence of a remarkably diverse group of people: Adam Bartlett, Arlene Oost-Zinner, David Haas, Scott Turkington, Frs. Columba Kelly and Weber, William Mahrt (who educated me about the propers of the Mass), Jeffrey Ostrowski (who pioneered online resources), and so many others, especially those who gave money for the effort. It has been a remarkable journey, and we are only one third the way there.

I have very expectations and I’m quite convinced that finally, forty years after the promulgation of the ordinary form, we will have a single book that we can hand to parish musicians and say: this is what you need to sing the propers of the Mass, on the way toward fulfilling the ideals of sacred music, the wishes of the Second Vatican Council, and the pastoral needs of the people for beautiful, prayerful music.