Posted on by Arlene Oost-Zinner

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time


Here is my Responsorial Psalm setting for the sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, year A. It’s a pretty simple and straight forward Mode V.

It is really important that the congregation be able to sing along right away – the text here just kind of traces up and down the scale with a mind to the rhythm of the words.

It can’t always be done, and shouldn’t be done for its own sake, but there is usually a place or two or three in English were you can do a playful or declamatory rhythm of three. This helps prevent the music from becoming too tied to this world – keeps the text hovering somewhere above us, somewhere that beckons our upward attention.

Can you find a rhythm of three here? If you are not Solesmes trained, all I mean is that there is a system for counting the chant by twos and threes. The method and the counting system are just a way of organizing the music so it continues to move forward in a pleasing way. It’s quite an effective system, but certainly not the end all of chant scholarship. I’ll talk more about that another time and how that impacts what I do from week to week.

I settled upon Mode V because I looked ahead at the verses. They seemed to fit quite well with the prescribed final cadences. There is one pesky spot – look at the mediant cadence in verse two. “Diligently kept” was what I had to deal with. Keeping in mind that the accent according to the mode V mediant cadence is on the penultimate note, I had a few choices. I could look at the word accent and line it up: diligently kept. Not good. It doesn’t sound much like English when you try to sing it. I could have lined up the musical accent with the one of the words that come before “diligently,” but that would have been ridiculous – too many syllables on the last note. So I went with the musical accent over the unsuspecting “ly.” Try it out. I think it works.

Why don’t I just make it easy on myself and using a set of Psalm tones that are specially tailored for English? The Meinrad tones, for example. I mentioned these a couple of weeks ago. For now I don’t because I can usually find something that works. It might take me a little longer, and I might have to abandon something and start anew, but I don’t mind. I enjoy the challenge.

Mostly I appreciate the sound and sense of the Gregorian tones, be they the Gloria Patri tones or the Office tones. I appreciate their tie to history. And during a Mass, especially if we are doing Gregorian Propers (save the Responsorial Psalm), using these connects us audibly to what is going on musically otherwise. They seem to me to be the best fit.

2 Replies to “Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time”

  1. I received some encouraging correspondence regarding this post, including the following. I thought this was an interesting discussion and worth sharing:

    Paul Ford, who created the English version of the simple gradual that is available from Liturgical Press (By Flowing Waters), discusses this same issue in the introductory notes to the book. He cites a ruling by the Sacred Congregation for Rites: “On July 8 and December 12, 1912, the Sacred Congregation for Rites gave permission, in the case of verses which terminate on monosyllables, for abrupt mediation in psalms tones with mediants of one accent…” (page xxxviii). This would allow you to, in the case of next Sunday’s psalm, to sing all of the first phrase, up to the word diligently, on the reciting tone and move up to the first note of the mediant cadence on “kept” – leaving out the last note of the mediant cadence and then beginning the next phrase of text on the reciting tone, etc.

    My response was:

    Thank you for your note. Yes, that is an option. I try wherever possible not to use it because I think English is infinitely more flexible than official word accents, according to dictionaries, would have us believe. In this case, for example, one is going to slow down a bit at the cadence any way. I can't imagine anyone punching the "ly" when singing it, and in listening to the last two words, diligently kept, there is a fall in the voice on kept anyway.

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