Author: Adam Bartlett

Firstly, I am happy to confirm Jeffrey’s report that the Simple English Propers collection has been finally submitted for publication, and I couldn’t be more thrilled. This project has been on my desk for nearly nine months, so I suppose that the “birth” analogy is appropriate here. I feel like I have birthed a child… well, not literally, but my exhaustion and joy at the end of this process have to be at least a ‘sacramental’ representation of this. We have all waited with expectant joy, and now we can rejoice in the arrival of the completed project. Thanks be to God.

Secondly, I would like to apologize for my radio silence on the Chant Café, and elsewhere online. The completion of SEP has only been a part of my load in recent months. I’ve also been directing and guiding a young parish sacred music program, in addition to crystallizing plans for what I have called the ‘Sacred Music Project’, which is soon to be transformed and given new purpose.

For me, the Simple English Propers project is a beginning, not an end. I have learned so much in the process, and have had the opportunity, like many other followers of this blog, to already have used these chants settings in liturgy for five months or more. In my experience of working on the ground level of American Catholic liturgical culture I have begun to see the great things that lie ahead. The SEP project, for me, has laid a foundation on which to build. It will be wonderful to see this come to completion, but it really is not an ending point. It is a beginning point. What lies ahead in the distance is a musical treasure of inestimable value, and, I think, a vast expanse for further development in our own day. The difference here is that we’re not talking about more additions to the realm of ‘alius cantus aptus’, but contributions in the form of musical settings of the liturgical texts themselves.

Just today I read a very lengthy review of a forthcoming hymnal from a recently prominent Catholic publisher. The contents of this book are so contrary to the nature and spirit of the liturgy as I see and understand it that it is nearly appalling. What this book communicates is a clinging to an ethos that is no longer viable, not a looking to the future or a response to the needs of today. What lies ahead for us is a liturgical renewal that is founded solidly on the liturgical texts and rites themselves. The abandonment and neglect of these in the past decades has left a vast expanse for our generation to explore and understand. The propers have been ignored to such an extent that there is virtually a blank slate in front of us for further authentic development. The Gregorian ideal is still always there and needs to be utilized more and more, but still there is an incredible amount of room for filling the gap between the chants in the liturgical books and the common practice of the past 50 years.

It is an exciting time to be a church musician I think. The only place to go is up, and the future is looking very bright. I’m excited!

Please, again, accept my apologies for being largely absent in the Chant Café conversation. I will be back more now. I have accumulated quite the blogging to-do list, and hope to tackle this in the coming weeks. So please enjoy a round of virtual espressos on me and I’ll look forward to catching you all soon.

Thanks to Aristotle Esguerra the Kyriale Simplex has now been posted online.

Kyriale Simplex

Please consider for a moment the way that sacred music publishing has changed since the days of yore:

This morning at 9:00 I posted on the value of the Kyriale Simplex, to which Aristotle Esguerra responded with a PDF file of the collection he created using free software a few hours later. Within 3 minutes of receiving Aristotle’s file I had in my hands two beautiful editions of this Kyriale, ready to sing:

And now, less than an hour later I’m able to share with you all my experience of the process.

How does this compare with your other experiences of finding new Mass settings?

Over the past two and a half years I have had the opportunity to direct an ordinary suburban parish music program out of the land of Gather Comprehensive into the world of the sacred. This project has been multi-faceted and the work is far from over.

It began with weeding out problematic hymnody, then the slow and gradual introduction of propers, in simple English settings. The choirs also began to explore some of the simpler Latin choral repertoire from the polyphonic tradition, and so forth.

While all of this was happening we simultaneously began initiating an more important step: the singing of the Order of Mass by priest and congregation and the singing of unaccompanied chant settings of the Ordinary of the Mass by the congregation. I believe that it is the focus on these that has transformed the liturgical life of our parish. It has been the a cappella singing of the ordinary texts of the liturgy by priest and people that has ordered and focused all that our choirs have done in the area of propers, choral motets, and so on.

The question has lingered in my mind through these 2 1/2 years: “What is a reasonable introductory repertoire of Gregorian Ordinaries for a parish that is in a ground-zero situation?”

I have spent countless hours with the Kyriale Romanum, envisioning a path forward for a more complete and varied singing of chanted ordinaries in my parish. The starting point is clear–most hymnals contain it–it is Kyrie XVI, Gloria XV or VIII, Sanctus and Angus XVIII. Many parishes have undertaken to learn these and here their work with Gregorian ordinaries has stopped. It is either this “Iubilate Deo” ordinary, or it is Mass of Creation or some other organ and choir based English setting, or worse.

But where should we go next? This simple composite ordinary is very accessible and it is widely sung for good reason–they are among the simplest and most intuitive ordinaries in the Gregorian repertoire. As one begins to work through the rest of the Kyriale Romanum it becomes quickly evident that the next step is a huge one. It is so great, in fact, that it seems that most parishes have not been able to take it.

Yesterday I took up again the task of charting a course beyond this basic composite ordinary, and the few other supplemental Kyrie and Agnus settings that my parish now sings very well. It remained clear that a composite approach is still what is needed, so I began organizing the simplest chants that are found in the Kyriale Romanum in what seemed to be logical compliments. There is something about this that makes me very uneasy. There is enough hacking, cutting and pasting that already occurs in our very unstable liturgical environment, the least I can do is try to preserve the integrity of the liturgy as given in the liturgical books. This is like Fr. Z’s “say the black, do the red” for the church musician: “just sing it, don’t change it!” But the problem remains that the 18 ordinaries of the Kyriale are quite varied, and almost every Mass setting contained in it has that one Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus or Agnus that is the deal breaker–it’s just too much to bite off right now. So the composite approach seems to be the best path forward.

So as I was crafting these custom “composite ordinaries” I was suddenly prompted to pull that most curious post-conciliar innovation off of my shelf: the Graduale Simplex. I remembered the “Kyriale Simplex” that it contained, that I have flipped through curiously a number of times before, only to put it back on the shelf and forget about it.

What I realized while taking a closer look at the Kyriale Simplex was that I had virtually recreated, in my work of custom-crafting simple composite ordinaries from the Kyriale Romanum, Masses II and V of the Kyriale Simplex! (Mass I is the same as we will find in the new Missal, the “Iubilate Deo” ordinary.)

I began to explore this simple Kyriale in more depth and realized that the work that I had been doing in trying to find the best introductory Latin ordinaries for my parish had already been done, and admirably at that, and, best of all, this was presented in a way that had the precedent of an official liturgical book!

As I looked more closely at the chants contained in the Kyriale Simplex I discovered that of the 30 chants contained in its 5 composite ordinaries, 18 of them had come from the Kyriale Romanum. The other 12, I presume, come from other sources, but undeniably are from the authentic ecclesiastical chant tradition (loosely speaking–e.g. Sanctus X was composed by Dom Pothier, I believe). It contains a Gloria from the Mozarabic chant tradition, and the Gloria “more Ambrosiano” that is contained in the Kyriale Romanum ad libitum section, along with a complimentary Sanctus and Credo from the Ambrosian tradition. The remaining chants, though not contained in the Kyriale Romanum, I presume are from the Gregorian canon, and are remarkably beautiful and easy to sing. After considering each one I was able to resonate deeply with the decision that was made to make these settings available in a book that was meant for use “in minor churches”.

So what I discovered here, I would like to submit, is a hidden treasure that might be the key to getting average parishes who desire to sing more Gregorian ordinaries out of the Iubilate Deo rut. I can see why this approach might seem ideologically problematic to some, especially to those who want to do the sacred music equivalent of “say the black, do the red”, but I would like to propose that we need a few intermediary steps to realistically get to this point, and I think that the Kyriale Simplex might have paved that path. Perhaps it just took us about 50 years to realize it.

Monsignor Andrew Wadsworth will be giving a “Hillenbrand Distinguished Lecture” at the Liturgical Institute on March 31st at 7:30PM which is free for all to attend. If you are in the Chicago area tomorrow evening it would be a wonderful event to attend.

From the LI website:

Join us for a stimulating lecture and discussion with Monsignor Andrew Wadsworth, Executive Director of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy. Free and open to the public. Please call 847.837.4542 for further details and to reserve a place.

Yesterday I had the great joy of receiving in my mailbox two unexpected delights: The Winter 2010 issue of Sacred Music and also a copy of the brand new Graduale Novum.

Online orders can be made here [site entirely in German].

I plan to give a more thorough review on this volume in the coming weeks, but for now all I can say is that the book, for me, is a dream come true. Here are a few “unboxing” photos, some samples of the content, and an excerpt from the preface to the edition.

The outside cover (the book production is strikingly similar to the 2009 Antiphonale Romanum):

The ribbons:

And a look inside:

Here’s the ‘Ad te levavi’ from page one (the graphic on the front cover is of this incipit–notice the melodic differences from the 1908 edition):

A page from the Kyriale, which appears to be identical to the previous editions:

And, lastly, a look at the Order of Mass, contained in the back of the book, which conforms identically to the usage in the 2002 Missale Romanum:

Again, a more thorough review of this volume will be forthcoming. For now, I will close with a few very informative paragraphs from the beginning of the five page preface contained in the new Graduale Novum:

PREFACE TO THE GRADUALE NOVUM

In its Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, art. 117, the Second Vatican Council requested that a more critical edition (editio magis critica) be produced of the books of Gregorian chant, which had been published in the early 20th century on the basis of the reform of Pius X.

Convinced of the urgency of this request, a few members of the International Society for the Study of Gregorian Chant (AISCGre), founded in 1975, have been meeting since January of 1977 to begin work on restoring the chants of the Graduale Romanum (1908). They have been re-examining the ancient manuscripts that were consulted for the Editio Vaticana, in order to exploit the progress that scientific research has made since the publication of that edition. The aim of this group was to achieve a more accurate rendition of the ancient chants; the basis for their restitution work were the adiastematic manuscripts from the 10th century, which are the oldest witnesses of the melodies and are written without notation lines, as well as the most important diastematic manuscripts from the 11th century which do render the exact intervals of the melodies. With regard to the adiastematic manuscripts, the need for an editio magis critica already became apparent with the publication of the Graduel Neumé of Dom Eugéne Cardine (Solesmes 1966) and the Graduale Triplex (Solesmes 1979). The wide dissemination of these books had done more to strengthen the awareness of the importance of a revised edition than the scientific publications had been able to do.

After about two decades of common work, the scholarly results of this group of specialists, whose work is still in progress today, have been published, beginning in 1996 twice yearly as “Suggestions for the Restitution of Melodies of the Graduale Romanum” (“vorschläge zur Restitution von Melodien des Graduale Romanum”) in the journal “Beit age zur Gregorianik” (BzG) by the ConBrio Publishing House (Regensburg). For each chant, not only were the suggested restitutions published for the first time, but also a detailed critical apparatus, which cited the pertinent manuscripts in support of each suggested change.

The appearance of the melodies will strike the casual reader as unfamiliar, not to say strange in the present edition in the case of a few chants. For example, alongside the familiar si-flat there is also a mi-flat, fa-sharp and do-sharp, tonalities that were “forbidden” in Medieval times by the theoreticians, but which were nevertheless sung in not a few cases, as is shown above all by the transpositions of Gregorian melodies that appear in many diastematic manuscripts. This fact has been known for over a century; but it has been comprehensively and meticulously confirmed above all through the researches of the last decades. Since the scribes who produced the adiastematic manuscripts did not render exact melodic intervals anyway, there had been no need for them to resort to melodic transposition in order to avoid “forbidden” tones.

[…]

May 34 years of collaborative effort bear its fruits through this edition and may it prove useful to the users of this book in the realms of scientific research and teaching, but above all in fostering a vibrant celebration of the Church’s liturgy.

UPDATE: This volume can also be purchased at a cheaper price here.