Author: Keith Fraser

The question has been mooted about how, if the 2 forms of the Ordinary of the mass cannot be mixed, the mutual enrichment of the forms can take place (arguably this is more likely to be an enrichment of the newer form than the older given the prescriptive rubrics of the latter)? In his blog The Hermeneutic of Continuity Fr Tim Finnegan talks about an article he has written for the journal Usus Antiquior. Because of copyright restrictions on that publication it is difficult for me to quote the article at length, however a link can be found to it on Fr Tim’s blog.

Here is the abstract from the article, which I can quote:

To what extent may the prayers and ceremonial actions of the usus antiquior be used in the celebration of Mass according to the Missal of Pope Paul VI? Examples of some elements being used by Archbishop Ranjith and Pope Benedict XVI seem to contradict in practice the idea that such enrichment is forbidden. An often quoted text from Notitiae, which discouraged the use of traditional elements, is examined and found wanting, especially in the light of Summorum Pontificum, which is considered in terms of its application to the celebration of the newer form of Mass. The enhancement of the newer form of Mass by the addition of elements from the usus antiquior is distinguished from arbitrary deformation of the liturgy and from the imposition of the priest’s personal whims. Some possible future practical developments are outlined.

I’ve often thought that in a parallel universe that if ever I were to be ordained to some arch-episcopal seat (rest assured that’s NEVER going to happen!) that the music would have to be suitably dramatic. The first I had heard of Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir was when James O’Donnell recorded it with Westminster Cathedral Choir, which surprised me a little bit because it demonstrated a little musical personality from O’Donnell, a man hardly noted amongst those who know him for exuberance.

The interesting thing about Martin is that you won’t find a great deal of biography for him out there and his list of compositions, while adequate, is hardly voluminous. The mass was largely written in 1922 and then amended in 1926. I think I recall reading somewhere that he re-wrote a large section of the Agnus Dei and included parts of the Credo that had been omitted because he personally disagreed with the theology (though this being the interweb, if there are any Martin scholars reading this with a greater knowledge and appreciation of his music than I have and who would wish to correct me, please do so).

For me, being a bass, the spine-tingling moment comes in the Gloria about 2 mins 30 secs in with the pedal note under “Domine Deus”. I’ll leave you with the Kyrie and Gloria.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a link to Choral Evensong at Bath Abbey on Radio 3 in which the choir sung Arvo Pärt’s The Beatitudes.

I’ve only ever sung this once when I was a Lay Clerk in an Anglican church, and while it is a simple piece rythmically, it’s incredibly tricky to keep the tuning. Rather than go on and on about it, here’s a decent version on YouTube:

In one of the combox comments in my last post, a comment read said “Isn’t it great to be having this conversation? Imagine a liturgy discussion in the 90s comparing polyphony styles.” Well because I’m a bit of a spotter on things liturgical on polyphonic I probably could, but then I generally take the point.

The thing that has led inexorably towards the kind of discussions that we are having today in the Cafe have been the developments of the last 20 years, namely the internet and cheap and accessible CDs. The internet has given people the opportunity to communicate their ideas and a space to discuss their viewpoints, and the access to cheap CDs has given a lot of people the opportunity to access polyphonic music.

In the late 1980’s there was a cohort of Oxford and Cambridge graduates who had been choral scholars at the various colleges of those universities. Over about a 5 year period many of them gravitated towards the professional church and cathedral choirs of London. At the time The Sixteen and the Gabrielli Consort with the Kings Singers were the main early music groups playing to niche markets and who turned out the odd recording every year or two followed by a concert tour. With the exception perhaps of Harry Christophers, they weren’t really doing anything different. Then came Andrew Carwood, Mike McCarthy, Ed Wickham and David Skinner.

Each of them formed an ensemble group with Andrew Carwood and David Skinner’s The Cardinall’s Musick and Ed Wickhanm’s The Clerks being the longest lasting and most successful. In the early and mid 90’s these groups were recording for labels like Hyperion and Deutsche Grammephone and they concentrated on the output of recordings. For the first time there were whole swathes of repertiore easily available. Of course, the Cathedral choirs would regularly put out recordings, but they typically were either pot-boiler collections of motets, hymns, and the odd mass here and there, but these groups started to produce something different – CDs containing the chant propers, mass ordinaries, and motets that would give the listener a start-to-finish experience of what a mass would have sounded like in context.

With the Cardinall’s Musick there came a shift in direction. Initially an all male ensemble, they were signed to Hyperion as a “big ticket group”. Hyperion had always specialised in classical recording, but this was a bit of a risk for the label as early music was thought to be a small but expanding market place. Hyperion commissioned the Cardinall’s Musick to re-edit and record the entire series of Ludford’s masses. It was a commercial success, and the group went on to record the entire works of Cornysh, Fayrfax, and Byrd. As another change in direction in recent years the group (along with The Clerks) have started to explore contemporary pieces.

When you read the credit lists of the singers in thse groups you start to see the same names re-appearing: Becky Outram, Carys Lane, Tessa Bonner, David Gould, Robin Blaze, Julian Stocker, Matthew Vine, Robert McDonald, Rob Evans amongst others. All expert early musicians and regular singers in some of the best church choirs in the country they bring both expertise and sympathy to their work. They all started out at roughly the same time in roughly the same places.

The prominence of polyphony and chant in the mindset of many people began long before Liturgicam Authenticam, and long before the revisions to the liturgy were in train, but its time has come and the seeds were sown by the work of thye groups mentioned above. So in short, yes we were having these discussions in the 90’s and they are bearing fruit now.

For a while now I’ve been fascinated by the style of chant known as “organum”. For those of you not familiar with the form, it takes the melodic line of chant, and by adding one or two, or more voices contextualises the chant with basic underpinning harmony. In Medieval times this practice began to take hold and the cantus firmus would be sung by a tenor with (usually) a bass/bourdon singing a sort of continuo in parallel fourths and perfect fifths underneath the chant.

It wasn’t ever really intended as “polyphony” as such, but was used in the tropes and chants of the masses of the greater feasts as a way of enhancing and highlighting the importance of the liturgy. Early treatise exist on the method and practice of Organum, the earliest I can find reference to being the Musica enchiriadis, believed to have been written around 895AD and covering topics such as njotation, modes, and monophonic plainchant. That the treatise was wrongly ascribed to Hucald, and then later Odo of Cluny suggests that the use of Organum had at least the tacit approval of the church authorities at the time.

Over the years the styles of Organum developed from simple idiaphonia to melismic writing from Notre Dame and Limoges in the 12th Century that would be almost indistinguishable from early polyphony.

As a style it is being used still in liturgical settings, with ensemble Exsurge Domine singing it regularly at the traditional masses in the Basilica Magistrale di S. Croce a Cagliari. I, for one, find it absorbing.

Kyrie IV Cunctipotens

Salve Regina

Stabat Mater

One of the blogs I tend to check in with quite often is written by Father Dwight Longnecker. His is an unusual story in that he was an American Episcopalian who, after studying in England and marrying his English wife, was ordained in the Church of England and served a number of years as a vicar of a rural parish before converting to Catholicism. He tried for a few years to be ordained to an English diocese but was rejected a couple of times, arguably for being “too orthodox”. He eventually returned home to the US with his family and was accepted for ordination over there. He’s now a Catholic priest, and is one of the small number of married former Anglicans in the Roman Rite. He has a sensible perspective that isn’t tainted by the bitterness or seperative mentality I find with many traditionalists.

He wrote a series of posts on music, and specifically hymns and the failings in many parishes when it comes to hymn selection. He makes a lucid point that with bad catechesis and poor sermonising that hymns are quite often the only exposure some catholics get to apologetics, and many hymns fail in that regard. I would really recommend reading the posts in detail, but I want to pull out some of his points.

His criticisms of modern hymns are that quite often they fail to be hymns. Hymns are songs of praise and worship and recognise the relationship we have with God, namely creator and created. All to often in modern hymnody that relationship is turned over and God, and Our Lord are nothing more than our “mates”. Your mates take you down to the pub for a drink, are your equal, give you things, and tell you you’re wonderful. And in these hymns, so it is with God. I’ll quote him directly because he makes the point well enough that I wouldn’t want to change his wording:

A second category of non-hymns are the ‘comfort hymns’. Again, these are hymns that do not reference God at all except as a kind of comfort blanket. Usually very sentimental and subjective, they often have syrupy tunes and are all about how “I walked on the beach one day and felt alone, and when I only saw one set of footprints I knew that was when he carried me.” You can spot these hymns because they are all about me and us and how sweet it is to be loved by Jesus. They are Coca Cola hymns–sweet and fizzy but likely to rot your teeth/soul. There is nothing wrong, of course, with devotional hymns that turn our attention to God in time of need and praise him for his loving mercy. Psalm 23 and all its different versions do just that. However, if the focus is not on God, but on me, and this is the only sort of hymn that is ever chosen it becomes ridiculous.

A few weeks ago in my own parish we had one such “hymn”. You might recognise it, but it’s worth looking at in some detail to explore it in all of its “glory”.

O Lord All The World

Words and Music: Patrick Appleford.

O Lord all the world belongs to you

And you are always making all things new.

What is wrong you forgive and the new life you give

Is what’s turning the world upside down.

The world’s only loving to its friends

But you have brought us love that never ends.

Loving enemies too and this loving with you

Is what’s turning the world upside down.

This world lives divided and apart.

You draw us all together and we

start

In your body to see that in

fellowship we

Can be turning the world upside down.

O Lord all the world belongs to you

And you are always making all things new.

Send your Spirit on all in your Church whom you call

To be turning the world upside down.

Let’s just take the first verse:

O Lord all the world belongs to you

Well I suppose I can’t argue with that, but it’s a painfully obvious statement. Neither could I argue with the statement that the sun comes up in the morning as it’s true, but it doesn’t really tell me anything I can’t directly observe myself. As an opening line you have to start somewhere, but it says nothing. I’m all in favour of brevity, but compare it to the opening line of any of the old hymns which make a statement about what we believe. It neither expresses anything (compared to say “faith of our fathers Holy Faith!”) or sets a tone of thanksgiving (Immaculate Mary our hearts are on fire”).

And you are always making all things new.

What exactly does this mean? It’s a highly ambiguous statement. The clostest biblical reference to this I can find is Psalm 104: “Thou shalt send forth thy spirit, and they shall be created: and thou shalt renew the face of the earth.” but it kind of just hangs there. There is no preceding reference to the Holy Spirit or the context in which the psalmist writes, so it gives the impression that God is permenently busy re-doing everything he creates, which would naturally follow from the opening statement. Is this born out by any theological reasoning? I doubt it. If God is perfect, as we believe, and his creation is perfect (but which man has corrupted with sin) then why would he be set about permanently and continually re-creating what he has created? It just doesn’t make any sense.

What is wrong you forgive and the new life you give

God does forgive. The Messianic mission was ultimately one of mercy, HOWEVER, this statement would seem to suggest that mercy is something that is just handed over whether we ask for it or not. That is simply not the case and is dangerously misleading. If you have never been properly taught about the gifts of mercy and the need for redemption then the first natural presumption that you would make about Catholic teaching on mercy and forgiveness is that it is automatic. Imagine this is the last hymn you hear before leaving the church knowing no better. Imagine considering going to confession before you leave but having heard this hymn decide it’s not worth it because God’s forgiveness is automatic and you leave the church and get wiped out by a bus. It might be a far-fetched analogy, but what service is this hymn doing to Catholics when it confuses the faithful?

Is what’s turning the world upside down.

Turning the world upside down? Say what? Is that the nature of Catholicism? to turn the worlkd upside down? Did Christ ever say “Guess what? I’ve come to turn the world upside down!”? Is this the ecclesiology of revolution? What this suggests is a mentality of turmoil and disorder. That isn’t God’s way. If it weren’t for its triteness and banality this statement would trouble me.

A better exegete and theologian than me would tear this hymn apart. It is fairly typical of any number of hymns being sung as part of the 4-hymn sandwich in church each Sunday. The usual arguments in favour are that they are “nice” or “pastoral” or “people like them”. What I generally tend to find is that they fit the mindset of parishes where the clergy are lukewarm about the supernatural aspects of the faith in their own beliefs and where the emphasis is on a revisionist theology or a social justice ecclesiology of activism rather than devotion.