Author: Keith Fraser

One of the problems that many parishes with a good music programme faces today is how to sing the Divine Office, especially Vespers. For many years Solemnes has been threatening to bring out a revised Vesperale for common parish use that addresses the problems music directors face: namely how to sing the Office effectively. Some choral parishes, like the Brompton Oratory have maintained the pre-concilliar form of Vespers partly out of continuity, but also in the absence of any meaningful alternative while others such as Westminster Cathedral have addressed the problem by commissioning a Vesperale for their own use.

About 18 months ago I arranged a choir to sing choral Vespers, and it was a task of Herculean proprotion. Firstly comes the problem of structure. The main point of refernce is the Liber Usualis which has all of the chant for a Sunday Vespers (P250 if you care to reference) with the 5 psalms and antiphons that would have been sung in Ordinary Time (commemrative or votive offices can be comiled from the antiphons and psalm tones contained throughout the LU). The new rite of Vespers only has 3 psalms, one of which is a canticle (of the Lamb) which is not used in the old rite. There is the additional problem of the second psalm rotating on a 4-weekly cycle in a way that the old rite didn’t.

The Liber does have each of the psalms in common use set to all 8 plainsong modes, however when taking the antiphons in the modern calendar and adding them to the psalms from the Liber you may find that you are singing an entire vespers to a particular mode, or that in going onto the next psalm a jarring shift in mode is necessary in order to use the correct antiphon with the psalm. Then there is the next problem of finding the appropriate short responsory, or a short responsory at all.

One of the other major problems is the Magnificat. In parishes with limited resources (both in terms of numbers and/or ability of the singers, or the stock of the music library) an antiphon in a less common mode creates the difficulty of selecting a polyphonic Magnificat to compliment it. In a choir of experienced and competent amateurs or professionals there is an abundance of settings, however some of them can be fiendishly complex or aurally difficult to comprehend without good pitch and sight-reading skills where they are written in uncommon modes (such as mode 7). If your resources are more modest then it begs the question of how do you cope? Do you omit the sung antiphon and say it in order to insert a Magnificat the choir knows or sing the antiphon with a plainsong Magnificat, or omit the sung antiphon and magnificat altogether and concentrate on a motet to sing afterwards?

Then there comes the issue of the Canticle of the Lamb. You won’t find it anywhere in the Liber. Neither will you find many of the antiphons that go with it (in fact I’m not sure any of the antiphons for it are in the Liber).

Westminster Cathedral addressed these issues a few years ago by commissioning Peter Wilton to compile a weekday and Sunday Vesperale of the existing chant and composing new chants to plug the gaps. It works incredibly well, sounds fantastic and I won’t at all admit to “borrowing” the problem antiphons and Canticle from it because I’d get into trouble. But there you go, needs must.

The need for chant to meet the requirements of a new vernacular mass are pressing and urgent given the relative pace with which the translations are coming, and the opportunity to get chant into the parishes ahead of the horrors we could be exposed to by the likes of Paul Inwood if there were to be a musical vacuum. Once we have passed that stage, I would suggest the next thing to do is to extend projects like Watershed and the Simple Propers into an Office that is workable at parish level.

The Catholic Herald has printed a statement by Archbishop Nichols (of Westminster) on the ordination of 3 former Anglican bishops to the Catholic priesthood and the creation of the Ordinariate. Amongst traditonal bloggers there has been a buzz of excitement about the anticipated influx of more traditional “Anglo-Catholics” into the church. I am not quite so sure I share their optimism just yet.

When I lived in west London I sang at Our Lady of Victories and at the Dominican Abbey in Hampstead. A few hundred yards up the road is a Victorian Pugin masterpiece of a church which was in the Anglo-Catholic movement. I got to know a couple of people there and every so often on a Sunday evening would pop my head in for the chance to sing a bit of chant. Having seen an Anglo-Catholic parish in action I have my doubts about the extent to which there will either be mass conversion or easy integration, and here is why.

The church had 2 clergy, one retired and one a non-stipediary (for those unfamiliar with this concept, the CofE has a number of NS clergy who, like our Permanent Deacons, have secular professions and exercise their ministry on a part-time basis). The retired vicar would say a Tridentine Rite mass according to the 1962MR in a side chapel, often only attended by one or two people in the morning. The other vicar would say the main “mass” in the evening. This would be according to the Catholic Novus Ordo, but with a few additions, such as a rota of servers dressing up in Dalmatics and acting as sub-deacons which would not be permissable according to the GIRM. The NS vicar was, during the week, a psycho-therapist who charged a few hundred pounds an hour for his services, and this allowed him to leave London on a Thursday night to catch a Eurostar to his weekend chataux in France, returning late Sunday afternoon to say “mass” to a congregation of about 20-30. I have to wonder how the ordinariate would contend with non-stipendiary preists and whether this practice would be allowed to continue, and certainly whether those priests would be allowed to fit their ministry around their work and private life to this extent? I also wonder whether this particular non-stipendiary would be tempted to remain in the CofE to be able to afford that lifestyle? I can only speculate, but it would be an act of enormous generosity to give it up.

Then you have to look at the congregation. A significant proprortion were in fact baptised and confirmed Roman Catholics who had defected to a high AC parish of the CofE for what I would term “lifestyle” reasons, mostly because of their sexuality or marital status making full communion in the RC church incompatible. They would go through the most incredible intellectual gymnastics to explain how, while they thought that the clergy of the mainstream CofE did not have valid orders that the AC wing of the CofE somhow did, that the mass was “real” and that they weren’t just kidding themselves that they were wasting an hour of their lives each week in a pantomime where people played clerical dress-up and make-believe. Would they, if the entire parish went over, normalise their positions with the Catholic Church, and would the parish, if in the Ordinariate, uphold Church teaching and require their normalisation before allowing them to receive communion? I can see difficulties in this regard because if the clergy truely believed in Catholic moral teaching then they would decline to give communion to congregants that they knew were Catholic but who could not receive communion in a Catholic parish and chose to attend their parish as a sort of “compromise”. One member of the parish was ordained by the Old Catholic Church of Utrecht but for reasons I didn’t fully understand was not incardinated to that church. He was allowed to say a private mass in the church if he wanted to, but was not allowed to exercise any form of public ministry. Rather than say mass he chose instead to attend the parish and serve their masses dressed as a sub-deacon. I understand that there exists the argument that as parishes in the CofE they cannot refuse to give communion to anyone who presents themselves, but I wonder how they would deal with that if the issue were put to the vote in the Parochial Church Council and it elected to convert? Also, those defectors from the Catholic Church would have a say in the matter of conversion if it went to the vote, which leads me to the next issue…

The PCC. The Parochial Church Council is a powerful beast in the CofE. It appoints the 2 Churchwardens that take custody of the church building and parish assets when there is no incumbent vicar. The PCC has the power of veto on clerical appointments making, in some parishes, the Bishops nomination almost like a terna is to the Pope, a purely advisory position. The PCC can set the tenure of the clergy (some clergy are appointed by the PCC for the entrity of their ministry, known as a “freehold” of the parish, others for a fixed term after which they must re-apply). The PCC governs just about everything in parish life making the relationship between vicar and congregation more of an employer/service provider one rather than pastor/flock. Would the members of the PCC who exercise such influence over the parish be prepapred to cede it to the priest in the new Ordinariate?

Then you have the semblent remainder of the parish. Many see themselves purely and simply as Anglican protestants. They are able to put up with high churchmanship and faux “popery” as an alternative to the Evangelicals, but they crave the mainstream CofE at heart. They would no more go over to that “Pope of Rome” than to drink coffee instead of tea at 4pm. They cling to the CofE structures as their totum and the form of worship is of lesser importance. Would they swim the Tiber?

In reality, I expect that the Anglo-Catholic wing of the CofE will face many difficulties, and I suspect that this particular London parish was perhaps a little extreme in its “diversity”, but possibly not so far removed from the realities of many other AC parishes. The fact is many of their congregation wanted to be catholic without actually being Catholic, and I expect many of them will remain put.

It probably wouldn’t come as much of a surprise if I were to tell you that I didn’t learn to pray the rosary at church, it was my mother who taught it to me. She was quite devoted to the rosary and prayed it daily. In one of those moments of clarity she spoke to her friends in our home parish and she started up a “Rosary Circle” which would meet in someone’s house every Monday night where we would pray the rosary and then have tea and as much cake as you could eat. It wasn’t an “official” “ministry” and no-one assumed the style and title of co-ordinator, minister, or director. It was a group of families who would simply meet and pray.

That group was small, it lasted a good few years until my mother’s health failed, and it probably never made much of a direct impact at parish level, but in the souls of those who met and prayed I think it will have left some impression or other.

The Holy Father speaks of the need for popular piety and prayer amongst the faithful. There are probably little prayer groups that meet in parishes all over the world. Some of them may meet in your homes, you may meet in the homes of your friends. The thought then occurred to me: if we want to reclaim our Catholic heritage, if we want to re-introduce the singing of psalsm and chant and our parish “directors” of this and that are wedded to their own ideas and agendas that do not include the form of piety that matters to us, then one way to circumvent this is with small prayer groups. Let’s call it the Tea Party of Chant.

Now if we were to try and set up a Monday evening schola we probably wouldn’t get very far, but two forms of common prayer amongst the faithful are ther rosary and the Chaplet of Divine Mercy. Why not , if you are able to do so, introduce some simple plainsong Marian hymns each week in your prayer groups? Embed the notion of singing the Ave Maris Stella, or the Salve Regina, and the idea will likely take hold.

If any of you have access to EWTN at home and have heard the Chaplet of Divine Mercy in song then there is a version, in English, that is chanted quite wonderfully. It’s even on their website for download in audio format. Why not start a weekly chaplet? Then chant it. My PP is open to the idea, yours may be also.

On this feast of the baptism of the Lord I pray for those of you, who like me, are parents trying to pass on to their children the wonderous traditions of our church.

The EWTN recording of the Chaplet can be downloaded here:

The essence of our faith, as recited every Sunday is the Nicene Creed which takes its name from the first Ecumenical Council of the Church in Nicea in 325. It has, for nearly 1800 years, been the foundation from which the principles of the faith have been taught. For almost as long it has been codified in chant that the people of God may sing it in unity of thought, unity of profession, and unity of voice.

It hasn’t been without its revisions and controvosies including the filioque clause, added to affirm the precedence of the persons of the Trinity that ignited a heated debate with the Orthodox Church and remains a point of contention today. Regular readers of Fr Z’s blog will understand the “lame duck” argument against the 1970 translation and the way in which even subtle changes in text have led to significant changes in understanding. Consubstantialem patri became “of one being with the Father” rather than “consubstantial” which it becomes with the new translation. We “believe in” rather than “confess” one baptism, which again, thankfully will change. The detractors of the new translations claim that words like “consubstantial” are difficult concepts to understand and linguistically tricky because we just don’t speak that way in normal conversation. There are many points to be made in reply, but Fr Z answers it succinctly in the argument “if it’s structurally tricky in English then why not sing/say it in the fluid Latin?” A good point well made.

In order to aid the transition later in the year I’d be game for singing the creed in one of the 6 chant modes. Some parishes do this, and many of the English cathedrals will most Sundays, using either Credo 3 in ordinary time and Credo 1 (which I much prefer) in the penitential seasons. Personally, I think if we are in a time of counter-revolutionary revolution why not push the boat out with some of the other modes? Credo 4 is a particular favourite of mine (confusingly Credo 1 is in mode 4, Credo 4 in mode 1) as it evokes a monastic feel. I’d happily see that become the norm for the Lenten season perhaps. Maybe if your parish is too wedded to the 4 hymn sandwich to introduce plainsong propers, the plainsong creed is another way to go.

One of the ways the liturgical tinkerers have really undermined the centrality of the mass has been through the creed. I remember 20 years ago as a teenager going along to a Youth Rally that ended in a “mass”. I was in “Rhets” (Rheteoric, the name given the the lower 6th form year in my school) and a friend of mine was involved in the organisation of the day. Part of it included a kind of assembly where some “grown ups” (read “yoof ministry” professionals a good 20 or so years older than us and with no real idea of what messages would really have resonated with us) would talk to us about their “testimonies”. From what I remembered most of them involved stories of how excited they were at our age because Vatican 2 was going on at the time and how the mass was going to change from crusty old Latin into funky English, and the mass was going to be “fun” and the challenges they faced standing up to “the man” in the name of justice and peace. We listened politiely while scoping out the girls we fancied planning our advances for the disco later that evening, as you do when you’re 17. Then came mass. It was awful. My friend David, who had spent months organising this event with others in the Deanery, was effectively told that the mass was out of bounds to him and that the “yoof ministry” of 40-something grown ups would organise this bit of the day. We had “liturgical dance”. We had standing round in a circle holding hands during the consecration. We had bidding prayers for Mother Earth. We had a nun asking a non-Catholic if she wanted to be a Eucharistic Minister (because “we are all members of God’s family”). We had Fr Funky in his sandals and polyester ethnic shawl/stole strumming a guitar leading “praise songs”. We had all of that, but we kind of expected it. We resigned ourselves to the mass being a playground for the infantile “grown ups” who thought they were “reaching out”, but instead did nothing other than pander to their own whims while making us think they were loosers (in the nicest possible way). We knew that was the quid pro quo, so it didn’t shock us. What did, what got us talking afterwards (other than whether anyone knew if so-and-so’s sister had a boyfriend) was the fact that the Creed, the bit everyone would usually say together had been replaced with some nonesense. I don’t remember it in any detail, except that there was absolutely no mention of God beyond a passing reference to (and this I do remember even now, 20 years on) “a collective consciousness that energises the whole of creation”. Whatever that means. We professed beliefs in justice, peace, caring for the world and each other, denying war and famine were true paths, but we never actually stated a fim belief in anything other than a “collective consciousness”. God simply didn’t get a look-in.

What does it say about the innate understanding of the centrality of the Creed when Fr Funky and Sr Bendy and a few “yoof workers” can liturgically dance to the “table of more than plenty” and we, as teenagers, were hardly surprised and only mildly offended; but play with the Creed? That was a whole new dimension and it bothered us. We would have struggled to articulate why, but the absence of the Nicene Creed seemed to disjoint the whole experience.

As a counter to the folly of my older generation your correspondent leaves you with Credo 4. Let’s hope my children’s generation are spared the toe-curling embarassment of infantile “grown-ups” offering up what I had to endure. Now would be the time to encourage that change.

In a very accessible book explaining the theology and philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, Fr Francis Copleston makes a lucid argument that Aquinas differed in many respects from Augustine and Anslem in that he refused to allow that God’s existence is self-evident and that mankind automatically “knows” God. Copleston defines this as a more “empiricist” view in that Aquinas argues that mankind comes to know God not just through an innate predisposition, but through experience.

How then do we experience God? There are probably as many ways to answer that question as there are ways to ask it, but that point did get me thinking. The most direct experience of God we all encounter is the mass where (as Catholics) we believe He is truely present. It was interesting to read in one of Jeff’s earlier posts “It didn’t turn out that way“ where he quotes passages from the 1976 edition of Pastoral Music such as James M. Burns bemoaning the old days when Church music “was locked into a theology that stressed the transcendence of God… Today, however, with existential theology and philosophy being the intellectual ground for many of the scholars in the Church, a tendency to reduce the transcendental aspect of worship to a more ‘realistic’ concept has appeared. The stress is on the human, the real, the ‘non-God-talk’ approach.”

The net result of Mr Burn’s thinking has been the adoption of folksy “realistic” mass settings in parishes the world over. Those of us in the UK will be sadly familiar with the Hopwood Mass, Kirkwood Mass, and the other plinky-plonky, up and down the scale, unsingable faux-folk “choones” that the ordinary is sung to. Perhaps if Mr Burns and his ilk had spent a little bit of time reading some Aquinas and contemplating his writings they might have realised the dangers inherent in the path they trod.

There is an evident truth: if we wish to experience God in order to come to believe in Him and have our faith in Him strengthened then we need to transcend the earthly and come to terms with Him in His reality. We are God’s creation and in His plan I cannot conceive of us lacking the faculties to connect with God in some way or form. Equally, I can also conceive of a gulf existing between creator and created that somehow needs to be bridged. In my understanding of His plan, God created the angels who have at various points in the history of creation and salvation been the mechanism by which God communicates heavenly beauty.

It was the message of an angel that became the Word made flesh. It was the song of the angels at the nativity which became the Gloria. It is the image of the angels that dominates the visual representations of heaven. Is it then impossible to consider that the greatest works of our musical tradition have somehow been Divinely inspired to reflect some aspect of the beauty of the continuing song of the angels in heaven? If asked, what would we consider the angels more likely to sing – Allegri’s Miserere Mei Deus of a Bob Dylan-esque pastiche of a folk song? If played a smaple of both even the most naive or agnostic would likely think the former over the latter.

Well I would argue by some form of logical extension that this is exactly the case. At the end of the preface the priest says (in its current translation) “and so with all of the choirs of angels in heaven we sing….”. The ending of the preface ought to set us up nicely to subconsciously and internally consider the awesome beauty of God ahead of Him breaching the vault of heaven to come down to earth, and just as we do so more often than not we get…. plinky-plonky folksy earthly tunes that create a disconnect between the theology being exposed and the behavior of the faithful (who are now singing something un-heavenly and “earthly” as Burns puts it) that detracts from the experience of God that Aquinas argues is so essential to our ability to know of God’s existence.

In a recent blog post by Fr Tim Finigan The hermeneutic of continuity: My mum forced me to clean my teeth he pours scorn on the argument people use for not going to Mass any more (My mum made me go), but actually, I see a reality in that. Imagine being innately designed to seek the existence of God, being innately programmed to want to experience God, being taken to the place where God can be encountered, and then being ultimately disappointed because our sensory experience of God failed. I’m not suggesting for a second that taking your children to Mass is a bad thing to do, on the contrary, but I find some sympathy in the argument that being taken to Mass as a child can be off-putting for the future when the very experience that should lead us to God falls flat on its face even as an earthly experience and then ultimately fails in its mission.

A close friend of mine who knows my musical tastes well once commented that because I had been a boy treble that I tended to prefer the purity of sound of boys voices over sopranos. In a sense, that is true, but there is much to be said about context when discussing the merits of adults vs boys and men.

On the 25th October 1970 Pope Paul VIth canonized the “40 Martyrs of England and Wales”, and being a Lancastrian it’s a sense of great pride to me that many of them (SS John Rigby, Edmund Arrowsmith, John Southworth, John Almond, Ambrose Barlow OSB, Luke Kirby, John Plessington, and John Wall) all come from my home county whose regional seat is Preston, a city whose name derives from the enclosed estate of a priest. At the time of the Reformation there were a number of Catholic families who continued the practice of their faith in the face of great danger and some of those martyrs lost their lives for hiding priests in their homes. Many homes, such as Ladywell at Fernyhalgh just outside the city, have priest holes for hiding clergy, secret passages to enable their escape, and altar rederos hidden behind the facade of what appears to be large items of furniture such as wardrobes and sideboards so they could hide their recusantry.

It is in this context that masses were heard secretly by families and their close associates. If we look at Byrd’s output during this time, it is noticeable that some years after his association with Lord Thomas Paget and his marriage to a Catholic and his conversion to the faith that the motets in the Cantiones Sacrae take on a different tone from his earlier collection of works with Tallis and become more lacrimosal in tone and move away from High Anglicanism towards subtle messages in their themes and incorporate those of the persecution of the chosen people (such as Domine praestolamur a5), or which can be interpreted as hidden warnings such as Vigilate. Between 1592 and 1595 he published his masses for 3, 4 and 5 voices.

Each of these masses “works” when sung by large choirs, and the Papal Mass at Westminster Cathedral was centred around Byrd 5, but in context I much prefer them as more intimate pieces sung by one or two per part. The reason for this is Byrd’s masses will always be inextricably linked for me to the hidden Catholicism of the North West of England and are very much the mass settings of the martyrs and the Jesuits who went from house to house saying mass. I can picture a small group of a family and friends, a priest saying mass on a side-board altar like the one pictured from Ladywell House, and 4 singers quietly singing Byrd.

For me, the most moving part is the Agnus Dei because of its poignancy. From the very first notes of the soprano and alto singing aganst each other they cry out with a power that stands in complete contrast to the simplicty of the writing. The addition of the tenor and bass at the second invocation adds to the depth and colour of the lacrimosal tone and the real solemnity and pleading comes in the bass part with its gentle syncopation and desent in scale. The voices linger on the qui tollis before taking a more dramatic turn and darker sound as Byrd pleads further in dona nobis pacem – bring us peace, where again the bass cries out as the tension builds and then resolves in a manner similar to Victoria’s Tenebrae Factae Sunt where the tenor line exposes the “Deus meus et me dereliquisti?” (My God why hast thou forsaken me?). The final bars bring that sense of peace, and unusually for Byrd he doesn’t place any passing notes in any of the voices as he usually does at the conclusion of a motet.

For me, Byrd’s masses are the high point of English choral composing for all manner of reasons. While I do think that many compositions benefit from the purity of boys and mens voices in the manner of a traditional cathedral or collegiate choir, Byrd speaks to me in many different ways and from many different places and I enjoy him most in the simplicity of 3, 4, or 5 singers performing his masses as I imagine they would have been when he was alive and catholicism in my home county was a secretive affair.

A few years ago my parish had what you could call an old but orthodox priest who had had the fight knocked out of him. When our first daughter was born he was less than pre-disposed to the notion of good liturgical music when I asked if I could bring my friends to a Saturday rite of baptism and sing some chant and polyphony. He agreed, but only reluctantly after I threatened to go to the Bishop.

His health was poor and he retired soon after to be replaced by a priest who was a former Anglican vicar. The new PP, while not being familiar or versed with Latin, was more open, more willing to encourage me to come to the parish and be part of it’s life as opposed to seeing me as trouble. He also has a fine understanding of a choral tradition as at least in most quarters the Anglicans have retained it.

As my second daughter was baptised in August and the Cathedrals have that month off from musical services, I had a few friends who are lay clerks at Westminster Cathedral and St Albans come and sing. We had chant and polyphony, and as we rehearsed word got out and the parish turned up. It was lovely to have them there.

The PP was open to persuasion. I persuaded him to let me put a choir together and sing vespers last year. It was a lot of work, but largely successful. This year I persuaded him to let me loose on a Sunday mass.

For Christ the King this year the choir I put together sung the full Latin Introit, Byrd’s Mass for 4 voices, a psalm from the Chabanel psalms that the congregation could join in with the responses, a simplified alleluia, Tallis’ If ye love me, and Bairstow’s Let all mortal flesh keep silence along with the communion antiphon.

The church was packed. I noticed 2 young couples present themselves kneeling for communion. There were silences where silence was appropriate. Mass was, well mass.

To add some context to this the “choir” of the parish sings the usual 4-hymn sandwich and when I suggested some time ago trying some of the simple propers or even a Kevin Allen motet I was told that 2 members had refused and wanted to sing a “Carribean Our Father” instead. The organist would love to try a Missa de Angelis, and on the odd occasion when the choir are absent I’ve chanted the Sanctus with no wild objections from the congregation. but personality politics does come into play. However, following the choral Mass, the following week the choir did sing a simple Latin motet. You cannot underestimate what a seismic shift this was.

You see, it just takes an open minded priest, a little effort, and planting the seed in people’s minds as top what is possible. The parish won’t be going to a full weekly Mozart Coronation Mass in the EF, but a packed church heard chant sung in its proper context, and having heard it and appreciated it, the seeds have been sown for the future. The walls that have been built up against chant and polyphony in the Mass by the three decades have been broken down in the parish and they have had a glimpse of what could be.

I’m encouraged by the words of our past Holy Father, Venerable Pope John Paul the Great: “Be not afraid!”