Category: Adam Bartlett

If you haven’t read Msgr. Wadsorth’s recent address on sacred music, you must. The statements made here by the Executive Director of ICEL are full of unrealized potential that could change the world of Catholic liturgical music as we know it.

In this post I would like to uncover one of these potentials and to invite you to help make it a reality, helping change the landscape of Catholic liturgical music publishing.

Among the items in Wadsworth’s talk was a call to church musicians to sing the liturgical texts that are proper to the Mass, namely the proper antiphons which contain a portion of the substantial unity of the Roman Rite, a “textual unity”, as he put it. In assessing our current state of affairs, where there is virtually no singing of these proper antiphons, he reveals a very interesting dichotomy:

Firstly, on the part of commercial publishers: He stated that “…musical repertoire has for practical purposes largely been controlled by the publishers of liturgical music…this is unavoidable, for a whole variety of pragmatic reasons…“

He also said regarding commercial publishing: “This is something of a ‘chicken and egg’ situation. Praxis has governed the development of our resources of liturgical music and for the most part, composers and publishers have neglected the provision or adaptation of musical settings of these proper texts.“

The dichotomy comes in when Msgr. Wadsworth offers a solution to this dilemma: “a brief trawl of the internet produces a surprisingly wide variety of styles of settings of the proper texts which range from simple chants that can be sung without accompaniment to choral settings for mixed voices.“

How interesting is this dichotomy? Did you catch it?

On the one hand we have the major commercial Catholic liturgical music publishers who have “neglected the provision or adaptation of musical settings of [the] proper texts” because of a “chicken and egg” situation, and who control the music repertoire in Catholic parishes for “unavoidable” and “practical reasons”.

And on the other hand we have “a surprisingly wide variety of styles of settings of the proper texts” that are made available by “a brief trawl of the internet”.

To put it more concisely: On the one hand we have an “unavoidable” situation where the distribution of liturgical music resources necessarily depends on the whims of the commercial market and is regulated by purchase and sale and other external factors, while on the other hand we have a 21st century technology in the internet that has enabled the creation and promotion of musical settings of the proper of the Mass that is not subject to these seemingly unavoidable forces that are imposed by the commercial publishing industry.

This dichotomy between two different means of creation and distribution of liturgical music resources represents a paradigm shifting phenomenon that is happening now in the Church and in the world. At one time the distribution of music resources depended solely on the production and sale of paper and it is around this model that our systems of copyright, intellectual property, licensing, commercial distribution, etc. evolved. Paper is a scarce good that can be bought and sold and is the bearer of the music that the publishers distribute. Therefore the publishers must buy the paper, must hire production staff, they must buy printing presses, paper cutters, pay for shipment costs, pay the electric bills, and on and on. The cost for the production of printed sheet music is quite high. It goes without saying that this paper must be sold to consumers in order for publishers to cover their production costs and in order to build and sustain a successful business.

But we are seeing a new phenomenon today. A single individual who has a laptop can produce musical scores in his spare time using free software, from his sofa in his living room, and post it freely on a website that he accesses or even owns and manages for free. The situation that this person finds himself in allows him to assess the needs of the Church without any influencing factors such as commercial considerations, the whims of the financial market, client base, or anything. This person, in his spare time, as an activity of leisure, can produce musical resources, without the bias of any imposing influence, and instantly “publish” it freely on the internet and make it available and accessible to a virtually global market.

There was perhaps a time where such activity didn’t hold much stock in the “real world” of liturgical music distribution, but, as we have been told by the Exective Director of the International Committee of English and the Liturgy, the best place to find a variety of musical settings of the proper antiphons of the Mass–texts that form a part of the substantial unity of the Roman Rite–is currently the internet, in the forum of the self-publisher who can produce resources that the Church is asking for without having to play any “chicken and egg” games, or without having to be subject to the demands of the commercial market.

How extraordinary is this? The CMAA should be proud and people like Jeffrey Tucker, and many others who have done similar work should be thanked profusely for their tireless efforts in making musical settings of the texts of the Roman Rite freely available to the world. Who knows–if these resources had not been developed and had not been made available online would we be eternally consigned to the cycle of destruction that is found in the world of Catholic music publishing? Would we be suppressed by the “unavoidable” and “practical reasons” that have kept Catholics from having available to them a variety of musical settings of the texts of the Mass? Would there be no hope that things could improve and that we could some day finally arrive at Vatican II’s vision of a sung liturgy?

Well, the good news is that the pioneers have charted new and exciting territory in these past few years and the world of Catholic liturgical music will never be the same.

I think that it is time to raise the stakes. I would like to invite you, any and all of you, to participate in an experiment in the production of Catholic liturgical music resources.

As Catholics we have long understood the axiom “the sum is greater than its parts”. This is the way that the Body of Christ operates–we work together. What good is a hand alone? Or an eye? Or a foot? Alone these parts of the body can do very little on their own, but when acting as a part of the whole body, the potential is infinite.

Many of us musicians have made small contributions to the world of online liturgical music resources. Largely this has been the enterprise of a handful of driven individuals who have assembled very nice projects according to their individual gifts of time and talent. Many of these projects have been limited, though, in scope because of skills, knowledge, and of course time. Many of these projects have still found great success, but they could have been all the greater if the greater specialized skills or manpower were available.

I would like to invite you, even if you don’t feel that you have much to give, even if your contribution is small, to participate in this experiment. This will be an organized effort, the author of this post is the current leading organizer, and the place for discussion and delegation of tasks will be the CMAA web forum.

The project is called “Toward the Singing of Propers” and the immediate result might end up in a book of simple English antiphons and psalms for use in average parish settings by average parish musicians. Another result will be a open database of liturgical texts and source material for the development of future and various projects. The fruits of everyone’s labors will remain in the Creative Commons and in the open forum so that others can benefit from your work as they take on similar projects of their own.

What help do we need? Well, the first task is to organize a database of the needed source texts for the project. This involves the data input of all of a complete set of antiphon translations, and also of the Latin antiphons for proper and simple textual comparison. All of the metadata for these texts needs to be input and organized: biblical text source, incipit name, mode, psalm verse designations. Psalm verses for the antiphons have to be figured out and notated in the database. The psalm verses themselves need to be extracted and arranged in the database. We need someone with biblical/textual/language skills to undertake the task of “modernizing” the Douay Rheims psalter so that we can have a good public domain psalter for use in the Creative Commons. We need people to help typeset musical antiphons. We need proof readers, both textual and musical. There are surely many things I’m forgetting and surely many other needs that will arise.

The great thing about “open source” projects is that anyone can contribute to them with whatever time they have to give. I find it absolutely amazing that a computer operating system like Linux (a community developed and completely open source software) can rival the best commercial operating systems that money can buy. I have no doubt that an organized effort around sacred music resources can produce the same result.

I believe that in Msgr. Wadsworth’s addressed we have been commissioned to return the antiphonal propers back to their rightful place in Catholic liturgy and to work outside the conventional confines in order to do so.

We are able to give freely of ourselves, of our gifts, of our time, to the Church because Christ first gave of himself to us, and He continues to pour out the gift of himself freely to us in every single Eucharistic liturgy. Everything that happens in the liturgy is a response to Christ’s sacrifice of himself to the Father in the Holy Spirit. Our only able response as Catholics is to first receive this gift and to make a gift of ourselves back to God in our worship and in the making of our own lives a sacrifice.

It is because of this eternal gift that we receive in the liturgy that we live and move and have our being. It is in response to this gift that we are able to give freely of our time and our gifts for the glory of God, the sanctification of the faithful, and for the good of the Church.

I hope you’ll participate in this experiment in liturgical music resource production. Your involvement might be small, but when united with others working toward a common goal your impact will be great. Future generations of Catholics might thank you.

Yesterday, the conductor-less polyphonic chamber choir Stile Antico, recently featured on the Chant Café, performed and discussed some of the music from their latest recording “Song of Songs” on the BBC Proms. I thought it might a good follow up to our previous coverage of this fantastic young British polyphonic group.

Here’s the hour long program.

From the Catholic News Service:

Catholics in the United States will begin using the long-awaited English translation of the Roman Missal on the first Sunday of Advent in 2011, Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago said Aug. 20.

The cardinal’s announcement as president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops marks the formal beginning of a more than 15-month period of education and training leading to the first use of the “third typical edition” of the Roman Missal at English-language Masses in the United States on Nov. 27, 2011.

Read the rest of the story here.

Update: Here’s the official press release from the USCCB

This is the time of year where music directors and church musicians are returning home from summer conferences, colloquia, seminars, retreats, possibly trips abroad, or maybe just summer vacations. Over the next few weeks we are planning out the year that lies ahead, recruiting choir members, choosing repertoire, organizing and preparing ourselves for the exhausting stretch of rehearsals and liturgies, especially the privileged seasons that will be here before we know it. Although this time of year is comparatively very slow, it brings with it a certain anxiety because we know that our strategizing and big-picture thinking now may very well determine the course of the coming year.

If your parish is like mine, you might be considering what subtle or possibly profound additions, subtractions, or adjustments you can make that will help steer your parish toward the sacred and more closely toward the musical and liturgical ideals that are given to us by the Church. This might be the creation of a schola that begins to explore the Church’s musical treasures, an implementation of the basic Gregorian ordinary, more singing on the part of the priest and the congregation in dialogue with him, a weeding out of problematic repertoire, it surely involves a thorough agenda of catechesis, and probably also of continued personal study.

And it also is likely to involve some sort of introduction of your parish to the proper of the Mass–perhaps specifically the processional antiphons which form an integral part of the liturgy and which are ideally supposed to be sung at the Entrance, Offertory and Communion.

At this point in history the desire to begin singing the proper chants, or at least the Introit and Communion, presents some very interesting challenges. There are several resources that are now available, all of varying degrees of difficulty, and many if not most of them available to you freely. Of course there is the Graduale Romanum, the Roman Rite’s book for the choir, there are Rossini propers (very popular before Vatican II), there are simpler chants of the Graduale Simplex, there are the polyphonic and choral propers found at CPDL, there are collections of English chant like Bruce Ford’s The American Gradual, the Palmer-Burgess Gradual, The Anglican Use Gradual, Fr. Samuel Weber’s work, Fr. Columba Kelly’s work, the Simple Choral Gradual, The Arbogast collection, Tietze’s Hymn Introits for the Church Year, there are 101 different ways to sing antiphons to psalm tones, falsi bordoni, Anglican chant, you can write your own settings, there even funky collections from publishers like the Liturgical Press (if you want to go there).

I’m sure that I’m missing several different methods of singing the propers in this list. But the list will continue to grow with projects like the the Graduale Parvum, the St. Meinrad Gradual, the St. Louis Gradual, the Mundelein Gradual, and surely many more that will surface in the coming years.

That many of these collections are free for parishes to use is fantastic and this big disorganized mess of options for the singing of the propers is indeed a very good problem to have! But there is an undoubted trepidation and anxiety that overcomes the parish music director, volunteer schola director, underpaid organist, campus ministry director, or pastor who begins to browse through these options with limited time, an uncertainty about what he or she should really do, and an impending “season kick-off” just a few weeks away.

Depending on the resource or resources that you choose, there are the challenges of sometimes adding psalm verses, of copy and pasting antiphons out of books into usable resources, of adding translations, of doing musical typesetting, of creating worship aids, of substituting a setting when others seem inappropriate. And you need to create a strategy, and layout a game plan for providing these resources for your musicians every week, teaching them how to sing them, all the while fending off angry letters and offensive outbursts from choir members who can’t understand why we can’t sing On Eagles Wings anymore. And there is the possibility that your choice in strategy ended up being the wrong one and you have to shift strategy mid-stream.

You may have to introduce your singers to new notational styles, there may be a style of language in the musical setting that is difficult for your parish to handle at the moment, you might end up biting off more than you can chew and end up waxing an Introit one Sunday morning, furthering your own frustration and the confidence of your singers and congregation. These potential situations are can drive a young and enthusiastic music director crazy (and I do speak from experience!) and missteps in strategy on the path to sacred and normative liturgy can seriously hinder or altogether stop progress.

It is certainly much easier to choose four familiar hymns or songs from the Music Issue or the Gather book and call it a day, and this is surely what many people who really want to sing the Mass end up doing because the whole world of the propers right now is a sort of huge disorganized mess. People like myself can get by just fine, but we are very good with computers, are very web savvy, and have an enthusiasm about the propers which compels us through grueling hours of sleepless nights of preparing organized and useable resources for our choirs.

Perhaps I am the only person who experiences these anxieties, I don’t know. I would appreciate hearing feedback from others who deal with similar situations in the comment box!

This post is titled “New Beginnings” and there was a reason for that–there is another “beginning” that is approaching us, and it is a little more than a year away, and this is the implementation of the new English translation of the Roman Missal. This means that not only congregational responses, collects and the Eucharistic prayer will be changing, but also the Ordinary of the Mass, the translations of the antiphons that are found in the Missal (for those who sing these antiphons in lieu of the differing Graduale antiphons), and the official translation of the psalms will also be changing (the Revised Grail Psalter). The good news for some is that “alius cantus aptus” (another suitable song) saves the day in regard to “official translations”, but many do see the great value in singing “official” and “approved” translations where possible. This certainly applies to the texts of the Missal, the Lectionary (Responsorial Psalm and Gospel Verse), and to the psalm verses for the processional propers.

So some people may be in a situation where they have only begun to introduce propers, or they would like to begin to do so throughout the coming year, but they are frustrated to discover that all of their labors in crafting a suitable resource for the current needs of their parish will be superseded by new text translations, new psalm translations, and new musical settings in about a years time. I know of many who are putting off the introduction of propers into their parishes until the safe arrival of the new translation for these and other reasons. This seems to be a very sad reality, but for many it is the reality.

What’s the answer, we might ask? Well, conventional wisdom might tell us that in a few years when the new translations stabilize we will probably have about 10 or more new hard bound books to choose from that offer a “complete” resource. The problem that arises, though, is that one might commit to a particular collection, but then find themselves locked into it because of their investment, and they are not able to introduce more sophisticated, or varied settings of the propers, “climbing the ladder toward the Graduale Romanum” so to speak, without having 3 or 4 books in the hand of each singer. Making copies or printing off varied settings might lead some to a certain case of “music paper madness“.

As a solution, many have discussed ways of organizing the existing online resources in some kind of website or database, but much of what has happened so far is a small index of links and the situation is not much improved.

Well, (and I do have a point here) I am glad to say that a group of people who see the same need and have diverse solutions to the problem, and the many challenges encountered in the current liturgical project have come together and are coming together and are joining forces to create a solution that is greater than the sum of its parts, and it is being called the Sacred Music Project.

Most of what the Sacred Music Project actually is exists currently only in the theoretical realm–in conversations between like minds. A very simple website does exist, but it is essentially a means of making the English chant work of Fr. Columba Kelly, OSB, available to the world. Fr. Kelly has encouraged the project on and remains committed to it with his existing and forthcoming English chant compositions. A professional computer scientist has tackled the question of how to make sacred music actually work in the digital age and is now developing the first stage of a custom web application that will become a “complete parish resource” of sacred music materials, published in the Creative Commons or Public Domain, of instructional materials that assist people in using the resources, in catechetical resources that invite parish musicians into the Spirit of the Liturgy, of recordings and demonstrations that help train musicians in singing a repertoire that may be largely unfamiliar to them.

So the Sacred Music Project is essentially seeking to harness the cumulative efforts of the many who have advanced the cause of sacred music and is working to help it make sense in the world of Web 2.0, of social networking. This may seem all very esoteric, and maybe it is, but we really think that we have something substantial here, and we think that it can easily and effortlessly put truly sacred and liturgical music in the hands, on the music stands (and on the iPhones and iPads) of average parish musicians and can offer them a path toward the sacred and toward the Church’s musical treasures and normative musical practices.

We also have prolific typesetters, designers, composers, scholars, theologians, and visionary thinkers on board and beginning to work together. The results of this sort of collaboration could be great indeed.

We are indeed on the cusp of many new beginnings and it is all very exciting.

If you would like to hear more please stay tuned for more Chant Café posts on the Sacred Music Project, visit the SMP Blog for more info and future updates, or contact me if you would like to know more or if you would like to get involved in some way.

Maybe we can help promote an “authentic updating of sacred music according to the great lineage of the past”, per Pope Benedict’s request, while we’re at it. Let’s see!