Category: Jeffrey Tucker

Jenny Donelson at the forum draws attention to the Gramophone list of the best choirs (none in the U.S.!). I must say that I find the list pretty much in keeping with my own sense of this.

She also points to this interesting comment from the story:

Susanna Beiser: “It’s not necessarily some vague Britishness’ either, that makes their choirs so good. I think it’s worth pointing out that it’s the Church of England. The Anglicans rule choral music. The Catholics, on the other hand, to whom much of the repertoire rightfully belongs, have not sustained their music traditions as well, and their choirs mostly sound bad when they’re not doing some guitar mass or something. But even before Vatican II, I don’t think they were keeping up. From what I hear, the Church of England is in terrible shape, attendance-wise, and now with the move by a growing number of conservative Anglicans to reconcile with Rome, the choral tradition may end up being the primary contribution of 500 years of English Protestantism.”

Congratulations to Jeffrey Ostrowski who sang this entire Graduale alone for this video and did an amazing job at it. Doing something like this is exceedingly difficult. I’ve variously attempted even short communion chants and never been happy with the results of the recording.

Benedictus Dominus is sung at the Baptism of Our Lord, ordinary form. Yes, you read that right. Check the Gregorian Missal if you don’t believe me.

Benedictus Gradual from Corpus Christi Watershed on Vimeo.

The irony is ever present, especially at this time of year: Catholic music is being heard in concert halls and in Protestant Christmas specials but not in the Catholic Church (for the most part, in any case). Here is a nice note underscoring the point.

Many of us with choral experience in pre-council times have found little of the church music in the vernacular since then inspiring in any way. That said, as a child I was exposed to some dreadful Marian hymns. Lent was my favorite musical season since we sang “O Sacred Head.” Who can resist Bach even when you have no clue who he is? I salute your most active ministry in promoting our cultural heritage. It’s definitely an uphill battle as it is for all classical music. It’s very difficult to recruit members who are not seniors for a traditional church choir. Compounding the problem is often a lack of funds to enable hiring of professionaly trained directors and accompanists.

I have been singing with a fine concert choir for over 40 years and am always inspired by the religious music we perform. For the same reason I’m privileged to join a local Presbyterian church choir for their concerts with organ and orchestra. I quite realize how blessed I’ve been to have been continually inspired by so many great composers. It’s just sad that it has taken place outside my church rather than in it.

I believe that this is starting to change, however.

Geoffrey Clarfield has a wonderful article in the National Post today about 20th century scholarship that reinforces an ancient supposition that Gregorian chant grows out of Jewish cantillation.

Clarfield provides a great account of the core argument, but we do need to remember that the idea of a connection between Jewish and Christian chant is hardly a 20th century one. In fact, in the 20th century and even very recently, many people tried to debunk the idea, with the hope of severing the attachment of Catholics to chant. Even today, we read flippant comments to the effect that Gregorian chant is mostly a 19th-century innovation. If it is just another form of art music, why bother with it?

What Clarfield shows is that the chant is integral to Christian worship as it evolved from the Jewish tradition. He is also right to draw attention to the parallels between various forms of chant. The discovery of the relationship between the present chant and the singing of the early Church is yet another case in which the tradition knew more than the scholars, and the best scholars end up discovering the truth of tradition.

This oral tradition of synagogue cantillation has survived unbroken among the Jewish people for more than 2,000 years and still flourishes today. Over the centuries communities in Spain, Eastern Europe and as far away as Iraq, Persia, Yemen and Uzbekistan have developed their own unique styles of cantillation. One would think that after 2,000 years there would be no more “family resemblance” of a musical nature among these traditions. But there is.

At the start of the 20th century, communities from all over the Islamic and Western world began immigrating to the land of Israel, which had become a mandated protectorate of Great Britain after the First World War. A European-born Jewish musicologist by the name of Idelsohn made it his life’s work to record and compare the full range of cantillation of these newly ingathered communities of Jews in their homeland. Apart from the great service of musical preservation that he carried out for the Jewish people, and for the national archives of the future state of Israel, he also conducted the first comparative studies. He found that despite the relative historical separation and isolation of Jewish Diaspora communities, much of their traditional repertoires had similar melodic motives, especially when chanting the Psalms.

In 1938, a young Jew by the name of Eric Werner was allowed to come to New York as a refugee from Hitler’s Germany. He was by then already a well-known musician and composer and one of Europe’s finest musicologists. During that acme of European anti-Semitism, he asked himself a most counter-intuitive question. Was Gregorian Chant based on the cantillation of the Jewish synagogue?

He spent more than a decade trying to answer that question. In 1959 he published his landmark study on the relations between Jewish cantillation and Gregorian chant. It was called The Sacred Bridge and in it he argued that Gregorian chant was indeed a direct descendant of Jewish synagogue music. He never discovered a definitive medieval or early Christian text that bluntly announced that Christian cantillation was based on Jewish cantillation, but that is not how new religions develop. They adopt and adapt, and the evidence for adoption is circumstantial and comparative.

The Sacred Bridge was published in 1959. In 1974 Werner published an updated second edition with more data.

We finally got around to doing what so many have been asking us to do. We’ve put in print Joseph Robert Carroll’s wonderful 1957 book An Applied Course in Gregorian Chant. This is the fruit of generations of experience in pedagogy, an attempt to reduce the teaching of chant to the essentials so that a person can sing or direct well at the parish level.

The language is super clear and precise. It avoids unnecessary complications. It is not the end of studies but it goes a very far distance down the path toward expertise without losing the reader. It is probably the single best introduction. It is also ideal for the classroom in a school of music.

Whole collection of such treasures here.

Kevin Allen’s TANTUM ERGO (vocals by Matthew J. Curtis) from Corpus Christi Watershed on Vimeo.