Category: Jeffrey Tucker

Today’s scholas working within the ordinary form have a great appreciation for The Gregorian Missal, which provides most all the music they need for Sundays and Feasts throughout the year.

Before The Gregorian Missal there was the Liber Brevior, which I believe came out in the 1950s. It shortened the vast resources available in the Liber Usualis to just what the schola needed to sing at Mass. So 2000 pages became 800 pages, and it is a very nice size print. I’m not sure how widely circulated the book was at the time, but it is pretty clear that the Gregorian Missal is based on this model.

The good people at Preserving Christian Publications have now reprinted the Liber Brevior, and this is a wonderful thing. It is a fraction of the price of the Liber Usualis, and mostly meets all the needs of a schola that sings for the extraordinary form. It includes only Masses for Sundays, so you avoid the bulk and complexities of the full Graduale and you don’t have to sort through all the extras you find in the Liber Usualis.

This is a very helpful and nice resource, and the price is really right. The editions of music of course are stable across all of these books – all of them prepared by the monks of Solesmes. This makes singing at Mass a straight-forward matter.

And if you are good at calendar conversions, you could use this at the ordinary form too.

And congratulations to PCP for doing all of this. There can be much money in this work, and yet their prices are reasonable and their quality first rate.

You can buy the Liber Brevior here.

Peter A. Kwasniewsk has sent us a resource he uses at Wyoming Catholic College. It is a book of simple antiphons and hymns for the Church year, set up for bookfold, so you have to print and staple. It has some very useful material.

Sorry to be late on this but I’ve only now familiarized myself with the sad, sad spectacle of the Papal Mass in Berlin where the Pope was savaged with outbursts of 80s rock music that included screaming guitars and sexy soprano sax ballads. Sample here. I guess these people didn’t get the memo, or they did and tore it up. The advance crew can only do so much, as we learned from the American experience a few years ago. It wasn’t all terrible. The Mass setting was overblown and forgettable but not offensive (you can here samples here). But the best part, as Fr. Z shows, were the traditional dialogues and “Holy God We Praise Thy Name” sung by everyone. As every prelate knows, in the enforcement of norms, there is a balance to be achieved between charity and justice. You do what you can when you can.

Here is one example of utterly pointless expenditure, overblown and pompous with absolutely no added value of having a single cantor alone sing this Alleluia. Even better: learn an Alleluia in the Graduale.

Happy day: the offertory antiphon for Sunday is “Super Flumina Babylonis” and some of the most remarkable music of the Renaissance sets this text, which means that the proper of the Mass can be sung polyphonically in any number of settings.

Our choir knows this one by Palestrina, so this is what we will sing. Thank you Taipei Singers for a loving and passionate performance! Can we import you to our parish for a tomorrow performance? Note the memorization of all music, and the work-of-art style of conducting. Absolutely wonderful.

However, youtube turns up others, such as this marvel by Philippe de Monte – yet another composer of the period with whom I’m unfamiliar. Embedding disabled sadly but go away.

And here is Victoria

Finally, for those who love this exotic sound of Charpentier here is a version you will not very likely hear in liturgy in your lifetime.

The singer of ChoralTracks.com was struck by how unusual this piece is by Jacob Arcadelt (c. 1507 – 14 October 1568). I agree that there seems to be something suspiciously modern about it – even if it is incredibly beautiful. One wonders about 18th or 19th century reworkings. There has to be some scholarship on this.