You can get a sense of the environment and the energy level of the first night from these introductory remarks.
Brilliant and Yet Unreported
It is absolutely pathetic how few posts I’ve put up this week – but this happens every year during the Sacred Music Colloquium. I’m quite certain that there has never been anything like this in our lifetimes. The whole program has been wildly spectacular: teaching, liturgy, lectures, socializing. The EF Mass yesterday in the octave of Pentecost was just beyond description. I have about 1000 articles to write about what has happened so far, and yet no time to write them. I need to take off an entire day to get it down.
Today I will try to grab random images. Of course later, there will be a massive outpouring of videos and audio files. For now, I only have this one small clip of Charles Cole directing a men’s schola:
A tiny snippet from the Colloquium
I know that this is pretty slim and that more would be better but I’ve yet to find a way to really live video blog this conference.
Here is Charles Cole of Brompton in rehearsal with the advanced men in a tiny snippet that would uploadable without broadband. I feel certainly that others will have more later.
Happy Australian Catholics
The new translation is now being used in Australia. As I had suspected, the effect is much more profoundly impressive that expected. Story here.
The Colloquium Packet
Mary Weaver put this together for the week at the colloquium: 270 pages of music for all the choirs. Wow!
That SEP Buzz
We’ve waited a long time for this – forty years for this book but a mere 8 months since its conception – and yesterday was the day that I finally looked at the final product, and it is amazing. If I could figure a way to post directly from my iphone to this blog, I would do it (will try again today).
It began with the arrival of the books in the ballroom.
Then I opened the box while many, including Arlene Oost-Zinner and William Mahrt and many attendees, ceremoniously stood by to get the first look.
Then finally we pulled out the first one: ooh aaaah! As we had hoped, this 460-page book is actually quite compact and manageable, due to a specialized paper style.
Then finally, here was the first look at the stuff inside. One can only stand in amazement: this is the first truly complete and accessible book of sung chant propers for the ordinary form of Mass.
And now I’m pleased to say that you can order yours too, from Amazon, with prime shipping available.
See: The Simple English Propers. The link says that they are out of stock but that’s because Amazon didn’t order enough to meet the demand over the last few days. In fact, I delayed posting this link just to make sure they they stocked up but their algorithms are dictating inventory levels (sometimes the human brain works better!). In any case, they will be there in a day or two. All this means is that you can’t get overnight shipping.
All that aside: it’s a new day for chant in the ordinary form! Congratulations to the brilliant, hard-working Adam Bartlett for his spectacular work.
Common Mass Settings: Mistakes and Corrections
Pray Tell has drawn attention to the Diocese of Jackson, Mississippi, which is insisting that every parish teach and use two Mass settings as an effort toward a common repertoire – and one can hope that this is in addition to the Missal chants. The Bishop writes:
The two approved settings are: The Belmont Mass by Christopher Walker from Oregon Catholic Press and Missa Simplex by Richard Proulx from WLP/Paluch Music. Both settings are straight forward and based in plain chant so that they should fit easily into any parish. Either setting will facilitate our faithful learning the new English translation of the Mass in a simple and prayerful manner.
As Bishop and Guardian of the Liturgy for the faithful in the diocese, I mandate all parishes in the Diocese of Jackson to use only the above two Mass settings for Masses in English for the above listed transition period. This applies to all Masses including school and youth Masses.
After the transition period, parish music ministers may choose from the myriad of new and revised Mass settings, keeping in mind that Catholic musical tradition is about singing the Mass and not singing at Mass. Settings chosen should lend themselves more to congregational participation than to performances.
The Roman Catholic Liturgical Tradition is a beautiful and sacred treasure. As Bishop and protector of that treasure, I appreciate your full cooperation during this time of transition.
Both settings are fine and suitable – good choices overall, if we restrict ourselves to mainstream publishers, which this diocese is doing for understandable reasons. Both would serve regular parishes well. They treat the text well, are flexible enough to be sung with or without instruments, can be sung by a cantor alone or choir, and avoid the attempt to slice and dice the speech rhythm to turn it into a metrical song.
They have some degree of musical integrity even apart from the issue of whether and to what extent that people will sing along; neither settings attempts to sound like a pop song. And yet it would be a safe prediction that people will tend to sing along with the cantor or choir.
For most parishes, these settings would amount to a much welcome departure from the parish convention of singing settings that have three main problems: 1) they attempt to push prose into a strict metric with awkward results that too frequently result in dance-like songs, 2) they often strive to use the antiphon/response format when it doesn’t and shouldn’t apply (the Gloria is an example), and 3) the overt and primary goal of many settings is to get people to sing along, and hence the melodies are drawn from popular culture rather than staying within a liturgical style.
The forthcoming translation will help in this regard because it avoids that triple-time metric of the current Gloria and Sanctus translation. It also offers an opportunity to avoid the other two errors as well. That’s not to say that metrical settings are impossible or that participation can’t be anticipated with a chant-like setting. It is a matter of where the composer is placing the priority. If the primary goal is to create holy, beautiful, and universal music that adheres to the sense of the liturgical text, we have a good beginning. And the two settings link above are a good beginning.