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In remembrance.

H/t, Gary Penkala of CanticaNOVA.

What better way to start off the New Year than with great music, terrific directors, and good company?  January 2-6, 2017 is the time, Birmingham is the place.

You can find all of these if you attend the Winter Sacred Music 2017 conference in Birmingham, Alabama.  Scott Turkington and Nick Botkins will be leading classes in chant and polyphony (two each). The culmination of you and your companions’ efforts will be an Ordinary Form Mass for the Memorial of St. John Neumann on January 5th and an Extraordinary Mass for the Epiphany on January 6th, both at the splendid Gothic Revival Cathedral of St. Paul. In addition, Dr. William Mahrt will offer breakout lectures that will deepen your understanding of the history and role of our great patrimony.

Learn more and register now without delay at www.musicasacra.com/winter-2017/

Your skills will grow; your happiness will increase.

From the perspective of a father, Tim O’Malley of Notre Dame writes about the importance of chant in the liturgical life of children.

My son, despite his natural religious imagination, gets bored. Very bored. He wants to leave half-way through Mass, because there is no movement. There is no music. Only the naked human voice reading and reading and reading.

Last Sunday, we went to the Melkite Liturgy on campus. The entire liturgy, as anyone knows who has attended Eastern liturgies, is sung. Despite our son’s lack of familiarity with the words on the page, he hummed along the entire time (sometimes even during the Eucharistic Prayer). With his slight speech delay, with his limited grasp of understanding of English, the chant allowed him to participate in the Eucharistic sacrifice in a way that he rarely experiences.

Not once did he ask to leave.

Not once was he bored (though he did perform frequent prostrations and crossing of himself).

More here.

Once I visited the cathedral in Lisieux, St. Therese’s home parish, with a particular view to understanding how her young imagination was filled with thoughts of heaven. Images, in particular, abounded. Everywhere you looked there was a saint: on the walls, on the altars, carved into the flooring. A smiling Blessed Mother gazed down from the Marian altar.

Appealing to a child’s mind, so receptive to truth, is easy. We have an app for that. It’s called authentic liturgy. 

Sometimes it seems like the 70s are here again, retro-style. So here’s a blast from the past.

That’s the sort of thing that grownups used to think brought the kids in to the Church.

Except, as we know, those kids left. In droves.

Still, the Lord’s Prayer is what we are given to pray, in authentic, multicultural expressions. So, let us pray.

I’ve written here a number of times about the advantages of teaching excellent singing, particularly in the chant, to little ones. I thought I’d outline a few specific tips about how to do that. Most of these are taken in one way or another from the Ward Method.

1. Insist on excellent singing from the very beginning, even with kindergarteners. This can be a little challenging if students are used to singing in a loud, shouting way. One remedy is simply to have students repeat back notes, sung on “oo,” and listening for beautiful singing. Another is to ask students to repeat the call of the mourning dove, singing on the syllable “oo.” Listen carefully for vocal production. Gently correct the students who are making more playful sounds and challenge them to “sing beautifully.”
2. Another way to correct shouting is to ask students to sing–not shout–a note as loudly as they can. Correct shouting until it is loud singing. Then ask them to sing the same note as quietly as they can, not whispering, but quiet singing. Lastly, ask them to sing the same note as “mediumly” as they can.
3. Teach the students to sing the Do Re Mi scale with hand motions that walk the notes up the body. This is an outstanding video explanation. The entire series is wonderful.
4. To explain the half steps in the scale, I tell a story about being on vacation in an old house on vacation, and tell the students that since their family is in the beautiful basement of this wonderful house, and the kitchen is on the first floor, that it is very important to know how to walk up the stairs at night to get some delicious hot chocolate. The problem with this old house is that some of the steps are only half as tall, and you have to be careful in order to walk up in the dark. I draw a platform horizontally low on the board, and that is Do. Then a stair, up to Re, then a stair up to Mi, and then a half-tall stair up to Fa. This continues up to Do, with a half-tall stair between Mi and Do.
   Little children are very interested in the height and size of things, and will have fairly recently conquered the processes involved in walking up stairs, so this image is very memorable to them.

Some of our readers who are celebrating the Memorial of Pope St. John Paul with special solemnity may like to sing this Hymn Tune Introit during the entrance procession.

The Lord chose him to be high priest.
And made His gifts in him increase.

He opened up His treasure store,

And made him rich forevermore.

The Hymn Tune Introits are a way of introducing the proper texts in a parish or other worshipping community in an agreeable and easy way. This text may be sung to the tune of any familiar Long Meter tune.

Enjoy!

I teach Gregorian chant and renaissance polyphony at a wonderful independent Catholic K-12 school near San Diego, with a classical curriculum and prolife values. I thought our readers might be interested to know about our biggest fundraiser of the year, which is a raffle with a $10,000 grand prize.

 Only 1,000 tickets will be sold, so the odds are good, and the school is certainly worthy of support.

 California is something of a mission field, and our students are being taught how to keep and stand up for their faith.

For my part, I teach Religion, Latin, and how to sing beautifully at our Masses and to read music, in both chant and modern notation systems.  

Please consider helping us to form the next generation of faithful (and musically literate!) Catholics. The details of the raffle may be found here. 

Thank you!