This Monday’s magnificat is by Giovanni Gabrieli (1555-1612). Love your mother! If you have suggestions for future Monday Magnificat compositions, feel free to send them to me by clicking here.
Colloquium XXIV is filling up…
… don’t miss out.
Register today to participate in the first Colloquium to be held in Indianapolis, Indiana. Seven days of musical heaven can be yours. Join us this year and learn from our outstanding faculty, sharing in beautiful liturgies, chant courses, polyphonic choirs, Vespers, morning prayer, plenary talks, and a wide range of topics in breakout sessions.
Enjoy the view of Indianapolis’ lovely 4th of July fireworks display atop the Sheraton Hotel’s pool deck.
The registration deadline is June 1st. For more information about the schedule, polyphonic repertory, faculty, hotel, and other details, visit our Colloquium webpage. Make your hotel reservations at the Sheraton before June 4th to get our special Colloquium rate.
The clock is ticking…
Image courtesy of winnond / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
The Cardinal Vaughan Schola sings for the Ordinariate
Following on from the two highly successful Epiphany Services in London organised by the Friends of the Ordinariate, at which the renowned Schola Cantorum of The Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School has sung, the Ordinariate is delighted to welcome the choir back to its central church in London next week (Thursday 8 May).
Te Lucis Ante Terminum: a recital of choral music drawn from the Roman Catholic and Anglican traditions, was devised especially for the Ordinariate by the school’s music director, Scott Price, who also conducts the Schola. The programme includes music by Victoria, Guerrero, Stanford, Walton and Balfour Gardiner.
The Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School is one of the country’s foremost Catholic state secondary schools, known particularly for its fine musical tradition and strong Catholic ethos. Besides singing at the Vaughan’s weekly Masses and Feast Day celebrations, the Schola Cantorum performs widely around London, at concert halls and churches including Westminster Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s Cathedral, Cadogan Hall, St John’s, Smith Square and The Royal Festival Hall. It also makes annual tours abroad and has featured in Radio and TV broadcasts, most recently on BBC Radio 4’s Sunday Worship and on Vatican Radio.
The Ordinary, Mgr Keith Newton said: ” The Cardinal Vaughan School Schola have sung for us now on two occasions, most recently, in January this year at our central church, Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory, Warwick Street. They are a wonderful choir and they have been very supportive of the Ordinariate. We are delighted, this time, to welcome them back to Warwick Street for a concert at which there will be a retiring collection to raise funds which will go towards the cost of the schola’s next international tour. This choir makes a tremendously important contribution to the Catholic musical scene and I am very happy that the Ordinariate has formed such a close association with it. I hope that Ordinariate members will come and support what promises to be a very enjoyable recital”.
The concert is at 7pm on Thursday 8 May at the Church of Our Lady of the Assumption and St Gregory, Warwick Street, London, W1B 5LZ. Admission is free with a retiring collection for the Schola.
Simple English Propers Accompaniment Editions now Available
As many of you may remember, Adam Bartlett’s Simple English Propers was a product of this blog right here, the Chant Cafe, as Adam posted them weekly, received feedback, and people began using them. Then after they were published, Jeffrey Tucker posted weekly rehearsal videos for quite some time.
Now, organ accompaniment editions have been born out of another one of the CMAA’s sites, the MusicaSacra Forum.
Thanks to the tireless work of Ryan Dingess who has also been posting files of accompaniments weekly, the full year’s cycle is now complete. It is split into two editions: one containing Advent, Christmas, Lent, Holy Week, and Easter, and the second with Ordinary Time, Feasts & Solemnities, and Ritual Masses.
And just like Adam has done with his editions of SEP, Ryan has also released the editions to the world.
The revolution of sacred music marches on!
Musica Sacra Florida Reg. Deadline This Friday!
A liturgical and musical renaissance in Florida? Many, including myself, were dubious about it.
When I moved to Ft. Lauderdale six years ago to take an academic position, I was moving from a vibrant diocese to a place that felt dead, like it had nothing to offer for the Catholic serious about his faith, and serious about the revitalization of Catholic culture and liturgy—very few young adult activities, a tiny, nearly-unknown Latin Mass community, very few priests interested in cultivating sacred music and reverence in the liturgy. Indeed, many have suffered for their faith in our state, as elsewhere.
But, that was six years ago – barely after Summorum Pontificum had been promulgated.
As is the case in many other dioceses and states, the gentle example of Pope Benedict XVI inspired many, including seminarians and priests, and the Holy Spirit has prompted the hearts of many to rediscover and help revitalize the Church’s traditions and liturgy. But there is still much to be done—the impact of the new liturgical movement has still touched only a small percentage of parishioners in the pews in our state.
One of the initiatives in Florida which has made a difference in bringing about the start of a renewal is the annual Musica Sacra Florida Gregorian Chant conference.
For the past six years, sacred musicians from all over Florida and elsewhere in the U.S. and Canada have been coming to study the Church’s sacred music. Since our first conference at Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale, we’ve held the annual conference at Ave Maria University in Ave Maria, Florida. We’ve had a great time connecting with others who love the Church’s liturgy, developing our chanting skills, singing the Divine Office together, and assisting at fully-sung Masses in both the new and old rite. The conference has spawned new scholas around the state, and connections which help make special liturgies and training for sacred music more widely available in the state.
This year, we’ve added a special track for altar servers and clergy to learn the assisting roles in the pontifical Mass in the extraordinary form of the Roman rite. Fr. Scott Haynes will be teaching a workshop on Thursday, May 15th and Friday, May 16th for all those desirous of learning this liturgy. Participants under the age of 18 accompanied by a chaperone are also welcome to participate (contact Susan Treacy for more details).Also joining the faculty this year is Mr. Adam Bartlett, composer of the Simple English Propers and the Lumen Christi Missal. He will be presenting a workshop, with Mr. Jeffrey Herbert, on English chant and parish resources.
Other faculty include:
- Mary Jane Ballou, D.S.M. – Cantorae Saint Augustine
- Jennifer Donelson, D.M.A. – Nova Southeastern University
- Jeffrey Herbert, CAGO/ChM – Saint Raphael Church, Englewood, FL
- Susan Treacy, Ph.D. – Ave Maria University
Special workshop tracks are available in:
- Singing Gregorian Chant in English & a new parish music program, the Lumen Christi series
- Gregorian Chironomy – How to conduct Gregorian chant
- Instruction for chant directors & aspiring chant directors on learning & teaching new chants
- Basic instruction on how to read Gregorian chant notation
The conference also includes:
- Choice of scholae for beginning/intermediate (men & women), upper-level men, & upper-level women
- Missa cantata in the Extraordinary Form on Friday evening with chants provided by the Schola Cantorum of Saints Francis & Clare (Miami)
- Closing Missa cantata in the Ordinary Form on Saturday evening with English & Latin chants provided by conference participants
If you’re interested in working for better liturgy and sacred music in your area, join us for this conference! It will give you ideas and inspiration, and help you make connections with other people working hard for the same goal.
The setting of Ave Maria University makes the conference like a retreat – cheap housing on campus and a peaceful town to enjoy. The conference registration is $60, $15 for clergy, seminarians, and full-time students.
The registration deadline is this Friday, May 2nd, 2014. More information is available at the conference website: www.musicasacra.com/florida.
We hope you’ll be able to join us!
Quattro Papi
A New Resource for Chant Solfege from CMAA
Cours élémentaire et pratique de plain-chant grégorien, Troisième édition
P. Balduinus van Poppel, O.C.R.
Westmalle, Belgium: Imprimerie Cistercienne, 1949
Reprint, Richmond: Church Music Association of America, 2014
A New Resource for Chant Solfège from CMAA
With the daunting title and author, Cours élémentaire et pratique de plain-chant grégorien by P. Balduinus van Poppel, O.C.R., one might be tempted to pass over this little gem. Originally published in 1906, this is the third edition of a comprehensive set of exercises in the singing of chant. This book, used judiciously, is a wonderful resource for schola directors and dedicated singers who have longed for systematic sight-singing exercises geared specifically for chant.
Again, the Church Music Association of America gives us another book that will help us develop scholas with sure and beautiful intonation.
Originally a comprehensive course in chant, the third edition published in 1949 removed the theoretical material, retaining only brief introductions to each of the three sections of practical exercises. Here is sight-singing on the four-line staff, with movable do-clefs and fa-clefs. The exercises progress methodically through interval training in Part One to the full range of Gregorian neumes in Part Two. While singers might quail at the elaborate names of the compound neumes in Part Two, schola directors can calm their hearts by reminding them that they are simply amalgamations of neumes they already know. There is no need to learn their names unless one wishes to make a splash at musicological cocktail parties. Part Three is the pinnacle of the exercises, requiring the singer to move from one mode to another with the clef (and thus, the mode) changing every two bars. Only for the very adept singer.
Each part has an introduction in Dutch, French, and English, so language is no barrier to this book. Pater Balduinus van Poppel (1862-1945) was a monk of the Abbey of Saint Benedictus in Achel, Belgium. He taught chant in his own monastery, as well as other religious houses, parishes, and seminaries. The opening material to the book includes a tribute to Pater Balduinus in Dutch and a warm endorsement in French by Dom Joseph Pothier of Solesmes and St. Wandrille fame.
Schola directors who want to improve (or begin) their singers’ training in solfège will find here the exercises that will speed the learning of new chants by instilling a familiarity with intervals and neumes of Gregorian notation. An over-zealous director might be tempted to go from one exercise to another to another in a single rehearsal. Do that for a few weeks and you might be improving your solfège by yourself. Perhaps one exercise each week as part of the schola warm-up will suffice, combining the solfège with the development of unified tone that comes from singers listening to each other. An interval study of those thorny fourths and fifths might be in order for an adept schola that needs some cleaning up on those intervals.