Posts

Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

Local Girl Finds Fun Studying with French Monks

There is a two-part interview and story in the California Catholic Daily with Mary Ann Carr Wilson: 1 and 2. Mary Ann has grown up with the growth of the chant movement in this country, having attended the Sacred Music Colloquium when it was small and fledgling and coming most years since, and watching as it became large, evangelistic, and musically sophisticated.

The big change in her musical life came when she was tapped to provide musical direction for an FSSP parish. Now she is in charge of music for extraordinary form Masses.

And this is interesting:

What I like about the Extraordinary Form is:

1.) It’s less prone to abuse because less options; the culture of obedience is stronger and more stable than a culture of options

2.) There is an explicit and rich Catholic identity in all prayers

3.) There are beautiful, theologically rich Offertory prayers, excised in the Ordinary Form

4.) The sung Gradual and Alleluia are more conducive to meditation and recollection than the Responsorial Psalm and Gospel Acclamation, often poorly composed ditties.

5.) I especially don’t miss the Prayers of the Faithful or the Sign of Peace as they are often experienced in parishes.

6.) This is valid in both forms, but I appreciate praying in the same direction as the priest, who faces liturgical east. Feels more like the Church moving
together, led by the priest as shepherd and father, in the person of Christ.

7.) The full use of Gregorian propers. Valid in both forms, but more
common to experience in the Extraordinary Form.

8.) I appreciate the use of the communion rail and receiving our Lord kneeling and from a priest or deacon. Personally I am able to recollect more this way.

9.) I do not miss cluttered sanctuaries with tons of lay people and concelebrating priests. Though I know the Church allows much of this, to me it obscures the Mass.

What I don’t like about the Extraordinary Form:

1.I miss singing the Pater Noster

2.) I wish the entrance was the Introit, for which it was composed, often neglected in both Ordinary and Extraordinary forms.

On the last two points, it’s my understanding that having the people sing the Pater Noster is now permitted in the extraordinary form, but overcoming a local tradition can be difficult. As for the introit, she is so right about this. The Asperges is to come before the introit only on the primary Mass on Sunday but this is the very Mass that most often uses the sung Introit too. I’m not sure there is a way to use the Introit as the entrance under these conditions.

Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

$5 for a Full Year of Entrance Propers

Richard Rice has done it again. He has produced a full year of entrance antiphons with Psalms, with accompaniment, for use in the ordinary form. These are all in modern notes and the samples look very good. You can download the set here.

These are clearly designed for the congregation to sing in a responsorial pattern. There is just no comparing these to any hymn you could possibly pick to sing. This gets people’s heads out of the book and has everyone singing the actual text that is proper to the Mass.

This is just the sort of music that is going to bring a new solemnity to Mass. You can start using them this Sunday.

Posted on by Keith Fraser

Polyphony in the past 20 years in England

In one of the combox comments in my last post, a comment read said “Isn’t it great to be having this conversation? Imagine a liturgy discussion in the 90s comparing polyphony styles.” Well because I’m a bit of a spotter on things liturgical on polyphonic I probably could, but then I generally take the point.

The thing that has led inexorably towards the kind of discussions that we are having today in the Cafe have been the developments of the last 20 years, namely the internet and cheap and accessible CDs. The internet has given people the opportunity to communicate their ideas and a space to discuss their viewpoints, and the access to cheap CDs has given a lot of people the opportunity to access polyphonic music.

In the late 1980’s there was a cohort of Oxford and Cambridge graduates who had been choral scholars at the various colleges of those universities. Over about a 5 year period many of them gravitated towards the professional church and cathedral choirs of London. At the time The Sixteen and the Gabrielli Consort with the Kings Singers were the main early music groups playing to niche markets and who turned out the odd recording every year or two followed by a concert tour. With the exception perhaps of Harry Christophers, they weren’t really doing anything different. Then came Andrew Carwood, Mike McCarthy, Ed Wickham and David Skinner.

Each of them formed an ensemble group with Andrew Carwood and David Skinner’s The Cardinall’s Musick and Ed Wickhanm’s The Clerks being the longest lasting and most successful. In the early and mid 90’s these groups were recording for labels like Hyperion and Deutsche Grammephone and they concentrated on the output of recordings. For the first time there were whole swathes of repertiore easily available. Of course, the Cathedral choirs would regularly put out recordings, but they typically were either pot-boiler collections of motets, hymns, and the odd mass here and there, but these groups started to produce something different – CDs containing the chant propers, mass ordinaries, and motets that would give the listener a start-to-finish experience of what a mass would have sounded like in context.

With the Cardinall’s Musick there came a shift in direction. Initially an all male ensemble, they were signed to Hyperion as a “big ticket group”. Hyperion had always specialised in classical recording, but this was a bit of a risk for the label as early music was thought to be a small but expanding market place. Hyperion commissioned the Cardinall’s Musick to re-edit and record the entire series of Ludford’s masses. It was a commercial success, and the group went on to record the entire works of Cornysh, Fayrfax, and Byrd. As another change in direction in recent years the group (along with The Clerks) have started to explore contemporary pieces.

When you read the credit lists of the singers in thse groups you start to see the same names re-appearing: Becky Outram, Carys Lane, Tessa Bonner, David Gould, Robin Blaze, Julian Stocker, Matthew Vine, Robert McDonald, Rob Evans amongst others. All expert early musicians and regular singers in some of the best church choirs in the country they bring both expertise and sympathy to their work. They all started out at roughly the same time in roughly the same places.

The prominence of polyphony and chant in the mindset of many people began long before Liturgicam Authenticam, and long before the revisions to the liturgy were in train, but its time has come and the seeds were sown by the work of thye groups mentioned above. So in short, yes we were having these discussions in the 90’s and they are bearing fruit now.

Posted on by Adam Bartlett

American Popular Musical Values

As I write I’m fading in and out of watching the Super Bowl half time show featuring the Black Eyed Peas, failing auto-tune technology, and a guest appearances from Slash of Guns ‘n Roses and Usher (so far). Of course the Super Bowl is the single most widely viewed television program of the entire year. 100 million Americans are currently enduring this musical show. The half-time show is probably not the musical event of this evening that will be most widely discussed, however.

The national anthem was sung by Christina Aguilera. Instead of the third line of our nation’s anthem, “O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming” Christina sang “What so proudly we watched, at the twilight’s last streaming.”

This, of course was buried under many layers of diva-like styling, scoops, belts, and the like. Not many in room apparently knew that anything wrong had even happened. The singer quickly covered her tracks as best as she could by belting out at the top of her lungs the next line–the tear jerker–”and the rocket’s red glare…”. The crowd erupted in approving shouts of praise, admiration and ecstasy. The camera pans to players on the field who are shedding tears, and to a shot of U.S. troops in uniform, proudly looking on.

The entire stadium seemed to be overcome with such an overwhelming emotional experience that no one was even able to realize that the text that was being sung wasn’t even the national anthem. The text actually made no sense at all!

I wonder what this says about American musical values? It is no wonder why the task that lies ahead of those who serve the music of the liturgy is so great. The essence of liturgical music is a liturgical text, rich in theological and liturgical content, clothed in sacred melody that lifts the mind and soul to prayer.

This is the three-headed beast that we are up against:

Posted on by Arlene Oost-Zinner

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time


Here is my Responsorial Psalm setting for the sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, year A. It’s a pretty simple and straight forward Mode V.

It is really important that the congregation be able to sing along right away – the text here just kind of traces up and down the scale with a mind to the rhythm of the words.

It can’t always be done, and shouldn’t be done for its own sake, but there is usually a place or two or three in English were you can do a playful or declamatory rhythm of three. This helps prevent the music from becoming too tied to this world – keeps the text hovering somewhere above us, somewhere that beckons our upward attention.

Can you find a rhythm of three here? If you are not Solesmes trained, all I mean is that there is a system for counting the chant by twos and threes. The method and the counting system are just a way of organizing the music so it continues to move forward in a pleasing way. It’s quite an effective system, but certainly not the end all of chant scholarship. I’ll talk more about that another time and how that impacts what I do from week to week.

I settled upon Mode V because I looked ahead at the verses. They seemed to fit quite well with the prescribed final cadences. There is one pesky spot – look at the mediant cadence in verse two. “Diligently kept” was what I had to deal with. Keeping in mind that the accent according to the mode V mediant cadence is on the penultimate note, I had a few choices. I could look at the word accent and line it up: diligently kept. Not good. It doesn’t sound much like English when you try to sing it. I could have lined up the musical accent with the one of the words that come before “diligently,” but that would have been ridiculous – too many syllables on the last note. So I went with the musical accent over the unsuspecting “ly.” Try it out. I think it works.

Why don’t I just make it easy on myself and using a set of Psalm tones that are specially tailored for English? The Meinrad tones, for example. I mentioned these a couple of weeks ago. For now I don’t because I can usually find something that works. It might take me a little longer, and I might have to abandon something and start anew, but I don’t mind. I enjoy the challenge.

Mostly I appreciate the sound and sense of the Gregorian tones, be they the Gloria Patri tones or the Office tones. I appreciate their tie to history. And during a Mass, especially if we are doing Gregorian Propers (save the Responsorial Psalm), using these connects us audibly to what is going on musically otherwise. They seem to me to be the best fit.

Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

Where Does the Term Missal Come From?

One of my favorite but least noticed books on the literature page of MusicaSacra.com is Marie Pierik’s Spirit of Gregorian Chant (PDF | printed). She offers a detailed and very inspiring look at everything a Catholic singer needs to know about the primary music at Mass. Here she presents a short version of the origin of the term Missal — which, it occurs to me, might be a new term for younger Catholics in the English-speaking world. We know about the Sacramentary and the Lectionary but what is this thing called the Missal?

The Missal (L. Missale, from Missa, Mass) had somewhat the same development as the Breviary. At first it contained simply the Mass and a few morning services connected with the Mass. From this Sacramentarium (so called because all of its contents centered around the great Act of Consecration, and also because, in the course of time, it came to include the ritual for the celebration and administration of all the other Sacraments) the songs of the Deacon as well as the texts which the choir sang were omitted. The songs of the choir, such as the Introit, Offertory and Communion, were contained in the Antiphonarium Missae or Graduale. The parts chanted by the Deacon and Subdeacon, the Gospels and the Epistles, with lessons from the Old Testament for particular occasions, were collected in the Evangelarium and the Epistolarium or Apostolus.

Besides this, an Ordo or Directorium was required to determine the proper service. The contents of the Sacramentary, the Gradual, the various lectionaries and Ordo were amalgamated, but the development was slow, and it was several centuries before all were brought together under one cover.

The first printed edition of the Missale Romanum was introduced in Milan in 1474. Nothing officially authoritative appeared until the Council of Trent (1545-63) considered the question of uniformity in the liturgical books and appointed a commission to examine the matter. (p. 132)

Further:

The word Missa (Mass) is of folk, not of classical origin. It was used originally in the sense of “missio” or “dimissio,” signifying the dismissal of the faithful at the end of any celebration of the cult. St. Ambrose used it as a liturgical term in a letter written in the year 385, applying its meaning to the Eucharistic Sacrifice; as used by another writer at that time, it would also seem, from evidence, to have included within its scope the canonical Office as well as the Eucharistic Sacrifice. The meaning of the word, therefore, originally applied to a detail, gradually embraced all of the preceding service with its rites and prayers. (p. 118)

Here is the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on the same topic.