Chant Café

Well, many people have waited years for this. Kevin Allen is one of the greatest living Catholic composers. His music is as thrilling as it is pious, as passionate as it is peaceful, as ancient as it is modern. Many people heard it for the first time in the Tantum Ergo at the documentary about the Sacred Music Colloquium.

Watershed is the reason for his emergence from unjustified obscurity into the spotlight. They’ve now published a second volume of his work, Cantiones Sacrae II. You can and should get this here. Sometimes people think that the sacred music movement is all about old music; it is really about timeless music that can emerge at any point in time. This is a fantastic example.

This book contains 1. Oculi Omnium • 2. Sepulto Domino 3. Intellige Clamorem • 4. Hodie Scietis 5. Hoc Corpus • 6. Sanctificavit Moyses 7. Jerusalem Quae Aedificatur 8. Qui Meditabitur • 9. Juxta Vestibulum 10. Scapulis Suis • 11. Gustate et Videte 12. Ave Regina Caelorum • 13. Tota Pulchra Es 14. Tristis Est Anima Mea • 15. Tantum Ergo

If you are not a leader of a choir, you might just buy some copies for your parish. Give them to the director and say: here is some new music you might consider. Watch what happens.

SATB Hodie Scietis • Kevin Allen (Cantiones Sacrae II) from Corpus Christi Watershed on Vimeo.

Winfred Douglas was the brilliant musician who set the Mass ordinary to English. His editions became the standard chant for Anglicans. His book is now online. It is regrettable that the text is different enough that it cannot be used in full in Catholic parishes with the new texts.

But there are enough chants in here that are useful and essential to make this a book not to be ignored. Ideally, ordinary form parishes would rediscover, for example, the Sprinkling Rite. See page 92. Also, the Requiem chants would be fully usable in the ordinary form. In addition, it is useful to study his method of setting English to chant – a subject of perennial debate and discussion.

Ordinary of the Mass

William Renwick just dropped me a line that the first installments of the English translation of the Sarum noted Breviary are now available on-line. It is absolutely thrilling to look through this edition in English or Latin. This is truly work for the ages. He deserves every congratulations on this massive project.

In 1926, Solesmes assisted in the production of Chants Abreges, a book of simplified versions of Psalms and Alleluias plus Tracts for Lent (ordinary form musicians have probably never even heard of the Tract).

Here is the PDF and here it is in print. People are now using these the world over, ever since the CMAA made them available.

The even more rare update to this book has been discovered and is now posted. It came out in 1955. Both volumes illustrate to me just how dedicated Solesmes really was to parish-based chant performance, consistent with real-world demands.

These are not ideal obviously, but the point was to provide materials that are suitable and get us pointed in the right direction. This is the goal. It should be the goal today, in my view.

Graduels Versets Alleluia Traits

There was a famous book called Black Like Me. The author, John Howard Griffin, posed as a black man and documented the indignities to which he was subjected.

But who knows the rest of the story? A new documentary, discussed here, says that “Griffin was drawn to the Catholic faith while studying Gregorian chant at the Abbey of Saint Pierre in Solesmes, France. It was there that he began taking his first steps from agnosticism to conversion to Christianity. He entered the church in 1951.”

Griffin died in 1980 from complications of diabetes. He was just 60 years old. At the time, he had only $50 in his bank account. But as Atkinson’s documentary reveals, Griffin left an incredibly rich legacy of social activism, spiritual wisdom, and artistic achievement.