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Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

The Prayer Vigil for the Pope

Damian Thompson reports on the sabotage of the September 18 prayer Vigil for the Pope on his visit to the UK will consist mostly of pseudo-folk music from the 1970s and 80s. The detailed program is listed here, but what I really do not understand is why it is necessary to trot out huge forces of instruments and singers for such a thing.

This is mostly unison music that most Catholics could rattle off in their sleep. It isn’t really choral music at all. It’s just a series of small tunes, best performed with a guitar, sitting on a stone by the fireside at a youth encounter thirty years ago.

Talk about over-egging the pudding: “The choir will consist of 160 singers from nearly all the dioceses in England and Wales. Together with 50 singers and 50 musicians from the New English Orchestra, you will provide the majority of the accompaniment to the Vigil. You will also be on stage (under cover should it rain) and in close proximity to the Holy Father. It should be an experience to cherish for many years.”

Oh, there is one grand piece: Hallelujah Chorus by Handel. This is also something that I do not understand. There are many good things to say about this piece and they would all be easier to say if this piece hadn’t become the world’s most notorious musical cliche, second only to the opening notes of Beethoven’s 5th.

But even if we consider the intended purpose of the piece, it is a composition for religious theater, by a Protestant for Protestants. This doesn’t mean that it is bad, or something that should be banned from Catholic circles, but there is a downside for any community that cannot define itself with its own magnificent forms of cultural expression but instead relies on rehashing other people’s traditions. It is not necessary to make Handel central when you have a Catholic musical tradition inclusive of Tallis and Byrd.

I have detected a trend for Catholic gatherings of this sort to use the Hallelujah Chorus as a signaling device, as if you suggest “Lest you think that we only sing small ditties about journeys of love, here’s a big classical piece just to show you what we could do if we wanted to.”

Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

Is the Copyright/Royalty Regime Starting to Crack?

A remarkable and telling story just now appeared on NCR: US Bishops, Biblical Association in Dispute Over Royalties. It seems that the US Conference of Catholic Bishops has stopped paying the Association its traditional 25 percent share of royalties that the U.S. Bishops get from the New American Bible, which is at once the most copyright protected and widely criticized translations in existence.

I’m most interested in the actual reported figures of what the U.S. Bishops actually receive in royalties from the NAB and other publications. Mary Sperry actually spells it out: “the budgeted net royalties of the bishops’ conference over the past five years have been $1.38 million in 2006, $1.5 million in 2007 and 2008, $1.17 million in 2009 and $875,000 in the current calendar year.”

Two points: the obvious decline in payments and, most strikingly, the relatively small amount of money we are talking about here, especially when we consider the vast distribution of the NAB and the unfathomably high moral costs associated with restricting access to the sacred scriptures.

The NCR story is packed with weeping about those students who are being denied money for archeological digs, the journals that are hurting for funds, and the like. All of this is a given: everyone wants more money rather than less. What the story never mentions is where this money is coming from to begin with. In the end, it all comes from the pockets of Catholics in the pews, who are being taxed to read, listen to, and learn from the Word of God. There is something very wrong here. These institutions all need to ween themselves from attachment to money from this source.

Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

Ego Flos Campi

Many people were taken with the post from Stile Antico, but I failed to identify the piece. It is Ego Flos Campi, for 7 voices, by Jacobus Clemens non Papa. It is on CPDL.

Ego flos campi et lilium convallium.
Sicut lilium inter spinas sic amica mea inter filias.
Fons hortorum et puteus aquarum viventium
quae fluunt impetu de Libano.

[Bride:] I am the flower of the field and the lily of the valleys.
[Bridegroom:] As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.
The fountain of gardens: a well of living waters,
Which run with a strong stream from Lebanon.

Posted on by Adam Bartlett

New Beginnings

This is the time of year where music directors and church musicians are returning home from summer conferences, colloquia, seminars, retreats, possibly trips abroad, or maybe just summer vacations. Over the next few weeks we are planning out the year that lies ahead, recruiting choir members, choosing repertoire, organizing and preparing ourselves for the exhausting stretch of rehearsals and liturgies, especially the privileged seasons that will be here before we know it. Although this time of year is comparatively very slow, it brings with it a certain anxiety because we know that our strategizing and big-picture thinking now may very well determine the course of the coming year.

If your parish is like mine, you might be considering what subtle or possibly profound additions, subtractions, or adjustments you can make that will help steer your parish toward the sacred and more closely toward the musical and liturgical ideals that are given to us by the Church. This might be the creation of a schola that begins to explore the Church’s musical treasures, an implementation of the basic Gregorian ordinary, more singing on the part of the priest and the congregation in dialogue with him, a weeding out of problematic repertoire, it surely involves a thorough agenda of catechesis, and probably also of continued personal study.

And it also is likely to involve some sort of introduction of your parish to the proper of the Mass–perhaps specifically the processional antiphons which form an integral part of the liturgy and which are ideally supposed to be sung at the Entrance, Offertory and Communion.

At this point in history the desire to begin singing the proper chants, or at least the Introit and Communion, presents some very interesting challenges. There are several resources that are now available, all of varying degrees of difficulty, and many if not most of them available to you freely. Of course there is the Graduale Romanum, the Roman Rite’s book for the choir, there are Rossini propers (very popular before Vatican II), there are simpler chants of the Graduale Simplex, there are the polyphonic and choral propers found at CPDL, there are collections of English chant like Bruce Ford’s The American Gradual, the Palmer-Burgess Gradual, The Anglican Use Gradual, Fr. Samuel Weber’s work, Fr. Columba Kelly’s work, the Simple Choral Gradual, The Arbogast collection, Tietze’s Hymn Introits for the Church Year, there are 101 different ways to sing antiphons to psalm tones, falsi bordoni, Anglican chant, you can write your own settings, there even funky collections from publishers like the Liturgical Press (if you want to go there).

I’m sure that I’m missing several different methods of singing the propers in this list. But the list will continue to grow with projects like the the Graduale Parvum, the St. Meinrad Gradual, the St. Louis Gradual, the Mundelein Gradual, and surely many more that will surface in the coming years.

That many of these collections are free for parishes to use is fantastic and this big disorganized mess of options for the singing of the propers is indeed a very good problem to have! But there is an undoubted trepidation and anxiety that overcomes the parish music director, volunteer schola director, underpaid organist, campus ministry director, or pastor who begins to browse through these options with limited time, an uncertainty about what he or she should really do, and an impending “season kick-off” just a few weeks away.

Depending on the resource or resources that you choose, there are the challenges of sometimes adding psalm verses, of copy and pasting antiphons out of books into usable resources, of adding translations, of doing musical typesetting, of creating worship aids, of substituting a setting when others seem inappropriate. And you need to create a strategy, and layout a game plan for providing these resources for your musicians every week, teaching them how to sing them, all the while fending off angry letters and offensive outbursts from choir members who can’t understand why we can’t sing On Eagles Wings anymore. And there is the possibility that your choice in strategy ended up being the wrong one and you have to shift strategy mid-stream.

You may have to introduce your singers to new notational styles, there may be a style of language in the musical setting that is difficult for your parish to handle at the moment, you might end up biting off more than you can chew and end up waxing an Introit one Sunday morning, furthering your own frustration and the confidence of your singers and congregation. These potential situations are can drive a young and enthusiastic music director crazy (and I do speak from experience!) and missteps in strategy on the path to sacred and normative liturgy can seriously hinder or altogether stop progress.

It is certainly much easier to choose four familiar hymns or songs from the Music Issue or the Gather book and call it a day, and this is surely what many people who really want to sing the Mass end up doing because the whole world of the propers right now is a sort of huge disorganized mess. People like myself can get by just fine, but we are very good with computers, are very web savvy, and have an enthusiasm about the propers which compels us through grueling hours of sleepless nights of preparing organized and useable resources for our choirs.

Perhaps I am the only person who experiences these anxieties, I don’t know. I would appreciate hearing feedback from others who deal with similar situations in the comment box!

This post is titled “New Beginnings” and there was a reason for that–there is another “beginning” that is approaching us, and it is a little more than a year away, and this is the implementation of the new English translation of the Roman Missal. This means that not only congregational responses, collects and the Eucharistic prayer will be changing, but also the Ordinary of the Mass, the translations of the antiphons that are found in the Missal (for those who sing these antiphons in lieu of the differing Graduale antiphons), and the official translation of the psalms will also be changing (the Revised Grail Psalter). The good news for some is that “alius cantus aptus” (another suitable song) saves the day in regard to “official translations”, but many do see the great value in singing “official” and “approved” translations where possible. This certainly applies to the texts of the Missal, the Lectionary (Responsorial Psalm and Gospel Verse), and to the psalm verses for the processional propers.

So some people may be in a situation where they have only begun to introduce propers, or they would like to begin to do so throughout the coming year, but they are frustrated to discover that all of their labors in crafting a suitable resource for the current needs of their parish will be superseded by new text translations, new psalm translations, and new musical settings in about a years time. I know of many who are putting off the introduction of propers into their parishes until the safe arrival of the new translation for these and other reasons. This seems to be a very sad reality, but for many it is the reality.

What’s the answer, we might ask? Well, conventional wisdom might tell us that in a few years when the new translations stabilize we will probably have about 10 or more new hard bound books to choose from that offer a “complete” resource. The problem that arises, though, is that one might commit to a particular collection, but then find themselves locked into it because of their investment, and they are not able to introduce more sophisticated, or varied settings of the propers, “climbing the ladder toward the Graduale Romanum” so to speak, without having 3 or 4 books in the hand of each singer. Making copies or printing off varied settings might lead some to a certain case of “music paper madness“.

As a solution, many have discussed ways of organizing the existing online resources in some kind of website or database, but much of what has happened so far is a small index of links and the situation is not much improved.

Well, (and I do have a point here) I am glad to say that a group of people who see the same need and have diverse solutions to the problem, and the many challenges encountered in the current liturgical project have come together and are coming together and are joining forces to create a solution that is greater than the sum of its parts, and it is being called the Sacred Music Project.

Most of what the Sacred Music Project actually is exists currently only in the theoretical realm–in conversations between like minds. A very simple website does exist, but it is essentially a means of making the English chant work of Fr. Columba Kelly, OSB, available to the world. Fr. Kelly has encouraged the project on and remains committed to it with his existing and forthcoming English chant compositions. A professional computer scientist has tackled the question of how to make sacred music actually work in the digital age and is now developing the first stage of a custom web application that will become a “complete parish resource” of sacred music materials, published in the Creative Commons or Public Domain, of instructional materials that assist people in using the resources, in catechetical resources that invite parish musicians into the Spirit of the Liturgy, of recordings and demonstrations that help train musicians in singing a repertoire that may be largely unfamiliar to them.

So the Sacred Music Project is essentially seeking to harness the cumulative efforts of the many who have advanced the cause of sacred music and is working to help it make sense in the world of Web 2.0, of social networking. This may seem all very esoteric, and maybe it is, but we really think that we have something substantial here, and we think that it can easily and effortlessly put truly sacred and liturgical music in the hands, on the music stands (and on the iPhones and iPads) of average parish musicians and can offer them a path toward the sacred and toward the Church’s musical treasures and normative musical practices.

We also have prolific typesetters, designers, composers, scholars, theologians, and visionary thinkers on board and beginning to work together. The results of this sort of collaboration could be great indeed.

We are indeed on the cusp of many new beginnings and it is all very exciting.

If you would like to hear more please stay tuned for more Chant Café posts on the Sacred Music Project, visit the SMP Blog for more info and future updates, or contact me if you would like to know more or if you would like to get involved in some way.

Maybe we can help promote an “authentic updating of sacred music according to the great lineage of the past”, per Pope Benedict’s request, while we’re at it. Let’s see!

Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

Why ICEL Needs To Put Its Texts Into the Commons

I’ve written uncountable numbers of words scolding ICEL for keeping its texts proprietary and charging for access – on grounds that this is a practice contrary to the whole history of Christianity. Even before Christianity, Judaism taught that the teaching of the Torah and the knowledge of the rabbis was not a commodity to be bought and sold. They could charge for the time, for the room in which they teach, and the books that contained the teaching, but the knowledge itself could not be commodified or limited.

“ALL you that thirst, come to the waters, and you that have no money make hast, buy, and eat; come ye, buy wine and milk without money and without any price.” Isaiah 55:1

The Christian ideal of the same impulse is embodied in the prohibition against “simony” – a sin named for Simon Magus (Acts 8:18-24) who offered disciples money in exchange for the laying on of hands. Peter said to Simon: “Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money.”

But enough with the condemnations and lectures. I would like to make positive case for something wonderful and easy that ICEL could do right now. It could post a single note on its website that said: “All texts bearing an ICEL copyright may be distributed, copied, transmitted, or recorded, provided ICEL is acknowledged as the source.” Over time, the front matter of all ninety-six books could be customized with this announcement on the next printing, but, for now, the digital announcement would be enough.

ICEL could formalize this announcement with a legal stamp of a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, which is nothing other than a means for getting around certain legal contingencies on texts. The plainly worded announcement would do the same work. The point is to put the texts into the commons where they belong and where they would be were it not for modern legislation that artificially restricts the use of texts.

How could ICEL do this? It is just a matter of doing it. There is nothing more to do. ICEL owns the texts and can control them completely. It is as simple as that. It is a small step with enormous consequences.

For starters, the outpouring of joy across the entire world would be spectacular to behold. It would be one of the largest jail breaks in the history of Christendom, all this wonderful books set free at last, just as the teachings and sermons and liturgical books of all ages were free from restrictions on their distribution.

For decades, ICEL has been the subject of decades of derision and beating, and now with the new texts on the way, this problem has intensified. All of this would change instantly. The global sense of elation would be palpable. The world press would take notice. The New York Times would sing the praises of ICEL. The point of Christian generosity and charity would be undeniable. There isn’t a soul who wouldn’t praise ICEL for having done the right thing. It would be a bright day in the history of the faith.

In light of this, ICEL should put up a banner on its site that says: “If you support our efforts to evangelize the world with these free resources, please consider a contribution.” I would certainly dig as deep as I could. So would thousands, even millions of others. The gratitude would translate into vast financial contributions that I would expect would far exceed the amount that ICEL currently receives in royalties. Even better, this money would be given voluntarily, not extracted by force. The ICEL staff would feel better about itself and be flush with new resources to do its work.

What happens next? That’s when the world community of English-speaking Catholics gets to work. Imagine of blizzard of fantastic iPhone apps that contain the Rite of Baptism for Children, The Book of Blessings, The Book of Prayers, The Code of Canon Law, The Order of Christian Funerals, and the entire Roman Missal, right there in the palm of your hand. No more lugging around heavy books (though anyone would be free to do so). No more being stuck without the right blessing at your fingertips.

What would ICEL have to do to develop these? Nothing. They would all be developed within a matter of weeks and months, on the initiative of people like me and thousands of others.

Every single one of the texts would be scanned and put online, some low quality but many high quality, perfect for printing at a moment’s notice. These texts would appear on uncountable numbers of websites. They would be multiplied again and again and again without limit.

There would be Kindle editions and iPad editions and editions for every epub that is around. Publications that routinely pirate these texts without payment – you know who you are – would no longer have to fly under the radar screen or fear the copyright police. They could go about their missionary work with their heads held high.

Monasteries, convents, and parishes could all freely record their liturgical services and post them on youtube without having a sense that they are doing something wrong. They could sell CDs and custom missals to raise money for themselves.

The new missal, when it appears, would come in a huge range of editions. Some would be heavily bound with the most expensive leather and beautiful medieval stylings. Other editions would come in small paperback editions that you can carry in your pocket, and wouldn’t that be glorious to have an edition that every single Catholic could afford to carry (imagine a price of, say, $7)? Talk about evangelization!

The Bishops and ICEL are right now extremely concerned about catechesis on the new missal. Well, stop worrying about it. Making the texts part of the commons will allow all the creative energies of all Catholics to put to use in the cause of education. Nothing educates like the text itself, and so long as the text lives in copyright prison, there will be problems. Why limit the Gospel? Free it completely and 90% of the work is already done for you. ICEL has limited resources, so why not call upon the vast energies out there just waiting for a chance to help?

The next stage will be spin off publications. There will be manuals, hymnbooks, songbooks, children’s books, commentaries, reference sets, dictionaries, concordances, searchable files, illustrated books, and many other media types that no one has yet thought of. There will be audio books and instructional DVDs and CDs, as well as downloadable MP3s. Do you know of priests who have trouble singing the whole Mass? Well, this is an easy thing to correct if anyone can make a demo file and distribute it without paying for the privilege. Keep in mind that none of this can be done now, at least not legally, without jumping through hoops and paying ICEL. This is why it is not being done now!

Why not harness all of these energies on behalf of the Catholic liturgical project? ICEL needs help. It cannot be singularly charged with the whole burden. It cannot expect only four publishers who know the ropes to do the bulk of the work here. It is a very simple matter of freeing the texts that would make the difference. In other words, all of ICEL’s texts would take on the same precise status as all Christian texts have had from the first to the late nineteenth century when copyright enforcement first became global and some Christians wrongly took the bait and deliberately set out to limit their influence.

To be sure, many Christian texts are part of the commons already. The old Latin Missal is an example. No one has to pay anyone to publish that text. The same is true with Gregorian chant from all ages. The same is true of the Douay-Rheims Bible and hundreds of other translations that are in public domain now.

Take a close look here: all of these source texts are flourishing in every way right now! I can call take out my phone and look at the completely music in the old rite for the whole of today’s services, right now, and it takes about two seconds. I cannot do this with all of the texts that are under conventional copyright. There is a reason for this.

The ICEL decision would inspire other publishers too and perhaps put an end to the copyright arms race that is killing the life of the liturgical text. GIA might move to do the same with the Grail Psalter. The same could happen with the NAB translation of the Bible. Composers might even follow in line. The entire house of copyright cards could fall, and what a blessing that would be! But it all must start with ICEL.

So a plea to ICEL: thousands of others like me want to be involved. We want to help. We want to spread the Good News. We want to work as messengers for Catholic liturgy. Please allow us to do so in every possible way. It is just a matter of posting a simple sentence.

St. Augustine once gave a homily about the divine qualities of the word and its capacity for being shared. He pointed out that he need not parse out his words carefully for fear of losing them to the hearer, but rather that the hearer can take all of his words even as he can retain them. He made an analogy here to the way the Father and the Son can have the same thoughts and the same words without the one displacing the other. Herein lies the mystery and glory of the message, the magnificence of the idea and its infinite reproducability. It was precisely the capacity of words to be spread, and for truth to be held by an unlimited number of people, that inspired the spreading of Christianity all over the world.

Let’s recall that power, that glory, and make it happen again.

Posted on by Jeffrey Tucker

My favorite video ever!

Stile Antico illustrates that there is no master and no slave in polyphonic music, taking this so far as to eliminate any evidence of a director, creating something like a perfect small society.