Chant Café

James MacMillan writes

Far from being a spent force, religion has proved to be a vibrant, animating principle in modern music and continues to promise much for the future. It could even be said that any discussion of modernity’s mainstream in music would be incomplete without a serious reflection on the spiritual values, belief and practice at work in composers’ minds.

Much more in his brilliant essay here.

One of the hidden benefits to a common orientation of priests and people towards the Lord in liturgy is that the priest is free to pray. Instead of having to compose his face for public viewing, he can be himself before His God. He can return to honesty and simplicity. He has a unique role, surely, but it is a humble role. He is not the central focus of the action, like an actor, but its true servant.

Similarly, the people of God can pray to God without meeting the eyes of the priest. They can be honestly praying the prayers to God, instead of composing themselves to be seen as respectable before the priest. The Mass is a time for honesty and clear intentions, not for show. “Your life is hidden with Christ in God.”

The priest is indeed an intermediary in the Mass, but it is “no longer I, but Christ in me.”

Although we are together, let us take our eyes off of one anothers’ eyes, and let each other pray.

Here’s an opportunity to check out:

CHANT COLLOQUIUM 2016
August 11-14, 2016
Saint Augustine’s Seminary, Toronto

The Gregorian Institute of Canada is pleased to announce its 11th Annual Colloquium, to be held at St. Augustine’s Seminary, Toronto, ON, August 11-14. Our plans include a series of practical chant workshops ranging from introductory to advanced, featuring the outstanding clinician Adam Bartlett, composer and editor of Simple English Propers (CMAA, 2011), and editor of the Lumen Christi Missal, Lumen Christi Simple Gradual, and Lumen Christi Hymnal (Illuminare Publications, 2012-2015). Active as a teacher, workshop leader and speaker, Adam has traveled widely offering catechetical and training workshops on topics of Catholic sacred music and liturgical chant.

The colloquium also includes a series of scholarly papers in honour of the late Andrew Hughes, renowned Canadian chant scholar and Professor at the University of Toronto.

In addition to the workshops and lectures, there will be daily offices and Sunday mass sung with Gregorian Chant.

The Program and Registration Form are online at www.gregorian.ca .

Many of our readers will have heard that Cardinal Sarah, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, asked yesterday for a return to a unified posture of both priest and people, turned together toward the Lord.

For too long, a misunderstanding of the need for mutual affirmation of priest and people has “closed the circle” of the liturgy, effectively leaving no place open for God in se.

The transcript should be available by next week at the Sacra Liturgia facebook site. 

Thank you, Your Eminence, for your leadership!

Passing through the beautiful city of Flagstaff, Arizona lately, I happened to attend Mass at a fairly new church dedicated to St. Francis. San Francisco de Asis was decorated in a way that was quite intriguing: with prints made of the frescoes in the upper church of St. Francis in Assisi.

I had very mixed feelings about this use of art in a liturgical space. On the one hand, just as other symbols lose their savor when imitated–sampled music, recorded bells, silk flowers–so too art that is copied is always less than the original. In this case, the setting is one of the things very far removed. Rather than a contiguous and integrated cycle, the large prints are hung on the interior walls of the church much as though it were a museum. That important sense of the authentic was missing.

On the other hand, it is such a sincere relief in the American church to find any thoughtful use of the medium of paint that my first feeling was one of joy. Moreover, the paintings themselves are beautiful, important and certainly worth copying, on an subject deeply relevant to the parish, and perhaps the early work of the important proto-Renaissance painter Giotto (although this is contested). The paintings are decidedly not icons, and while their realism is not yet fully effective, yet one can see the beginnings of geometrical shape and other marks of the humanism that would come to represent the art of Rome in the Renaissance.

In other words, the paintings are of a time and a place that truly represent the saint himself, full of freedom and vision. Although they are historical, like museum pieces, they have that originality and freshness that characterize St. Francis.

American churches are full of blank walls. What are we to do with them, particularly in this age when drawing skills are very often lacking, and a curious trade in religious cartoons is for some reason on the rise? Here is one solution that seems to work to a large degree, and perhaps to a degree impossible without the technology that in our day makes such excellent reproduction possible.