Now I Walk In Beauty

We are delighted to post Jeffrey Morse's review of the CMAA's latest publication, Now I Walk In Beauty by Wilko Brouwers. To purchase this new book, please visit the CMAA Shop.

Now I Walk In Beauty: 100 Songs and Melodies for School and Choir Collected and edited by Wilko Brouwers, published by The Church Music Association of America, 2017

The appearance of any new material for the Ward Method is newsworthy, and this latest songbook from Wilko Brouwers, coming nearly 40 years after the last revision of the Ward Method books by by Dr. Theodore Marier, is certainly no exception and breathes an invigorating freshness into a musical method that has been long awaited. The Ward Method, created by Justine Bayard Ward (1879-1975), is a method for the teaching of music to children through singing as both “method and goal” as Brouwers points out in his introduction, using the well known rhythmic gestures of the method which interiorize in the child the “arsis” and “thesis” of the melodic line. These rhythmic gestures help the child to, as Brouwers writes, “experience the inner development within one tone toward the next tone, or within one group of tones toward the next group”. The Ward Method also uses a rather unique method of teaching solfeggio, built upon the previous work of Fr. Thomas Shields, Fr. John B. Young, S.J., and surprisingly, Jean- Jacques Rousseau, the 18th century French philosopher. The Ward Method, starting in the earliest grades, as a twenty minute class, five days a week, eventually leads the child to a mastery of both Gregorian Chant and its notation and to modern notation and singing, with the ability to easily sight-sing in either notation. It also leads to a facility in rhythmic and melodic dictation, improvisation, and to creating a beautiful and well-rounded tone in singing.

Despite its proven success, and arguably, its superiority over other methods like Orff and Kodaly, its popularity and influence started to wane in the years after the Second Vatican Council, with most of the international Ward Centers closing: Cambridge (U.K.), Paris, New Zealand, Belgium, and others. The abandonment of Gregorian Chant and the shrinking number of school sisters in the wake of the Council, seemed to signal the end of this amazing and proven method of teaching music. The Ward Method books were revised after the death of Justine Ward, and have been kept in print by the Catholic University of America Press, and classes in the method are still offered there as well as at the University of Northern Colorado. In the last number of years there has been a revival of interest in the Ward Method, perhaps because of the renewed interest in Gregorian Chant and the growing homeschooling movement, not to mention in various schools where it is also used.

Now I Walk in Beauty: 100 Songs and Melodies for School and Choir, has arrived at just the right time. While hymn books and song books have always been part of the pedagogy of the Ward Method, many of them, if not most, are now out of print, available only rarely in used book shops. Now I Walk in Beauty, fills a void as a new Ward songbook, with songs both sacred and secular, reflecting the way the method has always taught music. The collection is comprehensive, and comprises folk songs (e.g. Arkansas Traveller, The Skye Boat Song, Little Red Bird), Sacred Hymns, both Latin and English (e.g. Puer Nobis Nascitur, Cor Jesus, Eternal Father, O God Our Help in Ages Past) as well as folk songs in other languages. It also includes music for the main liturgical season of the year: Advent, Christmas, Easter etc. The pieces in this book are delightful, and could easily be used at Mass or other services, at a school choir concert, or just for for the fun of singing. The collection of 100 songs and melodies starts with the simplest two-note melody and the pieces then progress in difficulty until number 100: “Stella Splendens”, a brilliant little two-part medieval piece from the 14th century Liber Vermell. It is clear that Wilko Brouwers has gone to great trouble to search out some of the most beautiful music to include in this collection; some things are familiar, but many others more obscure and rare, and not often found in collections of music, if at all.

The collection is most obviously “Ward” in the first 40 songs: numbers are used for the solfeggio names (e.g. 1=“Doh”, 2=“Re”, 3=“Fa”, etc.), partial staves of one, two or three lines are used, the “Doh” clef is used on the modern staff, and the “rhythmic waves” are included, showing arsis and thesis. The other 60 songs are presented primarily without any obvious Ward Method devices, weaning the student from some of the supports of earlier pedagogy, however one could still have the singers use solfeggio to discover the melody. Indeed this would be expected in the method, mentally placing the “doh” clef on “G” when the key signature has one sharp, for example, or perhaps drawing in with pencil the arsis and thesis. This said, a thorough knowledge of the Ward Method, or even a cursory knowledge is certainly not needed to use this book in your school or church choir, or in teaching music at home. Despite its value to Ward teachers and students, there is no reason why this splendid volume shouldn't be used by all in the musical education of children. The musical levels covered in this collection are from the very beginning of musical education through the students ability to solfege major scale melodies and minor ones (based on “LA”). The inspiring music in this collection will doubtless leave the student wanting to discover even more.

Included in this collection are end-notes on nearly every piece, giving provenance and history as well as interesting facts, as well as a separate section entitled “What’s New in Each Melody”, giving pedagogical insights for each melody (suggested pitch, intonation/solfeggio, rhythmic gestures and hints about notation used). This is a fabulous collection, certainly one to thrill the hearts of Ward teachers and their students, coming from one of the great teachers of the Ward Method. This new book, it is hoped, will certainly do much to excite interest in the method amongst those who are not familiar with it, and one can only hope that this is only the beginning of a succession of new materials to help revitalize this amazing teaching method, and fulfil the hope that ‘all might sing’.

Jeffrey Morse

Jeffrey Morse Studied Gregorian Chant and Ward Method with Dr Mary Berry (Mother Thomas More, CRSA), and was a Ward Method student of Dr Alise Brown at the University of Northern Colorado, and has been regularly a member of the faculty of the CMAA

St Charlemagne and the Antichrist

A concert in London by the Schola Gregoriana, founded by the late Dr Mary Berry. More information available here: www.scholagregoriana.org

JT on: The Truth about Veni, Veni, Emmanuel

During Advent, people like to sing the traditional hymn O Come, O Come, Emmanuel. Sometimes, a smarty comes along to point out that this is actually not a deeply traditional song but one that dates only to the 19th century. It follows that what we often think of as traditional is really modern. We are all supposed to feel properly demoralized by this scientific point.

Well, suffer at the hands of the pedant no more! In fact, the tune was discovered in a 15th-century processionale, and a funeral responsory in particular. Here is Mary Berry on the topic, from an introduction to an edition of Veni:

The well-known Advent hymn O Come, O Come, Emmanuel belongs to the ever-growing repertoire of popular hymns known, loved, and sung all over the English-speaking world. It made its first appearance as far back as 1854, in Part II of the Hymnal Noted, edited by Thomas Helmore. The English words are based on a free Latin paraphrase of the great O Antiphons, which are sung with the Magnificat at Vespers on the days leading up to Christmas Eve. These antiphons themselves came into existence at least as early as the eighth century. The paraphrase can he traced back to the seventh edition of the Psalteriolum Cantionum Catholicarum, published in Cologne in 1710. The present splendid English translation was made by Thomas Alexander Lacey (1853-1931) for the English Hymna1 (1906), of which he was joint editor.

The familiar melody was said by Thomas Helmore to have been "copied by the late J. M. Neale from a French Missal" which he located “in the National Library, Lisbon." But in a letter to the press in 1909, H. Jenner claimed that his father, Bishop Jenner, had copied both the tune and the words in Lisbon in 1853. All attempts to track it down, however, failed: neither a "French Missal," nor indeed any service-book from Lisbon could be produced to justify either claim. The compilers of the 1909 historical edition of Hymns Ancient and Modern drew a complete blank, and, more recently, one scholar even made the ingenious suggestion that Thomas Helmore had perhaps composed the tune himself, coyly hiding his identity behind the pretence that it was an ancient tune gleaned from a Continental source.

I was able, however, in 1966, to vindicate his honor. My attention had been drawn to a small fifteenth century processional in the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale. It was Franciscan in origin and probably intended far the use of nuns rather than friars. Turning the pages I discovered, on folio 89v ff, a number of troped verses for the funeral responsory Libera me in the form of a litany, beginning with the words "Bone iesu, dulcis cunctis.” The melody of these tropes was none other than the tune of O come, O come Emmanuel. It appeared in square notation on the left-hand page, and on the opposite page there was a second part that fitted exactly, like a mirror-image, in note-against-note harmony with the hymn-tune. The book would thus have been shared by two sisters, each singing her own part as they processed.

So it would seem that this great Advent hymn-tune was not, in the first instance, associated with Advent at all, but with a funeral litany of the saints in verse, interspersed between the sections of a well-known responsory. Perhaps it is a measure of Helmore's genius that he detected in this melody an appropriate Advent sound as well, one which conveys an unmistakable sense of solemn expectancy, not only for the Nativity of Christ, but also for his Second Coming as judge and as savior. Helmore was shrewd enough, also, to have been aware that an indubitable link exists between the theology of Advent and a procession marking the passage from death to eternal life.

JT on: Mary Berry's "Plainchant for Everyone"

For those of us who never had the chance to meet Mary Berry, who died only recently after a lifetime of dedication to sacred music, her book Plainchant for Everyone provides an excellent window into her teaching style and personality. We have here the great enthusiasm for her subject and a warm wit at work, alongside a passion for getting the point across. She was also an excellent writer and pedagogue.

While this volume is not something you are likely to run across at Catholic bookstores, and I’m not sure that I even knew about it until recently, it is in fact available from GIA, even if the online record contains not one word of description about what it is. GIA has given no one any good reason to buy this at all! So maybe this blogpost will help.

Published in 1979, it is only 56 pages and that includes a nice bibliography. (How wonderful it would be to see this online! I’ve written already in the hopes of seeing that happen.)

She begins with the thing you really want to know.

What is this thing called ‘Plainsong’? One often also hears it called ‘Plainchant’, or ‘Gregorian Chant’, or simply ‘The Chant’. To put it in a nutshell, the chant is the unique music of Western Christianity and our closet living link with the Church of the first centuries. It has also been said, with truth, to lie ‘at the foundation of all our Western music.’

See what I mean about a fast start? There is nothing fussy or pompous here. The evangelist is speaking. She continues:

The chant grew originally out of the music of the Jewish ritual. Te first Christians were themselves Jews and they brought into their worship the ancient Jewish custom of chanting aloud the books of the Bible. The melodies they used brought out the meaning of the words, made the text audible to a large gathering of people, and added beauty and dignity to the ready. In particular, the chanting of the psalms was to become the first basis for all future Christian workshop. Even today, the melodies used for chanting the psalms – the eight Gregorian Tones (or ‘tunes’) -- have their recognizable counterparts in Jewish practice.

By the way, I’ve heard this view criticized as untrue – and actually the claim that this is not the case survives in the wikipedia entry on chant. But if you follow the footnotes to Apel and beyond what you find is a series of qualifications concerning the use of song in Jewish worship that do not in fact refute the main claim that chant has its ancestry in Jewish practice. In other words, what Berry says here was conventional wisdom in 1979 and later revised but, so far as I can tell, the old conventional wisdom here is actually untouched, and I suspect that she knew this. This is only one example of many in which her simple prose is actually masking vast scholarship and knowledge.

Next she moves to dating the chants we sing:

Most of the great masterpieces of the chant repertoire as we have it today were composed well before the ninth century, the period of richest creative activity being from about the fifth or sixth century to the eight century. Compositions dating from this period are said to belong to the ‘Gold Age’ of the chant, because by this time the chant of the Western Church had developed into a highly elaborate and complete art in its own right.

Now, here again, we have a careful use of words that gives us the “bottom line” of vast amounts of scholarship. Notice that she says “were composed well before….” rather than attempting to pin down a precise date. She learned through her studies that the manuscripts we have can be misleading because the music itself can far predate the actual writing down of the chant. The careful scholar is at work here while speaking to the regular person.

She continues to describe the types of chants, where you can hear chant, whether chant can be in English, and some notes on pronunciation. From here she plunges right into how to read the notes, and this section is particularly strong. I like the way she speaks so plainly to the issue of how to know what pitch to start on: “look at the highest note and the lowest note of your piece and decide whether these two notes can be sung most comfortably by your choir so that the piece is neither too high nor too low.”

Clarity that will save many errors!

She then explains the role of the clef signs, the relationship between half steps and whole steps, the note names, and then the church modes – again, her method here reflects many years of experience in teaching scholas and seeing what kind of language works to impart the message.

Even in the thicket of discussion of modes and notes, the warmth of her voice is also present. See how she discusses Psalms:

Psalmody is at the very heart of the chant, so do try to get lots of practice in singing the psalms. There is one psalm-tone for each mode, and each tone has one simple form and several more elaborate forms. There is generally a choice of final cadences, or endings (sometimes also called ‘differences’), but the books always tell you clearly which one to use.

This passage really made me laugh because it is clear that she knows precisely what can confuse the student:

Don’t be alarmed by such an array of final cadences! It’s really much simpler than it looks.

She provides a great set of rules of psalm singing. For example: “In ordinary psalms the intonation is only used for the first verse, all the remaining verses starting on the reciting note.” “In the New Testament canticles (Magnificat, Nunc Dimittis, Benedictus) the intonation is used for every verse, unless (as in the Nunc Dimittis) some of the verses are so short as to make this impossible.”

Did you know this? Well, in today’s environment, it is very difficult to discover such information, and the author here knew this so she was careful to sift through so much information to tell the singer precisely the information that will make the singing right.

I was really excited to see here section on a strategy for introducing chant into a parish. She recommends against starting with a Credo or Gloria “as this will discourage by its length.” Instead she recommends an “easy, straightforward Kyrie, Sanctus, or Agnus Dei,” or a chant hymn such as Tantum ergo. It is also interesting to see how she recommends a “five-minute run-through with the congregation before the service begins; it is quite remarkable what a lot can be learnt.”

Maybe you can already see what a little treasure Mary Berry left for us with this little book. She is imparting here many years of experience and all her acquired knowledge to help parishes in our own time embrace the chant tradition. To that end, the book is supremely practical while filled with vast wisdom. Mostly, it makes me personally happen to feel as if I’m getting to know her teaching personality and her enthusiasm even though I never met her.

Note too the year it was published: 1979, what was clearly the depths in terms of chant practice in liturgy. Her heart must have been broken to see what happened, and yet it doesn't show here. She is optimistic and thrilled that you are interested. From what I hear, this spirit defined her life.

Funeral Arrangements for Dr. Mary Berry

Friday 9th May, 7 pm
Our Lady and the English Martyrs, Cambridge
Vespers of the Dead (usus antiquior)

Saturday 10th May, 11 am
Our Lady and the English Martyrs, Cambridge
Pontifical Requiem Mass (novus ordo), celebrated by the Most Rev. Mario Conti, Archbishop of Glasgow.

Sunday 11th May, 6 pm
St Birinus, Dorchester-on-Thames:
Vespers of the Dead (usus antiquior)

Monday 12th May, 2 pm
Dorchester Abbey, Dorchester-on-Thames:
Requiem Mass and Burial (usus antiquior)

Jeffrey Tucker on: A Hero of the Century

The day that Mary Berry died was the day that I got to know her through her disciplines around the world. They came from all corners of the earth to blogs, forums, comment boxes, and sent articles and praise in every which way. It became clear that everyone who loves Catholic liturgy and Catholic art is deeply in her debt.

She was a nun and a don of Cambridge University, born of an academic family on the Feast of the Holy Apostles in 1917 and died on the Feast of the Ascension in 2008. She was a musicologist whose contributions exhibited a wonderful scientific curiosity, but, based on the outpouring after her death, it is clear that there was much more to this woman than science. Working nearly alone, she sustained the interest in Gregorian chant after the postconciliar meltdown. Actually, she did more than sustain it. She inspired many people to the point that they took up her cause in academia and in parishes all over the English-speaking world.

As example here, I had a nice conversation with Jeffrey Morse, who is the director of music at St. Stephen the First Martyr Parish in Sacramento, California. Here is a parish that is wholly and exclusively committed the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite. There are some 800 families that attend, and Morse works with many choirs to provide Gregorian propers at the Masses, as well as sacred polyphony. He directs a children's choir that learns how to read and sing chant—a choir filled with the future directors and singers in our own parishes. His is a fully funded professional position. Here we see the highest of the Catholic musical arts flourish in their fullest form – secure, beautiful, and building for the future.

And why? Because of Mary Berry. When Morse was 17, he called Monsignor Richard Schuler at St. Agnes in Minnesota and asked where he could go to study Gregorian chant. Nowhere in the United States, he replied. You must go to Cambridge to study with Mary Berry. So he did. And there he learned to master the art. She shared her knowledge and her gifts. And today all these live in this parish. So it is in Australia and all over the United Kingdom. There are Mary Berry students and followers who caught that fiery love for chant from her. So too in Austria, Germany, Italy, and France. Her followers seem to be everywhere and they all credit her.

Can one person make a difference? My goodness, yes. And consider the times. Think of the intellectuals, musicians, priests, and liturgists who had obtain mastery over their craft in the late 1950s, working diligently and productively to improve the Church and its worship. Think of the institutions they were building and the great things they were achieving for the glory of God. Now imagine these same people ten to fifteen years later in the turbulent times following the Second Vatican Council, and put yourself in their place. If you have ever spoken to one of these people, you have to marvel at what they saw, which was essentially this: their whole world was swept away, seemingly over night, buffeted and finally wrecked by the crazy confusions and disastrous fashions of the day, which led to an abandonment of all that was revered as holy and true in the past.

We think we have it hard now. Imagine having lived through it all. Would you despair or have hope that truth will eventually prevail? Would you fight or relent? How would your decision work out in practice: with patience and prayer or anger and protest? And how lonely might you have been? Would you find yourself an outcast among your peers and possibly then decide to change directions along with everyone else? Or would you have been steadfast and continue to build in every way you could? These are extremely difficult questions and I'm only happy to not face them with the severity that this generation faced them. But Mary Berry faced them with great courage and hope. It's almost as if all the experiences of her life led her to do this.

Following her initial schooling at Cambridge, she went to study music in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, who was perhaps the most influential music pedagogue and conductor of the 20th century, having taught Copland, Piston, and Virgil Thomson. Berry converted to Catholicism in 1938. When war broke out, she was a nurse with the Red Cross and joined the Canonesses Regular of St. Augustine of the Congregation of Notre-Dame in Belgium. She and the sisters fled to Paris and then to Portugal. After the war she was sent to Rome to teach music and also to help manage a typhoid epidemic. It was in this period that she studied more deeply at the Gregorian Institute in Paris.

After returning to England, she completed her PhD in music in 1968, with a dissertation on the relationship between chant and polyphony in the middle ages. And it was at this point that her entire world changed. The interest in chant that she had loved came to an end. And with only a few others such as an aging Justine Ward and Theodore Marier in the United States she set out to keep the art alive for another generation. She saw that there was continuing interest in chant as pure music and assisted in placing its performance in music festivals and continued to write and teach about its use in liturgy. She founded the professional Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge, an ensemble that still sets the highest standards of performance.

In 2000 she was awarded the Papal Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice for her work. A few months ago, a colleague wrote and suggested that she be interviewed at the age of 90 and that this interview be printed in Sacred Music. It struck me as a splendid idea. But it came too late. This child of the day of the Holy Apostles was called home on the day of the Ascension. And observe what she has left behind! There are hundreds of Gregorian scholars in the United States. Around the world, they number in the thousands. She must have suspected that the postconciliar hiatus would be short, a small parenthesis in the 2000-year history of this art, and I'm only guessing that before she died she had already begun to suspect that the hiatus had ended.

One of her discoveries concerns the song we all know so well as Veni, Veni Emmanuel. Like so many others, I had always assumed that even though it sounded old, it was really a modern song, as in 19th century. She, however, discovered a 15th century edition in a French Processionale. So it turns out that Veni has a much long heritage than we knew. And this raises a very serious question about the applicability of the scientific method when it comes to dating the music of the faith. It is an obvious fallacy to date it from the earliest known physical copy. Music is not like painting; it can be and was passed on orally.

And the longer you know the chant, the more you come to understand how it is that someone like Mary Berry could so fully dedicate her life to it. Each chant of the Graduale Romanum is a masterpiece. Even the shortest communion chant achieves a miraculous integration between words and music, and quite often the singer is just struck with awe, the way we are at a Mahler symphony or a glorious cathedral. It is art that was created in this world but it is not of this world. In fact, I'm had some suspicion that though many chants are dated from the middle ages, we might find out differently in Heaven and it will be revealed to us that the essential core of what is today Gregorian chant can trace its roots to Jerusalem and even back to the earliest Church. If that is true, we might not ever discover the proof in this world. It will be revealed to us in eternity, to which the music and liturgy that Dr. Berry loved with such passion points unceasingly.

JT on: Mary Berry Obit in Times

Here it is:

Musicologist, nun and don of the University of Cambridge, Mary Berry was hugely influential in reviving Gregorian chant in Britain and abroad. Through the Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge she promoted the teaching, study and performance of Gregorian liturgical music within a 2,000-year-old tradition of Christian song and, after the sweeping changes generated by the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, she preserved the chant and kept it alive at a time when the old certainties were falling all around her.

The youngest of three sisters, Mary Berry was born into academia. Her father, Arthur Berry, was Vice-Master and Librarian at Downing College, Cambridge, while her mother, Ethel, was the daughter of a clergyman. All three girls attended the Perse School but, while Bunty and Claudie went on to Oxford, Mary chose Cambridge “because the music was better”.

After school she spent a year at the École Normale de Musique in Paris, studying under Nadia Boulanger, who inspired in her a love of early church music. Arriving at Girton as a Turle scholar in music in 1935, she was awarded the John Stuart of Rannoch scholarship in sacred music in her second year. Although brought up in the Church of England she became drawn towards Catholicism and in 1938 she was received into the Catholic Church by the Bishop of Liège before graduating with a music degree from Cambridge.

Then war broke out. When she was nursing with the Red Cross, her calling took a deeper turn. In March 1940 she joined the novitiate of the Canonesses Regular of St Augustine of the Congregation of Notre-Dame de Jupille in Belgium. This put her right in the line of the invading German Army, and two months later the novitiate was evacuated on the last train to Paris with its few possessions wrapped in scarlet blankets — “hardly the best camouflage”, as she later recalled.

Throughout this summer of danger the young nuns joined the streams of refugees trudging through France until a fellow novice, an ambassador’s daughter, arranged travel papers for Portugal and they found safe harbour in Lumiar, a suburb of Lisbon, opening two schools soon after they arrived. Here Berry lived out the war.

After the war she taught and nursed. She made her final profession in 1945, becoming Mother Thomas More in religion, before being sent to Rome to teach music and English, and take charge of an infirmary during a typhoid epidemic. She performed similar offices back in Jupille and then, while in Dijon, she was sent to Gregorian chant courses at the Institut Grégorien in Paris.

This was a turning point in her life. Returning to Cambridge in 1963 to work for a PhD in musicology under Thurston Dart, she founded centres in England and Ireland for the teaching of chant, wrote for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and in 1968 was awarded a doctorate for her thesis, “The Performance of Plainsong in the Later Middle Ages and the Sixteenth Century”. By now a fully fledged academic, she was appointed director of studies in music at Girton and, two years later, was awarded a fellowship at Newnham College, Cambridge, while also heading its music faculty.

But, meanwhile, all was not well with the Church she loved. In the surge to modernise, much had been lost: the Latin language, the liturgy, music and the chant. She felt that a tradition and culture was on the brink of destruction and what could she, a convert who had been received into that tradition, do about it?

The catalyst was not long in coming. In 1975 a colleague, Rosemary McCabe, experienced a Eureka moment which was to reconfirm the course of Mary Berry’s life. Lying in her bath one day with a copy of Early Music magazine, McCabe read it from front to back and then, springing from the bath, informed her startled colleague, “There’s nothing in it about the chant. You must do something!”

Berry often told this story of how the Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge was founded. Beaming at the assembled singers who gathered at the Schola’s singing weekends, workshops and pilgrimages, she welcomed all comers. From the Schola’s first service on Palm Sunday that year in St John’s College chapel, “our main aim was to tell people about this wonderful, virtually unknown, music”, and she did this by orchestrating medieval services, concerts and liturgical plays. She revelled in dressing up for the ancient liturgies with meticulous attention to detail and occasional wild improvisation.

As her work became known, her teaching of the chant took her all over the world — to France, Estonia, Canada, America and Australia, and places in between. Galvanised by her knowledge and encouragement, numerous local chant groups were formed, including a flourishing all-black choir from Dominica in the Windward Islands.

Devout and erudite, Berry radiated a joyful and sunny blessing, occasionally interspersed with crisp commands if singers flat-footed a wrong note. There were no concessions to ignorance — either of the chant or the liturgy — but her bubbling humour leavened long hours of choir practice. With a fund of interesting and mildly scurrilous anecdotes delivered with a twinkle in her eye, she was fortunate to attract many fine cantors to sing at festivals and record CDs on the Herald label.

The cantors of the Schola, a professional group of singers interested in Gregorian chant and early music, specialise in the reconstruction and performance of liturgy from the 10th century to modern times. Led by Berry, they were the first in the field to record a reconstruction of a complete festal service based on the tropes and organa of the Winchester Troper, and this won the Michael Beazley Medieval Recording of the Year in 1991. Their work was, and continues to be, very significant in bringing early music to a wider audience.

In 2000 she was awarded the Papal Cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice for her work with Gregorian chant, and in 2002 she was appointed CBE for her services to plainsong and Gregorian chant.

Mary Berry, CBE, musicologist and nun, was born on June 29, 1917. She died on May 1, 2008, aged 90