Three Nostalgia Trips: Audio Albums from 1957, 1975 (?), and 1979

It seems as if advocates of eliminating the Catholic Church’s liturgical tradition often try to explain away the surprisingly dogged adherence to older forms as a matter of “nostalgia”—even today, when the average age of many Latin Mass congregations cannot be much higher than about 18 thanks to the enormous number of babies. It is hard for them to understand that the older forms have a holy eloquence of their own, an effiacious communicative capacity, that has almost nothing to do with the age or past experiences of the ones who attend.

But one might feel a bit of genuine nostalgia looking at these three LPs that have come my way in recent times.

The first was discovered by a priest when cleaning out his parents’ house. Today there are websites on which one can practice making the responses at Mass, but back in the day, in 1957 to be precise, you could pick up an old 45 called The Mass: Serving and Responses: Latin Responses for Altar Boys and for First Level Participation in Dialogue Mass, with an imprimatur from Cardinal Stritch. Quite the time capsule of 1957.
 

The second is a rather revealing slice of history: Latin High Mass for Nostalgic Catholics, which was produced by World Library of Sacred Music in Cincinnati. There is no date, but I’m guessing, on the basis of the description on the back, that it would have come out around 1975. The cover shows scenes taken from Fr. Lasance. It features a recording of the traditional Nuptial Mass, with Casali’s Mass in G, Schubert’s Ave Maria, Franck’s Panis Angelicus, and Widor’s Toccata from the 5^th organ symphony. The celebrant is a certain Rev. Cronan Kline, OFM, and the director of the choir is, interestingly, Omar Westendorf, whose hymns show up in many a hymnal.
 

What I find especially noteworthy, and rather sad, is the justification the record offers for itself:
 

The third exhibit is something of an oddity from 1979: Lieder des Papstes Johannes Paul II in Polen. The pinkish halo surrounding the Polish pope seems already to anticipate his accelerated canonization—that seems a better interpretation than radioactivity or phosphorescence.
 

The music is all sung in Polish, of course, but the album is designed for Germans, so it offers (according to a tiny note) a word-for-word literal translation of the various folksongs and specially composed offerings for the Polish pope on his momentous return trip to his homeland, from which many date the beginning of the end of Communism in Eastern Europe.
 

 

If I were to say “Ah, those were the days!,” I would be telling a lie, since I was exactly –14, 4, and 8 years old at the time these discs were manufactured. No, they hold no nostalgic value for me, but they do prompt some thoughts. Lots of little boys are still learning and making the responses at Mass, in spite of the attempt, some twelve years after the 45’s release, to cancel out the Latin Mass forever. Second, chant, choral music, and organ music of a far higher caliber than that which is found on the Westendorf record can be heard today at actual High Masses and Solemn High Masses around the world, in spite of renewed barbarian aggression against the Latin Mass. Third, whatever one might say about John Paul II’s weaker moments, he is in fact glowing in comparison with what Providence has allowed us to suffer in the past decade.

Charles Tournemire’s L’Orgue Mystique and the Ordinary Form of the Mass

This article by Douglas O’Neill was originally published on the website Vox Humana, and is here reproduced by permission of the editors, with our thanks.

Charles Tournemire (1870-1939) completed his monumental project L’Orgue Mystique on February 5, 1932. It is unparalleled among Roman Catholic organ music; Tournemire had desired to do for the Roman Catholic Mass what J.S. Bach had done for the Lutheran Mass with his Orgelbüchlein. It is a set of 51 suites for nearly every Sunday and select feast days of the church year. Gregorian chant permeates Tournemire’s music, with motives drawn from the appointed proper chants for the day. Each suite consists of five movements: a “Prélude à l’Introït,” “Offertoire,” “Élévation,” “Communion,” and “Pièce terminale”.

Charles Tournemire, 1910

The Roman Rite was substantially changed with the issue of the 1969 edition of the Roman Missal after the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965). This new order of Mass is variously known as the Mass of Paul VI, the Novus Ordo, and now the Ordinary Form of the Mass. The Mass adopted a new three-year lectionary cycle, and with it the proper chants for the Mass were re-ordered to coincide more closely with the readings. The official book of proper chants for this new Mass, the Graduale Romanum, was published in 1974.

One might be tempted to think that this radical overhaul of the Mass propers might condemn Tournemire’s massive project to the dustbins of history. Pope Benedict XVI’s Summorum Pontificum of 2007 liberalized the permission to use the old Tridentine Mass, now known as the Extraordinary Form of the Mass; thus, musicians who serve communities that offer this Mass may use this music in its original context. Nonetheless, the Ordinary Form remains the norm, and so this article will focus on how to incorporate this music into the commonly celebrated form of the Mass. For each piece of the suite, I will cite current liturgical law and suggest how the music might be used in the “new” Mass. I will rely on two magisterial documents (that is, documents approved by the Holy See): Musicam sacram of 1967, the only post-Vatican II magisterial document that specifically concerns liturgical music; and the General Instruction of the Roman Missal (hereafter GIRM) in its 2011 edition.

The reader may wonder why I choose not to include two other documents: Sacrosanctum Concilium from the Second Vatican Council, and Sing to the Lord: Music in Divine Worship. Sacrosanctum Concilium, known in English as the “Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy”, is a seminal and highly important work, but is largely philosophical, with broad general concepts. Musicam sacram more specifically applies that philosophy to regulations concerning music for the Mass. Sing to the Lord was issued by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in 2007, and as such contains guidelines for liturgical music in congregations of the United States. This document to this date has not received official approval from the Holy See, and so remain guidelines (except where rooted in magisterial documents) rather than liturgical law. As well, this article seeks to suggest worldwide use of L’Orgue Mystique.

The 1863 Cavaillé-Coll organ at Ste-Clotilde in Paris, France, where Tournemire played.

Prélude à l’Introït

The first piece of each suite is a brief piece based on the Entrance Chant for the Mass. The old High Mass would customarily begin with the Rite of Sprinkling, accompanied by the singing of the Asperges. After this, the procession would return from the main nave of the church to the sanctuary, upon which the celebrant would remove the cope and vest in the chasuble. Then he would go to the altar for the singing of the Introit. The organist was permitted to play an interlude during the time between the end of the Asperges and the beginning of the Introit, which is the original purpose of Tournemire’s Prélude à l’Introït.

Musicam sacram specifically mentions that organ music may be played during the Entrance Procession. The GIRM instructions regarding the Entrance Chant are these:

47. When the people are gathered, and as the Priest enters with the Deacon and ministers, the Entrance Chant begins. Its purpose is to open the celebration, foster the unity of those who have been gathered, introduce their thoughts to the mystery of the liturgical time or festivity, and accompany the procession of the Priest and ministers.
48. This chant is sung alternately by the choir and the people or similarly by a cantor and the people, or entirely by the people, or by the choir alone…. If there is no singing at the Entrance, the antiphon given in the Missal is recited either by the faithful, or by some of them, or by a reader; otherwise, it is recited by the Priest himself, who may even adapt it as an introductory explanation.

GIRM 47 mentions a fourfold purpose of the Entrance Chant, none of which would preclude the playing of organ music before the Introit. It also says that the Entrance Chant begins as the procession commences. However, it seems not to rule out an extended organ introduction to the singing of the Introit. GIRM 48 concerns more specifically the method of the Entrance Chant, and permits a choral-only rendition of the Gregorian Introit upon which the Tournemire piece is based. For those congregations that wish to incorporate congregational participation in the Entrance Procession, a short congregational antiphon could be added. Concerning chants in English, the work of Fr. Columba Kelly, OSB; Adam Bartlett; Fr. Samuel Weber; and Richard Rice are especially to be commended in this regard. Their settings tend to use the same modes as the Gregorian Introits. This allows various possibilities for seamless musical transitions between Tournemire and the singing, when the starting pitches of the chants are matched to the organ piece.

There would be a few options for its use in the current Mass: as a Prelude before the Mass, after which the Introit would be sung during the Entrance Procession; during the Entrance Procession, followed by the singing of the Introit; and music covering the entire Entrance Procession, with a spoken Entrance Antiphon.

Offertoire

Of the four movements from the suites, the Offertory is perhaps the easiest to incorporate into the Ordinary Form Mass, as the chants are often retained from the earlier Tridentine Mass. Musicam sacram makes clear that solo organ music is permitted at this time, and the GIRM regards the guidelines for the music to be identical to those of the Entrance Chant. Tournemire intended that the music be played following the singing of the Offertory Chant, and this practice may be followed. In addition, it could follow the singing of a vernacular chant of the same mode or be played without the chant being sung.

Élévation

This is the one movement that has no equivalent in the Ordinary Form Mass. It was customary for some churches in France to have organ music at the consecration and elevation of the host, though some clergy preferred silence. After the elevation, the celebrant would conclude this portion in a subdued voice, and organ music was permitted during this short time. Even before the Mass of Paul VI was promulgated, a 1958 instruction during the pontificate of Pius XII effectively ended the practice of having music during this time, and this guideline has continued to the present day. Organists who wish to play the Elevation pieces could incorporate them as part of a prelude before Mass, but not in the context of its function as Tournemire intended. For this reason, they are not included in the chart at the end of this article.

Charles Tounemire playing at St. Clothilde, June 1939

Communion

Tournemire’s Communion pieces are based on the appointed Communion chant for the day. Many of the Communion chants in the 1974 Graduale Romanum vary according to the three-year lectionary cycle. For instance, the communion piece in Office 9 paraphrases Dicit Dominus: Implete, which now is appointed for only Year C on the Second Sunday of Ordinary Time. The chant for Year A, Laetabimur in salutari, appears in the 1961 Graduale Romanum for Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Lent, and Year B’s Dicit Andreas Simoni for the Vigil of the Feast of St. Andrew.

Tournemire intended that the Communion piece be played following the Agnus Dei, thus beginning the music for the distribution of communion. The singing of the communion chant would follow.

Musicam sacram specifies that solo organ music is appropriate for music during Communion. Regarding music at Communion, the GIRM instructs:

While the Priest is receiving the Sacrament, the Communion Chant is begun, its purpose being to express the spiritual union of the communicants by means of the unity of their voices, to show gladness of heart, and to bring out more clearly the “communitarian” character of the procession to receive the Eucharist. The singing is prolonged for as long as the Sacrament is being administered to the faithful…. Care should be taken that singers, too, can receive Communion with ease.
…. if there is no singing, the antiphon given in the Missal may be recited either by the faithful, or by some of them, or by a reader; otherwise, it is recited by the Priest himself after he has received Communion and before he distributes Communion to the faithful.

Here, the GIRM specifies that the chant should begin as the Priest receives, rather than after, as was the former practice. Although some would claim that the mention of “unity of their voices” would preclude any instrumental music, or indeed a choral-only rendition at all, it should be noted that these are not specific guidelines, but rather broad expressions of purpose. It is left to those planning the liturgical music to decide if organ music fulfills the “spiritual union of the communicants.” The GIRM also mentions that the “singing is prolonged” for the duration of the communion procession, but that does not rule out the possibility that organ music could prolong the singing; the singing need not be continuous. Organ music could, in fact, enable the singers to “receive Communion with ease.” The following paragraph implies that singing is not necessary at all, as is the common practice at daily Masses. Feasibly, organ music could be played during the Communion procession, with no singing at all.

In my experience, the following scheme works well: (1) The choir/schola sings the Communion antiphon. (2) The organist plays Tournemire’s setting of the communion chant while the choir receives Communion. (3) The choir/schola again sings the communion antiphon, alternating with psalm verses. A short vernacular antiphon involving the congregation, in the same mode as the Gregorian chant, could also be incorporated if so desired.

Pièce terminale

Tournemire avoids the use of the common French term “Sortie,” as it connotes a purely functional role as “exit music.” Rather, he refers to the movement as the “final piece,” which implies a work of more substance. Robert Sutherland Lord writes that “Tournemire seemed to have envisioned a period of meditation for the devout at the conclusion of the Mass rather than the usual noisy and hurried movements of the congregation toward the door.” Unrestricted by time constraints within the Mass, these pieces are lengthy and complex, frequently quoting chants from the Gregorian Gradual and Alleluia of the Mass (normally replaced in most celebrations of the Ordinary Form Mass by the Responsorial Psalm and a simpler congregational alleluia, although they are technically still permitted), as well as hymns and antiphons sung at Lauds and Vespers.

Musicam sacram mentions the possibility of solo organ music “at the end of Mass.” The GIRM makes no mention of what happens at this point, as the Dismissal formally concludes the Mass itself. While it has become customary in many parishes to sing a hymn after the Dismissal, this practice is hardly required. Because Tournemire’s pieces often do not begin in a boisterous manner, they tend to sound anticlimactic after a final congregational hymn. They more appropriately commence immediately following the Dismissal, accompanying the retiring procession and continuing as the congregants leave the church, or choose to stay and listen while meditating.

The following chart shows how the suites of L’Orgue Mystique may be adapted to the current liturgical calendar, tied to the appointed chants:

L’Orgue Mystique for Novus Ordo.pdf

With this chart, I hope organists in Catholic churches around the world will incorporate L'Orgue Mystique into the Ordinary Form Mass.

First Prize Winner of the 1999 Dublin International Organ Competition, Douglas O'Neill is an active performer on organ, piano, and harpsichord, as well as a church musician and choral conductor. He holds degrees from the University of Evansville, the University of Iowa, and the University of Kansas, where he completed the DMA in Church Music. His principal teachers have been Douglas Reed, Delbert Disselhorst, and James Higdon. Douglas has performed solo and collaborative concerts in the United States and Europe, including the Dublin International Organ and Choral Festival. He has also performed at regional and national conventions of the American Guild of Organists, the American Choral Directors Association, and the International Trumpet Guild, as well as with the Utah Symphony Orchestra. He has previously served as Assistant University Organist at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, on the faculty of the University of Evansville, as Associate Organist and Director of the Organ Academy at Saint Cecilia Cathedral in Omaha, and as Organist and Assistant Director of Music at the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City. His responsibilities at the Madeleine included playing for daily liturgies at the Cathedral, managing the acclaimed Eccles Organ Festival, and teaching at the Madeleine Choir School, the only full-time co-educational Catholic choir school in North America. He also prepared numerous editions of chant and polyphony, as well as compositions and orchestrations for performance by the choirs of the school and Cathedral. In addition to his prizewinning effort in Dublin, he has participated in the Grand Prix de Chartres, the Concours internationaux de la Ville de Paris, and the RCO Performer of the Year Competitions, and was a finalist in the Grand Prix Bach de Lausanne competition.

“We Need Better Music for Mass”

This video really needs to be shared around as widely as possible. “Think about what we are asking people to believe, and then we present it to them like this, and then we ask ourselves why they don’t believe, and why the Faith is in such dramatic decline in places where this is common practice.” Bravo, Mr Holdsworth!

Benedict XVI and Plato on Music in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition

Here is a fascinating paper by Dr Tom Larson of St Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, entitled Man, Music and Catholic Culture; he presented it at the Institute of St Anselm Studies, an annual symposium which takes place the college campus each summer. It has just been published in the proceedings and is now online.

Dr Larson examines first the place of music in Greek philosophical tradition and compares this with accounts of two modern commentators. The first is a non-Christian philosopher, Allan Bloom, whose thoughts he presents as a foil to a modern Christian view, that of Pope Benedict XVI.

Larson’s discussion clearly applies to sacred music and reinforces all that has been said by many others on the importance of music in the liturgy. But he extends this also to the profane and considers the place of music in the wider culture and in general education.

Here is the abstract for the paper:

The topic of this paper is the place of music within the Catholic intellectual tradition. The paper discusses the dignity of music, its relationship to man, and its place in education. The paper begins with the pagan classical treatment of music. The classical account of music is bound up with certain claims about human psychology, education, and culture, as well as certain claims about the universe. Allan Bloom’s discussion of music in the Greek philosophic tradition is examined as a foil to the Catholic vision discussed in the second part of the paper. The second part presents Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI’s understanding of music’s place in Catholic culture. Music, along with laws of beauty and order, has its source in God; it contributes to the re-integration of Man and directs him toward union with God in prayer; it has an intimate relationship with the human longing for transcendence; as a universal language, it has a role in evangelization and facilitating inter-cultural dialogue; in its beauty we are enabled to experience the presence of Ultimate Beauty; and in its own and very powerful way, the beauty of the music that has grown out of Christian culture serves as a kind of verification of the Christian faith.

Read the rest of the paper here.

A New Setting for the Salve Regina

My last article about the music of Paul Jernberg and Roman Hurko provoked such a positive response I thought that readers might enjoy listening to this recording  and video of Paul Jernberg’s sublime setting of the Salve Regina. It is on his CD featuring the Mass of St Philip Neri recording in Chicago by the Schola Cantorum of St Peter the Apostle. CDs and sheet music are available from pauljernberg.com.

Top Ten Things I’ve Learned about Sacred Music

Ten years ago, I knew next to nothing about Catholic music. I knew that something was not right in the parish music program. I had some sense that the fix for the problem was somewhere in our history and tradition, somewhere in some dusty books somewhere, and the answer surely had something to do with preconciliar practice. I intuited this just because the Second Vatican Council represented something like a gigantic shift, and older people reinforced this to me with harrowing stories of living through the turbulent times.

Beyond that, I knew nothing.

What follows are the top ten things I’ve learned in the course of ten years of reading, singing, listening, and exploring. I offer them in roughly the order in which I discovered them for myself and in conjunction with working with others who pointed me in the right direction The point here is not only to share the lesson with readers but to admit to the existence of deep ignorance out there as regards Catholic music - and I know this because it was not long ago when I could be counted among the deeply ignorant. There is no shame in that. Admitting it is the first step toward shaping up.

In a lifetime of study, we could never know what we need to know, and relative to knowledge embedded in tradition itself, we are all hopelessly ignorant. This is also what makes Catholic music so exciting. There is always more to discover, always more to do. If you find a “know it all,” you can be pretty sure that he or she is a faker. We are all in the process of discovery. Here is my brief accounting of the high points I’ve gained from ten years in this process.

1. The Roman Rite comes with its own built-in music. This discovery came for me when I took at a look at the Gregorian Missal, which is a reduced and English-language version of the Sunday and feast day chants from the Graduale Romanum, which is the music book of the Roman Rite. I further discover that this book was not just old, though it is old; it is also new, with the latest edition having been produced in 1974 specifically for what is known at the ordinary form of the Roman Rite. This was an amazing revelation. It turns out that the Church does provide. The burden to cobble together music each week does not actually fall to us. In the same way that the books of the Bible are given to us, as is stable doctrine and moral teaching, the music is provided already in a perfect form for every single liturgical task. Our main task is to defer and master the ability to render it properly.

2. What we call hymns cannot be the main ritual music of the Roman Rite. Hymns play an integral role in the sung version of the Divine Office, but they are not part of the Mass. When they are used in Mass, they are more like medieval tropes, texts with music that elaborate on a theme. There is room for hymnody at Mass in particular places, but not as replacements for the real music of the Mass, except in extremely unusual situations. In general, all else equal, the chants proper to the ritual are to be sung. This is a great relief because I never liked the “hymn wars.” They are unnecessarily divisive and extremely subjective. It is best to bypass this problem altogether and sing the Mass itself.

3. The musical structure of the Roman Rite is both clear and stable. The main parts for the congregation are chants of the Mass ordinary: Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus Agnus. The congregation and schola are to sing the dialogues with the priest: greeting, memorial acclamation, and the like. The main job of the schola is to lead or sing alone the propers of the Mass: introit, Psalm and Alleluia, offertory, and communion. Beyond that, there are sequences. Until we can get this framework pounded in our heads, we will be lost and confused.

4. Nostalgia only gets you so far. The preconciliar practice does not offer much in the way of a model to restore. A close looks shows that the propers at high Mass were, for the most part, sung to Psalm tones but mostly people experienced low Mass with four hymns -- just as we experience today. Hence many of the core problems we have today are inherited from the preconciliar practice. They had their “praise music” and we have ours; the main difference is the style of the times.

5. There was nothing wrong with the goals of Vatican II. A careful reading of the history shows that the fathers of this Council sought to fix the problem of the ubiquity of vernacular hymnody of Mass and sought to change some aspects of the liturgy in the hope of inspiring a fully sung Mass with Gregorian chant taking its proper place. Mistakes were made that unleashed the problem in way that no one even imagined before the Council.

6. It doesn’t take a big choir to do the music right. Motets and big polyphonic Mass settings are wonderful but they are not essential. The Church has given us 18 chanted Mass settings to chose from and they can all be led by a few singers or even one cantor. A big choir is a great thing but it is not necessary for a quality music program at a parish. Moreover, you are more likely to find yourself in the position of recruiting singers if the structure is already in place and there is some security and certainly over the task ahead.

7. Accompaniment is not required. Singing is music in the Roman Rite. Organ, piano, and guitar might not support singing; they might actually crowd it out.

8. A good default structure is more important than a huge repertoire. Every parish needs a reliable musical framework to fall back on for every Mass, so that it is not so dependent on a particular organist or choir leader or the presence of a large number of singers with a huge library of music. If this is done well, simple chants from the beginning to the end, combined with the beauty of silence, accomplishes the goal. And here is an especially good time to say thanks for the new Missal translation, which has all the music already given to us for the main parts of Mass.

9. You can’t blame the musicians for junky music at Mass. The Missal changed quickly and hardly anyone was prepared. There were no books of English propers available until very recently. Musicians were using what they had and that was not much, and what has been available has been produced with very little understanding of the musical structure of the ritual. This problem has persisted until very recently.

10. Change does not come from edict. As much as we might dream of a pope or a priest who cracks down and demands appropriate music from everyone, this is not actually how change occurs. Change comes from patience, learning and teaching, inspiration and prayer, and hard work undertaken in the right spirit.

Those are my ten lessons. I have no doubt that the next ten years will continue to be fruitful no only in getting better at singing but in learning ever more about theory and practice of music in the Roman Rite.

Si Iniquitates and the Propers for the 28th Sunday

The sung propers of the 28th Sunday in Ordinary Time are all remarkable liturgical texts with justly famous settings having been composed throughout Catholic history.

Here are simple chanted versions from the Simple English Propers, which was lately reviewed by Dom Mark Daniel Kirby: "I heartily recommend Adam Bartlett's Simple English Propers. Put this book in the hands of your parishioners! And chant away! This extraordinary book has been met with widespread acclaim for the beauty and versatility of the music - and also for being the first generally accessible book of chanted propers in English for every parish."

You can sing the Mass or you can sing something else of your own choosing. Which choice is most faithful to the Roman Rite?

Tucker on: The Future of Catholic Music Is Bright

The new English Missal is being delivered this week. The changes for the people improve accuracy and poetry but they are minimal. The changes for the celebrant are extensive and epic. The implications for music are far reaching. Indeed, this Missal marks a new epoch for the Roman Rite. It is a vast improvement over anything experienced by anyone under the age of 60, and it is going to change the religious life of millions in the process, not immediately but gradually over time.

The language itself is a dramatic upgrade, much closer to the Latin, and much more formal and liturgical in its tone. The music of the Mass is embedded in the text as integral to the Missal’s presentation of the Mass, and the reports of the sheer dignity and beauty of the Missal music have been sensational so far.

This alone is a good reason to be optimistic about the future of Church music. But even if when Advent comes, you are underwhelmed by what you hear at your local parish, and it seems like the same old thing as it ever was, know that there are forces at work today in the Church and in the world that are moving toward change.

There is theological improvement all around, a sounder sense of purpose among the clergy, and young generation of priests that is very alert to the liturgical question, and of course the changes made in the pontificate of Benedict XVI are having an effect. All of this will be heard in the music you experience in the Catholic liturgy of the future.

But there is another dramatic change in the making. It comes down to this: new communication technologies have provided new opportunities for liturgical musicians to share with each other and learn from each other, and this creates the conditions for continual improvement going forward.

Composer Charles Culbreth pointed out that a quick arrangement that he wrote for a chanted Gloria is now being used in Canada by people he has never met. This gave him a real kick, and he noted that this would have been impossible back in the day. Working from his laptop computer, and without even leaving his desk, he can be a provider of liturgical music for the whole world. The supply and the demand once lived in isolation. Now they can come together.

Another example. It was only six years ago when the Liber Usualis went up online for the first time. It was the first major book of Gregorian chant to achieve that universal and limitless level of distribution that the Internet makes possible.

How well I recall the hysteria! There were threats of lawsuits. People said that I was going to bring the world crashing down on my head. I had anonymous emails telling me that because the “ictus” (if you don’t know, never mind) is a copyrighted marking added by Solesmes that Interpol was going to come to my house and drag me away in a burlap sack. (I called the Library of Congress to ask if a tiny tick above a square note could really lead to legal penalties, and the lady on the phone couldn’t stop laughing.)

None of it happened (and I knew this was not going to happen because I had done about twelve months of homework before going live). Instead, vast swaths of the Catholic world had its first look at the amazing reality: the Church has assigned specific music for all liturgical action that takes place throughout the year.

We don’t have to make up music every week. Every feast, every Sunday, every prayer throughout the day had an assigned song and Psalm attached to it. The Liber Usualis, a brilliant book that served the Church well for a century before a generation of know nothings gathered them all up and threw them in the dumpster, was our own Dead Sea Scroll, the text now digitized that opened up a new window to our history as worshipping Catholics.

That was just the beginning. Hundreds of books followed. Then there were new opportunities. People made shirts of the chants, and large-scale poster to enable an old-fashioned method of singing. There were iPhone and iPad applications produced for profit. And then individuals starting making recordings of their versions of the chant and posting them on audio and vidoe. Then tutorials went online, and then databases of chant, and then other aids to make the music of the faith ever more accessible.

People who only knew of the chant through legend were suddenly surrounded by it and they imagined for the first time that they might be able to play a part in its revival. They flocked to workshops, seminars, and colloquia. Scholas were founded up all over the country, from the smallest rural parish to the biggest big-city Cathedral. It was a beautiful scene, and, if you think about it, it all happened very quickly.

Then there were new tools created to enable people to create their own chant editions. At first, this involved recreations. But over time, it became obvious that more was needed. The vernacular had come to the Catholic liturgy in 1965, and yet there was a gigantic shortage of chant music in English. The entire liturgical year was crying out to be translated into song! And these efforts began in earnest.

People who had been quietly working for decades along suddenly emerged out into the open, and their work put online. People like Fr. Columba Kelly and Fr. Samuel Weber became overnight heroes, as the corpus of their work was given away for free.

The International Commission on English in the Liturgy was watching all this very closely, and, when it came time to produce music for the new Missal, a visionary there had the idea of putting that music online and giving it away for free. And this was done - and it was something truly revolutionary and incredible. The methods that were used by the folk musicians of the 1960s - distributing free of charge and uses any and every technology possible to evangelize - were now being used by the establishment to promote truly beautiful renderings of the Church’s own corpus of work.

In the latest steps in this direction, and based on the discovery that most of the Church’s most beautiful hymnody was legally in the public domain, new websites started appearing to distributed hymns as well. Now we are even seeing masterful hymnals being produced on single desktops and being distributed through digital channels.

And keep in mind that this is all in the last five years. Ten years ago, such things would have been unthinkable. This truly is a new world and it is refashioning the Church that is ever old and ever new.

This is all glorious but this is not just a story of the triumphant of one side of the debate above music. Just as crucial is that everyone involved in this world has left their respective isolated sectors and started talking to each other and thereby drawing from each other's experience to improve what they are doing.

Think of all the material progress that came to the world in the mass migrations out of the countryside and into the city. Since the early middle ages, this has been a trend that coincided with the rise of new levels of prosperity. This not because the city automatically makes wealth. It is because people in the city can talk, learn, share, and test new ideas against old ones. Ideas flourish in the city because there is a larger pool of thoughts that everyone can draw from and apply. The end of intellectual isolation is the beginning of progress.

In the digital age, all Catholic musicians have moved to the city. We are newly aware that there is a huge Church out there and we are all desperately in need of stimulating conversation so that we can do a better job at what we do. Praise musicians have found themselves talking to chant experts and being forced to come to terms with Church legislation and history, as well as the demands of the liturgy for decorum and dignity. Chant musicians have realized that if they wanted to make progress they had to do more than hold implacably strict poses; they had to speak to the whole Church in the modern world and adapt their message and their presentations of the music in light of current realities.

In the course of all of this, we have made new discoveries of our relative ignorance of this huge area of the faith, and found that we need to draw on the insights and experiences of everyone else. We have found new opportunities to learn and to listen to each other. The chant expert has realized that perhaps the guitar strummer is on to something with his or her desire for the music at Mass to connect with people in a meaningful way. The strummer has realized that the text of the Mass does indeed matter and that style is not something wholly arbitrary and external to the liturgical structure.

All this talking and communicating has been good for us all, personally and spiritually. It has led to more tolerance, more civility, more humility. We no longer need to proceed forth with the secret desire to destroy each other; we have a much greater appreciation of our mutual dependence on every point of view in the course of finding our way toward the ideals that the Church has laid out for us.

Back in the 1960s, Msgr. Francis P. Schmitt would often express profound frustration that serious chant musicians spent more time arguing with each other over rhythm theories and other minutia than they did actually working toward their larger goals. Msgr. Richard Schuler often echoed this concern.

They were absolutely right about this. As the musicians argued with each other, their world was falling apart around them. It’s almost as if they could not see the big picture for the focus on their own tiny slice of life. The only way this could have happened is for their communication and their awareness to have been limited. They had sealed themselves off from the larger Church and world, thinking that all would be well so long as they burrowed down and kept propounding the teaching. Meanwhile, everyone else moved on.

A similar kind of myopia affected the musical establishment as it came to be in the 1980s and1990s. The big publishers kept producing their copyrighted manuscripts and collecting their royalties while figuring that their was no credible opposition to the domination of the liturgy by pop music of their own creation. They fooled themselves into believing that anyone who complains about what had happened to Catholic music was surely some old codger who will be dead in a few years. Unknowingly, they too had sealed themselves up into a tiny sector that was sealed off from larger trends in the Church and the world.

Now they wake up to a new world in which their paradigm is being seriously questioned by Catholic thinkers and musicians of all ages and at all levels of the Church. At first they bristled. But now they are listening. And this is the first stop to genuine learning and improvement. In fact, we now live in a world in which Catholic musicians from all over the world are listening, sharing, learning, improving.

We all need to do this. This does not mean that all points of view will be compromised to become a giant opinion blob or that everyone must avoid arguments and differences. Communication can also mean sharpening a point of view, improving in in light of criticism, refining an intellectual point of view or a practice in light of objections that come our way. I know that my own convictions concerning chant have only intensified as I’ve tangled with its opponents, and, in this sense, every interlocutor has been my benefactor.

In the end, we musicians must all strive to be servants of the liturgy and its divine purpose. No one person has the one correct way that applies to every cultural context, every parish, every person in the pew. We must stay engaged, talk to each other, test our dogmas and theories against practical realities, be open to new approaches, and maintain the broadness of mind that keeps us all thinking about the future.

We’ve never been presented with better opportunities to share. This is why I’m optimistic about the future of Catholic music. May we all continue to use communication and openness to ward off pride, myopia, and sectarianism, those great killers of progress. With broadness of mind and the continued willingness to seek truth and work for it, the future of Catholic music is bright.

Boston's Example to the Nation: the BACS

The new energy and excitement in the Catholic music world today has given rise to a new emphasis on liturgical excellence. A leader in this forward momentum is the Boston Archdiocesan Choir School. Their director since 2010, and only the fourth in the history of the institution, is the seemingly tireless John Robinson, a young organist and choirmaster from John’s College Cambridge and Canterbury Cathedral.

He seems to be just the right person for the position at this stage in the history of the institution. He is shepherding the school from being an outstanding local institution to one that provides national leadership in Catholic liturgy and musical excellence. The new public profile of the school seems to be making the point that needs to be made right now.

The BACS was founded in 1963 by Theodore Marier, an American composer and musician - a leader in the Gregorian chant revival in the time when all trends were running the other direction - who saw the need for the English choir-school model to finally make the treck to the colonies. An expert on sacred music for Catholic liturgy, Marier was in so many ways a visionary who took on the impossible task what might have seemed like the worst time.

Theodore Marier

Sacrosanctum Concilium had just been promulgated, and there emerged a tension between its mandate to preserve the Latin treasury of sacred music and its permission for the vernacular. What neither he nor anyone fully expected was that Catholic music was on the verge of entering a long period of upheaval. Long traditions and ideals were abandoned in favor of forays into pop music and non-liturgical music generally. Marier saw both the problem and the answer, and never relented in his hope that this new institution would be devoted to bringing Gregorian chant to the postconciliar age.

Through sheer tenacity and creative composition and director, Marier built the school and saw it through this period until his retirement in 1986. John Dunn took over as director and headmaster in the years after, maintaining the tradition and continuing to build in the context of daily sung Masses and the performance of outstanding liturgical music at St. Paul Church in Harvard Square. Jennifer Lester also served in a crucial role in these intervening years, at a time when the goals of the institution seemed to have very little support from prevailing trends.

One can imagine how difficult it must have been to find a successor after this history. The choice of Robinson was wise indeed. He turns out to have all the right skills to both build on the past and go forward to a bright future . An outstanding musician with a clear sense of mission (he was raised in the very type of system of choral education that he now heads), he is also a brilliantly diplomatic person whose quiet erudition and attention to musical excellence has inspired students, donors, and parents.

He has led the way with a clear focus on the best of the Catholic choral repertoire, the fruits of which have been on display in public concerts and liturgical services. The goal is not just to create outstanding musicians but also to provide an exemplary experience of liturgical music - with attention to both musical and liturgical precision. The BACS is headed toward an ever larger presence on the national Catholic scene, and very well could emerge as a example to many other dioceses around the country.

The BACS is only one of two Catholic choir schools in the whole of the United States. The other (equally impressive) one is in Salt Lake at the Cathedral of the Madeleine accepts both both and girls.The BACS accepts boys from the fifth to the eight grade and trains them in all subjects with a specialization in musical skills. Every student learns piano, music theory, recorder, and perfects the skill of sight singing.

It is not widely understood that over the centuries there have been dramatic changes in the age when the boy’s voice shifts from soprano to tenor or bass. Johan Sebastian Bach sang as a boy soprano at the age of 16, and, in the late middle ages, it was not uncommon for the boy soprano voice to survive until the late teen years. That all began to shift in the 19th century with a change in diet and overall health. Today, the boy soprano voice is gone by the age of 14.

I can recall reading a manual on training boys to sing that was written in the early 1930s, and being struck by what a gigantic task it is to train boys to sing in any historical period. It requires vast experience, a good ear, a great sense of diplomacy, and a huge bag of tricks. Today the challenge is intensified because they must be trained earlier and the trained voice doesn’t last very long at all. Then the voice goes through a time when it seems nearly unusable only to emerge later as something completely different.

John Robinson

This reality is part of daily life at the Boston Choir School, and Robinson and the rest of the faculty must deal with not only the musical difficulties of the boys but the psychological ones as well. I can only imagine what it must be like to develop a wonderful skill at the age of 11 only to have nature take it away two years later. So part of the job of the director is to carefully migrate the acquired skills from childhood into early adulthood and to do this one child at at time.

Robinson himself went through this period and it was during this time that he developed his skills as a pianist and an organist, furthering his educational as an overall musician. So he has an intrinsic sympathy with the plight of all of his students. And even as this constant circulation of vocal timbres is taking place, the choir sings every daily at St. Paul’s for Mass, with an incredibly demanding repertoire ranging from Latin chant to Tallis to modern choral works.

It is a deeply tragic aspect of modern Catholic life that most parishes and even many cathedrals have no program at all for children choirs, or only paltry ones that sing on Christmas. Catholic Children these days learn to sing by listening to pop music on the radio or on their iPods, and this is a serious problem for the state of Catholic music generally. Directors of music in parishes find themselves without any singers among the adults. People don’t know how to read music much less perform it in a way that is suitable for liturgical services. Nor do they know the repertoire.

The best and most fundamental way to bring about long-term change is through the children’s choir. Children can chant and beautiful. They can sing complicated polyphony. They can be the foundation of an entire parish music program. This is as true today as it was one thousand years ago. In the year’s ahead, it is clear that the new generation that will lead to a rebuilding is going to emerge from within comprehensive systems of education such as we find at the Boston Choir School.

In this way, every day that Robinson and the faculty there teach, an investment is being made in the state of Catholic music that will bear fruit for decades to come. In the future, you might find that a graduate of the BACS will be leading music at your parish and bringing the glorious treasury of sacred music to Masses and the sung office experienced by you, your children, and your children’s children. This is the gift that Robinson -- in keeping with the tradition established by his predecessors -- has brought to our shores. For this reason, the administrators, board, parents, students, and director are fully deserving of all the support that Catholics can give them.

The Musical Transition to the New Missal

Some three months from implementation, the transition to the Third Edition of the Roman Missal has very obviously avoided the gloom and doom scenarios widely predicted among partisans of the 1970 translation. The dissidents have calmed down, the publishers are printing the Missals, the workshops are proceeding apace, the initial liturgical presentations have been beautiful, and we can all look forward to a vastly enriched liturgical experience beginning in Advent.

But there is another issue that is hugely important to the overall presentation of the Roman Rite, and that issue is music. Commentators tend to underestimate the significance of this factor, but if you talk to average Catholics, this issue turns out to be decisive. The music provides the aesthetic framework that is communicated to the faithful, and it is one they readily understand as a sign of the well being and confidence of the Church herself.

More than any other issue, the music issue was the one that most traumatized Catholics when the first Mass of Paul VI was promulgated. In the same way that this new Missal corrections that serious translations of that edition, so too does this Missal offer a chance for getting matters back on the right track so that the music is fully integrated as part of the liturgy.

The issue of the text has been settled from on high with the promulgation of the new Missal itself. It has simply been a matter of making a new translation and implementing it, and this has been done. The music issue is not so simply solved. It relies on parish-by-parish cooperation in the spirit of the change. Legislation can suggest, the Church can publish, influential voices can explain and guide. But, in the end, it is all about the parish, the pastor, and the directors of music at all levels.

Pastors, however, have come to fear the music question because it continues to divide people like few other questions. Uncountable numbers of people simple refuse to go to Mass because they do not like what has happened to music at Mass, particularly the emphasis on pop music. Those who do attend regularly continue to be as divided as any group that fights over song selections. As for the musicians themselves, no matter what they are playing or singing, they tend to take offense at the slightest suggestion that they have made less than stellar choices and need to change.

All this wrangling is completely understandable given the neglect of the music that is native to the ritual, namely the chant. Chant is music specifically crafted beautifully elucidate the text of the Mass in a stylistic manner than transcends social divisions. It does not draw from contemporary cultural archetypes so that it does not go out of fashion; it is timeless in the sense that it is appropriate at all times. It worked in the first century and it works today to accomplish what liturgical music is supposed to do.

This tradition has been neglected because of a series of missteps following the close of the Second Vatican Council. The Council made a strong call for chant. The Vatican published two books of chant, one before and one after the new Mass appeared. But the voice calling for chant was always an “uncertain trumpet.” The right to pick any music for the Mass, embedded in legislation, led to an untenable situation in which the Mass music, and therefore vast aspects of the liturgy itself, were effectively contracted out to third party publishers - and not just the composition and printing of the music but also every aspect of the text and style.

A few years ago, the tipping point arrived for many Church officials. They discerned that something had to be done about the loss of the chant tradition. The introduction of the new Missal seemed like the best vehicle for this: a more authentic translation should go along with more authentic musical experience of the Mass. This idea was to reduce in our liturgical environments the role of artificial, industrialized, commercial pop music and increase the role of simple chant that people can actually sing and grow to love.

This is why so much effort was put into composing chants for the Third Edition of the Roman Missal. Just enough of the words of the Order of the Mass are changed in the new Missal to make nearly all existing “Mass settings” unusable. The metrical elements of the old text that caused them to be said in a syllable-driven 6/8 meter (“Glory to God in the highest / and peace to his people on earth”) were changed (“Glory to God in the highest / and on earth peace to people of good will”) to be more accurate and eliminate meter and hence encourage plainsong.

Strategically, this amounted to a stroke of genius. With the slate clean, the next step was to formulate music that consistent with the Roman Rite tradition but is also easy enough for parish musicians to sing and implement in their parishes. Further, this music should be in English in order to overcome the great fear of our age of Latin, and doing this explores that largely neglected possibility opened up by the Council.

The chants were made integral to the Missal text itself. ICEL officials have said, time and again, that the Missal chants themselves should be thought of as a baseline music for all parishes. To this end, the USCCB has given approval for all of this music to be used in liturgy in the months before the Missal is scheduled to be implemented.This is why the music has been be given away free online far in advance, so that everyone could practice it. Publishers outside the Catholic Church, however, were not excluded but rather invited to offer settings consistent with the new text and the emerging ethos.

It was all very bold, and brilliantly done. It’s probably the plan that I would have crafted had anyone asked me. It strikes me that this overarching plan had a high probability for success in dealing with the problem, which is that the music in all but a few parishes bears any likeness to the historical experience of the Roman Rite or the hopes of the Second Vatican Council.

If the whole idea was a great one, is it working? For the well-educated musicians in parishes with savvy pastors, the answer is yes. My own private estimate is that perhaps 1000 parishes that were otherwise stuck in a pop-music rut are already making the shift. They are embracing the singing of the Missal chants without accompaniment. These same parishes are using the occasion to implement sung propers (see the Simple English Propers) and make some efforts to unify all the parishes Masses around this theme.

There is no question that this is progress, even amazing progress. It is tempting to look on the downside I will discuss below and forget that all of the above would have been unthinkably wonderful even two years ago.

There were, however, some missing pieces in the bold plan. A major factor has to do with the competence of the musicians in the parish that are to be the front line for implementation. I’m not sure that I’ve seen solid data how many of these people are trained to read music, receive a professional salary, and have knowledge of the structural demands of the Roman Rite. But I can say that in my own experience, most seem to be well intentioned volunteers who, if they are paid at all, receive just a small token for their services.

I’ve given speeches to large gatherings of diocesan musicians and ask for a show of hands of how many can name the minor propers of the Mass; only a few hands in a hundred go up. Fewer still can read basic notation; most follow along with the piano or affect singing based on what they have heard before. The prospect of hearing a note in their heads and breaking a silence to intone the Sanctus absolutely terrifies many of these people.

As just one example, at the largest gathering of Catholic musicians this year at the National Association of Pastoral Musicians, a speaker began singing Ave Maria, and several separate reports suggest that perhaps only one quarter of those in attendance could pick up the singing. And this is with 3,000 people in attendance.

The bottom line is that despite growing pockets of expertise and obvious progress over the last ten years, the major swath of people who have been pressed into service in Catholic liturgy over the country are not prepared to manage what exists much less lead in a transition to a liturgy in which the human voice predominates in chanted settings of the ordinary and propers.

There is, in addition, a deep conservatism that has taken hold in all our parishes, and it takes the form of preferring the status quo to any change. This results from the depleted musical capital just discussed and also a leftover effect of the great upheaval of the 1960s that continues to leave many people in the pews completely shell shocked.

Even among those who eventually became used to the new rite of Mass did not look upon the revolutionary fervour of the period with affection. Forty years later, we are in a strange position of panicking about the slightest change to anything at all. And so it is with Catholic musicians today. The deep irony is that lasting legacy of the Council of change has been a profound fear of change.

The new Mass text changes about ten words in total for the full set of ordinary chants. But based on the level of panic on the part of musicians, one gains the impression that they are all being asked to sing in a long recitative in Swahili and an aria in Galician. My inbox certainly testifies to the level of hysteria. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t receive pleading notes of “save me, save me.” When the head of ICEL gave a talk in New York recently, he took time for questions and they were nearly all asked with a tone of fear and loathing underscore by deep confusions.

What happens to a large community of people who are barely getting by as it is and then are asked to change toward something that is arguably more difficult? They throw themselves at the mercy of the institutions promoting the familiar. This is pretty much what has happened in a large number of parishes, as the old-line publishers who have learned ways to flatter amateurs with settings that get them through the day are thriving once again.

It’s possibly true that ICEL, the USCCB, and Vox Clara all overestimated the capacity of average Catholic musicians to adapt and sing what strikes experience liturgical musicians are ridiculously easy chanted settings of the Mass text. Even so, it could be the case that even this material is too difficult for their current abilities - or, at least, this is what many singers believe.

What about sending teachers out to parishes to get them going? Many of us have done workshops and worked with singers. We’ve made youtubes that have received as many as 7,000 views. We’ve produced editions in four-line staves and modern notes. But all our efforts combined are dwarfed by the influence of the large publishers, who have lobbied hard at every Office of Worship in this country (“you should have one Mass setting for the entire diocese and it should be the one we sell”), done non-stop seminars all over the country, and promoted proprietary music at every stop.

Pastors are in a position to get the musical transition on track with simple interventions. But, again, they are in the habit of not intervening in their music programs and are not interested in starting now.

None of this is to say that there has not been and won’t continue to be progress. After all is said and done, hundreds of parishes will be singing Catholic ritual music whereas they might otherwise after sung something else forever. But all these efforts are too little to amount to a wholesale counterrevolution that many have long awaited.

Some years ago, Michael Joncas wrote a book on sacred music that concluded that if chant were to make a serious return to American Catholic parishes, it would require concerted, relentless educational efforts over the very long term. It would appear that he was precisely right. Is it worth every effort? It is worth as much effort as the faith itself requires.

Remember that this struggle isn’t about us vs. them. It is about creating space to let the voice of the liturgy itself speak and sing. There is every reason to be confident about the long-term future. The high hopes of the Council will eventually prevail.

OF Propers for the 24th Sunday of the Year

Here are the propers for the 24th Sunday of the year, which apply to this coming Sunday in the ordinary form calendar. You can see that these propers from the Simple English Propers follow the modal structure of the Gregorian original. If you know those chants, you can recognized the structure in these re-creations that are especially designed for English and for ease of singing. These provide excellent training for musicians and also add solemnity and beauty to the liturgical action. Again, most musicians serving in the ordinary form are surprised to learn that there are appointed texts to be sung, and that to replace such texts with a hymn of any style really does amount to adding a trope to the Mass structure, which is to say that while doing so is not forbidden, such tropes really do amount to an elaboration on the core music of Mass.

It is worth noting that the entrance text here, which relates to the Gospel reading concerning the forgiveness of debts, deals with a theme that is particularly appropriate for the tenth anniversary of events of 9-11-2001. You can hear the Gregorian original of Da Pacem here.

A Future for English Chant

The new English Missal currently being rolled out throughout the world publishes more music than any previous edition of the Roman Missal. All of it is English chant - vernacular versions of traditional Gregorian chant. With this Missal, the Church has very wisely seen that if liturgical/sacred music is to have a future in the current environment, it will need to begin with the vernacular, not only for pastoral and pedagogical reasons but also because there is an inherent integrity associated with this genre of singing.

The Missal chants will cover the ordinary chants and dialogues of the Mass. This music is the foundational song of the new Missal. The International Commission on English in the Liturgy has given away sheet music for these chants and encourages their download and use. ICEL has also posted high-quality accompaniments.

It is a requirement that all pew hymnbooks now being printed including this Missal setting of the Mass. Many organizations such as the CMAA have posted tutorial and videos (see this page). For those of us who love sacred music and seek to teach it to a new generation, it is a fantastic thing for us to be able to say, with clarity and conviction, "this is the music that the Church desires for the ordinary form of the Roman Rite." Truly, this represents a sea change in what is arguably the most problematic area of Catholic liturgy today.

English chant is the great missed opportunity of the 1960s. A few composers worked to provide it following the council but the editions were spotty and entered into a contentious world of cultural upheaval and liturgical struggle. It was squeezed out during these years of turmoil. By the time the new Missal was finally promulgated in 1969, the opportunity seemed to have already passed - especially given that the language of the Missal was very unlike the vernacular translations that had commonly circulated for the previous 10 years. All these 40 years of wandering around have finally led us back to where some people thought we should have been immediately following the close of the Council.

Of course the ideal music for the Roman Rite in either form is found in the Graduale Romanum. This book as it applies to the ordinary form came out in 1974 - at which point the cause of all chant (whether English or Latin) seemed largely lost. But in order to have any hope of getting to this point, there will have to be several steps on the way that include: 1) making music that recaptures the primacy of the human voice, 2) making music that is based in plainsong and not strict meters and pop music stylings, and 3) making music the text of which is drawn from the liturgy of the Church and not something else. This is the beginning of the skills and tools that musicians must have to get on the right track. The Missal chants in English make this possible.

However, there is more to the music of the Roman Rite than just the ordinary chants and the dialogues. There are also the sung proper chants that have formed the basis of the changing sung texts of the Mass since the earliest centuries. The most sensitive places within the Roman Rite are the entrance chant, the offertory chant, and communion. These are the places within the Mass where the propers are usually replaced by some hymn chosen by the director of music - a choice that may or may not be appropriate to the liturgy or the day.

A major problem in finding English chant for the propers of the Mass has been to have accessible editions available to average parish singers. There have been attempts and I've posted many of them over the years here at the New Liturgical Movement. In each case, there was some problem with the edition that prevented it from entering in to wider circulation: dated language, old calender, insufficient Psalms to cover the entire liturgical action, and the difficulty of the music itself. This has been very tragic, for it has meant that even those pastors and singers who have wanted to upgrade their music programs haven't had the tools they have needed.

This situation changed dramatically in June of this year with with the publication of the Simple English Propers by Adam Bartlett and published by the Church Music Association of America. This book provides introits, offertories, and communions for the entire liturgical year. The music preserves the Gregorian sensibility by retaining not only the modal structure but also the precise mode of its Latin equivalent. The text is English. Each chant includes more than enough Psalms to sing along with the antiphon so that there is music for the full liturgical procession for which it is to be used.

I would say that this is the first generally accessible book of music for the ordinary form of the Roman Rite in English - and it is no surprise that it has been a huge hit in such a short time. We can bemoan the amazing reality that it took forty years for a book like this to appear or we can simply rejoice that at long last such a book does in fact exist. It is no longer the case that singing the propers of the Mass is out of reach of the average parish. This music can be sung by any cantor or choir in any parish - and it is current being used in everything from small rural parishes to big-city cathedrals.

They also help train singers to really sing - not merely eke out a melody karaoke style while hiding being the organ or piano. They train people to really declaim the text in song - to develop the skill of projecting the word of God in song in a liturgical environment. They underscore the point that the music that is most appropriate to the Roman Rite is (no surprise except to most singers in the Catholic Church today) the music of the Roman Rite. They also prepare the way for the realization of the chants of the Roman Gradual in Latin in the proverbial "brick by brick" manner that has proven so successful in parish after parish.

Shawn Tribe has asked that these chants be posted on this site on a weekly basis according to the new calendar, as an appropriate parallel to the emphasis on chant in the Third Edition of the Roman Missal. Of course I'm very pleased to do so.

I have hundreds of testimonies to their success in parishes. The testimonies come from people who have long trained in Latin Gregorian chant but have not found a way to introduce it to their parishes for a variety of the usual reasons (no singers, no pastoral support, fear of the reaction, etc.). This fact doesn't surprise me, for the music in the Simple English Propers can be used immediately in any parish in a way that most everyone will consider an improvement.

More tellingly, I have an equal amount of testimony from people who have only sung pop music but know in their bones that chant is more appropriate to liturgy. There is also something wonderfully thrilling about leaving the weekly hymn roulette and embracing the sung texts of the Mass itself. This change provides new energy to the whole vocation of being a Church singer.

And for pastors and celebrants, this book has meant blessed relief from the hymn wars that are always roiling around barely under the surface in every parish and also permits them to say Mass without have their sensibilities shocked by hymn choices that they feel they can't control. And given the wide demographic appeal of these chants, it can mean an end to having to endure radically different Mass cultures every Sunday, each crafted with a special demographic appeal in mind.

Finally, let us turn to this past Sunday's entrance chant, which, according to the Roman Gradual, is Justus es, Domine. It has ancient origins, and we sang the Gregorian original in my parish. I understand that this is an extremely rare event. The version of this chant in the Simple English Propers preserves the themes and mode from the Gregorian but resets it for the language and the current pastoral need in most parishes. This is merely a practice video, not a final performance version, but you can see how this works. Keep in mind that the edition provides many Psalm verses to cover the entire procession.

As you listen, I encourage you not to treat this as a performance piece and judge it the way one might judge a performance of Schubert or Bach. This music serves one purpose: to accompany the procession with the proclamation of the word of God according to the approach that has been urged by Popes from the earliest centuries until our own time.



INTROIT • 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time from Church Music Association of Amer on Vimeo.

Return of Silveri to Papal Liturgy

On the eve of yesterday's Feast of the Sacred Heart (10 June), our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI celebrated an evening Prayer Vigil with subsequent Adoration and Benediction with approx. 15,000 priests and 4,000 lay Faithful in St. Peters' square for the conclusion of the Year for Priests.

Here is a video of the occasion. While the answers of the Pontiff to questions asked by five priests, given without prepared text, are as always impressive and very much worth listening to, I would like to point out an item of liturgical interest. If you go to minute 63:15 of the video, you will see the Blessed Sacrament arriving on St. Peters' square, and it is greeted by the "March of Silveri", which used to be played at the elevation in the old papal Mass. This was the first time, as far as I am aware, that this piece was heard in papal ceremonies in decades. You may also recognise the baldachin used:

For comparison, here is the elevation of the Mass of Coronation of Blessed John XXIII (go to minute 2:55):

Roman Polyphony Returns to Saint Peter's

Sandro Magister today has this article at www.chiesa:

Great Roman Polyphony Returns to Saint Peter's

Not in a concert, but in a Mass. It will be conducted by Domenico Bartolucci, the most brilliant interpreter of Palestrina's music alive today. He was removed as head of the Sistine Chapel choir twelve years ago, but now, with Pope Benedict, has finally been rehabilitated

by Sandro Magister

ROME, November 16, 2009 – Among the arts to be represented in the Sistine Chapel next Saturday, November 21, at the highly anticipated meeting with Pope Benedict XVI, music is perhaps the one that has suffered the most from the divorce that has taken place between artists and the Church.

The distress in music has been the first to afflict the Church. Because while the masterpieces of Christian painting, sculpture, and architecture still remain accessible to all, even if they are ignored and misunderstood, great music literally disappears from the churches if no one performs it anymore.

And one can effectively speak of an almost generalized disappearance when it comes to those treasures of Latin liturgical music that are Gregorian chant, polyphony, the organ.

Fortunately, however, during the same days when pope Joseph Ratzinger will be seeking to reestablish a fruitful relationship with art, the organ and great polyphonic music will return to give the best of themselves in the basilicas of Rome.

They will again be heard not only in the form of a concert, but also in the living environment of liturgical action.

The culmination will be on Thursday, November 19, at the hour of evening when the setting sun blazes through the apse of Saint Peter's. That evening, making his solemn return to the basilica to conduct a sung Mass, will be the greatest living interpreter of the Roman school of polyphony, the one that has come down from Giovanni Pierluigi of Palestrina – whom Giuseppe Verdi called the "everlasting father" of Western music – to our own day.

This interpreter of undisputed greatness is Domenico Bartolucci, for decades the "permanent maestro" of the Sistine Chapel choir, the pope's choir, and now, at age 93, still a miraculously adept director of Palestrina.

Bartolucci is a living witness of the elimination of liturgical music from the West, but also of its possible rebirth. The last time he conducted a complete Mass by Palestrina at Saint Peter's was all the way back in 1963. The last time he conducted the Sistine Chapel choir was in 1997. That year he was brutally dismissed, and without him the choir fell into a sorry state.

But now comes its return – powerfully symbolic – to the basilica built over the tomb of the prince of the apostles.

At the Mass on November 19 at Saint Peter's, Bartolucci will not conduct Palestrina, but his own polyphonic compositions, in alternation with Gregorian chants from the Mass "De Angelis." And with that, he will show how it is possible to cherish the best of the Latin musical tradition even within the canons of the modern post-conciliar liturgy: just what Pope Benedict wants, as a profound theologian of the liturgy and a music connoisseur. Naturally, Bartolucci's secret dream is to return at last to conduct the emblematic "Pope Marcellus Mass" by Palestrina, as a Mass celebrated by Benedict XVI at Saint Peter's.

The anticipation that these signs will soon be followed by a change of the conductor of the Sistine Chapel choir will become more impatient from this point forward.

***

The context within which Bartolucci will return to conduct a Mass at Saint Peter's is that of the International Festival of Sacred Music and Art, which is held each fall in the basilicas of Rome, and is marking its eighth edition this year.

The program this year has two focal points: Roman polyphony, and organ music.

The inauguration will be on Wednesday, November 18, in the basilica of Saint John Lateran, with a concert in the spirit of Palestrina, conducted by Bartolucci himself.

Another event in the spirit of the Roman school of polyphony, in a modern reinterpretation, will be the oratory "Paolo e Fruttuoso," composed and conducted by Valentino Miserachs Grau, conductor of the choir of the basilica of Saint Mary Major and head of the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music, the Vatican's "conservatory."

The second focal point will be the organ. The Fondazione Pro Musica e Arte Sacra has completed the restoration of the huge Tamburini organ of the Roman basilica of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Its inauguration will involve a series of four concerts performed by the organists who supervised the restoration – Goettsche, Paradell, and Piermarini – and by other world famous organ virtuosos like Leo Krämer and Johannes Skudlik.

The organ is the main instrument of liturgical music, which unforgivably has been overlooked despite the fact that it is present in countless churches. But non-liturgical music will also be included in the program, with works by Mendelssohn, Mozart, Schubert. On November 20, the octet of strings and woodwinds of the Wiener Philarmoniker will perform Schubert's sublime Octet in F Major in the basilica of Saint Mary Major.

The Wiener Philarmoniker is a constant presence at the Festival of Sacred Art and Music. Of all the major orchestras of the world, it is the one in which sacred and profane music are most closely intertwined.

For the next edition of the festival, the Wiener Philarmoniker has already agreed to perform Bruckner's ninth symphony and a selection from Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" in the Roman basilica of Saint Paul's Outside the Walls, on October 26, 2010.

There are several links and additional information at the end of Sandro Magister's original article.

Here was the ethos of 1957

A brief follow-up on Shawn's outstanding and challenging post here, my eye fell on the following sentence from the December 1957 issue of Caecilia, stated as a given, not argued for, just presented as a summary of the prevailing view - a view which today is held by a dying-out minority, in light of new scholarship and a changed culture. I'm particularly struck by the idea that a Church council was be called amidst this ethos:

It is no longer the fashion to trumpet the astounding spectacle of the high middle ages. Indeed we have been enveloped by an opinion that almost everything since the seventh century has been a kind of devolution.

The Music in Angels and Demons

So, I saw Angels and Demons last night, the movie supposedly based on one of those Dan Brown novels about how awful the Catholic Church is. There is a quaint "village atheist" quality to this material that I find more funny than threatening, and there is something to like about this genre. It always portrays the Church as powerful, ominous, mysterious, bound to tradition, wealthy, adorned with beauty and majesty, steeped in history, dogmatic and unmodernized, with an iron-fisted attachment to a world gone by,

Well, I can think of ways to portray the Church in a less flattering light! There is something magnificently alluring about all of this, and part of me thinks that a movie like this probably works to achieve a certain evangelistic purpose. The reality of the local parish and its guitar quintet is likely to be disappointing by comparison.

It also reminds me of the old Jewish joke. A Jew in Germany in the early 1930s demands to know why his Jewish friend always reads the Nazi papers. His friend puts down the Nazi paper and explains: "The Nazi press portrays the Jews as wealthy, all-powerful, very clever, and running the banks and the government. The Jewish press describes us as poor powerless victims in grave danger of annihilation. Who do I want to believe?"

Actually, the real reason I like to see any film in which the Catholic Church is featured prominently concerns the music. Let's just say that "On Eagles Wings" is never featured at a Catholic funeral on film. And it pleases me to see confirmed that even the most secular parts of the industrial media sector understand what sacred music probably sounds like.

Sure enough, this movie opens with the Introit of the Requiem Mass playing at the funeral. Indeed, whenever there is a need to call forth some sense of solemn liturgy, a modal piece comes on featuring vague outlines of Kyrie Eleison and Angus Dei. There were several people's chants feature here and there – probably more than most parishes hear in the course of one liturgical year, sad to say.

The score by Hans Zimmer seems to have more than what made it into the film. The website of the movie has some more elaborate musical settings of some liturgical texts. At the movie itself, audiences mostly heard Zimmer's signature hoo-ha sound designed to elicit some ominous sense of Batman, or Gladiator, or Cardinals meeting in conclave or something. It is mostly interchangeable, though I do find it fun.

Actually, as everyone knows, Hollywood has never finally let go of the view that the Catholic Church should have Catholic Church music, and, in this sense, Hollywood has long been ahead of most Catholic publishers.