Newly Republished: Cantus Mariales — Rare 1903 Book of Marian Chants

Choirs and scholas often like to have a selection of devotional chants for ad libitum use. Books like The Parish Book of Chant have done an admirable job in this regard, but I often find there is a real dearth of Marian chants. I was therefore delighted when, some years ago, friends of mine delivered to me three copies of an exceptionally rare book published in 1903, Cantus Mariales, that contains 50 beautiful Marian chants for the entire Church year, as well as an Appendix of several litanies and antiphons. I am happy to announce today the publication of a facsimile edition, bringing this volume once again to choirs and scholas everywhere.

The story of how I came by these books is quite interesting. My friends were visiting Jerusalem, and happened to enter a monastery called St. Pierre de Sion, otherwise known as the Ratisbonne Monastery. They somehow got up into the choir loft (which is exactly what I would have tried to do myself!) and found a stash of old chant books, covered with dust and in various stages of disrepair, and evidently unused. When they asked a person who lived there if they could buy any of the books, he shrugged his shoulders and said: "Go ahead and take them, no one's using them." When my friends got back to Austria, they gave them to me and said: "You should be the one to get these, you'll know what to do with them."

One of the original books

Once I began to sing the chants inside Cantus Mariales — which bears the subtitle quos e fontibus antiquis eruit aut opere novo veterum instar concinnavit — I knew that I had stumbled on a goldmine that deserved to be republished. The editor, Dom Joseph Pothier, O.S.B., is well known to chant afficionados as one of the great maestros and paleographers of the Solesmes monastic movement. Dom Pothier ranged through manuscripts finding Marian sequences, proses, and rhythms from all centuries. Some of these were already fitted with melodies, others he adapted to existing melodies, and still others he set to neo-Gregorian compositions. At the end of most pieces, the sources of text and melody are indicated. (The preface and annotations are in Latin.) Here is the Table of Contents:

The short chant antiphons given for announcing each of the traditional 15 mysteries of the Rosary (pp. 125-31) are fascinating and could elevate the communal recitation of the Rosary in places where that is a custom, e.g., during a public Holy Hour.

The three original copies appear to be hand-produced: the pages show obvious signs of having been printed, cut, and assembled in small batches; each cover is marbled in a distinctive manner, and each book has discrepancies of spacing and placement, not to mention pencil and pen markings. The one I dismantled for scanning was in good shape and had few extraneous markings. I am happy to announce the availability of a full-color facsimile edition identical in content to the original, with a new cover.

An original copy (1903) and the new facsimile (2016)

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Solesmes releases new Liber Cantualis

Solesmes has published a new edition of the Liber cantualis - Gregorian Melodies (Latin-English). This small and convenient book contains Latin Chants for the Ordinary of the Mass & Chants for other occasions. The new edition uses the newer clearer notational typeface and also provides English translations of the Chants.

The Liber Cantualis was first published in 1995 and is designed for small parishes or schools. Amongst the Chants are seven settings of the Ordinary (Masses I, IV, VIII, IX, XI, XVII, XVIII), Credos I & III, four Alleluias, the Asperges & Vidi aquam, and Sequences including Victimae Paschali & Veni Sancti Spiritus. There are also chants in honour of the Blessed Sacrament, Our Lady, chants for different liturgical seasons, selected Psalms and Canticles, and the complete office of Compline. It is impressive how much has been fitted into this slim little volume and I am sure it will be of great use in a variety of contexts. It is available directly from Solesmes for 15E.

Books for Sale/3: Solesmes Books [UPDATED]

Update as of 1/14/15: All books in this batch have been SOLD.  (I will leave the rest of this post as it stands, because it is interesting to be able to see these books from the point of view of liturgical history and the art of the book.)
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Today's batch includes some rare Solesmes chant books. If interested, or to obtain more information, contact me at the email listed in the sidebar on the left.

Liber Antiphonarius (1891)

The oldest book in the batch. It's in decent shape for its almost 125 years of age, though I would be careful not to throw it across the room, even at someone who's not singing well. The binding has a few wormholes (no, not the astrophysics kind) and, like the classic Solesmes books, is filled with lovely line art. $100 or best offer, plus shipping.

Liber Usualis (1904) Here we have an early Solesmes edition, published in 1904, that, while printing the neumes in a way familiar to our eyes, utilizes a few note-shapes that were subsequently abandoned. One will notice parallels with certain more recent (post-conciliar) Solesmes editions. Also charming is the opening letter from Pope Leo XIII to Dom Paul Delatte. $85 obo + shipping.

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From Solesmes: A Beautiful Facsimile of a Montecassino Manuscript and a Flying Drone

Solesmes has published the latest volume in the Paléographie Musicale series. This beautiful volume is the 23rd in the series which began in 1889 and is the first to be published in colour. It is a facsimile of Montecassino MS 542, a 12th century antiphonary and a beautiful example of the distinctive Beneventan Chant which originated in the south of Italy. The book has an introduction and explanation (in French) of the notation by the scholar and musician Katarina Livljanić as well as a comprehensive index.

The photograph below shows the original manuscript and the first antiphon from Lauds on the Feast of the Holy Innocents: Herodes iratus occidit multos pueros in Bethlehem Judae civitate David. The damage sustained in a fire can be seen at the top.

The new edition can be purchased directly from Solesmes.

The video of Solesmes below was recently filmed by a drone and shows parts of the monastery usually hidden out of sight. The opening shot starts in the French Garden, the Abbey Church visible to the right, and moves towards the Maurist Priory building which contains both the Atelier of the Paléographie Musicale as well as Dom Gueranger's cell, exactly as he left it. The charming garden of the smaller Maurist Cloister can be seen, as well as the Great Cloister, in the corner of which is the small building (with turret roof) where the Abbot washes the hands of guests before they enter the refectory. The Abbot's octagonal cell juts out at first floor level over a small internal courtyard (1:30) next to the library at the heart of the complex. The classic view of Solesmes which ends the short video is taken from a little further upstream on the River Sarthe.

In Honor of St. Benedict, St. Thomas, and Benedict XVI

A meditation in honor of Saint Benedict, born into eternal life on March 21, 543 (or 547).

For the traditional feastday of the Patriarch of Western Monasticism and the Patron of Europe, it seems appropriate to recall these beautiful words from the Commentary on the Rule of St. Benedict written by a great disciple of his, the Right Rev. Dom Paul Delatte, O.S.B., Abbot of Solesmes from 1890-1921.

St. Benedict of Nursia was above all else a man of tradition. He was not the enthusiastic creator of an entirely new form of the religious life: neither nature nor grace disposed him to such a course. As may be seen from the last chapter of his Rule, he cared nothing for a reputation of originality, or for the glory of being a pioneer. He did not write till late, till he was on the threshold of eternity, after study and perhaps after experience of the principal monastic codes. Nearly every sentence reveals almost a fixed determination to base his ideas on those of the ancients, or at least to use their language and appropriate their terms. But even though the Rule were nothing but an intelligent compilation, even though it were merely put together with the study and spiritual insight of St. Benedict, with the spirit of orderliness, moderation, and lucidity of this Roman of old patrician stock, it would not for all that be a commonplace work: in actual fact, it stands as the complete and finished expression of the monastic ideal. Who can measure the extraordinary influence that these few pages have exercised, during fourteen centuries, over the general development of the Western world? Yet St. Benedict thought only of God and of souls desirous to go to God; in the tranquil simplicity of his faith he purposed only to establish a school of the Lord’s service: Dominici schola servitii. But, just because of this singleminded pursuit of the one thing necessary, God has blessed the Rule with singular fruitfulness, and St. Benedict has taken his place in the line of the great patriarchs.

Dom Delatte’s splendid characterization of the “unoriginal originality” of Benedict reminds me strongly of St. Thomas Aquinas, himself a Benedictine oblate as a child and, later, a Dominian friar of whom quite the same thing could be said: he was determined to collect and harmonize the teachings of the ancients and bring them to bear on every problem, so that his solutions often seem like the work of an elegant host who manages, at the table, to get all the guests talking to one another and to reach a consensus that keeps the best of each while gracefully ignoring the rest. Aquinas, in that sense, “was above all else a man of tradition … who thought only of God and of souls desirous to go to God.” To paraphrase Delatte, “Who can measure the extraordinary influence that the works of Thomas, particularly his Summa, have exercised, during seven and a half centuries, over the general development of the Western world?”

But I am also reminded here of our beloved Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who chose the name Benedict for so many of the reasons for which Dom Delatte praises the patriarch. How often did we thank the good Lord for sending us a pope who “was above all else a man of tradition”? How could we fail to see that he sought neither originality nor glory, but pursued a steady course of reviving the wisdom and language of the ancients, bring to his difficult task the “orderliness, moderation, and lucidity” of the best kind of German scholar? It is as if he had been handed the keys to a mansion in which many rooms were closed off and falling apart, one in which the domestic staff had turned suspicious and unaccommodating, and had taken it upon himself to begin the long process of repairing physical structures and healing spiritual breaches. God willing, it will someday be said of him: “Who can measure the extraordinary influence that the few pages of Summorum Pontificum have exercised over the reconstruction of the Church after the destruction wreaked by postconciliar storms?” Yet in all this, Pope Benedict “thought only of God and of souls desirous to go to God; in the tranquil simplicity of his faith he purposed only to restore to the faithful the first and greatest school of the Lord’s service, the sacred liturgy.”

May the teaching and legislation of Pope Benedict be blessed over the centuries with a fruitfulness comparable to that of the Rule of Saint Benedict and the Summa of Saint Thomas.

What are those strange squiggles in the Graduale Triplex?

Sacred Music is the name of the quarterly journal of the Church Music Association of America. In the most recent issue, I have an article entitled 'The Solesmes Chant Tradition: The Original Neumatic Signs and Practical Performance Today'. The article is based on a talk I gave at the CMAA Colloquium in Salt Lake City in 2012 and is intended as an entry into the world of Solesmes and Semiology, in other words how the monks went about the process of deciphering the early chant manuscripts and converting them into a universal and singable performing edition. I know that many readers of the NLM blog are very knowledgeable about this particular field, however this may be of interest if you want to know what semiology is, what is meant by 'Old Solesmes' or if you have simply always wondered what those strange squiggles are in the Graduale Triplex:

I have posted the article here and I am grateful to the CMAA for allowing me to do so. If you would like to subscribe to the journal, you can do so here. It represents good value at $48 a year, however you can donate more to this extremely good cause should you wish and help support the CMAA's vast plethora of projects. You can also browse the online archive of previous editions.

What is a Baculus Cantoralis and why do you need one?

The Baculus Cantoralis, to give it one of its many names, is a large staff held by a Choirmaster or Cantor which originates in Benedictine Monasteries of the 10th and 11th centuries. It is sometimes called a Baculus Choralis or a Baculus Praecentoris. At Solesmes, where it is still in use, it is referred to as Le Bâton de Chantre. When I was there recently I saw it being used at Vespers on Trinity Sunday. It can be seen beside the Cantors just to the right of the Eagle, resting on a stand:

At the top of the Baculus is a small ivory carving of St Peter, the patron of Solesmes Abbey, imparting a blessing and holding the Basilica of St Peter in Rome:

Its use is purely ceremonial nowadays, although in medieval times it was reportedly used as a 'corrective' instrument when dealing with inaccurate singers. (I wonder where I might acquire one...) The photograph below shows Dom Umberto Bertini of Farnborough holding a Baculus. The photograph was taken before Solemn Vespers at Clairvaux before the First World War.

I came across an article from 1940 about Dom Uberto Bertini in the Catholic Herald's online archive. Do go and read it if you have a moment: he was an extraordinary man. My thanks to the Monks of Farnborough for providing the photograph.