Matthew Alderman on: Mass on a Zeppelin and More

Our readers have run across Mr Andrew Cusack’s coverage of some of the stunning Catholic chapels on board the great Art Deco passenger liners, but I was pleasantly surprised by a friend who pointed out that around the same time, Mass was also being said in the air. The incomparable eccentric Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson imagines chapels aboard futuristic flying craft in his fanciful scientific romance The Dawn of All, the lesser known and even stranger companion to his more famous novel Lord of the World. But a little over two decades later, there was at least one actual aerial Mass said. This is a photo from airships.net of a Mass said by Fr Paul Schulte, the so-called “Flying Priest,” aboard the LZ 129 Hindenburg in its happier pre-Lakehurst days.

Fr. Schulte is an interesting character in and of himself. The founder of MIVA (Missionalium Vehiculorum Associatio/Missionary International Vehicle Association), while still a seminarian he was conscripted into the Prussian 4th Guard Grenadiers in the First World War, and only was ordained as a priest of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate in 1922, after a brief stint as a military pilot. MIVA was founded in 1925 in South-West Africa (modern Namibia) and was dedicated to acquiring transportation vehicles and qualified pilots and drivers for the missions abroad, especially Africa, Asia and Latin America. The first aerial Mass was said in 1936, with special Papal permission, by Fr. Schulte aboard the Hindenburg; presumably this is a photo of the event, though I am unable to confirm this supposition. Schulte was later stationed in the far north of Canada and spent most of the Second World War in Belleville, Illinois; he later helped found the outdoor National Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows in Belleville, itself an intriguing exercise in “mid-century modern” Catholic art and architecture. He died in 1975 in what is now Namibia.

JT on: St. Patrick's, New Orleans

St. Patrick's, New Orleans, is a thriving parish that provides Latin Masses in both the old and new forms every Sunday, and is home to a spectacular music program -- a good case of a parish that has completely revived through focus on fantastic liturgy. It attracts people each week from around the state and even from neighboring states.

In many ways, the program here seems to use St. John Cantius in Chicago as a model, with friendliness to both forms of the Roman Rite with special attention given to the interior beauty of the Church and also to the liturgy. This is the source of its energy and growth. It is a case in point that you won't find mentioned in any of the well-established Catholic music periodicals, even though the full embrace of tradition and excellence has been a boon for the parish in every way. Such places as this are a great hope for the future.

Here is one report that landed in my inbox:

If you have not been made aware of St. Patrick's Church in New Orleans (it seems to be flying underneath the radar), permit me to share the news with you -- it is everything that you would admire. I travel to New Orleans on Sundays from Hattiesburg, Mississippi for the weekly Latin High Mass, the Solemn High Mass on the first Sunday of the month, along with solemn Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament every third Sunday.

Each Mass is Gregorian while the high holydays (Christmas, Easter, Epiphany, etc.) are usually highlighted with one of the Masses of the great composers. (I must confess, however, that the simple reverence of the chanted Masses are much more congenial to me than the splendor of the classical Masses - too much like a perfromance for my personal taste, but that is just me.) The choir is nothing short of magnificent: fabulous tenor, accompanied by a grand organ, and graced on occasion by Sarah McMahan, a beautiful young soprano who has quite a repetoire of operatic performances in both New Orleans and New York.

When one is kneeling at the communion rail, gazing at the altar built before the Civil War, being administered communion by the beautifully-vested Fr. Klores (he wore a chasuble on Gaudete Sunday that had been worn five centuries earlier by St. Ignatius of Loyola) and with Sarah singing Panis Angelicus, Ave Maria or the like, well... it is just beyond my capabilities to describe.

Before each Mass, six acolytes process to the foot of the altar where they intone a series of quiet prayers - they have been enrolled in the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament - this is part of their ritual. The opening procession, after the Asperges is sung, usually has about a dozen acolytes, a couple of young seminarians and deacons and sub-deacon when applicable. When I tell people about it, I seem to keep repeating the same word over and over: magnificent; but there is no other word that conveys it better.

This past year the parish celebrated the 175th anniversary of its founding, and the Mass was attended by two bishops (there would have been three but Archbishop Hannan was ill), more priests, seminarians and acolytes that one could count and when it was all over, the choir sang the Te Deum in all of its splendor. The huge congregation was numb with joy.

So, just as you have given me so much hope and ecouragement that a better day will dawn, I wanted to cheer you up a little bit also. If you ever get the opportunity to visit New Orleans, be sure to search out St. Patrick's, and also be sure to contact me as I would be thrilled to have you as a guest for brunch.

JT on: Music Without Borders

The New York Times is devoting a major 3-part story to the changing demographics of the American priesthood. The core of the story deals with the priest shortage in the United States, and the ways that dioceses are dealing with it by drawing from the surplus of priests in Africa and Latin America. One of six diocesan priests now serving in the United States came from abroad.

For now, only part one has been printed, and it may yet deal with the problem of music, for this is a major issue that these new priests face. Music in all times and places is a major contributor to helping us identify aspects of home wherever we happen to be. This is a factor in the spread of digital MP3 players; they permit us to bring our preferred surroundings to us whether we happen to be in the subway, the car, an airport, or wherever.

The music of the Roman Rite—itself a universal liturgy—has a universal music that permits priests from all over the world to have a sense of “home” when celebrating it in all places. That is not to say that there are not local variations. The music at Mass in Uganda is going to have a different character from Masses celebrated in Utah, and national variations in incidental music are legendary.

However, there is a foundational music of the Roman Rite that has been the same in all times and places. The ordinary settings of the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus are world-wide settings in which no national culture in particular is embedded in its sound and feel. They were put together as part of a body of music overtly structured with a multicultural demand that no one language group of demographic prevail over any other. The Mass and its artistic setting must transcend not only time but also place and even the cultural character of the gathered people.

This is also true of the propers of the Mass (Introit, Gradual, Alleluia, Offertory, Communion), which are of the same plainchant style as the ordinary settings but more musically complicated and designed for singers who have studied and are engaged in continual practice. The Sequences are the same all over the world, provided we are using the prescribed melodies.

Finally, there are the chant hymns such as those gather in the Parish Book of Chant, and they have a universal quality as well. At Masses where there is an international gathering of people, chant hymns are what unite people from all over the world in song. They convey a sense that no matter what your national origin, the Catholic Church is your home, and it is a home that you share with the faithful from all over the world.

I don’t think it often occurs to American Catholic just how provincial and national in character the music at our Masses has become over the years. Of course this was also true in the 19tth and early 20th century, when the favorite songs of Irish and Italian immigrants became standard fare. But underneath them, there was still a constant strain of music that united the immigrants groups, and that was the chant tradition.

What is different today is that this chant tradition has been nearly entirely displaced by new tunes written in the 1970s and continue to be written today, and their source of inspiration was not the universal music of the Roman Rite but the localized, national, and contemporary trends of secular and evangelical culture. Our Masses take on a sensibility that strikes foreign people as predictably “white bread,” and provincial as hot dogs.

The result is that our liturgy often sounds distinctly American in a way that is distinctly unCatholic. I noted this years ago when I attended a Mass at the North American College in Rome prior to its more recent effort to revive and universalize the music used at the seminary. I was struck at how the Mass seemed no different from what one would hear in your local parish. Yes, it made one feel “at home” but only in the sense that Americans feel at home only with American things.

In this sense, we should have some strong sympathies with “progressive” Catholic liturgists who complain about the alienation that is felt by ethnic minorities in our parishes, and how the music that is dominate doesn’t really connect with their own history.

Not that music at Mass must necessarily connect with any particular national tradition but neither should it be so tied to a national genre as to indicate exclusivity. The chant, on the other hand, takes us to a new level in which we are neither catering to majority interests nor pandering to minority demands. It calls us all to leave such selfish concerns at the door and discover timeless truth.

What we need in our parishes is a form of music that emphasizes the universal unity of all people in Christ. On a practical level, this means that the African priest should be able to step into any parish in America and be part of a repertoire of music that is familiar and known, illustrating how any Catholic parish is a home to any Catholic priest anywhere in the world. It is an undeniable truth that there is only one musical genre that fulfills this demand, and it so happens that it is the same music that has been specifically named by the Church as that which is to have primacy of place at Mass.

Reflect on the wisdom of those who see chant as the universal music of the Mass. It means that all Catholics can have a sense of belonging. The Marian antiphon for the season is the same in all parts of the world, even if we are struck but subtle local variations.

My own parish had a visiting priest from Africa last year, and it was the chant that provided that deep connection between himself and our local parish. He was so grateful that he brought with him, in his heart and heart, this music. This gave our local parish a grander appreciation for the chant and its capacity to unite us all. And he left with a burning desire to learn even more and singing ever more in his own country, as a way of underscoring the mystical connection between parishioners here and there.

It is enough that priests from abroad must struggle with language issues and adjustments to our national traditions like Thanksgiving and our peculiar ways in matters of politics and material things. Amidst all these differences, if we can find areas of commonality, that is all to the good. The Rite itself we have in common. The music of the rite too should be a source not of division but of unity.

From AOZ: Chant in the New Year

If you were still thinking about attending the CMAA's Winter Chant Intensive coming up on January 5-9, this might be the sign you've been waiting for. There have been a few cancellations due to illness - which leaves a handful of spots open.

Imagine yourself studying nothing but chant for an entire week - and with one of the premier chant masters working today. Can you see yourself singing the propers for Epiphany in the historic Founders Chapel at the University of San Diego? There is no telling how long it's been since the chant has taken pride of place in a Mass celebrated in this beautiful and sacred space. Become a part of this historical event.

You can register here.

Fr. Kocik on: An Extra-extraordinary Form

The eastern Church uses three forms of the Divine Liturgy, or Eucharistic Sacrifice: the Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, celebrated on most Sundays and feast days; the Liturgy of Saint Basil the Great, celebrated ten times a year, especially on the Sundays of Lent and the Feast of St Basil (1 January); and, rarest of all, the Liturgy of Saint James the Apostle and Brother of Our Lord, celebrated once a year on his feast day, 23 October. Until the middle of the last century, the Liturgy of St James was used only by the Orthodox at Jerusalem and on the Greek island of Zante (a.k.a. Zakynthos);* it has since been revived elsewhere (mostly Orthodox churches), and quite recently at the Ruthenian Greek-Catholic Cathedral of Presov, Slovakia, where it was used this past October. Photos here, courtesy of Fr. James Badeaux, an American Byzantine (Ruthenian) Catholic priest. Note that the faithful receive the consecrated Host and the Precious Blood separately, rather than by intinction; also (so I'm told) the formula is "The Body of Christ" and "The Blood of Christ," as in the "ordinary form" of the Roman Rite.

* Timothy Ware, The Orthodox Church (Penguin, 1963; rev. 1983), p. 286.

Jeffrey Tucker on: Sacred Music and the New Evangelism

This is Part III. See Part II and Part I.

In the heyday of Glory & Praise music at Mass, the well-trained and serious musicians who favored a restoration of Gregorian chant and polyphony largely worked in alienated secrecy, afraid even to publish their own settings of Psalms and chant editions even if they could find a publisher. The old publishing institutions of the preconciliar days were long gone and the new ones were unfriendly to their work. There was a doubt about whether there was a financially viable market for their work, but that wasn't the only concern. Issues of copyright weighed heavily on them.

I can recall correspondence with some from the 1990s. These were masters of music at cathedrals and universities who lived in fear that someone would discover that they had put an episema over a punctum, or added a dot at the end of a phrase, and the fear was that these small dashes and lines were held by someone somewhere as a proprietary font, and that they would be risky lawsuits by making their editions available even through email.

What was unknown then, and what only came to be known in the last several years, is that the Gregorian editions of the past had long since passed from the proprietary stage into the open-source stage of availability. Inquiries with the Library of Congress yielded results that most any intellectual-property lawyer might have expected: the chants are the whole property of the Church, and the only editions that remain proprietary in a legal sense are those published in recent years since the Second Vatican Council. What applied to the music also applied to preconciliar texts: because most of them were not renewed in copyright, they had become the common property of all Catholics, which made them uniquely suited to delivering in the digital age.

But let's take a small step back and look at the origin of the great innovator in open-source music: the Choral Public Domain Library, or CPDL.org. It opened its doors in 1999 with fifty or so compositions available for free download, many of them by Renaissance masters such as Palestrina, Josquin, Byrd, Gabrieli, Gibbons, and others. There were no logins, no fees, no licenses.

This interface was the brainchild of a student of Professor William Mahrt's at Stanford University. His studies into this area had convinced him that the raw and unedited editions of the masters can and should be made available to the world. And it was just the beginning. Over the last ten years, thousands of scores have been added, so much so that the site has to be constantly upgraded to prevent crashing. And when it does crash, the entire Catholic music world panics.

In the new world of digital downloads, CPDL plays a hugely important role. The whole Catholic world could sing the music recommended by the Second Vatican Council without paying the fees attached to editions from establishment publishers, who were running a fee-based closed society of locked-down musical editions. This meant that choirs could download and experiment with music, throwing out what they didn't like and keeping what they did. It meant that parish budgets could focus more heavily on paying musicians rather than paying for music – a virtual revolution in parish budgeting.

In terms of the ordinary of the Mass itself, MusicaSacra.com uploaded and made available its first Kyriale in 2005, the 18 settings of the Mass that had been handed on from the middle ages, now available to the whole world, including the poorest of the poor. This was also completely new. The same was occurring for Latin propers: many editions of the Graduale Romanum were newly available, having long since past into the common property of the Church. This meant that choirs could experiment and composers could use the Church's music for composition without fearing for the police.

There were important steps taking place in the area of English propers too. Jeffrey Ostrowski of the Chabanel Psalms was the first to come forward with his settings of the Psalms for the ordinary form of the Mass. It was a revelation to many that music during this portion of the Mass didn't have to be sing songy and silly; it could be dignified and modal in character like the music of old. Many other composers came forward with their settings, and Ostrowski graciously made those settings from other composers available too.

Fr. Samuel Weber had for years circulated his English propers via email only, citing the same concern over copyright. But once the St. Louis archdiocese hired him to head their new institute for sacred music, they too took the important step of making his propers common property as well. They are now fully hosted and available for immediate download, with liberal permissions. Along with this, many other books came online: Bruce Ford's American Gradual, the Anglican Use Gradual, Psalm tone propers from the past, along with a massive number of teaching manuals and more.

Meanwhile, CPDL.org has become a place for the posting of new compositions too, under the Creative Common attribution license, which grants liberal use permissions provided that the source of identified. It also prevents people from homesteading new compositions and put them under restrictions.

At the same time, new resources such as The Parish Book of Chant—along with the republication of many older works—are springing up to change parish culture. This is an interesting book in particular because it compiles the true people's music from all ages, all in Latin, and provides the necessary English translations for them, along with ordos for both the new and older forms of Mass, along with a tutorial. Most importantly, this is a book for our time that brings to life music from the whole history of the Church. The typesetting is fresh. And it is presented in a way that our generation can understand, which accounts for its adoption at Received adoptions at the North American College, Franciscan University of Stubenville, Ave Maria University, Mundelein Seminary, Wyoming Catholic College, and the Catholic University of America.

In addition to these resources, there is this blog that provides daily commentary that reaches people as never before. The archives of Sacred Music are online. There are large communities of musicians are forums and blogs. There are new on-demand publications coming out constantly. The whole history of liturgical music is being scanned daily and posted, so that precisely treasures, once held by only a few, are available to millions at no charge. MusicaSacra.com has posted new books and dozens of archival editions once kept only in large libraries.

All of this new activity has coincided with the liturgical flowering prompted by Summorum Pontificum, which provides equal rights to the older form of Mass and blasts open a massive and extended tradition that had been previously closed to us.

That we are living in very exciting times for the flourishing of sacred music is no longer in dispute. The attendance at colloquia and workshops, and the changes permeating through parish life, are proof of that. What is often missed here are the institutional considerations that have created a distinct advantage to sacred music in particular. Many historical and institutional factors have contributed toward restoring sacred music as an open-source community in which imitation, free distribution, widespread dissemination, and the resulting dynamism are the characteristic features.

In this respect, we are seeing a restoration of the status quo ante that gave rise to sacred music over 1600 years, and once again gave a boost to the folk music movement of the 1970s. Here we see growth, evangelism, and excitement as never before, and it stands in marked contrast to the gloomy art world of the established music companies who live off the victories of the modern past, forever selling the same tired hymns and settings and trotting out the folk performers of the past to somehow breath life into a genre of music that has long past seen its day.

A truth that the Glory & Praise promoters realized long ago is that the battle for the musical soul of the Catholic Church takes place one parish at time, and resists being imposed by large establishments no matter what their legal status and claims.

In a time when all media is being revolutionized by digital delivery driving costs of use and dissemination toward zero, we see technology being used toward the formation of a new form of musical evangelism, a new form that is very much like the old form that inspired the Solesemes monastery in its earliest years: the conviction that the music of the faith is holy and universal and should be experienced by all the faithful in all times and places.

Jeffery Tucker on: Closed Musical Societies

The is part II. Read Part I.

In an age of digital delivery of nearly everything, it is easy to forget that the economic and technological means for universal distribution of printed matter only became the norm only a century and a quarter ago. Competitive editions of Gregorian chant were circulating all over Europe and America, as published by many different firms and printing companies. The encyclical Tra le Sollecitudini set off furious work toward standardizing the chant, recovery what was lost during the Renaissance and producing editions for the entire world.

It was an inadvertently related development that the issue of copyright also vexed the production of the new Graduale Romanum in 1908. The Solesmes monastery was using new rhythmic signs as a unique feature of its editions, even as the Vatican edition, produced under the leadership of the past Solesmes chant master, rejected the use of these signs. The battle played out in a mutual and highly confusing dispute over intellectual property. After the 1908 Graduale from the Vatican, there would be no more editions from Rome, leaving the monastery as the sole producer of chant. It was an institution that had become unusually protective of its exclusive use of its markings and therefore its editions.

In time, the incredibly brilliant volume called the Liber Usualis would become the world standard for use in parishes and cathedrals, and it was produced by the monastery in cooperation with Desclee printers in Belgium. Periodic litigation broke out in the early years that established a precedent that stuck for many decades: there would be no copying of the chants. Even the fonts that went into making the chants were held as proprietary, under the laws of France, which had to be respected in the U.S. due to new international copyright conventions. The result that no one in particular intended but that nonetheless undeniable: a system-wide limitation on dissemination set it at the very moment when the chant should have achieved universal availability.

What was the alternative to the Gregorian repertoire? In the effort to provide one for choirs who couldn't handle the demands of the full repertoire, publishers got busy and produce a variety of options, the most common of which depended on Psalm tones. Of their public domain status, there was no doubt, and hence no fear associated with publishing them, singing them, copying them, and disseminating them far and wide. If we understand something about the relationship between open- and closed-source materials, it should not surprise us that Psalm-tone propers became the norm for sung Mass. They were easier, of course, but, just as importantly, they were open source and non-proprietary.

In his book Where Have You Gone, Michelangelo? (1993), Thomas Day, in passing, notes that the Solesmes monopoly on chant created an "undercurrent of bad feelings," which he suggests might have contributed to what happened to Church music in the 1960s and 1970s. The new music of the folk composers was completely open source. There was a thrill associated with overthrowing an entrenched establishment. Their music was new and fresh, and its means of delivery was entirely different. It was not copyrighted or even published in the conventional way. It was written by hand, and commonly mimeographed and passed parish to parish, and also transmitted by ear.

This was part of the cache of the music itself, and central to the idea that this was "folk" music even though it obviously was not folk music in the sense that the term was used. However, it was folk music in the same way that chant had been: its distribution was informal and its dissemination was controlled not by a marketing apparatus but rather by word of mouth.

What gave rise to the new music were the needs of the moment. What inspired the compositions were the tunes that were in the air at the time, from all sources but mostly secular ones. What led to its spread was the desire of the people for something different, more organically connected to the social context they knew. In this way, there is a sense in which the "folk music" of the 1970s had more in common with the early chant music—speaking institutionally here—than the "sacred music" of the establishment of that day.

After the promulgation of the new Mass in 1970, it would be fully four years before Solesmes, which by now had been charged by the Vatican with maintaining the Church's chant book—would come out with the Graduale Romanum for the new Missal. It was expensive and in a language hardly anyone knew. Its appearance made no dent whatsoever in new trends in Church music. An English-language version didn't appear until 1990.

Already by the mid 1970s, however, the conditions were in place that were planting seeds that would lead to the current reversal in the fortunes of sacred music. What happened is what everyone knows about today: the folk music pioneers found new publishers, who applied all the existing rules concerning "intellectual property" to their music, and a lucrative and large new publishing establishment grew up around this music. Old publishers died and a new establishment came into being. Litigation followed, as spies for the large publishers started entering parishes and riffling through there music collections, discovery photocopied works everywhere that violated copyright terms. Judgments followed, some in the multi-million dollar category. The open-source folk music of yesterday became the closed-source establishment music of today.

Today every parish musician knows about the copyright quagmire, which rivals and exceeds anything that existed in preconciliar times. Parishes pay for expensive licenses. Publishers brag about their immense collections of copyrights. No one dares publish a hymnal without jumping through the intellectual property hoops, and this can take many years. Even more absurdly, publishers themselves go to great lengths to publish new and strange arrangements of traditional public-domain tunes solely for the purpose of re-copyrighting them in an attempt to recoup ever more in the form of royalties. These days we can't even imagine a profitable Church publishing firm without the dominate revenue stream being generated by licensing fees.

That it is a thicket is beyond dispute. What is not often understood is the big picture: any industry that enters into this thicket will, over time, find itself artistically stagnating and dying. Why is that? Because the music published can no longer benefit from the critical source of dynamism and life within art: imitation, widespread and people-driven dissemination, and innovation without the context of an existing milieu. There can be no art without these forces working, vibrantly and constantly.

Intellectual property regimes operate on a premise that is a complete myth: that of the lone creator who finishes a work from top to bottom that is a masterpiece hermetically sealed off from all outside influence. Every work that is newly printed and copyrighted as an original composition that no one may "steal" presumes this model. But then there is the reality of a tired establishment, legally sealed off from an important source of life and dynamism, which goes a long way toward explaining how it is that something so spectacular and beautiful throughout history—the music of the Catholic Church—could be so frozen in time, almost like a repeating loop of sound that lulls the whole Catholic world into a stupor.

There has never be a time in all of human history in which the dispersal and dissemination of music for Catholic worship has been so easy, so inexpensive, so efficient. It is a striking irony of history that mainstream music today is caught up in a legal thicket so complicated and entrenched that it has not been able to take advantage of the new environment. On the contrary, Catholic music publishers have taken a cue from the established film and music publishers and waged a war on piracy, which is really a war on the great vehicle of artistic creativity.

To be continued...

Jeffery Tucker on: What does it mean for music to become sacred?

I am pleased to offer this outstanding reflection on the meaning of sacred, from the newest issue of Sacred Music. It is written in response to published doubts that there really is such a thing as sacred music at all.

Be sure to read and share the entire article.

The sacred is not something simply merely separated from the world; rather the sacred transforms elements of the world to a transcendent purpose. The Eucharist is the most outstanding example: what was ordinary food for the Hebrews was transformed into the Passover meal; this, in turn was transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ. Bread and wine, elements of natural nourishment, progressively became transcendent, supernatural, saving nourishment. In my study of the Medieval Sarum Rite of England, I concluded that, contrary to the theorists of comparative religion, who looked to the opposition of sacred and profane (in the sense of secular), the medieval (and Christian) sense of the sacred was that the important differences were between the more sacred and the less sacred, and the continuity of these was more important that their opposition.

In music, the transformation of elements of our ordinary world conveys the message that our ordinary lives can also be transformed. The hitch is: what if the incorporation of music into the liturgy does not involve a discernable transformation? What if the use of styles clearly identifiable with worldly and secular purposes retain their identity in liturgical use? Is the message, then, that there is no transformation? that the secular life-styles are all that there is? I would contend that this is the danger of the present use of secular styles, since the instruments they use, their vocal styling, their simplistic musical construction all retain their secular identity. Rather, it is crucial that whatever musical styles are used in the liturgy, there be clear elements of their sacralization, that their incorporation is unambiguously for the sake of transformation into something sacred. The regular use of a few pieces of Gregorian chant and of sacred polyphony can be enough to signal that difference, to inspire a congregation to higher purposes in their participation in the liturgy.

Jeffrey Tucker on: The Church's Open Musical Society

The golden age of Gregorian chant, the many centuries in which it was written, developed, and applied, were times of imitation and innovation—and both were necessary to its flourishing and they were mutually reinforcing. Willi Apel and others have documented how tone formulas developed in many directions, as popular and useful devices became more elaborate, and how sounds that strike the ear in a certain way, signaling certain kinds of moods and thoughts, were reused in a different context to conjure up similar ideas. Within the developing musical ideas we begin to see a theology of music taking shape alongside the cognitive theology of text.

A good example is the Christmas proclamation, which we just heard at midnight Mass. It tells the story of the prehistory of the Birth of Christ, using the tone usually distinctively associated with readings in the Hebrew scriptures. The descending fifth at the end of the sentence is the mark that tells us, even if we could never understand the words, that we are hearing prophetic words. Finally near the end, on the words "born of the Virgin Mary," we encounter our first departure from this formula, with a sudden and striking rise in the pitch to the octave above the final note. Here we hear the fulfillment of the prophecy.

Thousands of chants have been closely analyzed by scholars to discover which parts were borrowed, which parts adapted from a previous and contemporaneous tradition, and which parts constitute innovations designed to more perfectly render the idea of the text. Those who sing these chants every day will discover something new in them every day, parallels within the Church year. Even casual singers have variously noted similarities between formulas used on Christmas and those use on Palm Sunday—the former welcoming a King in the form of an infant and the latter welcoming a King back into Jerusalem.

This glorious pattern of repetition, imitation, adaption, development, quoting, borrowing, and innovation—with tones and melodies all informing each other in complicated ways over a thousand years—became the rich and endlessly complicated tapestry that was inherited by the polyphonic composers of the second millennium. The early composers of polyphony drew almost exclusively from the chant tradition, making explicit in the musical notation was had only been implicit in the acoustic effects of the chant sung in large spaces with a striking reverberation. Their compositions and practices further inspired Perotin, Obrecht, Machaut, Josquin, Dufay, and the hundreds of others working in the 15th and early 16th century. Their work was in turn a necessary precondition for the emergence of Victoria, Guerrero, Palestrina, DiLasso, Tallis, and so many others in the new golden age of polyphony.

They quoted chants and quoted each other, and wrote compositions in hopes of inspiring others. There was a dynamic between them that was both competitive and complementary. An 8-voice setting that achieved some measure of fame would be followed up by another composure who copied the style and approach and went further with a 10-voice setting, followed by a 12-voice setting, followed by a 14-voice setting, and so on until we encounter such fin de siecle pieces as Tallis 48-part Spem in Alium. They were a competitive society that also practiced the greatest form of musical collegiality, at once making a name for themselves and dependent on the innovations of others as a precondition for their unique contribution.

The idea of a single ex nihilo composition, in which one solitary genius in one generation wrote a piece of music that was wholly original and artistically complete, was not an ideal that they knew or understood. To aspire to this would be been contrary to the idea of organic development, and no more justified that for one person alone to aspire to introduce a liturgical innovation. The idea was first to defer to the glory of what had existed and what did exists before daring to make one's own humble contribution to the edifice of what became the treasury of sacred music.

It goes without saying that polyphonic music of this period was freely copied, imitated, duplicated, borrowed, and performed in every suitable venue. This was not a threat to the composers or those who published their works but rather the goal, the highest compliment that true art could receive. It was not considered piracy to repeat what came from another source but rather an obligation, what Thomas Day calls the Unwritten Law of musical composition: "The icon painters prayed and fasted as they struggled to put the holy images into the exacting forms prescribed by tradition; you must try to do something similar." Even Beethoven himself obeyed it, having studied Mass settings dating back hundreds of years before writing his own Missa Solemnis.

For the nearly the whole of the development of music until the modern age, the idea of copyright—taking exclusive possession of a musical innovation and prohibiting imitation—was not only unknown and inaccessible via the laws of the time. It was something that was contrary to their vocations as composers, since their art was a gift to the Church and the world.

A side note on William Byrd here: It is a well-known fact that he and Thomas Tallis were granted a monopoly on the printing of music in England by Queen Elizabeth in 1575 (this was different from a modern copyright, which was unknown at the time; it was more like an old-world mercantile privilege). The very existence of such a right and privilege was unprecedented in music and was extended with a political goal in mind of maintaining some control over music. The patent was to last 21 years, but if the goal was political control, it failed miserably. English schools and Churches continued to import music from abroad, and failed to provide the expected market for the music of Byrd and Tallis. It is a deep irony that was of the most prolific violators of the patent was Byrd himself, who privately printed and freely distributed music written for Catholic Masses and services that were banned by law. Byrd, holder of the monopoly in printing, became the biggest practitioner of music piracy, paying relentless homage to his forbears and writing music that was circulated in the underground, "peer to peer," we might say.

The chant itself was never subjected to copyright, as editions proliferated throughout Europe for the following four centuries. Every order and monastery produced its own edition, furthering its own tradition and developing it in subtle ways. Reformed music books circulated alongside the traditional ones. As printing technology improved and more firms entered the production market, the entire field became wildly rivalrous, with competition between nations and within them, together with striking debates about chant technique, adaption, notation, and far more. The open society of Church music benefited from development in polyphonic technique as well, with relentless borrowings and imitations, theme upon theme, the sacred borrowing from secular and back again.

The same was true of music more generally, with nothing like today's copyright known until the late 18th century and then only spottily. Neither Bach nor Mozart nor Beethoven worked under a protected regime of intellectual property, and most empirical studies of this issue have shown that the imposition of copyright tended to reduce rather than increase the number of composers and published compositions - which is rather the opposite of what one might expect.

This glorious and productive society of musical development changed dramatically in the 20th century with the push toward applying a rigorous regime of patent and copyright to musical editions, including the chant itself. Because of a dispute between Solesmes and the lead influences behind the Vatican edition of chant, the leaders in the field took refuge behind national laws that restricted and hid their music, forbidding imitation and duplication and restricting dissemination and channeling all remuneration to a single source. No one really understood this in those days but the result created what Day calls an "undercurrent of bad feelings" that contributed mightily to the musical revolution of the 1970s and following.

To be continued…

Fr. Rob Johansen on: People Look East

Fr. Rob Johansen offers a wonderful reflection on what it means for us to "look East," especially as regards the orientation of the priest at the altar. It's all worth reading so click through.

The early Church attached great importance to facing towards the dawning light in its prayer as well. Early churches were built so that, when the assembly gathered for prayer, they faced the East. When Mass was celebrated, priest and people faced not each other, but together faced the altar, toward the East. St. Clement of Alexandria (150 – 216 AD) explained:

... And since the dawn is an image of the day of birth, and from that point the light which has shone forth at first from the darkness increases... In correspondence with the manner of the sun’s rising, prayers are made looking towards the sunrise in the east. (Stromata Book IV, ch. 7)


Even when, as the Church grew, it was no longer possible to build every church so as to have the altar facing eastward, the custom remained of having priest and people together face the altar during the Eucharistic liturgy, facing the Daystar who came to be with His people on that altar.

This posture of priest and people facing the altar is known as ad orientem, which is the Latin for “toward the East”. Most Catholics who are aware of this posture would probably associate it with the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, that is, the Mass as it was celebrated before the liturgical reforms of the 1970’s. Indeed, one of the liturgical changes most associated with Vatican II is that of turning the priest around so that he faced the people. Many Catholics would probably imagine that this change was mandated by Vatican II, and that the former posture of ad orientem had been abolished. But this impression, widespread though it is, is incorrect. In point of fact, no document of Vatican II and nothing in the rubrics of the modern Roman Rite either requires the priest to celebrate Mass facing the people or abolishes celebrating Mass ad orientem.

On January 11th, he will be celebrating a Missa Cantata in the extraordinary form.

JT on: Supplement to the Parish Book of Chant

Here is a special gift from Richard Rice and the CMAA. It is a supplement to the Parish Book of Chant, with notated extended verses from hymns in the book but for which there wasn't room in the pew edition. These all print out on letter sized paper. Print them and sing them! And Merry Christmas.

• Adoro te Devote
• Attende Domine
• Ave Maris Stella
• Concordi Laetitia
• Corde Natus ex Parentis
• Creator Alme Siderum
• Crux Fidelis
• Exsultemus et Laetemur
• Jesu Dulcis Memoria
• O Filii et Filae
• O Salutaris Hostia
• Pange Lingua
• Panis Angelicus
• Parce Domine
• Puer Natus Bethlehem
• Regina Caeli Jubila
• Resonet in Laudibus
• Salve Mater
• Stabat Mater
• Tota Pulchra Est
• Veni Creator Spiritus
• Veni Veni Emmanuel
• Vexilla Regis

JT on: How Does Bach Do It?

Here is one of a zillion amazing pieces that Bach has written for organ, this one perfect for Christmas. It is a little arrangement of In Dulci Jubilo (Good Christian Men Rejoice).

You will notice the melody roaming around in there but the real action is the moving material, and see if you can pick up on the two-against-three rhythm in here. You can spot it with the repeated linear blue dots, 6 of them, all in a row. It happens very fast right at the start, as if to say: "if you thought that this was going to be merely a 6/8 arrangement of the hymn you know, think again."

Keep your eyes moving and watch this bell-like pattern pass quickly from blue to purple/pink and back again. It is a pattern that reemerges in the melody line later. In the organist's hands, this 2/3 trick has to be managed by a single hand in some places, which is no small feat.

JT on: Psalm verses for Introit/Communio - 1962 Missal

After many requests, Versus Psalmorum et Canticorum is now available in print. This book, 233 pages, provides the Psalm verses for entrance and communion propers for the extraordinary form. The antiphons themselves are not in the book. It is a useful volume for a fairly narrow purpose, but essential for those who sing this Mass and don't want to point the verses or dig around for them week after week. The book was first in print in 1962 and has been incredibly difficult to find.

How is it different from Communio? The Psalms are the old Vulgate and there are no antiphons, and introits are included. The typesetting is more old fashioned, and it is certainly more difficult to follow (in my view).

The point seems like a small one, but it is one more addition to a vast and growing collection of Catholic music newly available. The free download of the book is available here.

JT on: O Magnum Mysterium

One of the "greatest hits" in the entire polyphonic repertoire of the 16th century is Tomas de Victoria's O Magnum Mysterium.

O great mystery, and wonderful sacrament, that the animals should see the new-born Lord lying in a manger. Blessed is the Virgin whose womb was worthy to bear Christ the Lord. Alleluia

The piece is not all that difficult. Before you dismiss that claim, a story. When our schola was founded, we all looked forward to a time when we could sing this. It seemed impossibly difficult.

Years went by. We worked a bit each Christmas season and still never got it together. I think our first time to sing it was three years ago. Now we pull it out every year without even thinking much about it, and play with rhythms, tempos, articulations, and effects. It is just a normal part of our repertoire.

I tell the story to encourage scholas not to become discouraged and always think about the future. Improvement comes over time, and one day you will turn around and everything will fall into place.

I'm posting this performance from Taiwan, just because I found it beautiful and charming. There are many versions on youtube, and I encourage you to listen to them all, and see how flexible the piece is. It sounds different with different forces and tempos. You can say, oh, this one is too fast, or, oh, this one is too slow, but in the end, this robust music accommodates many senses of how it ought to be.



(By way of contrast, consider this darkened version with instruments, with that magic touch of Jordi Savall.)

JT on: Introit on Christmas: Puer natus

For many centuries, the first sound on Christmas day was heard in the unmistakable opening notes of "Puer natus est," what was and remains the introit for the Mass on Christmas day in all forms of the Roman Rite. The interval of a fifth in chant usually represents an important announcement, and here is one that is exceedingly important.

I can't think of a better case for replacement the processional hymn (i.e. Christmas song) with the proper introit. We've been hearing carols for weeks, even months. This is only heard at Mass on this one day. Indeed, this stunning song should be heard in every parish in the world on this glorious morning. It is music that is Christmas day.



I like this video of Benedictines in Brazil because it has a certain real-world quality to it, homemade and rough hewn, but you can sense the drama, which is quiet but awe-struck. It beats any carol I can think of.

Jeffrey Tucker on: The legal issue that the USCCB needs to face

I won't go over the problems again with regard to the "intellectual monopoly" on the Revised Grail Psalter, one which originates in the Grail UK and is continued by Conception Abbey in the U.S.. If Rome approves this new translation for the English Psalter for Mass, the rights will be administered by HarperRow in the UK and the GIA in the US, two profit-making companies that have every corporate incentive to charge high prices for the use of the Psalms and to use coercion to prevent their publication and posting by other individuals and companies.

This type of institutional arrangement has led to stagnation and legal battles in the private sector, but matters are even more weighty when such tethered texts are mandated for liturgical use. The faith is supposed to be evangelistic and outward looking, not bound up with the Elizabethan invention of intellectual property law. If this translation is approved and mandated, many composers and bloggers will find themselves on the hotseat, treated as pirates and thieves who are stealing text, when in fact they are only seeking to use their talents to serve God and the Church.

The problem is becoming a serious matter in the private sector, and major rethinking is taking place. For anyone curious about the subject, I strongly recommend the book Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, published just this year. The book should be required reading for all Bishops involved with approving liturgical texts.

Sadly, as this 1994 transcript of the USCCB meeting on the Grail Psalms demonstrates, the issue isn't even on the radar screen. There is no evidence anywhere in this 31-page document that issues of IP are even known to those in the position to make decisions. There is much on the plate these days, and the issues regarding liturgical reform and language are never ending. But in the long run, having the liturgy tied up in these kinds of legal thickets will be devastating for the reform movement in a digital age. Let the education begin.

Jeffrey Tucker on: All of Life is Bach

There are times when you hear and experience Bach that it becomes easy to imagine that all music from all times and all places--all the most beautiful things in the world--is somehow fulfilled completely in this music. Christmas is a great time to go through this experience. His oratorio and seemingly endless cantatas--each of them strikes the listener as more spectacular than the last, and this happens in repeated loops of listening and listening--all provide a wonderful music to play at home. If you can find a concert, even better but far less likely.

I'm not going to recommend this or that recording because tastes are all over the place, there are so many, and there is nothing wrong with acquiring many versions. The music is out of reach for most any parish, and it doesn't find a home in Catholic liturgy very well, since it was written for a different tradition. But not all great music must be liturgical music, and here is proof.

If you do not know about Bach's extended work in this area, I offer this one tiny sample from BWV 133 "Ich freue mich in dir."

I find my joy in thee
And bid thee hearty welcome,
My dearest Jesus child!
thou has here undertaken
My brother dear to be.
Ah, what a pleasing sound!
How friendly he appears,
this mighty Son of God

I'm not sure which group here is singing but I suspect that it is the Bach-Esnsemble conducted by Helmuth Rilling

Jeffrey Tucker on: Grail Psalms: A Path Forward

From the instant that the USCCB announced that the Revised Grail Psalter would become the new standard for Psalms in the ordinary form of the Mass, musicians in the UK privately issued warnings along the lines of “welcome to our Hell.”

The problem is not the translations of the Psalms, which are said to be an improvement over what is in use today in the U.S. The problem has to do with the law, copyright, permissions, expenses, enforcement—and the problems are so pervasive in the UK that one of the least spoken about aspects of liturgical life in the UK is the proliferation of samizdat Psalms.

What are samizdat Psalms? These are Psalm settings written by composers attached to parishes and cathedrals, by composers and directors who are required to use the Grail text but cannot bear to sing the musical settings published by the mainstream publishers. They write their own, but understandably fail to jump through the copyright hoops and pay the exorbitant fees associated with the texts themselves. So they are copied, handed out, kept under wraps, delivered from parish to parish in brown envelopes, and spoken about in hushed tones. It’s like a sector of an underground Church.

The same situation could happen in the U.S. when the Revised Grail becomes official here too. The Psalm that are currently made available online will be forced down. The settings made available by independent composers will have to go underground. The job of setting the Psalms to music will fall to the “Big Three” music publishers who provide the mainstream fare today. Incredibly, one of those publishers, a for-profit company, has actually been named as the literary agent to decide the terms and conditions under which people can publish the Psalms.

What this means is that access to the Psalms of David, the very core of Catholic hymnody and the basis of Christian music since the early Church, will be wholly subject to the decision making of a private company working in league with the civic authority that enforces copyright with fines and jail. It will be courts, judges, lawyers, and a profit-driven firm—not the Church and not Catholics—who will be in charge of the terms under which the Psalms that you will be required to sing can be distributed.

How did this incredible situation come to be? It begins in the early 1960s, when a group of lay women that made up a group called The Grail (of England) came forward with Psalms for Catholic use in the vernacular. It was a radical project at the time since it happened before the Mass was reformed. But it was a good entrepreneurial choice since the demand for them emerged in 1969 with the new Mass. They have been in use in the UK.

Now to the ownership question. The Grail used a copyright convention at the time to retain exclusive rights to them, and they handed them over to the publishing giant HarperCollins to manage the rights. In those days, not much thought was put into the problems of treating the Mass as the “intellectual property” of a private entity. Everyone was dependent on the mainstream publishers. There was no means of digital delivery. Even photocopies were cumbersome. But all that began to change in the years ahead. Today, an infinite number of versions of any text can be delivered without degrading the integrity of the original. For a Church devoted to bringing its faith to as many as possible and a Church with a special mission to the poor, digital delivery and on-demand printing is a dream.

But the dream could not be so long as copyright conventions were obeyed. On the contrary, access to The Grail took the same route as many short-sighted private lobbying arms in the private sector. They regarded any digital copying or on-demand publishing as a mortal threat to their financial well being. Instead of celebrating the spreading of the Gospel, they treated the proliferation of sacred texts as “piracy.” This will strike anyone as a grave perversion until you consider this background and the grave choice of the Grail to copyright their works and put a corporate giant in charge.

In the US, the revision that has been approved by the USCCB was done by Conception Abbey. Again, everyone says that the revision is excellent. But they too turned to literary agents rather than using their sense of the faith to determine how to treat issues of intellectual property. The literary agents cobbled together a deal with another corporate giant, GIA, to become the gatekeeper to the Psalms. Under the law, the original Grail is still held in England, but the changes to the text can be copyrighted separately as “new matter.”

Nothing stands in the way of the GIA charging exorbitant fees for the printing of these Psalms. Nothing stands in the way of a decision to restrict access to themselves and others with whom they make special deals. If the managers of the rights see fit to treat everyone else as a pirate, they are free to unleash lawyers, courts, and judges—the entirely coercive apparatus of the state in defense of their private ownership of the Psalms that are part of Mass.

Nor is it hyperbole to speak of jails and prisons: every few weeks, the news reports carries announcements of judges sentencing people to months and years in prison for doing what musicians will be forbidden from doing in our future.

Obviously, this is a disgusting problem, one that should have nothing to do with the faith, the Mass, and the Psalms. What can be done? The answer is obvious and urgent. The Conception Abbey should immediately pull out of their deal with GIA. It should cut all ties with the literary agent who negotiated this deal. It should put their Psalms into a Creative Commons license to prevent anyone from copyrighting their text. This is a way of giving it to the whole Church and the world.

Conception of course is only responsible for new matter. What about the Grail itself? It is also critically important that this institution immediately end all connection with HarperCollins. It too should remove all its copyright claims to the text. It can put them into public domain as a free gift to the Church and the world. Only fear and greed stand in the way of this proper choice.

I know that this proposal will upset many plans. There is a lot of money at stake, and I would venture a reasonable guess that lots of money has been passed around to make the USCCB-GIA-Conception-Grail-Harper deal come together. They expect huge revenue in the years ahead, all of which comes out of the pockets of worshipping Catholics. Even so, there is a never a bad time to do what is right. Morality and justice should prevail. The Psalms must be set free for the whole Church.

James MacMillan on Christmas Music

This so good, please read it. I know that clicking around can sometimes be a bother and it is easier just to move on, but this time, try it. This article is tip top.

Ok, a quotation, so long as it won't deter you from reading the whole thing:

The Introit and Communion Antiphons for Advent are rich and full of the theological preparation necessary for the faithful to make Christmas a genuinely holy time. But like most of the Church's rotating Propers, they are edged out by the obligatory hymns which make up the "bread" of the modern Church's dreary and unedifying four-hymn sandwiches. Parishes can go into autopilot when it comes to standard liturgical practice nowadays, and the fundamental stumbling block to genuine imagination and authenticity in our liturgy is the modern Catholic hymn book.

It would be wrong to be pessimistic, though. Pope Benedict's liturgical reforms may take time to find their feet in Britain, but his encouragement to good practice is a breath of fresh air, and they will surely come.

From JT: Christmas Proclamation

Ah, thanks to a reader, here is a recording of the Christmas proclamation. It is so good that it might be tempting to put a mic up to your iPod, but resist: this is a tutorial only. The music is all over the web.