MusicaSacra

A kindly professor sent me this extract of a longer work by Niceta, Bishop of Remesiana (now Bela Palanka, Serbia). This one-page extract, On the Benefits of Psalmody, dates to around 370.

by Rev. Richard Schuler (from Sacred Music 1990)

If you would like Colloquium brochures to hand out to your choir, or to make available in the public areas of your parish, please drop us an email and tell us how many you need. We are very happy to send them along.

In anticipation of the Sacred Music Colloquium this summer, our offices have received many inquiries about scholarships. There are students of music would like to attend but cannot afford it. Directors of music in parishes want to attend but their parish cannot afford to send them. There are many such cases. 

Ideally, the CMAA would make it possible for any qualified person to attend and receive train in chant and experience the best of sacred music. But that is currently not possible: we simply do not have the funds to make it possible. We hope to build up a scholarship fund over time; indeed, this is essential.

Perhaps you love sacred music and understand its relationship to the liturgy. You long for liturgical prayer to be united again with chant. You understand the centrality of the Renaissance for the Catholic artistic experience. And you see how important it is for musicians to be exposed to and trained in this tradition. And yet, you don’t feel that you can make an artistic contribution yourself. This is not uncommon.

It still remains possible to send a student or director to attend this conference. A tax-deductible contribution of $560 makes it possible to for one student to gain the full experience of the colloquium: all materials, instruction, meals, and housing. This is a gift that can change someone’s life—and change the shape of liturgy in the English-speaking world. 

If you would like to help, please send your contribution to our offices or write us for more information. You can also use the paypal button. 

This year’s colloquium—six days of musical heaven—promises to be the biggest and best ever. Would you assist in helping a qualified student to attend?

Franciscan University of Steubenville is pleased to announce the creation of a Bachelor of Arts in Sacred Music to begin in the fall of 2007.  The degree may be pursued in either the program in voice or the program in organ.  Pianists may audition for the program in organ on the piano.  Courses will include private instruction on the major instrument, music theory, music history, conducting and a year-long course in Gregorian Chant.  In addition, students will participate in the Schola Cantorum Franciscana, which concentrates on polyphony and chant and sings for occasional services on and off campus.  Interested students may apply for admission to the university at: Franciscan University of Steubenville, Admissions, 1235 University Blvd., Steubenville, OH 43953.  Students interested in auditioning may contact Prof. Paul Weber at the above address or by telephone at 740.284.5884.

Una Voce Westchester is pleased to announce a two-part lecture on Gregorian chant by David Hughes this Sunday, Jan. 21^st, and the following, Jan. 28^th, at Immaculate Conception Church in Sleepy Hollow, New York.  Both talks are at 2:15 p.m. and will be followed by the celebration of the Latin (Tridentine) Mass at 3:00 p.m.  Session I: Proper Context and the Context of Propers: Chant in the Latin Mass.  Session II: Singing Chant at Mass.  Illustrations for the talks and chants at Mass will be sung by the Sleepy Hollow Schola Cantorum.  More information is available by calling 914-277-3368, or by visiting www.unavocewestchester.org.

The CMAA is very pleasd to present: "The Art of Gregorian Music," a lecture by Dom Andre Mocquereau from 1896, translated and published in the Catholic Education Review in 1923. 

The CMAA is very pleased to present and host a beautiful pdf edition of Justine Ward's brilliant book on chant pedagogy from 1921: Music Fourth Year: Gregorian Chant According to the Principles of Dom Andre Mocquereau. The introduction is by Dom Mocquereau himself. The navigation links on the left side of the page expand to show the details of each chapter. The book also includes images that have been scanned at high resolution. The book concludes with chant exercises organized by mode.

In its Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, the Second Vatican Council (1962-1964) required that official sacred chant books for the Church be published with care:

§117. The typical edition of the books of Gregorian chant is to be completed; and a more critical edition is to be prepared of those books already published since the restoration by St. Pius X. It is desirable also that an edition be prepared containing simpler melodies, for use in small churches.

One edition containing simpler melodies was released as the Graduale Simplex in 1967. Since then, use of Simplex antiphons in the U.S. has been limited, but at least one scholar has written that the Simplex did exert a considerable effect on the Alleluia before the Gospel. Prior to the new Missal of 1970, Alleluias were sizable melismatic chants. When usage of the Graduale Romanum declined, it appears the Simplex substitution of a triple Alleluia was adopted widely as the new default. Use of the actual melodies was not.

Whatever the faults of the overall approach of the Simplex, the use of a triple Alleluia throughout the liturgical year, and the lack of apparent rationale for their seasonal/festal distribution, the Alleluias in the Simplex are good examples of modal melody. They also have interesting rhythmic variety if one pays careful attention to groups of two and three. Some are somber, some haunting.  All the triple Alleluias in the Simplex are available for study in PDF.

The 1955 encyclical is here:

It is the duty of all those to whom Christ the Lord has entrusted the task of guarding and dispensing the Church’s riches to preserve this precious treasure of Gregorian chant diligently and to impart it generously to the Christian people…. And if in Catholic churches throughout the entire world Gregorian chant sounds forth without corruption or diminution, the chant itself, like the sacred Roman liturgy, will have a characteristic of universality, so that the faithful, wherever they may be, will hear music that is familiar to them and a part of their own home. In this way they may experience, with much spiritual consolation, the wonderful unity of the Church. This is one of the most important reasons why the Church so greatly desires that the Gregorian chant traditionally associated with the Latin words of the sacred liturgy be used.

The St. Cecilia Schola of Auburn, Alabama, is sponsoring its 4th annual, ever growing, workshop in sacred music, February 16-17, 2006, under the direction of Scott Turkington. You can find out more and register here.

The deadline for the Spring issue of Sacred Music is quickly approaching. The focus of this issue is the life and work of Orlando di Lasso but submissions of reviews and articles of others sorts are certainly welcome. Please write.

Father Konrad Fuchs, the oldest living Catholic priest, has died. He survived the trenches of the Great War, defied the Nazis, and lived to say Mass on his 109th birthday. He called our Holy Father’s election a “joy for Germany” and, in his last year, expressed regret that he could no longer see well enough “to read the Bible from beginning to end ‘one last time.’” To his parishioners, he was “a down-to-earth, deeply religious clergyman, [who] cited as his great passions the liturgy, especially choral music.” Requiescat in pace.

By Edwin Mullins
Blue Bridge Books
ISBN 1-933346-00-0
$24.95 USD

At crucial times in the history of Christendom, monasteries have served as vital centres of renewal, reorganization, and even protection from invaders. In the year 910A.D., amidst the chaos which followed the collapse of Charlemagne’s empire in the ninth century, Duke William of Aquitaine founded the Abbey of Cluny and appointed Berno its first abbot. Critical to this monastery’s success (political, liturgical, artistic) was its independence from local bishops and its responsibility solely to the bishop of Rome, a privilege repeatedly reaffirmed by several popes through the ensuing centuries.

Edwin Mullins chronicles in captivating prose the rise and fall of this most important centre of Christian life and culture. Having written previously on art and architecture, the author predictably (and understandably) leaves other issues aside such as music (for the most part) and instead, in addition to the fascinating political stories, focuses on his areas of expertise.

The greatest glory of Cluny was without a doubt the third abbey church, dubbed Cluny III, which was for centuries the largest church in Christendom, until the Vatican Basilica of St. Peter was deliberately built a few feet longer. This magnificent mountain of steeples and stones made history by making use of the very first flying buttresses after its roof collapsed in the early 12th century. The church’s barrel vaulted ceilings gave a great resonance to the chanting at the unusually elaborate liturgies conducted there, and by all accounts it housed some of the finest art of that time, work that seems even to have been ahead of its time.

Cluny’s independence, while it aroused jealousy amongst the nearby bishops, gave her and most especially her abbots a great amount of political influence. Along with the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor, the abbot assisted in making and negotiating some of the most important decisions of the day, often finding himself in the role of mediator between pope and emperor, who were frequently at loggerheads with each other. This clout also made it easier to find significant patrons for the monastery, among whom were King Alfonso VI of Spain and King Henry II of England.

Along with this power came a vast network of monasteries which were subject to Cluny’s authority and her reforming ideals. From small beginnings, Cluny eventually found herself in charge of nearly 1500 monasteries, many of which, having been established after Spain was freed from the Moors, offered shelter and safety along the yet dangerous road to Compostella, the legendary burial place of St. James the Greater and one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in the Middle Ages. These monasteries, and many other local churches besides, benefited from the artistic richness of Cluny. Some of the earliest churches of the Cluny dynasty are believed to have been built by the nomadic Lombard masons from Italy, and many others were built later by masons who were trained at Cluny, the monks having quite possibly been taught in the beginning by the Lombards themselves.

Cluny’s unique situation required strong leadership, a need for which Providence provided over the course of several centuries. Stability was the operative word: St. Odilo and St. Hugh the Great ruled for an astonishing combined 115 years. These are the men who built and sustained this monastery during its glory days and who were among her greatest abbots, along with Peter the Venerable, who defended the ornate practices of Cluny against the acerbic attacks conducted by his friend St. Bernard of Clairvaux in the early 12th century.

Alas, by this time Cluny had already had her best days. St. Bernard’s Cistercian Order was on the rise and soon eclipsed Cluny’s influence on the papacy. This was the beginning of a long, slow decline and one of the saddest stories in the history of Christendom, which Mullins accounts in painful detail. The rise of urban centres of culture and learning, as well as the growing sense that Christianity was no longer threatened certainly contributed to the abbey’s downfall. Add to these the decling discipline amongst the monks and newfound instability in the leadership as, after Peter the Venerable, there were nine abbots in the span of fifty years. Later on Cluny was attacked and damaged by Protestants in the 16th century, and over time she became dependent upon the French monarchy, which surely aggravated the animus against her amidst the anti-Catholic climate of the French Revolution, at which time the end of Cluny seems to have become imminent. Thereafter all but a few portions of the abbey church were carted away in pieces, the stone having been sold for use in other local buildings by shameless opportunists.

“The destruction of Cluny was the end of Europe.” Thus once remarked one of this reviewer’s colleagues, and he’s quite possibly right, for Europe has arguably been on the decline ever since those bloody days of the 16th and 18th centuries. Mullins’ book does a fascinating job of exposing what Cluny provided to a strong Europe–and perhaps what is now needed in our current climate in which there is much chaos (ecclesiastical and otherwise) and in which Christianity is on the defensive.

Unfortunately, it seems questionable whether the author would agree with this assessment, as one of the few drawbacks of this book is a seeming anti-Catholic outlook which shows through in a few passages. Mullins seems eager to point out instances of supposed ecclesiastical tyranny and misogyny while at the same time using “scare quotes” in discussing the liberation (or, as he writes, “liberation”) of Spain from the Muslims as if this were somehow an unfortunate turn of events.

There is another problem with this book, which in this reviewer’s mind is a bit more pressing–the complete absence of footnotes. It seems likely that this was done to facilitate reading by a wider audience, which is laudable. However, the absence of thorough citation makes this book nearly useless in serious research, even though an impressive bibliography is included.

In spite of these few misgivings, however, Edwin Mullins is to be congratulated for this fine book, and the reviewer warmly recommends it as a firm starting point in getting to know more about Cluny, the monastery whose ruins quietly beg us today to effect a new era of renewal in the Church. Sts. Odilo and Hugh, pray for us.

The CMAA is pleased to announce that the Sacred Music Colloquium 2007 (June 19-24) can offer daily priest training in the sung Mass, as taught by Fr. Robert Skeris. There is a growing need for this so that the fully sung liturgy can become part of the liturgical life of Catholics, precisely as the normative form of the Roman Rite suggests it should be. See the full schedule for times.