Music for the ICEL Missal

[musicus]

Interesting... Some of those posting are known to SSG members, but are not posting here for some reason.

Because they are organists?

[John Ainslie]

I started this hare running (nothing personal, Hare!) to see what would happen. Time to declare my hand!

“As sacred melody united to words, [music] forms a necessary and integral part of the solemn liturgy… Sacred music increases in holiness to the degree that it is intimately linked with [the] liturgical action…” (SC 112)

…and priests have an essential role in the liturgy. Therefore priests should sing! What we experience almost everywhere is a said liturgy with singing round the edges. Someone once complained to me “I didn’t know any of the hymns today”, as if that was why she had come to Mass.

For the first millennium, the liturgy of the Roman rite was always chanted, as is still the case with the Eastern rites. Then came the medieval obsession with multiplicity of Masses, and the ‘holy mutter’ of the Low Mass became the norm. But Joseph Gelineau, writing in 1962, could still state that, in the solemn liturgy, “the merely spoken word has almost no place at all in this, except in the sermon”.

We have a very wordy liturgy. Having the priest sing at least the most important parts of his utterance lifts them into the prominence they deserve and achieves a dynamic vocal balance and integration with the congregational, choral and cantored music. At the memorable Mass that launched the Westminster diocesan programme ‘At Your Word, Lord’ at the erstwhile Wembley arena in 2003, the rich musical fare was kept in proportion by Cardinal Cormac’s excellent singing of the Eucharistic Prayer to one of Chris Walker’s tones.

Moreover, chanted music actually assists the praying of the prayer being chanted. I appreciate that this may be a subjective view, but I submit that not only does chant give a certain added significance to the words being uttered, it also slows down their utterance – and most priests utter the presidential prayers far too fast. The chanted Lord’s Prayer in my parish every Sunday morning (to the Rimsky Korsakov tone) is a prayerful occasion to which I look forward every week.

I would therefore recommend the following as top priority for chanting, by reason of their liturgical significance: the dialogues before and after the Gospel; and in the Eucharistic Prayer, the preface dialogue and preface, the epiclesis and institution narrative, and the doxology.

Those are the principles underlying my appeal for priests to take their sung part in the liturgy seriously. Prior to the reform, all priests had to sing whenever they celebrated a Sung or High Mass!

Now to the new ICEL tones. I note that ICEL proposes them to the Bishops’ Conferences, and I understand that they are being considered by the relevant bishops in this country. It is clear that a standard set of tones needs to be adopted for the dialogues specified above. I would also support the adoption of a standard set of acclamations for the Eucharistic Prayer – though I disagree with the initial Latin-imitation phrases of the ‘Holy, holy’ proposed by ICEL.

The ICEL submission has tried to be comprehensive – even including a setting of the ‘Lord, I am not worthy’, thus leaving (oddly) the ‘Pray, brethren, that my sacrifice and yours…’ and its response as the only texts for which no music at all is provided. But I do not see singing everything as a counsel of perfection to be strived for everywhere and always. The use of the chants, like all music in the liturgy, must be judged according to pastoral as well as liturgical and musical criteria. Among the latter, an aural balance is needed…

…and in any case there is a linguistic problem about proclaiming the readings in chant. Italian is the language the opera, English the language of Shakespeare. The natural cadences of English can get flattened out by chant, unless they are very skilfully reflected by it – as, for example, in a Handel recitative. This is where the ICEL method of simply adopting the traditional Latin chants just doesn’t work for readings in English, IMHO. (But there is an excellent setting of the St John Passion that I reviewed for M&L a couple of years ago.) The fundamental difference between singing a Collect in Latin and singing it in English (any English!) is that the latter must communicate its words. My experience of hearing priests sing variable readings or Collects is that, almost invariably, chanting them makes them less intelligible and therefore less effective in enabling the assembly to pray them with the priest. (I realise that prefaces can be ‘proper’ to a day, but their integration as part of the Eucharistic Prayer justifies their inclusion in my ‘to be sung’ category.)

Enough for now!

[Gabriel]

Just to clarify 2 of John's points

Wembley arena in 2003, the rich musical fare was kept in proportion by Cardinal Cormac’s excellent singing of the Eucharistic Prayer to one of Chris Walker’s tones.

The ICEL submission has tried to be comprehensive – even including a setting of the ‘Lord, I am not worthy’, thus leaving (oddly) the ‘Pray, brethren, that my sacrifice and yours…’ and its response as the only texts for which no music at all is provided.

The Eucharistic Prayer chant was by Philip Gaisford.

ICEL task, in the same way as its task of translation, it to provide what is provided in the Latin Missale Romanum - nothing added, nothing taken away. So we can expect an English version of the chant of the 'Orate Fratres' (Pray brethren).

I think it worth noting that in the Latin Missal a distinction is made between those chants which are incorporated within the Order of Mass in the body of the Missal and those which are included in an appendix - tones for the readings, chants for 'Orate Fratres'. This would suggest some priorities are being given.

[JW]

John, Thanks for a very thoughtful and thought-provoking post.

The natural cadences of English can get flattened out by chant, unless they are very skilfully reflected by it – as, for example, in a Handel recitative.

Chant in the style of a Handel recitative is flowing through my head as I write - what a brilliant idea. Any composers out there ready to take up the challenge of skilfully reflecting the natural cadences of English in chant?

[Peter]

There are several instances where the drive to get to the chanting note on the second syllable makes word stresses, well, different. Page 5 for instance, the preface will start "It IS truly..." rather than a more natural (to me) "It is TRUly"

Similarly in the sign of the cross, moving to the chanting note on 'The' rather than 'namer (In THE name of...'

Not necessarily: just because the tone rises from A to C on “the” doesn’t mean the stress has to follow. It's possible to sing "In the" unstressed on A and C and then stress "name" on the next C.

What ICEL are up to here is comparable to the vexed question of translating opera, where a new text has to be made to fit music carefully designed for the very different stresses and rhythms of the original language; for that reason a translation seldom sits comfortably on the music and sometimes has to be significantly different from the original to fit it at all*. In ICEL’s case, the translation is accurate and the music has to be adapted but the task is similar: trying to fit a text to music designed for a different language with different sounds and stresses. It may be worth remembering that when Gluck was asked to perform one of his operas in a language other than the original he rewrote it: thus Orfeo ed Euridice and Orphée et Euridice may have similar music as their basis but they are quite different works. Wouldn’t it be better to allow English composers to create their own settings (Handelian or otherwise)? Wouldn’t it have been even better for ICEL to create texts that lend themselves to musical settings instead of adhering so closely to the Latin that they sound stilted as well as being very difficult to set?

In fairness, the way the chants in the ICEL draft have been adapted to fit the new texts is more sensitive than the way some of the dreaded Songs of the Seventies varied their banal tunes to fit selections from (or adaptations of) Scripture, often compounding the offence by fitting Scripture very crudely to the adapted tunes. Come, come, follow me (No 95 in the 1984 Hymns Old and New) is a particularly gross example but there are others. While I wouldn't touch hymns like that with a bargepole I'd be happy to use ICEL's chants. Indeed, I do something arguably similar each week, fitting Psalm texts and Gospel acclamations to Gelineau tones. Having said that...

But it was decided to imitate the Latin with its displaced accent more closely here, in part because the Latin setting is likely to be sung with great frequency by congregations in the future, which argues for similarity between the Latin and English settings.

Isn't the bit I've italicised rather optimistic? I know one PP who is traditional in many ways but has said he doesn’t want to use the new translation - I can't see him chanting it in English let alone Latin “with great frequency”! Parishes have evolved what suits them, ranging from totally said Mass to elaborate sung settings, with the four-hymn sandwich somewhere in between. Are they all going to knuckle under and sing plainchant every week (or at least more often than they do now) without the intervention of a liturgical thought-police less benign than the OFLIT that was a feature of many Summer Schools?

* The problem is not confined to opera. I have yet to hear a satisfactory English translation of the lovely Taizé chant "Nada te turbe" and though their chant "Bleibet hier" does work in English you have to make a choice between an accurate translation "watch and pray", which does not fit the original music, and a less strictly accurate "watching and praying", which does. Another comparable example is the hymn "Lord you have come to the seashore/lakeside", which works in English - until you realise that the English words are not always an accurate translation of the original Spanish, that the melody has been adapted slightly to fit them and that from both viewpoints the original is better!

[Southern Comfort]

If anyone is interested in seeing the rest of the music that ICEL is preparing, go here http://www.icelweb.org/musicfolder/musiclogin.htm.

The user name is newmusic
and a currently usable password is Gregory93

This contains the previously released material (see below) together with other material, including the Orate fratres that John Ainslie noticed was missing in the introductory material. Much of the material reflects the Latin chant of the Missal ─ i.e. boring, on just two notes a tone apart. Surely we can do better than this? *

The Introduction to the chants previously posted here (http://www.icelweb.org/ICELMusicIntroduction.pdf) has now also been published in print in the US Pastoral Music magazine.


* The Carmelites, in their austerity, used to use one note on ferias and two notes on feastdays.....

[festivaltrumpet]

Much of the material reflects the Latin chant of the Missal ─ i.e. boring, on just two notes a tone apart. Surely we can do better than this? *

Perhaps 'simple' might be a more charitable description of the material under discussion. The musical ability of many clergy is pitiful, and as a result if one were to request they sing anything more complex than this, one runs the risk of either refusal or poor execution. Furthermore, there is a minimal risk the text becoming merely a vehicle for the melody in this chant form.

[Southern Comfort]

Given that many presidential chants in the past had at least three notes spanning a minor third, I still think two notes is really very uninteresting.

[contrabordun]

...ah, but even those that span a mere minor third on the printed page frequently go way beyond that in execution.