The New Texts: Formation (discussion)

[gwyn]

I agree that common repertoire is important. But I honestly couldn't see the missal tones working with our assembly – doubt I'd even get a whisper from them.

Indeedy Nick. They're rather lack-lustre to say the least.

[alan29]

Pretty dreadful stuff. Sometimes it is better to speak with conviction than mumble in song.

[mcb]

No, I don't agree at all. Simple doesn't mean dull, and there's something very fine about voices united in plain speaking, set to music. The musical language for the ICEL chant is the same as for the dialogues between priest and people, and to reject those is rejecting too much that should be central to what the Mass is supposed to sound like.

And if the community has the basic chants as part if its core musical repertoire, every more elaborate, or more tuneful, or more upbeat setting relates back to them - people know what it is they're singing a more elaborate (etc.) version of. The whole repertoire for the parish is then grounded in a simple, ancient expression of the core of our liturgical life.

All as part of a balanced diet! It would be a dull parish that only sang these chants.

[HallamPhil]

In Hallam I'm planning to teach people the Missal tones and 2 other adapted settings of popular euch acclams (Farrell & Haugen Creation) and my own original setting.
Whether folk go with the choices I recommend is up to them and always has been but we would hope to move towards the revised translation using its introduction as an incentive.

[NorthernTenor]

I agree that common repertoire is important. But I honestly couldn't see the missal tones working with our assembly – doubt I'd even get a whisper from them.

Indeedy Nick. They're rather lack-lustre to say the least.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen that assertion made, and I don’t believe it will be the last, but the more I consider the ICEL chants the more I disagree. It would be easy to ascribe this to differences in taste, but that would be to avoid some interesting critical and liturgical issues. It is possible to think about music and our response to it, rather than simply emote or analyse its structural elements and historical influences. In this case, I would begin to explain my response to the ICEL chants by saying that I find the quiet understatement of the settings suits the sober, contemplative character of our rite. I believe that this individual perception is reinforced by tradition, in which chant developed with liturgy, and by those formal documents of the Church from the 20th century which make this explicit. I would also contrast the ICEL chants with liturgical and para-liturgical music that moves the focus of worship away from the object of the liturgy and towards an inward-looking, emotional gratification.

That is to make points on chant as such. There are also discussions to be had about how the ICEL settings work as chant, and I have yet to see any persuasive arguments, here or elsewhere, that they don’t. There are certainly some valid points to be made about their engraving, but these are matters of representation and performance. So, too, I might have done some aspects of the chants differently, but we’re not talking about an exact science here.

I trust that the process of formation will address the ICEL settings in an intelligent and sensitive fashion which considers their purpose and liturgical context, and gives competent attention to their performance. I also hope that those who fear that chant is somehow a retrograde step, or who associate the ICEL settings with a translation process about which they have misgivings, will be persuaded to consider this part of the formation process with an open mind and heart.

[Nick Baty]

Simple doesn't mean dull

Quite. But it doesn't necessarily mean interesting either. This chant can sound quite simply beautiful with the Latin text, but I fear it doesn't carry the English words at all.

[NorthernTenor]

Simple doesn't mean dull

Quite. But it doesn't necessarily mean interesting either. This chant can sound quite simply beautiful with the Latin text, but I fear it doesn't carry the English words at all.

Someone should tell those Anglo-Catholics (with much greater experience of vernacular chant than we) who been happily singing English chant for quite some time.

[FrGareth]

It could fit in this thread, but I'm proposing a new thread to exchange suggestions and ideas about a very particular kind of circumstance: implementing the new texts with congregations which do not have regular access to musical accompaniment on weekends. My own parish has an organist on Saturday evenings twice a month, and the Sunday congregation has a choir who are now without an organist.

The thread will be for your suggestions on
- new settings of the Gloria, Sanctus and Eucharistic Acclamations which can easily be learned without accompaniment
- how best to teach them, without accompaniment (but allowing for the possibility of demo CDs/MP3s to illustrate)

Many thanks

FrGareth

[alan29]

Simple doesn't mean dull

Quite. But it doesn't necessarily mean interesting either. This chant can sound quite simply beautiful with the Latin text, but I fear it doesn't carry the English words at all.

Someone should tell those Anglo-Catholics (with much greater experience of vernacular chant than we) who been happily singing English chant for quite some time.

Doing something a lot doesn't make it right. It just makes it habitual.

[NorthernTenor]

Doing something a lot doesn't make it right. It just makes it habitual.

But experience is worth considering, Alan. If the English-speaking part of Catholicism weren't so insular we might have avoided some of those mistakes that mar our liturgical life.

[Southern Comfort]

Although the ICEL chants are better than they might have been (see earlier drafts to make your toes curl), they still suffer from a major problem: those compiling them desired to follow the neums (that go with the Latin text) as closely as possible — a sort of Liturgiam Authenticam approach.

This often means that unimportant syllables are pushed into excessive prominence by being given more notes than more important syllables. This means that you thump the less important instead of following the natural speech rhythm of English text.

The dimmest intelligence could have done something about this — it's really not rocket science — but alas the LA principle generally prevailed. The only choice we have is to edit the ICEL chants and produce our own sensible versions which rather defeats the point of the exercise, which is for everyone across the world to have something in common.

That's why I'm not optimistic about trying to use the ICEL chants (with the possible exception of the Preface Dialogue) as a basis for anything much. It's not the English-speaking part of Catholicism which is insular, but the group of three who produced the chants who were insulated from the real world.

[musicus]

Simple doesn't mean dull

Quite. But it doesn't necessarily mean interesting either. This chant can sound quite simply beautiful with the Latin text, but I fear it doesn't carry the English words at all.

Someone should tell those Anglo-Catholics (with much greater experience of vernacular chant than we) who been happily singing English chant for quite some time.

I agree. I was one of them for a while and learned my chant from the English Hymnal (1933 edition). IMHO some of those English translations are classics and have never been bettered.

[alan29]

Doing something a lot doesn't make it right. It just makes it habitual.

But experience is worth considering, Alan. If the English-speaking part of Catholicism weren't so insular we might have avoided some of those mistakes that mar our liturgical life.

I do have personal experience of English words levered on to Latin chant, quite a lot, actually. Having grown up with the real thing (Propers as well as Ordinaries, yes all those Alleluias and Tracts too, all in Latin - the Liber was my friend) it set my teeth on edge. Just wrong musically and done for the wrong reasons, and ultimately deeply disrespectful to the source.
It puts me in mind of Edward Heath speaking French ..... worthy, flattering, and all the right words are there, but just a bit of a parody.

[Calum Cille]

I approve of connecting the stressed syllables in English to the appropriate melodic stresses of Gregorian chant.

One doesn't have to search for long among the gradual psalms before one finds two syllable words where the first, stressed syllable has only one note and the second, unstressed syllable many notes. If someone said to me that they had problems with the final syllables of words, either English or Latin, possessing many notes and being stressed musically by the singers, either in English or Latin, I would consider this a modern difficulty interpreting the repertoire, which is built on such features, and not enough reason to rejig the relations of notes to syllables in the repertoire.

Such rejigging was the approach of much of the 15th to 19th centuries, exemplified in the Medici gradual. The evidence of the earliest manuscripts show that such an approach is not a response to how the chant works but the imposition of a modern interpretation on the chant, evidently an unsuitable one. In the earliest manuscripts, melismas can actually occur on any syllable.

I'm no fan of singing Gregorian chant in English but I think the ICEL chants are generally reasonable (I've only looked at the finished items). I speak as someone who has occasionally translated my own hymns into English. It is an ultimately unsatisfying activity unless you are the crossword puzzle type. You are often confronted with translation options holding various advantages and disadvantages; choosing one option means you satisfy certain criteria, choosing another means you satisfy other criteria and, often, neither choice is perfect. ICEL has let us down badly with the Gloria, laus et honor, though. I'm sure someone can do better than this.

http://www.icelweb.org/musicfolder/open ... iaLaus.pdf

The second last syllable of each line of the Latin is stressed, and so we perceive the melodic stress as occurring regularly at the same points. In English, they've only managed to replicate this stress at the end of every line 2, and at the end of line 3 in verses 2 & 4. English nouns tend not to have penultimate stress, Latin nouns do and, working within the constraints of attempting to be as near as possible to the liturgical text, this is what you can end up with. I won't be singing this hymn in English in a hurry.

[HallamPhil]

Last night I gave the first of 15 workshops in Hallam looking at music for the revised translation. 33 deanery musicians attended with 3 priests.

I gave an overview of the history of the process, offered a comparison between what we currently use and the revised texts with reference to the Latin. Then I presented the Missal tones and we sang through several examples, most finding them quite familiar although admitting that these had not been used much in the last decade or so. I got the impression that some of the dialogues went down better than the Ordinary of Mass.

In response to fears about having to ditch what had been used in the recent past I explored already published adaptations (Walker's Celtic Liturgy, Haugen's Mass of Creation and Schubert's German Mass) and assured folk that other adaptations were in the pipeline. I also assured folk that a supplement for Mass Ordinaries (which had been accepted by the Bishops Panel) would be offered by Decani Music. Most agreed that the changes to the Holy, holy were minimal and that the changes to the Memorial Acclamations might encourage parishes to look at use of more than one acclamation!

Finally we looked at several movements from my 'New Wine' Mass using workshop sheets. In this the first of a pair of workshops the music was delivered in unison form and without the availability of published vocal, SATB, guitar and instrumental editions which are still in process with ICEL.

There was a call for the Diocese to establish one setting (guess which one!) to be used for Diocesan occasions in combination with elements from the Missal tones.