The New Texts: Implementation without Accompaniment

[musicus]

Thank you, John. Much nicer.

[Calum Cille]

I think some serious study needs to be done on chanting in English and its liturgical function. There was plenty of time to do this in the last 45 years. Simply adapting Latin formulae won't do, for the reasons that Calum Cille and I, from different points of view, have tried to explain.

In relation to settings of Gregorian chant to the vernacular, I am no doubt influenced through being a speaker of Scottish Gaelic as the language, unlike English, demands specific musical rhythms even within syllables themselves and will not easily tolerate the lengthening of a short vowel in melody, whether in rhythmic metre or not. The quasi metrical office antiphons, even if given metrical Gaelic words, would often demand rhythmic alteration of the melody.

I haven't made the point that even if one does not adapt the Latin melody but retains it as is (for example, in the psalm tones), there is a problem of the hermeneutic of the English missal translators. One of the first things I did with Salmaire (my Gregorian chant group) was hand out a page of the whole of De profundis, with the new vulgate Latin on one side and the Grail English on the other, and with the first millenium Breton notation for the mode I mass psalm tone marked above both. We sang both for comparison.

The psalm is nine verses long when sung to a psalm tone. I find the Latin words not to make the melodic structure awkward at all. In the English, I found it to do so at the beginning of part B of every single verse of the psalm tone.

In short, with the psalms at least, the ICEL translators are not producing English texts to be sung with Gregorian chant tones but to be set to melodies by modern composers. I have seen no indication that translators of the liturgy reject any particular word or phrase on account of its ability to fit a pertinent latin chant. I don't see the point in twisting the English onto a chant which has (from the lack of evidence otherwise) apparently been ignored for purpose when the English translation was created. One does not normally advise such an approach when translating any other kind of song. Such an approach is like singing Frere Jacques in English thus, with repeats: brother James, are you sleeping, the morning bells are ringing, ding dang dong. Rhythmically unsatisfying if you know the original. And why shouldn't you know and sing the original? Too dumb to know what it means, having read the English?

The same problem has affected the Greek liturgy, for one, who are still in the throes of a process during which we find in English, for example, high notes on hades and low notes on heaven. While they, as Greeks, cannot afford to divest themselves of their musical heritage (for only they can maintain it), there is no reason for English speakers not to leave Latin melody with the Latin and the Latins, rather than impose it on English text not designed for it. Had the Vatican II generation not thrown it out with the bathwater in many places, many people would still know at least the de Angelis in Latin today; instead, they have never heard even that in their parish.

De profundis - Laideann.jpg

[JW]

We are beginning a parish course on the new translations in June, based on the Paul Turner resource and I have been asked to introduce new settings at these sessions. I was thinking of introducing the Missal Chants, plus my own setting - but I wonder how memorable or easy the missal chants are for people, especially given the reservations in this thread. I saw the advantage of the Missal Chants being that they could be sung unaccompanied, but so can any simple Mass setting. What do others here think?

Frankly I was hoping that we weren't going to have a repeat of the situation where the chants in the Missal are relatively unknown in the English and Welsh church.

[NorthernTenor]

I saw the advantage of the Missal Chants being that they could be sung unaccompanied, but so can any simple Mass setting. What do others here think?

Frankly I was hoping that we weren't going to have a repeat of the situation where the chants in the Missal are relatively unknown in the English and Welsh church.

I think that you shouldn't be worried by people who have axes to grind, JW. Much of the ICEL music is cantillation or something close to it, the flexibility of which works very well with English, serving to highten its solemnity and add beauty. We sing unnacompanied psalm tone-based antiphons and responsorial psalms once a month at a church near you (I think) and they work very well. The Anglicans (an ecclesial body with some experience of the vernacular) have long understood the value of such chant, both in their psalm-chanting and the cantillation of high-church clergy. The somewhat flat and uninspiring translations that we are required to use benefit greatly from it.

I have grown to appreciate ICEL's melodic chants the more I have considered and sung them. They combine simplicity with melodic interest in a way that compares very well with a number of the alternatives I have seen (not least the Psallite Mass, of which I had hopes until I actually looked at the music). In doing so, they have a similar positive effect to cantillation. If there are elements that you find awkward to sing, just intensify, lengthen or diminish as you think the words demand. No-one is going to mind (who shouldn't get over it), least of all ICEL which has published the chants as a model, not a prescriptive declaration with anathemas attached.

I find it helps to see the chants in four-line notation.

[ woops - I've just remembered that John's already provided that link; still, you can't get too much of a good thing ]

[John Ainslie]

Whatever we may think of the ICEL chant settings, may I appeal (again!) for them to be sung with respect for the natural rhythm of the English text. I attended a Westminster diocesan music day yesterday, given by Chris Hodkinson of Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge, in the course of which we sang Gloria XV first in Latin and then in the new ICEL English setting. (This was quite a useful teaching approach.)

At first sight-reading we followed the ICEL blobs unthinkingly and sang "we give you thanks for your great glory" with equal note values. Horrible! The sentence really needs lengthening of some sort on thanks and glo-ry. We sang it again thus. Much better!

Though I haven't found it stated anywhere, I would like to think that ICEL's preference for blobs rather than quavers is to indicate flexibility of note value. Certainly that would help to cope with horrors like 'Ho-lee-ee', but resultant variations of interpretation could cause fun at diocesan gatherings.

Incidentally, the word has gone forth in Westminster archdiocese that Archbishop Nichols wants the ICEL chants to be known throughout the diocese, along with another Mass setting yet to be announced.

[Calum Cille]

At first sight-reading we followed the ICEL blobs unthinkingly and sang "we give you thanks for your great glory" with equal note values. Horrible! The sentence really needs lengthening of some sort on thanks and glo-ry. We sang it again thus. Much better!

The Copts don't do it, the Greeks don't it, the Ethiopians don't do it, the Syrians don't do it ... Solesmes have got a lot to answer for. How long are people going to sing different genres of chant all in the same way with an indiscriminate accentualist wash? If you're happy to sing It Came Upon The Midnight Clear to the same rhythm as Amazing Grace then I suppose you'll be happy singing mass ordinaries to the rhythm of sequentiae.

[presbyter]

............... for them to be sung with respect for the natural rhythm of the English text.

But then that's going to vary according to local accent (and dialect)........ and world-wide, don't you think? "Ho-lee-ee" - anathema to my ears and yours - could perhaps be quite acceptable to those who speak with a Southern US drawl? I don't know but Jeff Ostrowski's recording of this chant (linked to somewhere in a recent forum post) indicates that it could be.

I wonder if ICEL is asking the English-speaking world to adopt some kind of uniform "RP" when their texts are spoken or sung. Surely not.

I myself once made an embarrassing (to me) mistake in setting the word "diversity" to music for a large group of Americans to sing. I simply didn't know they would pronounce "di" with a very short vowel sound and would have written a slightly different notated rhythm if I had known beforehand. I don't speak American English.

Perhaps ICEL's blobby chant is a an attempt to provide for world-wide variations in English pronunciation/accent/rhythm. Sing it according to local English usage?
If that means it will be sung with slight rhythmic diversity in Bognor, Blackburn, Birmingham and Barnsley - so what?

[Calum Cille]

If that means it will be sung with slight rhythmic diversity in Bognor, Blackburn, Birmingham and Barnsley - so what?

Don't get me wrong - outside my own Gregorian chant group, I sing chant regularly to the free rhythm style but only because I'm not the one in control. I don't actually think it's the most authentic or indeed most musical way to sing Gregorian chant. Being a proportionalist, I'm not happy with the NPM recordings because they are one-sided further promotion of the Solesmes-inspired anaemic rhythmic wash with no sense of different genres of chant rhythm; same approach for psalmody, same approach for mass ordinary, same approach for office antiphons, same approach for hymns, same approach for Ambrosian hymns, same approach for sequences. There's simply no point in me using them. I have to make up my own using the English text in order to remain true to the original styles.

If someone asks for a scottische to be played to dance to, what does it say for us if we play a reel for them? What does it say for us if they ask for a jig and we again play a reel? If they ask for a polka and we play a reel? And then, in reply to complaints, we say, "all these are duple time dances, this is the way the music is supposed to be - duple time", thinking that we should use the same rhythmic approach to all duple time dance music, regardless of the rhythmic markings in the musical notation. Then we point the complainer to the music and say, "no, those extra dots and lines aren't rhythmic, they're for dynamic emphasis: an added dot marks a heavy emphasis and a cut in the tail marks a light emphasis. A scottische is dynamically different from a reel, not rhythmically."

Then there is the authenticity issue. We take the scottische tune to the reel rhythm and start to bend some notes rhythmically because we it sounds more like the pop music we like. It then starts to sound more musical to us than it was in its authentic form. A number of Scottish snaps are thus removed. Bit by bit, the scottische is deformed rhythmically even further away from its origin. Ah, the Tribulationes of proportionalists: doomed to watch a good tune being hacked away at syllable by English syllable by well-intentioned accentualists ...

[NorthernTenor]

(I’m mortified, CC, that you think my comment was a roundabout way of asking you to shut up about chant rhythm, because it wasn’t. I hate the idea of uniformity of chant performance style, and applaud those like the Dominicans who attempt to retain their own. I do find those who bang on about the onlie true & authentic waye of performing something a bit anachronistic and tiresome, tho’, but that’s a matter for another thread).

Nor was I suggesting, Presbyter, that all contemporary Catholic liturgical music sung in our parishes is incompetent or trivial. I’ve sung good liturgical music by Robert Sherlaw Johnson, James MacMillan, Phillip Duffy and others, and I know of the seriousness of your own approach (I was also much taken by a work-in-progress of DMU’s that I heard in Sheffield). The fact remains, though, that an unfortunate proportion of the liturgical and para-liturgical music sung in our parishes is poor stuff, sometimes desperately so, and frequently ill-matched to the Rite. That explains the general mirth amongst the Ordinariat clergy at Allen Hall the other week, when the subject was raised.

The point I was trying to make was that we’d do better to address this problem than making sweeping, ill-defined generalisations about ICEL chant that is better by far than most of the alternatives, however differently we might have addressed details of engraving or adaptation. The plaudits that have been showered on the new Psallite Mass confirm me in this opinion. It’s not incompetent, but the Gloria and Credo are inoffensively tedious, while the Gospel acclamations are self-indulgent at the expense of the text and its liturgical context. Frankly, if that’s the best we can do our standards aren’t that high.

[presbyter]

The plaudits that have been showered on the new Psallite Mass ......

How did you get hold of a copy NT? I can't form my own opinion about the piece without buying it and it's not even listed on the website of the UK sole distributor. A bit frustrating for as an American publication, it doesn't have to go through the rigmarole of the BCEW panel procedure.

[mcb]

How did you get hold of a copy

It's here.

[presbyter]

It's here.

Oh my! With such a grey "preview" watermark, that's one of the group of composers just about giving it away for free. Do his publishers know?

[mcb]

just about giving it away for free.

The publishers and/or composers of Psallite have a laudable and generous track record of giving away free samples.

Besides, why would anyone want to buy copies without having first seen and heard the music? That's the problem with publishers who stubbornly refuse to engage with the twenty-first century. Sad to say, the description seems to fit most publishers of Catholic liturgical music in the UK.

[Southern Comfort]

It's here.

Oh my! With such a grey "preview" watermark, that's one of the group of composers just about giving it away for free. Do his publishers know?

These previews are also available more conveniently as one file on the publisher's own website at http://www.theromanmissal.org/PDFS/Mass_1.pdf

It's worth noting that these are only previews. I'm told there's quite a lot of other material in the Psallite Mass beside what you see here — for example, settings of the Easter and Pentecost Sequences. Publication is now scheduled for July 2011, I gather. Copies will probably not be available in the UK until the beginning of August. It appears that the title of the Mass setting will be At the Table of the Lord. I understand that parts of the Mass may also be included in one of the forthcoming UK resources, assuming panel approval.

[Tsume Tsuyu]

The plaudits that have been showered on the new Psallite Mass confirm me in this opinion. It’s not incompetent, but the Gloria and Credo are inoffensively tedious......Frankly, if that’s the best we can do our standards aren’t that high.

I wouldn't profess to know much about anything, but I do know what I like and, when we sang through the Gloria from the new Psallite Mass at the SSG New Texts Seminar in March, I liked it! I didn't find it tedious at all. A simple, effective setting, I think. But then, maybe my standards aren't that high.