The Catholic Church's treasury of sacred music is coming to my parish in a whole new way this fall.  In response to the Church Music Association's stated goal of having two Gregorian Chant workshops a month taking place throughout the U.S., and in hopes of bringing real sacred music to the consciousness of singers and musicians in my own parish and our diocese and region, I asked for and received permission to arrange a workshop to be hosted at our parish.

The dates are set: Friday thru Saturday, October 26-27 2007

Place: St. Peter Catholic Church, Stevens Point, WI.

As the details are put in place and registration is available, you will find it on our parish website at www.saintpetercatholic.com. 

Gregorian chant expert Fr. Robert Skeris has graciously agreed to be our guide in this introduction to reading neumes and singing chant, as well as sacred polyphony, leading up to singing at our parish's 4 PM Vigil Mass.

More details will be available soon! 

Posted by Darcy at 02:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I think our new music director thought I was nuts when I told him I had the schola practicing in the summer.  I had two motives: 1) up until now we have been playing catch-up, rushing to get ready for the next big feast, with no time to learn the basics and 2) the Assumption is coming up, and it won't be a holy day of obligation in our diocese again for another couple of years, so I'd like to do something special for it this year. 

He went along with this, and our schola as we know it will have it's "last hurrah" on the Assumption.  Our numbers are down for the summer, so I didn't want to suggest anything too elaborate.  One chant piece, one polyphonic piece is all we can reasonably handle at this point in our development, and the polyphony needed to be less than 5 parts.

I settled on the Salve Regina, which is one of those chants everyone should know, and some of our schola members were already familiar with it.  It's perfectly appropriate for the Assumption.  With the experience of the colloquium fresh in my mind, I took a different approach to learning the piece this time.  I sat down and marked the ictuses, took note of all the various rhythms marked in the music, and where the rests are and for what duration.  It was a few weeks before it was someone other than me who realized we were not singing together and that we ought to look at that rhythm... and then I was actually prepared to walk everyone through the counting, etc.  It worked much better after that, we were together.  It was a good feeling to apply something I learned at the colloquium... and it actually worked!  The Salve Regina will be chanted by the women only.

Our polyphony piece is Diffusa est gratia by Giovanni Maria Nanino (1540-1607).  It is written in 4 parts, which is still a challenge with our tiny group.   We have one man on bass, me on tenor (which is a little low for my range but I can do it if I have to), a few altos, and two sopranos.  However, there will be a couple more people joining us shortly before the Assumption that will give us a man on tenor, and maybe one or two more altos.  It'll be a little off balance perhaps, but it is a beautiful piece (unanimous opinion of the schola members) and much better than doing just another hymn.  The score is only two pages long.  Really, those of us who have been at the last few practices already pretty much have this down, but we have 3 more practices to go before the Assumption which we will need as we add new people to the mix.  So it works out for the best.

This piece, by the way, comes from the Gradual for Mary Mother of God.  The verse given is different than the verse in the Gregorian Missal for that day, however.  This is the translation of the text of the score we are using:

Grace flows from your lips because God has blessed you forever.

All thy garments smell of myrrh, aloes, and cassia: out of th ivory palaces, whereby they have made thee glad.  King's daughters were among thy honourable women.

We will also be singing the hymns Hail Holy Queen Enthroned Above (basically the English hymn version of the Salve Regina) and Immaculate Mary.  Singing the tenor lines on these is a little tougher!  I wish we had descant parts to them - then maybe one of our sopranos could jump on that, and I could move up to the melody line. 

At any rate, we are proceeding with doing something special in honor of Our Lady's Assumption, and I think she'll be pleased.

Posted by Darcy at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

The situation at my parish that prompted me to start a schola to provide some special music especially for Holy Week and Easter (though we have gone on to sing at weekly Sunday Masses, doing special music for feast days and chanting the sequences etc., and we will still be together through the Assumption) has resolved in a way that it won't be on my shoulders any more to lead the group.  Our new music director started this month and has plans to grow a larger adult choir, which the members of our schola will become part of.  Rather than having a separate schola and adult choir, he felt it would be best to keep it one group, due to the (apparent) shortage of vocal talent in our parish.  So as a result, I now have a chance to reflect on how things went, and what I would do differently if I had to do it all over again.  And something tells me that some day I may be in a situation where I am starting a schola again, even if it is something outside of the parish.

I knew early on we were already going against the advice of those who know better about starting a schola - we started out singing for Mass right away, rather than spending months singing in private, then graduating to singing for Vespers or something, and finally getting ready to sing for the Mass.  However, we weren't attempting to take on singing all the music for Mass, or even chanting many of the propers.  The goal was to get a little bit of chant and a little bit of polyphony ready for the Holy Week and Easter masses.  It seemed like it might be possible to pull that off.

It's amazing how fast time flies though - in my inexperience I thought we'd be able to accomplish more music than was really possible.  I also thought I was going to have more men in the group and be able to sing 5 and 6-part polyphonic pieces without problem.  So here are a few things I'd do differently:

1) Scale down the number of selections we tried to learn - we could realistically handle about 2 pieces for a Mass, including one Gregorian chant and one polyphony. 

2) The chant selections need to be on the easier side during these first months of the schola's existence, such as the sequences for Easter, Pentecost or Corpus Christi, or the easiest of the propers, usually the communion antiphon.

3) Seek out polyphonic pieces that are 3 or 4 parts instead of 5 or 6.  We managed to sing a couple of the 5 part ones, including my re-working Hosanna to the Son of David (Weelkes) so that it was down from 6 to 5 parts.  That required me to start singing on the tenor line.  I had thought I would do contra tenor instead of alto, but hadn't thought I'd be singing down in the tenor range.  It was hard on my voice, but was one of the things that enabled us to pull off Hosanna.  On Emendemus in Melius, we had an extra bass with our group, which allowed one of our men to sing on the tenor line for that one.  However, that was one of the first pieces we tried to do, and one of the most difficult.  It could have been much better than the way it turned out.  I didn't know how to find 3-4 part polyphonic pieces at that point, in fact, I still don't think there's any easy way to search for them, someone let me know if there is.  I have stumbled across some 3-4 part pieces recently though, by wading through the CPDL (as much of it as I can get to now anyway, namely scores that are hosted on other sites and just linked from CPDL).

It turns out that singing in Latin was a stumbling block for some schola members.  We never took the time to really learn proper pronunciation, since I thought people would be able to pick it up as we went along, especially since I provided recordings for their use at home.  However, the recordings were not always easy to hear the words on, and not everyone has a smattering of Latin in their background to draw on.  What we started doing more recently was to read through the piece slowly, allowing people to make notes in their music to remind themselves how to pronounce things. Still, a solid understanding of Latin pronunciation and the director listening for mistakes and correcting them during rehearsal would have gone a long way toward a more confident schola. 

The biggest issue about schola that I would like to have done differently, but we were prevented by our limited rehearsal time and my lack of knowledge in this area, would be to have the schola spend time learning how to read chant properly. The way we did it, just to get by, was I made copies for the schola members of recordings of the monks in Brazil singing the chants, and I figured out what notes to plunk on the piano to play through the chant during practice.  Since attending the CMAA colloquium, I know the right way to go about that would be to teach the schola members to use solfege (do-re-mi) to figure out what the intervals are in the Gregorian chant piece we are learning.  We should have spent a good portion of our practice time "solfeging" the piece, as well as identifying the types of neumes and the rhythm (marking the ictus).  One of our big problems with singing chant was having a good unison sound - that would have been largely solved by learning the piece together in the proper manner.  Additionally, I would learn how to conduct chant using chironomy, something which comes from the Ward Method but also works for conducting adults.  The schola members could also learn chironomy to help them learn the rhythm of the chant.

(If this is all new to you, you can start with this good introduction to reading the neumes: An Idiot's Guide to Square Notes)

So if you're thinking of starting a schola, here's the summary:

Being flexible is the name of the game.  You might not get a group of expert singers who can all read music and easily learn to read chant when you start a schola.  You might have mostly beginners and amateurs, but this is an opportunity to help them grow and feel good about a new ability to read music and to sing well in a group.  Take a little time to get to know the sound and capabilities of your group, and spend time laying the foundation of knowledge that will enable everyone to improve over time. Ultimately, a schola should be able to handle singing all the Proper and Ordinary for a Mass, but that can only come after everyone is confident reading chant and can learn the pieces easily... it could be years.  Knowing what you have to work with, choose pieces appropriate to the level your group is at, and the number of voice parts you have to work with.  Set goals for the group and work toward them (i.e., if you are starting out singing in private, plan when you will do your first public singing, or if you're almost ready decide when you will sing for Mass the first time).  That's just a little feedback coming from my experience.

Here's another good resource:

How to Start Your Own Garage Schola

Posted by Darcy at 08:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Have you had a chance to read the Holy Father's Motu Proprio of 7/7/07?  There has certainly been a lot of buzz about it in the world of serious Catholics.  The traditionalist Catholics eagerly awaited the liberating of the "classical rite" and people like me are curious to see how the greater accessibility of the 1962 form of the Roman Rite will influence the authentic renewal of the "novus ordo" (the rite promulgated by Pope Paul VI and revised a couple of times by Pope John Paul II).

Pope Benedict was careful to define the 1962 missal and the current Roman missal as not two separate rites but two expressions of the one Latin rite... the current missal is the "ordinary" form of the Mass, while the 1962 missal is the "extraordinary" form.  (Both forms of the Latin rite, by the way, are in the Latin language and both can be offered in Latin.) So although there might be some ultra-traditional Catholics who hoped the motu proprio would restore the 1962 missal to the way the typical parish celebrates Mass, in fact, it is only allowed to be celebrated at one Sunday Mass at a parish, and there are conditions that have to be in place for that to happen, including an established group of people in the parish who ask for the 1962 Mass, and a priest trained in offering the Mass in that form.

Still, starting in September when the new laws governing the use of the 1962 missal will take effect, there will be opportunities for priests to get the training they need to be able to offer that Mass.  The Church Music Association's website is advertising a training for priests in the sung Mass, with tracks for both the current form and the 1962 form of the Mass.  In addition, I understand from one of the students that the buzz has also reached Mundelein Seminary's Liturgical Institute and there is a possibility of training in offering the 1962 Mass to be available starting next summer.

In addition to healing the wounds caused by the poor implementation of the post-Vatican II missal to those attached to the 1962 missal, the "liberating" of the older form of the Latin rite is also intended to have a good influence on the way the current form of the Mass is celebrated.  This is very relevant to church musicians interested in achieving what Vatican II called for, namely the pride of place of Gregorian chant in the liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concillium 116), and all the other related Church documents that call for keeping the Church's rich heritage and treasury of sacred music alive.  The 1962 form never lost the distinction between the high and low Mass, and the high Mass is sung.  The same should be true for the novus ordo.

Additionally, it is hoped that the newer form of the Latin rite will also have a good influence on the celebration of the 1962 form.  One way this is starting to manifest itself already is in the greater participation of the congregation in some celebrations of the 1962 rite.  I think of the Ward Method of teaching children to sing.  Justine Ward's goal was to enable children to be able to participate in singing Gregorian chant at Mass by the time they finished 8th grade, providing a singing congregation at Mass.  This was following on the call of Pope Pius X for a renewal of chant and greater participation in the liturgy.  In other words, this is not a new concept!  I've had the impression that during the 1962 rite, the congregation is merely spectators, but of course this is not the intention.  Somewhere between the renewal called for by Vatican II and the typical way the 1970 form of the rite is offered in parishes, the goal of Pope Pius X and the fathers of the second Vatican Council got mutilated and misconstrued.  Both forms of the Latin rite have the same goal, of providing most excellent worship to God.  There is room for improvement in both, and I am really looking forward to seeing how the typical parish Mass starts to transform in the years ahead.

For me, I'm adjusting to referring correctly to the two forms of the Latin rite, as you can probably tell from this entry.  It's wrong to call them two separate rites, because they truly are the same rite, whereas it is correct to say the Latin rite and the Ruthenian Byzantine rite are two separate (and legitimate) rites in the Catholic Church.  To call the older form of the Latin rite the "Tridentine Rite" is wrong on two counts: it is not a separate rite but the extraordinary form of the Latin rite, and it is not Tridentine because it does not date back to the council of Trent (1545-1563), but rather to Pope John XXIII and the year 1962, the same year Vatican II began.  The more recent term used mainly by traditionalist Catholics is the "classical Roman rite."  Again, it's incorrect to call it a separate rite, but the term classical is ambiguous or at least imprecise.  The Mass has had several forms across the ages, and the rite used in 1962 is the form immediately preceding the current missal, but it is not "the" classical Roman rite.  So I guess for now I'll stick with referring to the "Mass according to the 1962 Roman missal" and "Mass according to the current Roman missal" or something like that.  Awkward, but I believe it is accurate.

Besides the effects this motu proprio will have, there are other signs of hope for renewal of the liturgy.  In particular, it's impressive how much interest the Church Music Association has received for their Sacred Music Colloquium.  In part, it is due to the organization's recent good web marketing (getting better all the time in fact), but I think there is a great deal being done by the Holy Spirit in this area now.  My personal experience was a nagging feeling that although our parish's music was beautiful, it still was not quite right, and I didn't know why.  Now that I have tasted what it is supposed to be, I'm addicted and want to work to bring this beautiful sacred music to our own liturgies to help inspire the congregation, to help them pray and experience the universality and timelessness of the Body of Christ.

Posted by Darcy at 09:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)