In that article the author writes the following bombshell:
As most Catholics are aware, the textbooks of our sacred curriculum are the Missal and Lectionary. The scope and sequence is the liturgical year, with the three-year cycle of readings. The sacred curriculum also includes an equally authoritative textbook of sacred music: The Roman Gradual. It is entirely in Latin and contains only Gregorian chant. It was published after the Second Vatican Council in 1974, and carries the same authority as the Lectionary or Missal. For those who, like the author, know little Latin, the Gregorian Missal is a trustworthy substitute, containing the same music, but with translations. Ignatius Press also released The Proper of the Mass for Sundays and Feastdays by Fr. Samuel Weber, OSB, which is identical to the Roman Gradual only it is entirely in English, not Latin.
My comments: I think every Catholic or at least every Catholic bishop, priest and deacons knows this:
As most Catholics are aware, the textbooks of our sacred curriculum are the Missal and Lectionary.
But how many popes, bishops, priests and deacons, not to mention music ministers know this!!!!!:
The sacred curriculum also includes an equally authoritative textbook of sacred music:The Roman Gradual. It is entirely in Latin and contains only Gregorian chant. It was published after the Second Vatican Council in 1974, and carries the same authority as the Lectionary or Missal.
And how many know this, especially parish priests and their music directors?????:
Ignatius Press also released The Proper of the Mass for Sundays and Feastdays by Fr. Samuel Weber, OSB, which is identical to the Roman Gradual only it is entirely in English, not Latin.
My final comments: Shouldn't every bishop, priest and deacon be sued for liturgical malpractice if they did not know that the Roman Missal and three-year Lectionary are the primary "curriculum" of the Ordinary Form of the Mass?
And should not the same be sued, to include music ministers, who do not know that the Roman Gradual, the post-Vatican II revision of it released in 1974 is the curriculum for liturgical music in the Ordinary Form of the Catholic Church?????
6 comments:
Let me be the first to comment. How many Catholics, clergy and laity alike, know that the revised Ordinary Form Mass has the option of having the Gradual replace the Responsorial Psalm from the lectionary when chanted? Yes, the 1973, post Vatican II Gradual allows for a chanted gradual. How many of our priests and music ministers know this? Have you ever heard the gradual chanted, even in English, at an Ordinary Form Mass?????
Father,
Three years ago, almost to the day, my son and his bride celebrated their marriage using the NO. My son loves chant and all the propers and ordinary were chanted and my son chanted the Gradual. I have not heard a chanted Gradual since then.
The liturgy was also ad orientum. It was a powerful and reverent liturgy.
I really enjoy your blog.
A grateful Canadian
Sorry, Father, I forgot to mention that the Gradual was in English.
Let's get this right. When the new Missal was propagated (1970) the monks of Solesmes were tasked with a) producing chants for the Latin of the new Mass, which involved more singing and b) rearranging the chants of the Gradual to fit the Novus Ordo calendar and to some extent the lectionary. This, the Graduale Romanum, appeared in 1974. Five years later the Graduale Triplex (which includes the neumes of Laon and St Gall) was published.
When singing for the Extraordinary Form the Liber Usualis normally suffices. However, serious chanters need the neumes which predated the four-line square-note notation and have to fall back on the Graduale Triplex (or the more recent non-Solesmes Graduale Novum) which entails skipping round the book a bit.
Since most of the corpus of Gregorian Chant was composed before the end of the eighth century to accompany the Propers of the Roman Rite (which were not significantly changed until the 1960s) and since the principal focus has to be the text, the idea of an English Gradual is more than problematic. To shoehorn an English text into existing Gregorian melodies with their elaborate melismas doesn't work. Syllabic chant (e.g. the psalms) or Office hymns (where different words do have to conform to a strophic melody) can be more successful. But the ethos of Gregorian chant is that the melody fits the words and not vice-versa.
It is far better to give those listening a 'crib' to the Latin words. I am in favour of simpler English Proper chants replacing non-liturgical hymns, and there are some versions of the Ordinary in English in chant style which work very well (see the work of Aristotle Esguerra on the CMAA website). But they are essentially a compromise and a sop to those who (perversely) have a hatred for Latin which borders on the pathological.
By the way, anyone attending a sung Mass in London from the 1970s onwards will have heard the Graduale Propers chanted in Latin.
It suddenly occurs to me that we've seen this movie before.
Something happened in the 8th century to so undermine the faith across the Levant and Asia Minor as to throw Eastern Christianity into a complete chaos liturgically and socially and so undermine their cultural cohesion to the point that it became all the more easy for Islam to push through those regions.
"Better a turban than a mitre" became the slogan and it probably didn't just start after the 4th crusade.
What happened? The Iconoclast heresy.
Think about it. Eastern Christianity had a robust iconography and used statuary and mosaics extensively in their churches and liturgical functions. To suddenly declare all this to be wrong was like tossing a hand grenade into a gunpowder factory.
The turmoil was tremendous. Eventually it was tamped down but while Orthodoxy was restored in Constantinople, the damage to the hinter lands of Asia Minor was unrecoverable. Where did the iconoclast Christians go if not into Islam?
Or did they, like our own day, cease having children and contracept themselves into oblivion? Being replaced by the fertile Turks as we are being replaced by the fertile Hispanics?
"We are being replaced by the fertile Hispanics" sounds to me like an ill-conceived statement.
Post a Comment