I have known a few who crossed the Tiber whose boats should have been sunk in midstream. LOL. Far worse, it seems to me, are some of the Protestant musicians from churches that are clearly non-liturgical in practice. I have dealt with a few who wanted to duplicate those Protestant practices in Catholic worship.

Anglican music is excellent and I have a fondness for it. On the other hand, why is it surprising that a clash of cultures can occur when mixing practices of one church with another. It can work in the right place with the right priest and congregation, but in another place, it may not.

FWIW - Plenty of Episcopal churches have really terrible music programs. Some of them do four crusty hymns real slow on a bad organ. Some of them try to do traditional Anglican choral music, but do it really poorly. Some of them have jumped on one or another band wagon, doing folk mass, or U2charist, or Beatles Mass, or Praise and Worship. Some do a bizarre mix of all these things.

For every Trinity Wall Street or Our Lady of Great Choral Music, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of places with mediocre (or worse) music.

And a lot of the places that have really good music don't have much liturgical sense.

Bad taste is not a peculiarly Roman phenomenon. Nor is good taste universal within the Anglican churches.

Bad taste is not a peculiarly Roman phenomenon. Nor is good taste universal within the Anglican churches.

The font-boy speaks great truth. LOL.

Adam speaks truly. There are too many parishes in world-wide Anglicandom that are a far cry from being poster candidates for the Anglican liturgical ethos. This may be surprising to many, but it is true. And (sorry, Noel) having a hymnal is no guarantee, for there are almost as many spiral-bound trendy song books and plunky-plunky combos in Episcopal churches as in Catholic ones. The same goes for the Lutherans, who do not universally cherish Bach, German chorales, and a sober Lutheran liturgical praxis. The Anglicans do, though, have something which Catholics seem to lack, namely, a consciousness of what constitutes fine liturgy and music, an awareness and respect for Anglican ways even if they are not put into universal practice. The cathedral service remains a pradigm even for those who do not imitate it. There is the RSCM and countless choirs which follow Anglican ways and are loved by their congregations to a degree that has no correspondence amongst Catholics. There is no such universal liturgical consciousness in the Catholic Church. Yes, there are liturgical meccas here and there, whether EF or OF. There is the Benedictine tradition. There is the musical patrimony. But none of these is paradigmatical in the Catholic mind, amongst Catholic people, to the degree that it is in the Anglican mind. Most Catholics could not care less whether there is or isn't incense, whether the priest chants, whether the liturgy is 'high' or 'low'. When all is said and done, though, there is the Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony which is owned by all even if all don't practice it. It is significant and real enough that Good Pope Benedict established ordinariates for its witness in the Catholic church. And, one will find it, undiluted, at any ordinariate parish.

Yes, MR, the paradigm is that, whether high, low, or broad church, liturgy is nicely done. All things are done decently and in order. Too, many don't realise it, but, historically, a devout low churchman often had much in common with his high church or Anglo-Catholic cousin, insofar as a quite orthodox sacramental theology and understanding of each was surprisingly close, the difference being that the low churchman simply was not into ritual.

(One thing that the Lutherans have that I have often thought Catholics and Anglicans alike should imitate is teachers' colleges. These are dotted around the country and are the breeding grounds for all teachers in Lutheran parochial schools. These colleges have music departments, many of which cultivate well-known choirs of students who are imbued with the Lutheran musical heritage, who travel and give spiritual concerts in Lutheran parishes around the country. They also train their organists. There is nothing like these teachers' colleges in the Catholic or Anglican churches, but they would be well worth imitating. There is no better way to inculcate the young who will go out and teach their cultural patrimony in parochial schools.)

Noel,

The American bishops considered having a national hymnal of sorts. They wanted to improve the music nationwide, and get a greater repertoire of familiar music -- so they put the heads of GIA, OCP, WLP in charge of the music. (Talk about wolves guarding the hen house!)

I am so glad there isn't a national hymnal for Catholics!

The American bishops considered having a national hymnal of sorts. They wanted to improve the music nationwide, and get a greater repertoire of familiar music -- so they put the heads of GIA, OCP, WLP in charge of the music. (Talk about wolves guarding the hen house!)

I'd like to read about that. Where can I find this?

http://adoremus.org/0307NationalHymnal.html

Um... there's a country just north of ours that has a "national hymnal."

Go look at it and then tell me again that you want a national hymnal.

My only complaint about Gotteslob is its formatting and its lack of square notation. But it is a huge step in the right direction.

My only complaint about Gotteslob is its formatting and its lack of square notation. But it is a huge step in the right direction.

I don't mind that the chant isn't in square notation. Honestly, I'd rather see modern notation for the sake of consistency. It's what is widely taught now, and comunicates exactly what the square-notation did just fine. It'd be like printing all German liturature in gothic blackletter because that's how they used to do it. (Plus, someone such as myself with a mostly instrumental/public-school-band-program background find it easier reading a sequence of dots than a Porrectus.)

The big downside I see in getting the English-speaking world to adopt its own Gotteslob-like hymnal would be the resistance from OCP, WLP, and GIA, and other such companies in the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia. (GIA would have the least to loose, though, since much of their output is music-education material. Their big yearly event isn't even church related; it's the Midwest Clinic that all music-education people try to make a pilgrimage to at least once in their lives.)

Actually, upon some further reflection... if some churches that use only traditional hymnody were forced to use a national hymnal that turned out to be something like the Canadian national hymnal, they would just stop doing hymns and sing the propers.

Maybe Noel is on to something.

At the Colloquium we sang a marvelous setting of “Ad te clamamus” by Christopher Tye during the Salve Regina. For reasons, we wound up singing the Roman and not Sarum version, and I was glad, because the modern notation tends to distort the relationship between text and music. The chant no longer flows but gets caught on individual syllables.

My background is modern notation as well, but I need the square notes. I can solfege the chant (even writing in the solfege helps me) and it means I am not left dealing with sharps and flats as well as thinking chant has to be in C. I need to hear it sung so I can hear the intervals, but I am still new to chant...

The great value of square notation is that it is derived directly from the earliest Carolingian chant notation, which itself evolved from rhetorical symbols indicating vocal inflexions and a quite imaginative oratorical delivery of text. While pitch was an obviously important element of cantus, the rhetorical, yes, even emotional, word-wedded delivery as indicated by the earliest neums was somewhat more than equally important. With square notation we are on our way (but have not quite yet arrived) to the primary concern with pitch and the reduction of neumes to rather stylised and wooden methods of performance even yet employed by some, stripped of their original oratorical vibrance (whether prayerful and meditative or colourful and exciting). It may have been Guido (it was somebody) who said that one needed the square notation to know the pitches and the Carolingian neumes to know how to sing them. Of course this is all lost on those who consider chant to be but a loose performance of series of pitches absent any imaginative delivery of the text. Round, modern, note heads are another step removed from the earliest notation and are concerned almost totally with the equation of 'chant' with a string of pitches sung more or less 'musically'. This is a joke. Nor does putting slurs over these note heads do very much to indicate the exciting delivery of a syllable demanded by a porrectus, whether square or, better yet, Carolingian. At best, it might well be said that one does not 'chant a text' but 'texts a chant'.

If one doesn't know semiology one cannot make out, let alone, deliver genuine chant from round note heads. One can approximate genuine chant with square notation. But, for one who is serious a working knowledge of semiology is a requirement which every diligent choirmaster should have under his or her belt for to teach the intelligent delivery of propers to cantors, choirs, and scholas. Now, of course, we don't expect this from the congregation, whose chants are simpler and who are not capable of highly refined chant musicianship; we do, though, think that they are not cretins and are, therefore, more than intelligent enough to read basic square chant notation. To hold that they cannot do this is, in a word, irrational.

(If you haven't yet, do get, read, devour, and inwardly digest Dom Eugene Cardine's Gregorian Semiology. There's far more to those ancient IX and X century scribblings than most people realise. Nor are they all that daunting to comprehend.)

fails to trigger the response in the brain that the compound gnome groups does.

This really depends more on the gnome's training, I think. I don't hear differences in the congregation's singing of De angelis and In honorem Ralph Sherwin that I can attribute to a tree-unfriendly format. Does anyone here think they could tell from a recording whether I'm reading round or square notes? Slogans like "Four lines good, five lines bad" won't carry much weight with the adiastematics anyway ;-)

If one doesn't know semioloy one cannot make out, let alone, deliver genuine chant from round note heads.

There is no genuine chant, at least if you use Solesmes. It's all, if not contrived and made-up, based on earlier scholarship. To get anything genuine, you would need 8th-century or earlier texts. I am not aware of any, but one of those conspiracy theorist flat-earthers may have something stashed under a bed.

With square notation we are on our way (but have not quite yet arrived) to the primary concern with pitch and the reduction of neumes to rather stylised and wooden methods of performance even yet employed by some, stripped of their original oratorical vibrance (whether prayerful and meditative or colourful and exciting).

Ah, if we only knew what their "original oratorical vibrance" sounded like. If the performance is wooden, it is more the fault of the singer(s) than the notation.

Well, um, it actually doesn't!
Not by a long shot.
This is an hilarious assertion.

OK, no more chant, ever, for any reason since we can't do it in square notes. That was easy to fix. LOL.

How in modern notation do you notate how the note before a [quillisma] is meant to be sung? Impossible.

And old notation accomplishes the impossible how, exactly?

Noel, they stick a quilisma in there... I have seen it in the Mortem tuam acclamation on “Domine,” and I had to tell the cantor how to sing it. He had just gone to the next pitch normally, having no idea why it was there, and it was as if someone tore the sound in half.

Of course, there are those of us who know that it's the upper pitch following the quilisma that's lengthened - not the one before it. Cardine (and Columba Kelly) are most helpful with such insights supported by continuing paleographic scholarship.

Thank you, Adam. While I do not wholly agree with you, you have just provided further and potent reasons why modern note heads are an obstruction to chant. Yes, it's not just what they fail to convey, but erroneous signals that they do convey.

It seems to me (and this is not aimed solely at you) that to hold that note heads convey as much information as does chant notation (not to mention Frankish neumes) is to believe that chant is a slew of pitches which one can sing howsoever he pleases, in a manner that seems 'chant-like' to him; that there is no definite information signaled in chant notation with its direct lineage with Frankish neumes (which are packed with information that most people don't even know exists). This is, of course, a delusion - a delusion compounded by the false information which you have referenced.

Zac, neumes are not so hard to learn to read. My six year old schola members can read them competently after a year, starting from scratch. The only person so far I have encountered with difficulty, is the adult musician who refuses to engage with it because it is not 'proper' music. This is not a question of musical difficulty but of stubbornness. For them I don't know what you can do. ;-)

"But, for one who is serious a working knowledge of semiology is a requirement which every diligent choirmaster should have under his or her belt for to teach the intelligent delivery of propers to cantors, choirs, and scholas."

Good luck with that.