Is reading and singing chant fluently a basic skill that Catholic Church professionals should have?
  • BenBen
    Posts: 3,114
    Everyone has an agenda. It's like a bias: you may want to think you don't, but everyone has one. You should just make sure you have one in line with church teaching, including her teaching about music.
    Thanked by 2Adam Wood Gavin
  • CharlesW
    Posts: 11,937
    I don't have any problem with being in line with those teachings. Unfortunately, my experience has been that the Church is not serious about her teachings on music.
    Thanked by 2M. Jackson Osborn Gavin
  • kenstb
    Posts: 369
    Wow! You guys love tangential arguments more than chocolate.
    Thanked by 3CharlesW Gavin Ben
  • francis
    Posts: 10,677
    CharlesW said:
    Unfortunately, my experience has been that the Church is not serious about her teachings on music.
    Charles... it's not the church that isn't serious, it's the ignorant and uneducated clergy and musicians who 'play along' or prefer to be creative and novel that perpetuates the problems.
    Thanked by 2Ben eft94530
  • BenBen
    Posts: 3,114
    Wow! You guys love tangential arguments more than chocolate.


    BUT ONLY DARK CHOCOLATE.
    Thanked by 1Wendi
  • chonakchonak
    Posts: 9,161
    Maybe Almond Crush Pocky?
  • Kathy
    Posts: 5,500
    The CMAA does have an agenda, and I don't feel the need to apologize for it.

    Whereas I do feel the need for a Snickers bar.
    Thanked by 3Gavin Salieri CHGiffen
  • CharlesW
    Posts: 11,937
    Must be dark chocolate. I think Saints Lindt & Sprungli should be added to the Litany of the Saints. ;-)

    Yes, Francis, it is the leadership of the Church that isn't serious about music. You can probably find someone in Rome who takes it seriously, but it doesn't filter down through the USCCB to the parishes. Other than the rare bishop here and there who follows the rules, most follow an anything goes policy.
    Thanked by 2francis M. Jackson Osborn
  • ClergetKubiszClergetKubisz
    Posts: 1,912
    It just doesn't make any difference to them what is done musically at Mass, so long as the basic structure is still intact and nobody is complaining. Complaints are the big part: you can do whatever you want until someone comes by complaining that "people aren't singing" or the music is "too high" or "too difficult" or "too Catholic" or "not appropriate for Mass" or whatever else they can drum up.

    It also still stands that most OF clergy are not properly educated as to how music should be in the church. This is part of why they do not care: they aren't being taught that it is important.
    Thanked by 1CharlesW
  • SalieriSalieri
    Posts: 3,177
    We should have an especial candy bar for CMAA. Should we call it the Mahrt Bar?
    Thanked by 5ClergetKubisz Kathy CHGiffen Ben Gavin
  • hartleymartin
    Posts: 1,447
    The fact is that if you want to be Catholic Church Musician, then you need to have some background in:

    1.) Singing
    2.) Music Theory (ie interpreting written music to play it)
    3.) Plainsong
    4.) Hymn repertoire
    5.) Organ skills (or at the very least good keyboard skills)
    6.) Knowledge of Liturgy

    The fact is that what parish churches call for is someone who can do everything, and very few musicians are able to cover all the bases. I'm working on it, but it takes dedication in all the areas to make a good catholic musician.

    What does a parish usually demand:

    1.) Music be played
    2.) The Organist also sing as cantor (bad idea, but a common demand)
    3.) The Organist be able to plan liturgies with the liturgy committee (who usually know nothing about liturgy anyway...)
    4.) The Organist somehow recruit a parish "choir"
    5.) The Organist essentially work 3 days a week for free.
  • dad29
    Posts: 2,218
    As long as the Church still calls for a restoration of the chant, and says Gregorian chant has pride of place, and the liturgical chants are sung (alongside other music) during papal liturgies, etc., etc., I can't see how it's dead and buried and all that. That doesn't make sense.


    FWIW, that statement can also be made about the Church's insistence on chastity v. the "the kids can't control themselves" crowd.

    Also: it is NOT 'an agenda' when one is following the Church's directives. It is a mission, or a requirement.
    Thanked by 3Kathy CHGiffen francis
  • bonniebede
    Posts: 756
    I can't help feeling that it is a little premature to dismiss part of our liturgical heritage because of difficulties which are a mere 50 years old. That is a mere blink in terms of the full length and history of our patrimony. Just because we are so impoverished that many people do not even know they have an inheritance, only makes the task of revivifying all the more urgent. Our heritage is a Permanent patrimony, not something so easy to drop.
    Thanked by 3CHGiffen francis M. Jackson Osborn
  • Adam WoodAdam Wood
    Posts: 6,451
    I can't help feeling that it is a little premature to dismiss part of our liturgical heritage because of difficulties which are a mere 50 years old.


    While I agree with the general idea of your comment, it's important for us all to realize that the difficulties with Gregorian Chant did not begin 50 years ago.
    Thanked by 1Salieri
  • SalieriSalieri
    Posts: 3,177
    Ayuh. - If chant had been the common music of the Church at the turn of the 20th century, there would have been no need for S Pius X to issue Tra le, and to extoll the work of Solesmes in revivifying the chant. There also would have been no need for this: http://forum.musicasacra.com/forum/discussion/7572/augustus-pugins-earnest-appeal-for-the-revival-of-plain-song/p1
    Thanked by 2Adam Wood CHGiffen
  • CharlesW
    Posts: 11,937
    Just because we are so impoverished that many people do not even know they have an inheritance, only makes the task of revivifying all the more urgent. Our heritage is a Permanent patrimony, not something so easy to drop.


    There have been problems with chant since it stopped being the music of the day. You have to remember no one took away the "permanent patrimony" or our liturgical heritage. Many people gleefully and willingly threw it in the trash at the first opportunity.
  • dad29
    Posts: 2,218
    Many people gleefully and willingly threw it in the trash at the first opportunity.


    And many of them were 'church musicians' who preferred motets and 4-part Mass settings. Moreover, those motets and settings were often written in the 'style' of the day, such as Tin Pan Alley--or light opera.

    So the selections of modern-day 'hymnody', written in the style of Broadway or Joni Mitchell, is not really a "change" from the early 20th C.; it's more of the same.

    One other reason that Chant was so quickly abandoned: it was conducted and performed frightfully. Cut the tempo of "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" in half and see how long THAT remains popular....
    Thanked by 4Adam Wood CharlesW Jeffrey Quick eft94530
  • ClergetKubiszClergetKubisz
    Posts: 1,912
    One other reason that Chant was so quickly abandoned: it was conducted and performed frightfully. Cut the tempo of "Eine Kleine Nachtmusik" in half and see how long THAT remains popular....


    Yes, this is true. I've read several articles that stated something along the same lines: the older ways of music at Mass were abandoned in many places due to poor performance. When you've got a parish of less than 500 people, only 2 members in the choir, one of whom is the music director/organist, and the other has little formal singing experience, it is difficult to do what can be done at a larger parish or the Cathedral.

    In the days before V2, there were many more rural areas in the United States than there are now and many places, especially out West were not heavily populated. This means smaller parishes in these areas, possibly with only one priest to serve it, if any at all (my parish only recently became one: it was a mission church before, and served by many travelling priests, which coincidentally is another cause for issues in these places because there's no consistency). It also meant Low Mass most of the time, because there's no Deacon and Subdeacon to do the Missa Solemnis, which makes your principal Sunday Mass a Missa Cantata.
  • noel jones, aagonoel jones, aago
    Posts: 6,605
    From WIKI
    The Baltimore Ceremonial thus classified the Missa Cantata as a High Mass. The early 20th-century Catholic Encyclopedia said, on the contrary, that a Missa Cantata "is really a low Mass, since the essence of high Mass is not the music but the deacon and subdeacon. Only in churches which have no ordained person except one priest, and in which high Mass is thus impossible, is it allowed to celebrate the Mass (on Sundays and feasts) with most of the adornment borrowed from high Mass, with singing and (generally) with incense."[3]

    In 1960, Pope John XXIII's Code of Rubrics distinguished the Missa Cantata both from a high Mass and from low Mass. Under the number 271, it defined the forms of Mass as follows:

    Masses are of two kinds: sung Masses (in cantu) and low Masses (Missa lecta)).
    A Mass is called a sung Mass, when the celebrant actually sings those parts which the rubrics require to be sung; otherwise it is called a low Mass.
    Moreover, a sung Mass, when celebrated with the assistance of sacred ministers, is called a solemn or High Mass (Missa solemnis); when celebrated without sacred ministers, it is called a Missa cantata.[4]
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  • Ralph BednarzRalph Bednarz
    Posts: 489
    Sight-reading chant is the easy part, but for the DoM a proper understanding of chant will clearly show how a text generates melody and musical ornamentation inspired by its grammar, rhetoric, phonetics, tone of voice, and mood. This is essential in performing all types sacred music. Rhetoric, tone and inflection, modes, and proper intonation cadences, tonic accents resolution, repose ... all this would improve the St. Louis Jesuit "One Bread one Body." Imagine ""the Lord Hears the Cry of the Poor" with a mora vocis at the end of each line instead of a Broadway belt.
    There are important musical motifs and melodies in the Church's ancient reptoire of chant that the organist, guitarist, pianist and the vocalist can learn to quote as a lexicon for a wordless language of prayer. Sounds and sense that One , Holy, Catholic, and ancient enough to be called Apostolic.

    Thanked by 3kenstb Kathy Salieri
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