Dominican Chant and Dominican Identity
  • RevAMG
    Posts: 162
    In a recent issue of the open access journal Religions, Br. Innocent Smith, OP of the Province of St. Joseph (Eastern American Province of the Order of Preachers) published an article titled "Dominican Chant and Dominican Identity." The link is here: Dominican Chant and Dominican Identity.

    The abstract:
    The Order of Preachers possesses a venerable chant tradition that dates back to the thirteenth century. This essay describes Dominican chant, showing how it developed as a consequence of the attitudes to the liturgy expressed in the Ancient Constitutions of the Order of Preachers. These constitutions stressed that the liturgy was to be performed with careful attention to bodily posture, with a succinctness and brevity that would allow time for study and preaching, and with gradations of solemnity that would express the inner hierarchy of parts of the liturgy and of the liturgical year. After the initial development of the repertoire, Dominican chant has gone through periods of decline and revival, which are briefly traced in this article together with a consideration of the place of the chant in the contemporary practice of the Order. Throughout the last eight centuries, the chant of the Order of Preachers has played an important role in the inculcation and preservation of Dominican identity within the Order and in the lives of individual friars and sisters.
  • eft94530eft94530
    Posts: 1,577
    with a succinctness and brevity

    Back in the 1990s a friend of mine would say
    "the devil likes to appear to a Dominican in a black habit"
    which was his version of
    "we are not Benedictines"
    or
    "not-too-many-notes-per-syllable and keep-them-moving".