Simple Choral Gradual
  • Richard R.
    Posts: 774
    This project has been gathering dust (so to speak) in my computer for a dozen years. Some forum readers might find it useful, or at least curious. It contains choral settings in English of the Entrance, Offertory, and Communion Chants (or \"Antiphons\", as I erroneously called them in the day) with their accompanying verses. The collection is intended for the more modest church choirs, and employs simple harmonies that are, I hope, slightly more entertaining than drying paint. (I revised and enlarged a few of these for my Advent and Lenten Introits, published by CanticaNOVA... in case Gary P. wants to sue me for copyright breech.) Also in the day, I made the choice to use the texts from the English Sacramentary, which will not please the Graduale-or-nothing partisans among us. This is the 1985 edition of the Sacramentary, so I can\'t promise the texts are still current. I did have the foresight to use the Grail Psalter for the verses, which, I hear, is making a comeback.

    This is Volume 1 (in two chunks), covering the Advent/Christmas season. I hope to complete the Church Year, if anyone seems interested (though the collection extant seems to have come to a screeching halt around the 11th Sunday of the Year). My current self takes some issue with my 1996 Foreword and Introduction (for instance, my optimism regarding congregational participation, which may have been a reluctant nod toward the status quo), but I have left them pretty much as is.

    I am heartened by the renewed interest in Mass Propers, most of it generated by CMAA bloggers (and Maestro Tucker, in particular). You can gauge the relative interest in English Propers, circa 1996, by the lingering scent of mothballs and neglect surrounding this collection. And while I can\'t say much in praise of the music (I have tried to make it a little better), at least I can defend the concept as sound. (In the enthusiastic, but still confined, world of CMAA, one might even call it ahead of its time.)

    Merry Christmas.
  • Richard R.
    Posts: 774
    ...and part 2:
  • GavinGavin
    Posts: 2,799
    A very valuable project! Thank you!
  • Pes
    Posts: 623
    A Choral Gradual in English with through-composed antiphons and verses in fauxbourdon (for lack of a better word). Eminently sensible. Why wasn't this the approach taken just after the Council? It's as if people wanted to redefine the previous Low Mass as the new "High Mass," and thus demolishing 1500 years of liturgical practice at a stroke.

    Richard, how do you respond to the objection that the English propers are for recited Masses only?
  • Rebecca Bridget C-
    Posts: 79
    I might know just the church for this.....

    The pastor has been daydreaming about sung propers for years, but the choir is at the moment entirely uninterested in chant. They're exceedingly well-intentioned, but are unable to imagine looking beyond Gather for additional or alternative music; they've simply never known anything else. They do a great job with what they have, but the pastor is wondering whether they might be ready for some gentle change, if he personally asked for it.

    We'll see if he wants to give this a try.

    Thank you!
  • Richard R.
    Posts: 774
    "...how do you respond to the objection that the English propers are for recited Masses only?"

    Besides smiling politely, excusing myself, and heading for the bar?

    At any rate, it's a new objection to me, certainly not in play a dozen years ago (not in my liturgical world, anyway). Quite frankly, without denying the primacy of the Graduale, I don't buy the argument against singing the Missal/Sacramentary texts. The same church that gave them to us in official guise was simultaneously encouraging us to "sing the Mass". I have a hard time believing the Mass they meant us to sing is NOT the Mass in the Missal/Sacramentary. I have an equally hard time imagining anyone who sings these texts is destined to do hard purgatorial time. (If so, I imagine that will be the least of my worries.)
  • Jeffrey TuckerJeffrey Tucker
    Posts: 3,624
    Thank you so much for this wonderful resource Richard. Your note about the sung propers is wholly reasonable. So far as I know, no one knew that the two propers are supposed to serve two different purposes. No question that the translators of the GIRM didn't understand this. Really, there is just so much confusion about it all.

    These are very exciting. Thank you again
  • Aidan
    Posts: 8
    Richard, this would be perfect for my parish where we are trying to gradually (no pun intended) reintroduce the propers. It is a lot less intimidating then many other settings. I would be very interested in the rest of the project, even if it were just the ones you have already completed.
    Many thanks for all your hard work, I hope we can put it to use!
  • Aristotle EsguerraAristotle Esguerra
    Posts: 1,185
    Great stuff, Richard; thanks for dusting this off!
  • G
    Posts: 1,397
    I don't know how I missed this when the thread originated, I must have been on a bender or something, but this is great, GREAT!
    However, i had to get to it through another site, your links, when I click to open them with Acrobat say that they are jpegs, not pdfs, and won't open.
    Am I doing something wrong?
    Also, when will the rest arrive, at least what you have done so far? (Lent, pretty please?
    I have had little luck interesting my pastor in doing the propers, but at choir Masses I could see sneaking them in before or after the favorite hymn to which the congregation is "entitled".

    (Save the Liturgy, Save the World)
  • Richard R.
    Posts: 774
    Volume Two is attached, containing the 2nd through 7th Sundays of the Church Year, enough to last until Lent. If you have trouble opening the PDF file, ask Jeffrey, and he will send it to you directly.
  • Mark M.Mark M.
    Posts: 632
    To my Mac-using friends here: I've sometimes found that PDFs here appear as gibberish in Preview or in your browser window, but will look fine if opened in a recent version of Adobe Reader.
  • Jeffrey TuckerJeffrey Tucker
    Posts: 3,624
    Ack! this is great great. ok. I'll add to the other file.
  • Jeffrey TuckerJeffrey Tucker
    Posts: 3,624
    I had received emails from people who were looking for more
  • Jeffrey TuckerJeffrey Tucker
    Posts: 3,624
    here it is as one file
  • Pes
    Posts: 623
    This is incredibly stimulating.

    Richard, if composers had taken the structural approach you did here, we would be in a very different Catholic culture right now. You have done an incredible amount of work, for chant and ("now") this, and I am scratching my head with a mixture of pleasure and chagrin. Things could have been so different!

    I am so sorry for your sake that English translation has been such a rat's nest.

    One thing I notice about your settings is their rhythm. How did you approach this? Would you take the same approach now?
  • Richard R.
    Posts: 774
    Pes:

    I'll take "structural approach" as the compliment you intend, but I don't really know what it means. There were these texts. They wanted singing. They needed music. I had blocks of time on my hands. Voila.

    It is marginally painful to revisit these melodies a decade and a half later -- a bit like contemplating your 15-year-old driver's license photo. I have made adjustments that hopefully keep them out of the realms of the embarrassing, but I have to keep reminding myself that these are purely functional, necessarily *simple* choral settings, not intended to be heard concert-wise at one go (except, perhaps, to cure insomnia).

    In fact, the rhythm was the most creative part of the project, finding repetition and creating form in very narrow textual confines. I am appalled by the rhythmic shoe-horning afflicted on psalm responses in most disposable worship aids, and hope my solutions do more justice to the texts.

    Such as they are, I might add. Psalm 33:6 (Communion for the Third Sunday), so artfully rendered in the Grail: " Look towards him and be radiant; let your faces not be abashed," becomes sheer doggerel in the Lectionary: "Look up at the Lord with gladness and smile; your face will never be ashamed." That was a hard moment to be musical. Yes, when it comes to translations, we can do better, gang.

    But you credit me with more power than you ought, if you think I could have changed Catholic culture (or can change it now, for that matter). The mandate, such as it was, was given and received. Only on the margins did you find contrarians bucking the trends. Now, we have the Internet, the greatest gift to contrarians, which gives voice to the counter-culture, led by sites such as this. But I am afraid it is a voice that the old guard will go to their graves never having heard.
  • Pes
    Posts: 623
    By "structural," I simply mean you've got your propers, your psalm verses, and... you set them. Four-part, in the tradition. You were working in the vein, extending it. That's what I mean. Instead, what we got is ... chaos. So yes, it's a compliment, and a sincere one. I'm not saying you could've changed the tide yourself, but widespread adoption of your approach would have. That's all.

    Your comment on Ps. 33:6 is funny and sad. Can I indulge in a little congenial close reading for a second? Let's compare the first two parts:

    "Look towards him and be radiant" -- Note that some distance is implied by "towards," but also directionality and movement -- and "radiant" is evocative on several levels.
    "Look up at the Lord with gladness and smile" -- This flattens the directionality and makes the observer stationary -- "gladness" is trivial, and "smile" is simply... physical.

    And of course the differences in rhythm are vast and absurd. The Grail's is sprung and emphatic in the right places. The Lectionarists' can't make up its mind: it starts iambic but everything is derailed in the second hemistich. Blech. And I'm sure many more examples could be adduced.

    In heaven, we will all subject the psalms to scansion, decide on modes and cadences, construct ingenious and inspired melodies, and work out all the voice-leading in every possible permutation.
  • Charles in CenCA
    Posts: 2,416
    Dear Richard,
    I just wanted you to know that today, the second Sunday we've employed your settings of the Communion antiphon and verses, the pastor made a walk to the choir to inquire after the "beautiful, Russian-sounding" piece. I took the compliment and dovetailed it into a 2 minute chronology of what we've been doing since Colloquium 08.
    It's amazing and confounding at once: he "gets" the Propers in English as long as they're set chorally; he doesn't mention the equally beautifully rendered chants either from COMMUNIO or Bruce's AMERICAN GRADUAL.
    Oh well, brick by brick.
    But attention was paid.
    In Domine,
    Charles
  • Jeffrey TuckerJeffrey Tucker
    Posts: 3,624
    We used the Entrance today. It is just great. great.
Add a Comment