Want to field this one, Fr. Anthony Ruff?

Modern Chant-like Notation for the Neumophobic.

Interesting, isn't it?, that presumably intelligent people suddenly become mentally challenged when presented with a mere four lines instead of five... plus, horror of horrors, you ask them to calculate from a movable clef. One would think it was the proverbial 'rocket science', wouldn't one? Poor things. I pity them not. It's nothing more than deliberate mental laziness and purposefully chosen ignorance.

Oh, tush! Defense of the defenseless is disappointing. There is nothing at all 'condescending' here. Square notation is not problematic for large numbers of congregations and clerics who just simply look at it and sing it. It is really a more self-evident system to many than modern notation. Those who become panic stricken at the sight of it are not to be pitied in their wholly negative choice, their pretended, cultivated, and coddled idiocy with regard to music.

As I said, musicians can be their own worst enemies.

It is really a more self-evident system to many than modern notation.

This is true from a pedagogical perspective as well, especially since they really don't represent anything as abstract as specific pitches or keys: just pitch relationships. It was invented for singing chant, and is particularly efficient for notating vocal music: just what it was created for. I've had more success teaching children to read modern notation after they have learned the basics of square notes first.

...musicians can be their own worst enemies...

...and some of them are in our own ranks.

Square notation is, objectively, incredibly easy to decipher, not at all arcane, and is, in fact, rather fun to give life to, and deliriously liberating. There are quite a few congregations and priests around who find no difficulty at all with it. As for those who do find difficulty with it, some objective observation will reveal that it's a deliberately cultivated negative attitude, guardedly shut mind, and a childish, tight-lipped 'I'm not going to, just because I don't want to' that is the real problem. A child could absorb it in five minutes - providing his parents and teachers haven't already shut his mind for him. (And, if any person in our civilisation has never seen chant notation or heard chant before I would like to know what planet he or she was reared on. Our cultural markers are more accessible and revealed through all kinds of media to all strata of society now more than they have ever been in history.)

As for what is the name of the notation in the missal, I haven't heard of one inside or outside of church and academia. I and most just refer to it as 'note heads', which is really all it is, which, somehow, is better than quavers! Perhaps Bruce Ford has a name for it, since he uses it.

MJO, this is after all the Year of Mercy. Besides, this is beginning to remind me of Animal Farm: is it really more admirable to balk at TAG's five-line staff that at the four-line kind? I suppose we'll have to start blushing about not playing from the even more intuitive German organ tablature.

I suspect though that the idea of writing non-metrical music using tailless round note heads on five lines is ... quite recent. Like the O.P., I'd like to know more about this.

It is employed in the unified German Catholic hymnal "Gotteslob" (1975).
A different flavour can be found in the much praised "Nova organi harmonia" (194x).

Certainly we can find some examples still older than this.

The earlier version of the Nova Organi Harmonia from the 1910s(?) that can be found at CCWatershed also uses it.

Matthew: with tailless note heads, or quavers? Can you post a page?

We had the rogation day litany and May crowning procession to the outdoor shrine after mass at Walsingham this morning. The Marian antiphon was printed in the service folder in chant notation. Strange! You should have heard how our people sang it. Ditto the antiphons to the liturgy of the palms on Palm Sunday. All the Good Friday chants right out of Palmer-Burgess. Ditto lots of other similar stuff. No one blinks or gasps or groans or doesn't sing. They just, every one of them, sing it. Heartily. Are they going to be daunted by square notes!? Absolutely not! They wouldn't think of it.

Now, mind you, I wouldn't ask them to sing a complicated, highly neumatic or melismatic chant, but singing normal congregational chants in chant notation presents absolutely no obstacle to hearty participation.

Our people do sing the Kyrie cum jubilo as Englished in The Hymnal 1940 (and do so heartily!). Granted it's in quavers, but I suspect that if we put square notes in the service folder they would quickly realise that they know it and immediately make sense of it. All one needs to do is to give people credit for being as smart as Ordinariate folks, which I have no doubt that they are, and expect them to act like grown ups. As with children, so it is with adults - it isn't what they can or can't learn, it's what their teachers can (or can't) teach.

Paedagogical note: if one is starting from scratch, introduce a few simple chants in slowly, things that no one of normal intelligence could fail to fathom. Just one or two easy examples over time - really easy, like responses, dialogue, and such. After a while, give them more; something like square notes to a hymn they know well, like 'Humbly I adore thee', or Jesu dulcis. And go on from there. Sneak it in little by little - if that's really what you have to do. There is no excuse for a mentally healthy person to have apoplexy at the sight of four lines instead of five, and neumes instead of a boring slew of note heads.

Walsingham isn't the only place in Houston at which the people sing chant notation. There are others. And, there are others on this forum. And there are others all around the country.

As with children, so it is with adults - it isn't what they can or can't learn, it's what their teachers can (or can't) teach.

Some things can't be taught, but are still necessary for learning, though. Such as attitude. You can't write a lesson plan for that. You can model it, you can ask for it, you can even provide evidence showing that the student succeeds more often when he or she exudes a positive attitude, but you cannot make the student adopt it unless they want to. It's the whole "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink," scenario. At some point, the student must take ownership of his or her learning: a student who does not want to learn will not learn, no matter how talented the teacher is.

RANT BEGINS HERE

I'm not sure what it is about our current society that thinks that the only model of a great teacher is the one who has this magical ability to make students want to learn, or the one who makes learning fun, as if a teacher that doesn't do those things is a complete failure and shouldn't be teaching. Secondly, we're hyperfocused about rooting out bad teachers and eliminating them from positions; so much, in fact, that we see things that really aren't there many times. As a result of this, we have seen increased teacher accountability, sometimes in areas that are really not under the control of the teacher (and in some cases are in the domain of the administrator!), increased emphasis on standardized test results, and increased turnover in the profession. The last one is understandable, as the first two create what is essentially an inherently hostile profession.

END OF RANT

My apologies for the rant. Sometimes, you've just got to get it out there. As to the comment above: it's not all about what the teacher can or can't teach, although I do agree that students can learn anything you can teach them. The success or failure of the student, however, requires the efforts of student and teacher. The teacher is not responsible for every aspect of student learning: some of it is the student's responsibility. The student must be diligent in completing his assignments, and must take personal ownership of his learning. He must be dedicated to learning the content, and willing to follow the instructions of the teacher to the letter in order to get there.

Like this. It was not uncommon, but I am much more comfortable with square notes, since I can use solfège...

In German this kind of notation is called "Eierkohlen-Notation". No idea, how to translate this into English.

Like this. It was not uncommon, but I am much more comfortable with square notes, since I can use solfège...

You can use solfege with any music and with square, shape, or round notes. I grew us hearing shape note singers in this area use it when I was very young. It is common in my area and some Protestant churches nearby still use it. It works with any notation when you "sing the notes" as the shape note people say.

Charles, the thing is, I really learned modern notation with the arrangement of the named notes and pitches for the bass clef. I can with some difficulty apply the note names to tenor parts written with a treble clef. (I was taught the treble clef but as I began on trombone, I never used it, so I didn’t internalize it...) When I started singing, I learned solfège with square notes. Modern notation does not convey the chant effectively, even with using solfège. In fact, in my sister’s choir, the singers only use solfège. (She is 15.) But if I have a choice for something in square vs. round notes (and, God forbid, something like I posted!) I go for square every time.

Eierkohlen are charcoal briquets.

And the earlier usage of such "briquets" for notes were square-ish, not round ... I've seen them in Proske's Musica Divina and other places ... quite old. They were basically imitations of (or derived from) square puncta.

I've also seen squarenote/neume notation on five-line staves with modern clefs (Tenor G-clef-8vb, Bass F-clef) ... with key signatures!

What will be next?