This year's Colloquium started with some somber news, as instructor Scott Turkington was not able to attend and participate, due to his father's death a few days ago. Our sympathies and condolences are with Scott and his family as they prepare for the funeral.
On the first evening, there were words of welcome from CMAA secretary Mary Jane Ballou, from our president William Mahrt, and from chaplain Rev. Robert Pasley. Virginia Schubert from St. Agnes Church described the Mass which the parish and its musical forces will present on Friday featuring the singing of the last Mass Mozart completed. Professor Mahrt gave us a foretaste of his talk later this week on silence; Fr. Pasley urged us to approach the week as a spiritual retreat, and Dr. Ballou announced dates and locations for 2018 CMAA events. The January music event will take place in New Orleans; summer short courses will be held at Duquesne the week of June 18; and the 2018 Sacred Music Colloquium will return to Loyola University in Chicago June 25-30.
After the singing of Night Prayer, participants spread out to observe Grand Silence in their own various ways: studying their music, running personal errands, visiting pubs, etc.
"I'm walking to New Orleans..." Fats Domino (surely that's Latin for "great Lord!" and stop calling me Shirley.) We'll observe the Grand Silence at the famed W.I.N.O. (Wine Institute of New Orleans.)
...and maybe "Chicago, Chicago, it's my kinda town."
On the New Liturgical Movement site, Charles Cole has posted some wonderful photos of Tuesday's Mass in the University's Chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas, celebrated by Msgr. Andrew Wadsworth, executive director of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy.
In the colloquium's first plenary address, Fr. Benedict Andersen OSB of Silverstream Priory presented a study on the "Christian Psalter": the Psalms as they were known to the early Church, through the Greek Septuagint and the "vetus Latina" Bible, which informs many texts in the Graduale Romanum.
Modern biblical findings, such as the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, have shown that there is no single Hebrew source of Scripture that can be taken as most authentic, and this observation has a counterintuitive result: it reaffirms the value of the tradition. Attempts to take up a "pure" Old Testament text independent of the tradition are misguided, whether that attempt comes in the Protestant Reformation's embrace of the Masoretic text, or in 20th-century Catholic projects such as the Nova Vulgata. Such efforts lead to an impoverishment, and to the loss of Christological interpretations of the Psalms, a matter of great importance for the liturgy. The Scripture we have received comes to us, within the tradition, in a variety of formulations and with a variety of readings, and the Church has historically recognized these as divinely inspired Scripture.
In the second plenary address, Msgr. Andrew Wadsworth, executive director of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy, discussed ICEL's work on the Liturgy of the Hours. ICEL has been commissioned by the US bishops to translate into English the Latin hymns of the Liturgy of the Hours, as found in the Liber Hymnarius published by Solesmes. To illustrate the work in progress, he presented some examples of hymn translations. Here are two.
The first obvious question is: why do these translations not rhyme? ICEL has chosen to make non-rhyming translations. Here are some of the reasons involved:
First, ICEL's assignment is to present the texts accurately, and the constraint of rhyming can lead translators to add words or concepts to the target text which do not appear in the source text, just for the sake of producing a rhyme.
Some well-known rhyming translations use syntactic inversions in order to facilitate a rhyme; but these make the text less accessible when people read the hymn as part of praying the Office without music: a practice which, although not the ideal, is very common.
Furthermore, rhyming can lead translators to produce a text whose stresses do not fall in the same place metrically as in the original. A non-rhyming translation that is made with the same poetic meter as the original can be sung with the original chant melody.
ICEL's adoption of these non-rhyming translations does not exclude other efforts to make English adaptations of the hymns of the LOTH, so people will be remain free to use classic translations of Latin office hymns, in cases where these exist.
The first and third reasons for non-rhyming translations presented above seem to suggest that accurate and singable rhymed translations are impossible. It would be interesting to know if this were tried and failed, or never tried.
The second problem of inversions is much harder to escape. On the other hand people are perhaps used to flexible syntactic constructions in hymns. (God is my shepherd, so nothing shall I want. Blest are they, the poor in spirit. Under His wings your refuge; His faithfulness your shield. Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee. Alleluia, not as orphans are we left in sorrow now.)
Overall the project is likely to recover greater use of chant melodies, which is wonderful!
The music being prepared for the LOTH will be presented in modern notation, similar to that used in the current edition of the Roman Missal, for the convenience of people not familiar with chant notation. Msgr. Wadsworth indicated that there is no objection to anyone making an edition in four-line notation.
The notation on the LOTH hymns uses the music font default of Lilypond, which is also used in Adam Bartlett's Lumen Christi Hymnal, which itself includes translations (some non-rhyming) of many of the hymns of the Breviary. The Lilypond font (look at the curvature of the vertical stroke in the treble clef) is not present in previous ICEL publications.
To follow up, I finally got around to scanning the full four pages of Msgr. Wadsworth's handout, with examples of the hymn translations currently under preparation for the Liturgy of the Hours.
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