Did Pocahontes sing chant?
  • Jeffrey TuckerJeffrey Tucker
    Posts: 3,624
    Here I address an article from Pastoral Music from 1977, an article that claims that chant is for snobs and courts but not for common people. Hope you like my post.
  • tdunbar
    Posts: 120
    Somewhat tangentially, seem to me that while Appalachian shape note singing isn't Gregorian chant, it's closer to chant than to, say, Worship & Praise 80s pop songs.
  • Jeffrey TuckerJeffrey Tucker
    Posts: 3,624
    That's not tangential. That's a good point.
  • priorstf
    Posts: 460
    You're right, Jeffrey - Pocahontas likely never sang chant. But while the typical Anglo-centric American history crowd can harass you about that, what about the Spanish explorers in central, south, and western America who were indeed singing chant long before? For better or worse, Catholic missionaries accompanied the Spaniards, ministering to the needs of the wealthy leaders, the far more numerous un-wealthy soldiers and commoners, and the indigenous people, as best they knew how in those rather dismal times.

    Several members of our schola sang for a wedding at the San Gabriel Mission a few weeks ago. One of the first things that struck us was the fact that we were singing in a 240 year old church whose walls were likely christened by the very same Gregorian Chant we were singing today. It was an awesome and humbling realization.

    As to the question of moneyed snobbery. I think you will find people spending far more money for a single Hannah Montana concert than they will contribute to their church in the course of a year.
  • tdunbar
    Posts: 120
    Ok. It's also interesting that a standard Welsh pew hymnal uses alphabetic solfa notation (four part!).
    http://www.gwales.com/goto/biblio/en/9781903754023/
    This is largely due, in my opinion, to the popular/common Welsh revivals, e.g. 1904. It is precisely the "common" folk who, in a religious revival, insist that the technology (ie musical notation) focus on voice rather than instruments.

    I regret to say that having a Welsh hymnal on my bookshelf has not had the
    hoped for learning-by-proximity-osmosis effect :)
  • gregpgregp
    Posts: 632
    Just Google "California Mission Music". Indians were singing chant and polyphony in the missions before the Revolution.
  • Jscola30
    Posts: 116
    Yes I did a paper once about music education in America, and when the Spanish came over, they taught the natives European music, there were native orchestras, organists, etc.
  • David AndrewDavid Andrew
    Posts: 1,206
    I often wondered what would happen if, in response to a request for "Spanish" music (knowing full well they meant the most recent contribution from Donna Pena), I had the choir sing a Guerrero motet?

    *snort*

    (Sorry if this is over the top. . . can't help infusing a bit of well-placed intellectual humor!)
  • Cantor
    Posts: 84
    Who, btw, ever did claim that GC was the preeminent music in the Church in America? I think most are (and, if “are”, almost certainly “were”!) aware that GC was not the norm in most places prior to TLS - and I’m sure the U.S. was no exception!
  • Cantor
    Posts: 84
    And just what is wrong with associating high-brow education and the Church??

    ISTM that this is PRECISELY the association that should exist (while certainly eschewing snobbery etc.). The Church should be a place of high culture where there is tangible engagement with the frontiers of modern thought as well as a firm understanding of who we are and who we have been.

    Culturally, then, given that there still exists a positive correlation between the amount of Latin in one’s English vocabulary and his/her level of education, it is entirely appropriate to “Latinize” the English translations to some extent (there are worse things than learning new vocabulary at Mass!) and to use Latin per se for the liturgy, both in the choir alone and with the congregation.
  • Palestrina
    Posts: 422
    "Here I address an article from Pastoral Music from 1977, an article that claims that chant is for snobs and courts but not for common people. Hope you like my post."

    My answer to the "Pastoral Music" article: If chant is truly not the music of congregations, how do you explain the great participation in it in liturgies of the Eastern Rites, where choral music has not developed in the way that the Western choral tradition has gone? Even IF we accept the author's argument that "at no time during the formative centuries of plainchant did it ever become a vehicle for congregational song. Gregorian chant was the almost exclusive prerogative of monastic choirs and cathedral choirs…", given that chant is the only real form of liturgical music in the East of the Church, couldn't the West develop a chanted liturgy along similar lines to the East?
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