http://sixbasiclivingskills.com/about.html

This should help.

Thank you guys, very much.

bob

In Ken Canedo’s new book, Keep the Fire Burning: The Folk Mass Revolution, he records the history of Dennis Fitzpatrick’s involvement. Many of us on this forum should read the book: It’s the best account I have read of the era in question.

I treasure the four LP-set of the English chants Dennis recorded of his English chant schola singing the entire Mass of the Ascension.

I second the recommendation of reading Ken Canedo's "Keep the Fire Burning" for the clear presentation of that era with warmth and appreciation. Also, Ken Canedo has many podcasts relating to his new book on the link I gave above. Fascinating reading and listening.

It was also Dennis Fitzpatrick who first pressed the copyright question and pursued copyright violators. He gave us the first version of a copyright license to reproduce F.E.L. materials such as the English chant and the songs like "We are One in the Spirit" etc.

If I am not mistaken, George Devine in LITURGICAL RENEWAL: AN AGONIZING REAPPRAISAL (Alba House, 1973) discusses Dennis Fitzpatrick's work at some length.

I don't own the book, so I cannot check to be sure. If you have access to it, check.

I'm now reading this book and listening to the podcasts. The whole effort strikes me as reinventing the wheel, and not very well from what I can tell from the pods. I guess the Catholics back then didn't have any Episcopal friends to share with them something about a 500 year tradition of English chant with the same texts.

The book in general is startling in more ways than I can explain. You almost can't believe something like this could happen.

I just finished the book. It's like Film Noir. The whole wacky movement up in a blaze of glory and then crashing to the ground in disgrace. almost to a man and woman, these folk music "composers" left the Church, after having worked to dismantle the dignity of the Mass (the Mass!).The last chapter on the copyright struggles reveal a ghastly underside to the industry. Fitzpatrick's company had bills stacking up - it overreached like any boomtime Inc. -- and wickedly decided to turn to the courts to sue the Chicago archdiocese. Then his own company was sued by artists who (rightly) believed they had been robbed. Fitzpatrick won one and lost one. In the end, the lawyers got all the money. What a story. What an amazing calamity.

His entire lawsuit was a desperate measure to save a failing business based on boomtime arrogance. Typical and egregious.

Jeffrey, having grown up in that era as an Anglo-Catholic with hordes of family and friend connections to the Catholic Church (my parents' irregular marriage and then the local Catholic priest's refusal to baptize me when I was born at 30 weeks and not expected to live landed us on the Canterbury trail, but our huge Catholic family meant I probably attended Mass at least once a month as a child): I can tell you that no Catholics WANTED the input of Anglicans on anything--and the Episcopalians in the US rushed right onto the ICET/ICEL bandwagon, unfortunately. I remember being eleven and one of my Catholic friends crying because her confirmation was going to be in some ghastly trial rite--and attending another friend's Catholic confirmation in what we youngsters considered the only true Rite of the Church and wondering WHY would anyone give up THAT for the various trial liturgies being floated at the time. I remember asking my pastor (a retired bishop) why, if the Catholic Church was going to incorporate the vernacular into the Mass, they didn't just reclaim all the chants and Latin hymns already translated and used by Anglicans, and fix whatever theology might have been banged around by the Protestant-leaning; his response was something to the effect that that wouldn't sit well with the Catholics or Anglicans of the UK so it wasn't about to happen on our side of the Atlantic, and that wasn't what 'modern Catholics' apparently wanted, anyway.

Six years later, when I started studying traditional sacred music at a Catholic institution, I would ask the same question, and be treated as if I was an absolute idiot: "Anglican music isn't Catholic, no matter what Anglo-Catholics think, and no one wants that old stuff, anyway." (Oh, and we read the Vatican Ii documents, and as an idealistic youngster I couldn't figure out how people could get away with what was happening liturgically and musically; the documents are quite clear, aren't they? Out of the mouth of babes...lots of head-shaking over me.)

In my first chant class, I was the only person who could read neumes and could sing Cum jubilo, Orbis factor, and De Angelis from memory in English and (with a little looking at the exact syllable placement) Latin; none of the Catholics could read neumes nor chant in Latin (or English), and the main reason that both Protestants and Catholics took the course was that the organists studying the great works of the late 19th and 20th c. French school were interested in the "tunes" that were used as foundational material, but they saw no need to learn to chant for any liturgical purpose. The disdain for the traditional liturgy I was called to serve and the sorry state of the Novus Ordo were the primary things that kept me from converting as an undergraduate. Thirty years later, Summorum Pontificum was the sign that I was finally to come home, and I did so as an EF-devoted Catholic who is called to both aid in the restoration of the EF and work on the "gravitational pull". (And I have absolutely no desire to be an Anglican Use Catholic, even if that were an option locally.)

RE the PBEH, I'm on record with Noel as being in favor of "repatriation" (i.e., taking back) of all Anglican hymns which have their tunes or texts from the Unam Sanctam Catholicam Apostolicam Ecclesiam--most of them are public domain now and can have any theological difficulties ironed out while retaining their beautiful hieratic and edifying language.

Jeffrey said: "Catholics back then didn't have any Episcopal friends". Indeed it was worse than that, for most of the first half of the century. There was Protestant, and there was Catholic - period! When my youngest brother was born, my parents wanted to name him after my Dad's double-cousin, Walter Edwin. But they needed to have at least one saint's name! So they went to the Catholic Bible - probably a Douay version, maybe Confraternity. They only found a St. Edward, so they name my brother Walter Edward, and called it close enough.

Many years later I discovered the Anglican Use, change ringing, and the Roman Martyrology. Lo and behold, multiple saints both Walter and Edwin! Evidently, saints whose names ended up being kept by the Church of England were not considered saints worthy of American Catholics naming their children after!

Even after Vatican II "enlightenment", Joshua ended up at The Citadel for college after 13 years at the most Catholic school in the Houston, Texas area - St. Thomas Episcopal. He joined the Catholic Chapel Choir there, and the other cadets found that he was Catholic. Then, horror of horrors! They saw that he had a "King James Version" Bible on his shelf!

No. It did not matter that the right hand page of our personal Missals had a perfectly good translation - pretty much Elizabethan English. We were NEVER going to be allowed to utter those "Protestant" words in a Catholic Mass!

I truly believe that my 16+ years at Our Lady of Walsingham - Anglican Use - saved my sanity!

But now, as much as I work for the Church and play the organ for English Masses, I could quite easily NEVER again attend a Mass in English. I have not confidence that the "new" translations are going be worth setting one note of music to.

i'm sure it is very painful.

someone needs to investigate possible corruption in the relationship between the NAB and the USCCB. There needs to be some light shed on this.

there's more to it.