The Choral Service, 1927, Episcopal
  • noel jones, aagonoel jones, aago
    Posts: 6,611
    The Choral Service
  • Jeffrey TuckerJeffrey Tucker
    Posts: 3,624
    This is a dazzling resources, one which once again makes me wonder: what was and is all this astonishing fuss over translations of the Catholic liturgy into English? As this resource shows, this was all worked out long ago with great accuracy and beauty, with music to match, music written wholly in the Catholic way. A look at the above link leads one to believe that the whole exercise in the Catholic world has been reinventing the wheel again and again and never getting it quite right.
  • Jeffrey MorseJeffrey Morse
    Posts: 203
    Jeffrey, I couldn't agree more. This is a splendid resource! If we had only looked to our Anglican/Episcopalian brethren after the Council, after all, they had had great deal more experience than we in adapting english for the liturgy. I suspect there were a number of things going on however at the time, though not the least among them was a sort of misplaced pride, a certain smugness that the Church looked to no one outside her communion. Can you imagine all the Irish clergy in this country looking to the Anglicans/Episcopalians for help with the new RC liturgy? It would have perhaps been a bit galling on many levels...
  • Jeffrey TuckerJeffrey Tucker
    Posts: 3,624
    I suspect that you are right. It seems amazing that issues of class and "social rank" or whatever would interfere so seriously with liturgy but apparently so. By the way, I personally regard the new translation, from what I've seen of it, as halfway house. It's good but not good enough. Does anyone doubt that it will be revised again in 30 plus years? Which further raises the question concerning efforts at composing for the texts.

    By the way, a common defense of copyright and royalty on the new texts is that ICEL Inc. needs money money money to research, think, and write since of course it is rocket science to turn Latin int,o English. And yet: beautiful translations are free online! amazing to me.
  • Joseph Mansfield
    Posts: 113
    Old episcopalian music and translations won't do. They sound too sacred, like church or something.
  • Daniel Bennett PageDaniel Bennett Page
    Posts: 835
    Wow: I grew up on this. If you learn this sort of liturgy, music, and notation as a young person, you're not likely to find the current dominant liturgical dispensation in the English-speaking Catholic world to be remotely acceptable.
  • M. Jackson Osborn
    Posts: 8,414
    J Mansfield's observation explains a large part of this unfortunate situation. So many Catholic masses seem to betray a great unease, if not embarassment in their manner of celebration with any aesthesis which might seem too holy or ecclesiastical in character. Another, as alluded to above, is a rather disgusting disdain among many for anything that smacks of Anglican origins. EVEN if these origins are the now-fully-Catholic Anglican Use's Book of Divine Worship. Such people are unbearably snotty about things they have nothing at all to be snotty about. (If only they could see the egg on their faces!) It should, after all, be no surprise that Anglicans have been doing these things wonderfully for quite some time. And, Jeffrey's assessment that Catholics seem to need to re-invent the wheel in these matters is to speak of a dumbfoundingly head-scratching truth. Catholics are the loosers in this act of spiritual pride.
  • Daniel Bennett PageDaniel Bennett Page
    Posts: 835
    My Episcopalian parents always taught me that the ugly, anti-aesthetic text of the Novus Ordo Catholic Mass represented a conscious avoidance of the graceful diction of Anglican liturgies. If only they knew how profoundly correct they were.
  • IanWIanW
    Posts: 762
    This topic overlaps with the discussions over at The Anglo-Catholic and elsewhere about the nature of the Anglican Patrimony and its manifestation in the Ordinariats and their liturgy. It's also of relevance to Br. Lawrence Lew's thought-provoking post on NLM about inculturation.
  • DougS
    Posts: 793
    Thanks for those links, Ian. Br. Lew makes the exact point that I made very briefly in this recent thread.

    Though African-American Catholics have faced this issue head on for several decades now (some unfortunately left the Church and started their own schismatic "Rite"), the issue of inculturation is supremely important for Americans in general. There is a bigger question than how the liturgy should be translated, which is how the liturgy can be "incarnated" in American culture. Has America nothing of its own worthy enough to offer the Church?

    Unfortunately "inculturation" is used to justify all manner of nonsense in our churches, but this does not nullify the value of the idea or the practice.
  • M. Jackson Osborn
    Posts: 8,414
    .
  • IanWIanW
    Posts: 762
    The abuse of a thing etc. There does appear to be a place for reflection of particular culture in the liturgy, not as an end in itself, but as a vehicle for worship, in which elements of culture that are sympathetic to the liturgy are baptised into it. We’re aware of this process as musicians, through the introduction of particular styles into liturgical music. The current thread is also testimony to it – it concerns the potential value to the Church of a tradition of religious English developed by a Protestant culture. The interesting thing is working out the possibilities and limits of inculturation, while respecting the integrity of the Church’s own culture. The task is further complicated by the cosmopolitan influences on contemporary cultures – or simplified, perhaps, because that makes the unifying effect of the Church’s own culture all the more valuable .
  • Donnaswan
    Posts: 585
    M. Jackson. I know this is stating the obvious, but what about secular tunes of earlier days taken up and used by sacred composers like Bach, et al. I'm thinking also of French carols. Surely they have a place? And Vaughn-Williams, Cecil Sharp?
    I'm with you on the psuedo-stuff. Ghastly

    Donna
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