Beautiful! Children take to Gregorian chant like ducks to water, and it's not surprising since they are so lately recently come from their Father in Heaven! A friend of mine, a former Benedictine chant master of many years, has said many times that he was utterly and completely convinced that Gregorian chant was composed by angels.

it's not surprising since they are so lately come from their Father in Heaven!

Most interesting. However, the doctrine that our immortal souls pre-existed our human conception is not taught by the Church.

The Church also does not teach that very young children who die turn into angels, a view which appears to be held by a number of Catholics.

However their souls are new, and fresh from God the Father indeed, even if not pre-existing. They desire the true spiritual milk, and if baptized they are free of the taint of original sin and not yet guilty of personal sin. Pretty good, eh?


(re below: me neither)

Oh c'mon- Fr. Ron is just pouncing on the slightest possibility of doctrinal error, whether it exists or not. Clearly, he is starting to fit in here.

Thanks for the correction, Father, and thanks, Andrew M. and Scott for the intervention! My husband is also very good at keeping me from lapsing into heresy.

Yes, after the Second Vatican Council he was assigned the task of converting the Latin texts to English at his monastery, and after trying diligently for several years, he had to give up the project. He came to the conclusion that the melodies and text were so interwoven that it was impossible to separate them; it was after this intensive study that he decided Gregorian chant must be of divine origin, at least in part.

(Oops--angelic origin, I mean, since the angels aren't divine--that's probably a heresy, too.)

I would agree that the Latin words and melodies are too intertwined for a satisfactory outcome. I know of a project here in the midwest where a number of musicians and chant experts tried to do the same thing you describe. They tried for a number of years and finally gave up. Cal Shenk (my chant teacher) used to say that any group interested in singing the original melodies of these gorgeous chants is probably not interested in singing in English anyway so why try so hard to force a thetic language into an arsic?. Perhaps adapting a sound of GC with a more simple thetic melody works best for English. As for the beautiful original melodies, they should be sung in Latin.

In 1513 no-one was singing the liturgy in English.

Fifty years later they were, but not Gregorian.

I think the idea of actually trying to sing Gregorian melodies to Anglican English dates from the later nineteenth century.

I'm of the opinion that people who make pseudo-scholarly claims to the effect that the original melodies simply CANNOT be used with English are hoity-toity school marm poseurs, the sort of people who make up grammar rules that have nothing to do with precedent or natural usage. (It is the sort of thing up with which I will not put.)

It's been done, successfully, several times.

"But those attempts weren't successful, based on the rules I just explained about how it can't be done."

No. Begging the question.

Begone, J. Evans Pritchard, PhD!

"Dada.... that's music? Jesus."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDrm29YuzfY

You honor me with your assumptions.

I was really just making a joke about Dada-ism, because I thought about it every time I read the thread title. Any other associations are happy coincidence.

But it is a neat piece of music, actually.

Adam

IMHO that piece by Savinio is

Rhythmic organized noise.

Well, no... To create authentic music requires talent, mastery of theoretical principles, intellect, and the daring and discipline of an artistic spirit.

He may have had what you insist, for you may be more knowledgeable of his entire body of work; I am not... but that piece does not exhibit any of what I am talking about.

francis, WIKI has a significant entry for Alberto Savinio.

I like what Guillaume Apollinaire once said of Savinio's piano playing:

I was surprised and beguiled; Savinio mistreated his instrument so much that after each piece the keyboard had to be cleared of chips and splinters. I foresee that within two years he will have gutted every piano in Paris. Savinio will then go on to destroy every piano in the universe, which may be a true liberation.

That would at least address the issue of piano-based music in Catholic worship.

Really guys/gals?
Yada yada

Latin is an arsic language and English is thetic. The original melodies were written for the Latin. It is not being hoity-toity to say the melodies work better with Latin just like it isn't hoity toity to say that Puccini's melodies work better with Italian.

.

It's easy to fit English words to a Gregorian hymn tune, but other kinds of GC really marry the words and melody.

Fascinating perspective. The opposite seems true to me: a metrical hymn translation requires adhering to the poetic meter of the original, no small feat. However, prose chants (such as the Propers) would admit to all sorts of liberties without losing the original melody.

My opinion is that this business of whether vernacular adaptations "work" or not is largely cultural, and not linguistic:
-Gregorian hymn tunes work well in English because we are used to hearing poetic English texts set to music of all sorts.
-The soloistic chants of the Proper don't seem to work in English (to some people) because it seems weird to both (a) know the language being sung fluently and (b) hear it elongated to the point of near incomprehensibility.

Are we to supose that:
"Hae----------c di-----------es, quam feci-----------t Dominu-------------s: exsulte--------------------mu-----------s et laete---mu----r in e--a-------------------------------------------------------"

somehow sounded way more normal to a Latin speaker than

"Thi------------------s i---s the---- da-----------------y that the Lor-------------d ha--s-ma----de. Le-----t u-----s re---joi-------------------------------------ce a---nd be-------- gla-------------------------d i----------------------n i--t."

does to an English speaker?

Or should we assume that this manner of vowel elongation is somehow more suited to the Latin language than to English?

I think no, on both points.

"Oh, but Latin has pure vowels. English is a mess of consonants and diphthongs."

No.
Reconstructed Ecclesiastical Latin, sung by professional singers, has pure vowels. The same can be done (and is done all the time) with English. The problem isn't the language, it's the singers and the hearers.

Latin has the benefit of being not used conversationally, so treating with linguistically ecstatic melodies, or pronouncing it in a way that emphasizes the beauty of the sound over the meaning of the words, does not seem at all strange because we have nothing to compare it to.

.

-Gregorian hymn tunes work well in English because we are used to hearing poetic English texts set to music of all sorts.
-The soloistic chants of the Proper don't seem to work in English (to some people) because it seems weird to both (a) know the language being sung fluently and (b) hear it elongated to the point of near incomprehensibility.

Adam, thanks so much for this point. I was going to say yesterday that the Anglican chant hymns Charles suggested yesterday were excellent examples of how an English text could be married to the chant melody, and I looked in my Anglican hymnal and there are many more really beautiful converted chant hymns. (How about O come, O come Emmanuel or Creator of the stars of night?)

The only question I had yesterday was about converting the Propers from the Graduale to English and you've just very handily answered that question. I also tend to think it's a bit of a str-e-e-e-e-e-e-tch. : )

Adam I never said English is deficient, and yes Latin is a special language as is English. I wouldn't want to hear Shakespeare in Latin but I just love it in English. Yes some chants work well with English, the Simple English Propers are great and I have used them where I had to use English in the Mass. My point is that Gregorian Chant works best in Latin. If you do not have to sing the Propers in English then sing them in Latin, if you do, than you look for the best option. But to replace the Latin (and I know you did not say this) just because you feel like it is like stripping the altars and reminds me of the Cistercian Reform, but that is another topic of discussion.

It's funny you say that, Adam. I love reading Dom Johner's Chants of the Vatican Gradual, and he cautions quite frequently against finding "word-painting" in the Propers. He is very loathe to admit when a melodic passage illustrates the text, but once in a while even he will (rather begrudgingly) admit an instance or two of it. (It's always fun when he waxes lyrical since it happens so seldom.)

He is very loathe to admit when a melodic passage illustrates the text, but once in a while even he will (rather begrudgingly) admit an instance or two of it.

I think, given the size of the corpus, it's inevitable this will happen.

I'll try to convince the angels as well.