Mystic Modern: the music of Charles Tournemire
ICEL translation versus a new USCCB-approved translation of Easter Sequence Victimae Paschali Laudes
  • ContinuousbassContinuousbass
    Posts: 358
    https://archive.ccwatershed.org/media/pdfs/23/06/19/00-17-20_0.pdf shows a newish translation of Victimae Paschali Laudes approved for liturgical use by USCCB. Cf. CCW - Jeff Ostrowski - Easter Sequence
    'Praises to the Paschal Victim Christians yield in oblation'
    ICEL:
    'Christians, to the Paschal Victim offer sacrifice and praise.'

    I'm in a United States diocese and we were thinking of using this new translation for Easter. Just wondering if anyone else out there has used this yet? To me the grammer is more direct in the Ostrowski/USCCB.

    Also, did Ostrowski author this translation?

    Many thanks.
  • Liam
    Posts: 5,210
    To me, that translation would be something to use only to offer a more (though not completely) syntactical gloss in programs if the Latin only were being sung, rather than for singing in English.
    Thanked by 1tomjaw
  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 2,630
    Yeah. It’s not singable.
    Thanked by 2Liam tomjaw
  • Charles_Weaver
    Posts: 105
    The slavish avoidance of masculine rhymes makes it pretty awkward as English poetry, in my opinion. This is done to match the accentuation of the Latin, of course; Jeff has his own reasons for promoting that. I agree that it's not the most singable version in English.
    Thanked by 1hilluminar
  • RoborgelmeisterRoborgelmeister
    Posts: 211
    If one requires a "modern" English translation of the Victimae, the translation by Peter J. Scagnelli is worth considering. One can glimpse it here
    https://hymnary.org/text/christians_praise_the_paschal_victim
    Thanked by 3CHGiffen LauraKaz lmassery
  • Richard MixRichard Mix
    Posts: 2,862
    Some time ago I hand penciled "Christians to the Paschal victim offer your grateful praises" into some 200 pew hymnals.
    Thanked by 4Liam CHGiffen Roborgelmeister cmb
  • chonakchonak
    Posts: 8,973
    [As an aside, since Peter Scagnelli's translation was mentioned, a reader alerted me to the fact that he was removed from ministry (in 1994). He died in 2017 and his diocese announced in 2019 that he had been accused of misconduct. Musicians may want to take that into account in deciding whether to use one of his works. --admin]
    Thanked by 5LauraKaz maestrodicapella tomjaw Liam PaxMelodious
  • Here's a routine reminder: Be discriminating but don't nitpick.
  • M. Jackson Osborn
    Posts: 8,430
    I was amused (surely this was a joke?) when reading the above translation that was supposed to be 'singable'. True, the words fit the chant, but only as Cinderella's wicked sister's foot fit the glass slipper! The accents are all wrong and the language is anything but poetry. It's clumsy and amateurish.

    The version found in the 1940 is superb and, I think, pretty close to the one in the Roman Missal, which isn't bad at all.
    Thanked by 3CHGiffen tomjaw Liam
  • ContinuousbassContinuousbass
    Posts: 358
    Ok that settles it. Were chanting Latin, and displaying a la duplex the unsingable translation on the slide show. The translation is very matter-of-fact and not poetic. I will keep my ears open for laughter, and report back my findings.
    Thanked by 2tomjaw trentonjconn
  • Charles_Weaver
    Posts: 105
    I was recalling that I had written somewhere else about the accentuation of this sequence. This has some bearing on the English version one would choose to sing:

    https://www.ccwatershed.org/2023/10/21/two-ways-of-singing-the-easter-sequence/
  • Liam
    Posts: 5,210
    FWIW, when congregations sing it (in Latin or English) - which has been the typical situation in my experience of it in the post-conciliar missal context - accentuation is not an issue, because just blurs out given the size of congregation and of acoustical space.
  • ServiamScores
    Posts: 2,989
    I have never once heard a congregation sing this. Only ever a schola or cantor.
  • GambaGamba
    Posts: 581
    I have never once heard a congregation sing this. Only ever a schola or cantor.


    Certain Lutherans retain the custom of singing the Sequence together with the trope “Christ ist erstanden” (English here: https://www.lutheranchoralebook.com/texts/christ-is-arisen/)

    This video shows how the interpolation is done, but has a choir on the Sequence. I know places where the people sing the whole thing.

    https://fb.watch/yFezG12sFf/?=z4kJoQ

    As impermissible as such a practice is in our liturgy, it was pretty fun to try to keep it together on the organ, with a full house of 500 Lutherans singing at the top of their lungs.
    Thanked by 4CHGiffen trentonjconn tomjaw ServiamScores
  • davido
    Posts: 1,013
    The sequence used to be notated in full in Breaking Bread. It is notated in the hymn section of Source and Summit. No reason a congregation could not be trained to sing it.
    Thanked by 1LauraKaz
  • Richard MixRichard Mix
    Posts: 2,862
    A congregation can certainly get it. Take advantage of the Octave on Divine Mercy too and you'll be pleasantly surprised the following year.
    Thanked by 1Liam
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  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 2,630
    Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet does the Veni Sancte Spiritus with alternation with the congregation (I have never checked the Easter or Corpus Christi livestreams)

    French trads are also familiar with the Dies Irae.
  • Adam WoodAdam Wood
    Posts: 6,482
    that new one is awful what is happening
  • FSSPmusic
    Posts: 330
    As for accentuation, I don't think (or feel) that a long note at lau(des)/Vic(tim) or (Christi)a(ni)/prais(es) improves anything. You should already be in a ritardando at the cadence before the double bar line, and an actual doubling of the penultimate note seems contrived and unnecessary, at least to my ear. Why not simply this?
    image
    The short-long ternary grouping at laudes and -ani is against the Solesmes principles because it's considered a type of syncopation, but so what? The 1940 Episcopal Hymnal does it in the first incise but doubles two notes at the end of the period, as well as the note before the comma at the beginning:
    image
    Placing the ictus on a weak penultimate syllable is not preferable in that system, but it's exactly what the Solesmes editors do at the first word (see also Dr. Weaver's linked post):
    image
    Another gem from Ostrowski over the weekend:
    Dom Mocquereau ended up promoting a rhythmic interpretation sometimes called Neo-Mensuralism because it lengthens almost every other note.

    image
    Poor thing thinks the Solesmes vertical episema is a sign of length, whereas Gajard says in the clearest possible language, "The vertical episema has of itself absolutely no connection with length or intensity." Who calls the Solesmes method Neo-Mensuralism? Maybe one of his numerous alter egos, which he admits in a footnote here?
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  • Andrew_Malton
    Posts: 1,204
    At the risk of taking this thread into the weeds, I admit:
    • I've never understood what Solesmes meant by syncopation, although I know what it means in metered music.
    • Despite listening to recordings and readings and listening to explanations I've never really understood what the ictus is, other than “the beginning of a little rhythmic group”. But if it really and truly has no relationship to time or stress, what's left?
    Thanked by 1FSSPmusic
  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 2,630
    A forum thread? In the weeds?

    Organization?

    I don't think that it has no relation to stress; it has if anything an inverse one, given the preference in syllabic chant (some of the sequence portions, psalmody, and even the Credos) for weak final syllables followed by an accent on the first syllable of a new word (or at least a weak syllable of a new word where the second of the three syllables is accented), rather than a preference for the accent in every case, which, say what you want, I think that trying to squeeze in the ictus there would further distort the chant. There are places that @FSSPmusic has convinced me probably should be treated as they would be if the ictus was not marked by an editor's insertion of the vertical episema (which, am I the only one that calls the marking the ictus by extension instead of risking confusion with the true episema?).* This is the case of the scandicus where the last note is a virga, and the podatus is marked, and sung like the "usual" form of the salicus.

    As far as recordings go, you can get an idea of how the ictus is placed according to both textbook rules and the obvious shifts that a choirmaster might make in case of ambiguity or more difficult ternary groups (I would not, however, extend that to the pressus or oriscus groupings; that seems inviolable to me, as would be placing an ictus on the note before the quilisma). Dom Cardine famously recognized this listening in his earliest days at Solesmes. But normally, the ictus, while real (in its way: there's a beat, and the groupings of twos and threes are defensible even if one is not inclined to Mocquereau's system for chant or to his more universal theory of rhythm), is in the mind and therefore in the hand of the choirmaster, but not heard directly as such.

    *However, I'm probably not going to white these out in our scores. Too much work.
    Thanked by 1FSSPmusic
  • Charles_Weaver
    Posts: 105
    It's a fair question and kind of a complicated one. And it takes a certain amount of thought that has little or nothing to do with the sources of the chant that we actually have, which is why it is a little less fashionable now. Still, I find it interesting, so here goes:

    Although the ictus is not associated with either length or stress, it is used, as Matthew says, to organize the time. You can think of time as being made up of beats (these are just lengths of time) or of motions (which is more a function of music and takes place with dynamics, melody, etc.). If it's made up of beats, then every single note has a simple beat just by existing in time. According to the theory, these simple beats are not divisible but are like the smallest units of time for music (the chronos protos of ancient Greek theory). Mocquereau groups these into twos and threes, which he says are composite beats. These always begin with an ictus, which the conductor also marks. You don't stress the ictus or lengthen it.

    But it's a little more musical to think of music as made up of motions (which Mocquereau calls "rhythms"). In this case, you think of the basic musical unit as an upbeat proceeding to a downbeat (so you need a minimum of two simple beats for a rhythm). The ictus in this case is the end of the motion. The composite beats (beginning with the ictus) and the motions (ending with the ictus) are in a sort of brick-wall arrangement with each other, so that when you sing you are constantly moving from beat to beat in an artistic way, sometimes gaining energy and sometimes letting the energy dissipate. This also intersects with the Latin text so that it is often favored for the words to align with the motions (ictus at the ends of the words) although they can also align with the beats (ictus at the beginnings of the words).

    There is a certain nice interplay that happens with all this, which many people find prayerful. But of course it is a product of Mocquereau's own time and place. For instance, in saying that the basic motion of music moves from upbeat to downbeat, he's aligned with a bunch of thinkers in the nineteenth century (incidentally I have always found this way of thinking natural and also endemic to the current Historical Performance movement), but it is the opposite of the way a lot of present-day Schenker-influenced musical thinkers think of it. It's also sort of weird for native English and German speakers to conceive of a kind of Latin where the accented syllable is not aligned with the beat. Hence the ongoing controversy!
    Thanked by 3CHGiffen FSSPmusic Earl_Grey
  • FSSPmusic
    Posts: 330
    “the beginning of a little rhythmic group”
    and
    in the hand of the choirmaster
    sum up the nature of the ictus. That's what it is: the alighting point where the compound binary or ternary beat begins and the choirmaster's hand changes direction at the bottom of the chironomic curve. The ictus has no more force or intensity in and of itself than a snowflake landing on the ground (this is a classic Solesmes method illustration), although it may indeed coincide with word stress or a lengthened note.

    Syncopation occurs when the ictus is transferred from the beginning of a doubled note (either dotted or doubled by formation, but not necessarily a note marked with the horizontal episema) to a short note preceding it. Here's Suñol's explanation:image
    Consider the doubled notes at dixit in the Midnight Mass introit and festum celebrantes in the Gaudeamus introits. There the ictus must be placed at the beginning of the doubled note. But of course they got it wrong because there ought to be repercussions and a long third note in each case. As for the adiastematic neumes, I think there's one syncopated figure that's rather common in graduals but also used occcasionally in other chants:image

    If you knew the Laon or St. Gall neumes and wanted to write such a syncopated figure with them, you would probably write exactly what you see above.

    Carroll considers "placing of a word-accent on the second count of a ternary beat" to be an example of syncopation.

    We've drifted rather far. I'm sorry!
    Thanked by 2CHGiffen Andrew_Malton
  • Xopheros
    Posts: 32
    It's slightly off-topic, but as @Gamba mentioned some metamorphoses of the medieval Easter sequence, here is another one: Luther used the melody as a basis for his Easter chorale "Christ lag in Todesbanden". Elam Rotem from Early Music Sources just made a marvelous video about it (do not miss the setting by Scheidt at 14:50, which is overwhelming).

    And, as a side note, in collaboration with the priest Albrecht Kronenberger I have made another singable translation that is very close to the original. Although it will not be of any use to you, the three part setting (live recording, sheet music) might be.
    Thanked by 1Felicia
  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 2,630
    Ha I came to post that video and then saw that this is your original comment.
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