Category Archives: Chant

Chant and “Liber Usualis Modern Notation”

Several things are conspiring to make me think about chant this morning. I’ve been splitting the Sarum hymn tunes into discrete jpeg files—like this one:

Frere's Melody 38

suitable for for use at Matins with Aurora lucis utilat and Lauds with Sermone blando Angelus. Too, at breakfast my Shuffle turned up the Enigma track that samples the Kyrie from the Missa Orbis Factor. Furthermore, I was looking at my blog stats. I get a lot of hits from Office hymn titles or searches for the Liber usualis.

One of the most common, though, is “Liber Usualis modern notation”. If you came here through this search term, I’ll make a quick comment on this topic. I don’t have one here and you’re not likely to find one. Why? Well—it’s about time economies. It would take an awful lot of time to translate the notation from the Liber into modern notation and the genuine fact is that the modern notation version would be inherently inaccurate because of the differences between modern music and chant. Even modern chant notation wouldn’t really do the trick.

So, that’s one half of the time economy; it would take a lot of time to produce it and the result would be imperfect. Now—here’s the other part. Chant notation only looks intimidating; it can be learned quite easily. Once learned, you can use it to read all sorts of things that go beyond the Liber. If you want to learn, I’d recommend starting with this excellent introduction, then download the Liber usualis, and go to your cd collection. If you have some basic chant cds—like “Chant” and “Chant II” from de Silos produced a few years back—cue a track, locate the chant in the Liber, and sing along. Start with the simple, then go from there. And look here for links to more introductions, scores, and audio files.

New Chant Book from the Romans

The New Liturgical Movement has an announcement up about a new chant book that the Catholic Music Association of America has put together. The key here is that it contains chant for both the Ordinary (Novus Ordo) and Extraordinary (traditional Latin mass) Forms.

Naturally, texts are in Latin but with English translations.

There is a section for seasonal hymns; sadly, office hymns are in short supply…

New Stuff at the OJN Liturgy Page

I have been alerted through a broken link notice (thanks, bls!) that there is new material that the Order of Julian of Norwich’s Liturgical Publications page. There are three new items: a new set of collects, a 2008 kalendar, and—perhaps most exciting—the order’s hymnal from Advent through Lent. I’d posted Advent bits but did not have the time to get to the rest. Thankfully, they have…

Advent Goodness from the OJN

Two items for Advent:

  • I’ve scanned the hymns used by the Order of Julian of Norwich during the season of Advent and compiled them into a single document (Advent_Hymns). Father John-Julian appointed hymns for First and Second Vespers of the four Sundays of the season and in doing so incorporated the traditional Lauds and Matins hymns as well. For the sake of completness, I also added the Marian Antiphon for Advent (Alma Redemptoris) at the end of the file. The translations are not under copyright (but see the fair use terms on the side-bar) since they were prepared specifically for the Order into contemporary (Rite II) English. The sole exception is the final hymn; it was composed by Fr. John-Julian himself. The hymns contained here in order of appearance by original language incipit are:
    • Vos ante Christi tempora (Paris Breviary, XVIII cent.)
    • Conditor alme siderum [aka Creator alme siderum] (Ascr. St. Ambrose, VII cent.)
    • Verbum supernum prodiens (Unknown, V cent.)
    • In noctis umbra desides (C. Coffin, Paris Breviary, XVIII cent.)
    • Vox clara ecce intonat [aka En clara vox] (Unknown, V cent.)
    • Instantis Adventum Dei (C. Coffin, Paris Breviary, XVIII cent.)
    • Jordanis oras praevia (C. Coffin, Hymni Sacri, XVIII cent.)
    • They knew you not (John-Julian, OJN, 1997)
  • Fr. John-Julian has also sent the kalendar and ordo for the 2007-2008 liturgical year (ordo-2007-8.pdf).

The traditional (i.e., Anglo-Saxon/Sarum/Tridentine) Office hymn distributions are:

Links go to the Latin and English parallel texts at the wondrous hymn page at Thesaurus Precum Latinarum.

Hymns vs Propers

There’s an interesting argument over at NLM about hymns vs. propers. The “propers” are Scriptural compositions–mostly psalms with other material added in–appointed for Sundays and major feasts through the year that tie into the old one year lectionary cycle. One of the items under discussion is the Anglican Use Gradual, a resource created for the Anglican Use of the Roman Church which uses traditional language translations of the propers set to psalm tones a la Rossini (a set of tunes some would say were used to death before Vatican II and one of the features that gave the Traditional Latin Mass a bad name from a musical perspective…).

I’m ambivalent about the debate myself. The propers are part of the web that wove the various lectionary and Church-Year cycles together, making a harmonious system of Scripture and Tradition that was crucial to spiritual formation for those who lived the liturgies and understood Latin—but meant very little to people outside of intentional liturgical communities. And thus, I really like the point that Gavin makes about the pedagogical and catechetical value of hymns. Most protestant groups, of course, did choose hymns over propers, the best retaining the connections between hymns and liturgical occasions—the worst overlooking them entirely. (Which, to be perfectly honest, is one of my big complaints with the way I’ve seen praise music services done: there’s been a complete disconnect between the music and the experience of the liturgical year. Theoretically it could be done, and done well, but I’ve never experienced it…)

The real value of propers to my mind is that 1) they are primarily Scripture and 2) without fail they stabilize and deepen our understanding of the Church Year. A real complication with using the old propers, however, is the introduction of the three year lectionary which means that if you intend to tie things together, you ought to think about a three year cycle of propers, not just the old one year cycle. This is one of the advantages of the (maligned) By Flowing Waters which offers propers for use by season rather than by occasion and thus is quite useful in a three year cycle. However, this means the connections within each occasion are not as tight as they could be. (But at least they exist thematically…)

At the end of the day, I’d like to do both—use classically conditioned propers with edifying hymnody—but I wonder how hard that would be to pull off…

Gospel Tone Question

Ok—here’s a call for information. M has pointed Gospels before and has sung lots of Gospels other people have pointed. Yet, she’s not terribly pleased with the spare instructions in the back of the Altar Book or with the modern variants like Grace Newark that seem to tinker with the traditional method.

So, we have the instructions from the Altar Book; we have the examples of the three tones in the Liber Usualis, but we don’t have a clear set of rules for pointing Gospels.

As an example of what I’m thinking of, the St Dunstan’s Plainsong Psalter has a clear and comprehensible set of instructions for chanting the Lessons at MP/EP in Appendix II on pp. 270-275—What’s comparable for Gospels?

Advent Notes from the Liber Usualis

I was poking around the Liber thinking Advent thoughts when I came across two things I thought I’d share. The first was a rubric I’d never noticed before, the second a marginal note I’d written in a while back.

  • On tune changes: We talked a little while back about whether Office Hymns could be put to any ol’ Long Meter (LM:8 8 8 8 [that is, 8 syllables in each line of the stanza]) tune. Checking over the material under Advent I which is where any broadly seasonal stuff falls I say on p. 317 that the same tune is to be used for all the hymns of the Little Offices through Christmas. The tune indicated is a mode one tune that I know as Verbum Supernum Prodiens. This indicates two things to me:
    • In the Liber tradition at least, there is more of a disconnect between tune and text than I thought and
    • seasonal tune changes for these unchanging hymn texts are another way that the Seasons of the Church get filtered into the Office pattern which overall has far less seasonal changes than the Mass.
  • Name changes: Glancing at the Advent Vesper hymn, the Liber has “Creator alme siderum”; a marginal note I wrote in my Liber a while back indicates “Conditor alme siderum”. The difference is not in meaning—they both mean essentially the same thing, but points to some deeper issues. Notably, the Clementine Butchery when Jesuits from St. Louis Rome corrected the Office Hymns from their original texts to match Renaissance norms on order of the pope. These changes occurred only in the secular use (i.e., the Liber) but not in the monastic uses who wisely (I think) retained the original words. Again, this means two things:
    • Medivalists beware!: The Latin texts found in the Liber are not the medieval texts. To find medieval texts, always go back to medieval sources (like the A-S Hymnarium).
    • Cross-Referencers beware!: Typical practice in dealing with Latin liturgical sources is to use the incipit—the first few words of the hymn/antiphon/psalm/whatever—to locate the correct text. Because of these Renaissance changes, however, some of the most common hymns no longer share incipits. This has an impact both on medievalists looking for full texts of medieval hymn incipits but it also has an impact on people working from histoprical protestant or hymnal sources. Some of our favorite hymn translating/arranging antiquarians like Blessed John Mason Neale and Blessed Percy refer to the original incipts rather than the more recent ones. Needless to say, changed incipts make computer searches much harder as well; let the researcher take care…

New–and Better–Materials at OJN

Independently Fr John-Julian and Jonathan have both pointed me to new materials up at the Order of Julian of Norwich’s download page. Posted there are both the full chant offices and the Psalter broken into two parts (which doesn’t have the repeated pg. 50 error that mine does…). These files are not scans and are from the source documents and so are much cleaner than the ones I posted.