Now that's singing!

Check out these sample tracks from San Diego soprano--my friend--Mary Ann Carr.

The IMSLP/ Petrucci Music Library

New to the sidebar, this is a free public domain sheet music library. Enjoy!

Same tune, waaaay different orchestration

Jeffrey Tucker at the Catholic Information Center

Jeffrey Tucker, the author of Sing Like a Catholic, will sign books at the Catholic Information Center on K Street in downtown Washington, DC.

Jeffrey Tucker is managing editor of SACRED MUSIC, a quarterly journal published in its 135th year by the Church Music Association of America, where he serves as director of publications. He is a director of the St. Cecilia Schola in Auburn, Alabama with a specialization in bringing chant and polyphony into modern parish life. He has been widely published and interviewed in the Catholic press, writes a weekly column for the New Liturgical Movement (http://www.newliturgicalmovement.org/) and The Wanderer, and gives clinics to choirs around the country. He will speak on the desperate need for a unifying and universal music voice for all Catholics to call their own. all Catholics to call their own.

http://www.google.com/calendar/event?eid=bzFwamc5Z2NpZjQ2NGd0bmFnMTJkOThibjQgazRtNTM5NHBuOTJ1MWVzMjRpbmd0YTdsbTRAZw

Great resources on the Library of Congress website

Here is a beautiful upload of The Southern Harmony.

Many other hymnals are available here. Your tax dollars at work--for hymns!

The Artistic Temperament

G.K. Chesterton:

The artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs. It is a disease which arises from men not having sufficient power of expression to utter and get rid of the element of art in their being... Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily, or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament. Thus, very great artists are able to be ordinary men... There are many real tragedies of the artistic temperament, tragedies of vanity or violence or fear. But the great tragedy of the artistic temperament is that it cannot produce any art....

It need hardly be said that this is the real explanation of the thing which has puzzled so many dilettante critics, the problem of the extreme ordinariness of the behaviour of so many great geniuses in history. Their behaviour was so ordinary that it was not recorded; hence it was so ordinary that it seemed mysterious. Hence people say that Bacon wrote Shakespeare. The modern artistic temperament cannot understand how a man who could write such lyrics as Shakespeare wrote, could be as keen as Shakespeare was on business transactions in a little town in Warwickshire. The explanation is simple enough; it is that Shakespeare had a real lyrical impulse, wrote a real lyric, and so got rid of the impulse and went about his business. Being an artist did not prevent him from being an ordinary man, any more than being a sleeper at night or being a diner at dinner prevented him from being an ordinary man.

from Daniel Mitsui's The Lion and the Cardinal http://www.danielmitsui.com/hieronymus/

At their best, hymns can pack a ton of theological information, and religious emotion, into a small space. Here's a familiar Easter hymn by Charles Wesley.

1. Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia!

Sons of men and angels say: Alleluia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!
Sing, ye heavens, and earth, reply: Alleluia!

2. Vain the stone, the watch, the seal; Alleluia!
Christ has burst the gates of hell: Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids His rise; Alleluia!
Christ has opened paradise! Alleluia!

3. Lives again our glorious King, Alleluia!
Where, O death, is now thy sting?
Alleluia!Once He died, our souls to save, Alleluia!
Where thy victory, O grave? Alleluia!

4. Soar we now where Christ has led, Alleluia!
Following our exalted Head, Alleluia!
Made like Him, like Him we rise, Alleluia!
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!

5. Hail, the Lord of earth and heaven! Alleluia!
Praise to thee by both be given; Alleluia!
Thee we greet triumphant now; Alleluia!
Hail, the Resurrection, thou! Alleluia!

Aside from the excellence of the entire hymn, which takes us proleptically from the Resurrection of Christ to our own resurrection (in keeping with the remarkable Pauline logic of I Corinthians 15), there is a single line of such exquisite theological intensity that I've tried to "steal" it in several different ways already in my own writing.

"Vain the stone, the watch, the seal; Alleluia!"

Frankly the rest of verse 2 is somewhat pro forma, because after this line, what else is there to say? The tomb is empty! Death has been defeated, the powers of earth have been defeated. Their efforts are vain--kenotic--empty, and against God.

The images are directly Scriptural and used as Scripture uses them. And yet they come through the hymn in a fresh way. First, they demand a small amount of work, like a puzzle: in context and as a group they can only mean the three things they mean, but first one must think. Which stone? Watch (a multivalent English word)? Seal (the same)? The hymn points us back to Scripture to rediscover a story with concrete details, including the unusual situation of soldiers guarding a dead man. Secondly, they are very short words, one of the keys to Wesley's perennial appeal. Here his short words are nouns (and an adjective) but just as often they are verbs: "FIX in us thy humble dwelling/ all thy faithful mercies CROWN" (from another excellent Wesley hymn, Love Divine, All Loves Excelling).

Thirdly, these short words have big, open sounds. Vain is an emphatic word, a word that excludes, but its long vowel would seem to suggest the opposite. (Notice that the sound of the old word "fain" captures a sense of longing.) "Stone," one of Thomas Merton's favorite words, implies weight and solidity, with its long O. "Watch" is exceptional here. The vowel is short, the consonants much more expressive. "Seal" has a very long vowel, a diphthong anchored in its long e.

Verse 3 will taunt death, death in se, in the Pauline way. But here at the beginning of verse 2 we are still in the mode of wonder at the fact of Jesus' resurrection, as much declaring the resurrection as reflecting upon it. And yet there is some taunt in this line: it is both "joy" and "triumph."

As with all great hymns a congregation becomes like little children saying "Can you believe it? Look at the great things God has done!"

The Reform of the Reform

Here's a nice article in US Catholic about the upcoming changes in the English translation of the Roman Missal.

Nixon also addresses some of the larger questions surrounding the recovery of reverence in the Roman Rite, including liturgical music.

Hymn to St. Anne

This Sunday is the Feast of Sts. Joachim and Anna, the parents of Mary. This is my translation of one of the hymns of the day from the Liber Hymnarius.

The morning star is on the rise
And soon the dawn will fill the skies,
Foretelling of the coming Sun
Whose light will shine on everyone.

The Sun of justice, Christ, true Light,
And Mary, grace's dawning bright,
And Anna, reddening the sky,
Have caused the night of Law to fly.

O mother Anna, fruitful root,
From you came your salvation's shoot,
For you brought forth the flow'ring rod
That bore for us the Christ of God.

Christ's mother's mother, by the grace
Your daughter's birth brought to our race,
And by her merits and her prayer
May we her favors come to share.

O Jesus, Virgin-born, to You
All glory is forever due.
To Father and the Spirit, praise
Be sung through everlasting days.

trans. c. 2009 Kathleen Pluth. This text may be used freely on July 25-26, 2009. All other rights reserved.

This is the original:

Nocti succedit lucifer,
Quem mox aurora sequitur,
Solis ortum praenuntians
Mundum lustrantis lumine

Christus sol est iustitiae,
Aurora Mater gratiae,
Quam, Anna, praeis rutilans
Legis propellens tenebras

Anna, radix uberrima,
Arbor tu salutifera
Virgam producens floridam
Quae Christum nobis attulit

O matris Christi genetrix
Tuque parens sanctissime
Natae favente merito
Nobis rogate veniam.

Iesu, tibi sit gloria,
Qui natus est de Virgine,
Cum patre et almo Spiritu,
In sempiterna saecula

Progress!

All Four Pending Liturgical Items Pass; Work On The Translation Of The New Roman Missal Continues

WASHINGTON—All four liturgical item actions whose votes were inconclusive at the June general assembly of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops are now approved. Support for the action items continues the work for the English translation of the new Roman Missal for use in the United States.

The deadline for the submission of ballots was July 16. These items require two-thirds (163) votes of Latin Church members for to pass, and subsequent recognition by the Holy See.

The translation of the Order of Mass II (of the Roman Missal) received 191 votes in favor, 25 against and five abstentions.

The translation of the Masses and Prayers for Various Needs and Intentions passed by 163 votes, while 53 bishops voted against it and five abstained.

The translation of the rituals for Votive Masses and Masses for the Dead passed 181 to 32 with two abstentions.

And the translation of the text for Ritual Masses received 186 votes in favor, 32 nays and two abstentions...

http://www.usccb.org/comm/archives/2009/09-159.shtml