I can at last prove that Latin plainchant is the preferred music of Leeds United fans.
In the event of the words of the Holy Holy (Peter Rose, Mass of the Cille Choirill, Rose Conlon pubications, very nice and sort of Celtic and very suitable for guitars and other instruments with a little simple harmony, Lord have mercy and Lamb of God, texts as spoken) not being reproduced on the Newsletter (again, doh!) ......
I took the chance to play the Sanctus from the Missa de Angelis. As requested by various parishioners at various times.
To resounding non participation. Well in excess of 150 at Mass and no one sang.
Father said afterwards, that didn't go down well ...........because all the singers are at the match.
Since I have no reason to doubt that what he says is true, I conclude that people who like to sing Latin Plainchant and people who like to go to watch footie .......
I can prove that Latin Plainchant is the preferred music of
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oopsorganist
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organist
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Re: I can prove that Latin Plainchant is the preferred music of
So why don't they sing it at the matches? 
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organist
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Re: I can prove that Latin Plainchant is the preferred music of
oopsorganist wrote:
In the event of the words of the Holy Holy (Peter Rose, Mass of the Cille Choirill, Rose Conlon pubications, very nice and sort of Celtic and very suitable for guitars and other instruments with a little simple harmony, Lord have mercy and Lamb of God, texts as spoken) not being reproduced on the Newsletter (again, doh!) ......
I took the chance to play the Sanctus from the Missa de Angelis. As requested by various parishioners at various times.
To resounding non participation. Well in excess of 150 at Mass and no one sang.
Perhaps the lesson here is that the people need the music in front of them? Celebration Hymnal has the Missa de angelis in modern notation with music in the people's books. Why rely on a newsletter? Why not have separate copies of your Mass setting available every week so those who know it well don't need to bother with the copy and can just sing? I have been cantor at Sunday evening mass at Westminster Cathedral quite a few times recently. The people are given a sheet with the plainchant notes of the Missa de angelis. Some of the vast congregation (1000) do sing, others never look at the sheet at all. It can be disheartening for the cantor!
I wonder if modern notation might not be more friendly. I do not think we can assume that people from all over the world know Missa de angelis or that they even want to sing in Latin. Yes we must preserve the chant but is Missa de angelis really what we want to preserve? Personally I would rather promote Gloria 1 and Credo 1 and the requiem Sanctus Missa XVIII and Pange lingua, Veni creator, Veni sancte spiritus, Adoro te, Salve regina, Regina coeli, etc. We begin this mass with a Latin plainchant antiphon with the cantor singing verses in English. Even with the organist improvising on the antiphon beforehand I'm not sure that the people pick up the antiphon very well. It does make a difference if the organist plays the tune over very clearly at the start on a solo stop! They do sing the Lord's Prayer (Rimsky-Korsaskov) and responses quite well and they joined in with the hymns at the Corpus Christi procession on Saturday night. Mind you Saturday evening Mass is the only one with hymns (one at start, one at communion). While it is great to have the organ played magnificently, I wonder if we should sing something at preparation of the gifts. We did this in Lent and it worked quite well. For the cantor, you sing a great deal at the start - antiphon, Kyrie, Gloria, psalm, alleluia and then silent until Eucharistic prayer and Agnus Dei. The procession was a marathon having sung Vespers then Mass and then lots of hymns and finally Benediction. You can't beat a really good hymn like "Alleluia sing to Jesus"!
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oopsorganist
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Re: I can prove that Latin Plainchant is the preferred music of
Well in fact we had the CFE in front of us, but it would need pratice before the parish get the hang of finding it in the book, should they suddenly want to sing Missa etc, (but I know that many of them can sing the Sanctus off by heart, they just weren't led by anyone.) Which shows they need practice using the book before practice of singing anything that has not been sung the last year or so.
PP will not allow it again so there we go, better learn another one from CFE, practice finding it in the book, then introduce it gradually.................or just do Cille Choirill forever and ever.
As for the terraces, I was sure I could hear old Mr. Murphy singing in Latin at the back there. I could hear the Kaiser Chiefs singing at Elland Road when I was gardening on Saturday. I am not sure if they were singing in Latin or not....
PP will not allow it again so there we go, better learn another one from CFE, practice finding it in the book, then introduce it gradually.................or just do Cille Choirill forever and ever.
As for the terraces, I was sure I could hear old Mr. Murphy singing in Latin at the back there. I could hear the Kaiser Chiefs singing at Elland Road when I was gardening on Saturday. I am not sure if they were singing in Latin or not....
uh oh!
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organist
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Re: I can prove that Latin Plainchant is the preferred music of
oopsorganist wrote:Well in fact we had the CFE in front of us, but it would need pratice before the parish get the hang of finding it in the book, should they suddenly want to sing Missa etc, (but I know that many of them can sing the Sanctus off by heart, they just weren't led by anyone.) Which shows they need practice using the book before practice of singing anything that has not been sung the last year or so.
PP will not allow it again so there we go, better learn another one from CFE, practice finding it in the book, then introduce it gradually.................or just do Cille Choirill forever and ever.
I am mystified. The CFE has numbers - why can't the people find the relevant sections for the Mass in the book? Perhaps you don't have big enough hymnboards. Couldn't the PP announce where to find the Mass sections? This can be done before the Sursum Corda. He could help by pointing out that the usual leaders are absent and everyone is going to have to sing. Does he sing himself? This must have been obvious from the start of the service surely.
"PP will not allow it again" - why not? You say people have asked for it so why not try again but with some one to lead? This is so typical of the desire for instant liturgy that works first time. If it didn't work we are not doing it again! Why don't people analyse properly why it did not work and try again? To introduce a new Mass setting can take months! Do NOT do Cille Choirill for ever and ever - you will just bore people into leaving for the terraces!
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oopsorganist
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Re: I can prove that Latin Plainchant is the preferred music of
Missa de Angelis is 479 in the hymn book and has the melody line with it but it starts with the Kyrie and many people will not have had the energy to look down and across and by the time they had they would have lost the place to come in...... and now I think about it, I don't think we have ever sung it with the organ..... only unaccompanied.
I did go out before the Mass and tell some of the folk what we were going to do and where it was in the hymn book fairly loudly but a lot of other people crept in after that ........if only people would turn to others and show them where to find the whatever we are singing. There always seem to be new people and not enough regulars to roll it all along.
A pity because I thought that was a standard. It only goes to show you that you have to keep everything boiling.
PP really does not like Latin singing in the Mass and this was the last chance for this piece! He is very sensitive to the embarassing not singing episodes but does not think he is responsible for any of it, although he does not sing. In fact, I am fairly sure he would not have been able to find it in the hymn book.
No one will leave if we sing the same thing for all eternity. They don't come to our church for the music. They certainly do not come to sing. ( Although several people were moved to tears the other week when I played " I watch the sunrise" and one requested it for their funeral).
Only Mr. Oops, he is the only one I know, who thinks that people come to church to sing a good hymn.
Maybe they come for a laugh. Or maybe they are praying for Leeds United. That is probably it.
I did go out before the Mass and tell some of the folk what we were going to do and where it was in the hymn book fairly loudly but a lot of other people crept in after that ........if only people would turn to others and show them where to find the whatever we are singing. There always seem to be new people and not enough regulars to roll it all along.
A pity because I thought that was a standard. It only goes to show you that you have to keep everything boiling.
PP really does not like Latin singing in the Mass and this was the last chance for this piece! He is very sensitive to the embarassing not singing episodes but does not think he is responsible for any of it, although he does not sing. In fact, I am fairly sure he would not have been able to find it in the hymn book.
No one will leave if we sing the same thing for all eternity. They don't come to our church for the music. They certainly do not come to sing. ( Although several people were moved to tears the other week when I played " I watch the sunrise" and one requested it for their funeral).
Only Mr. Oops, he is the only one I know, who thinks that people come to church to sing a good hymn.
Maybe they come for a laugh. Or maybe they are praying for Leeds United. That is probably it.
uh oh!
Re: I can prove that Latin Plainchant is the preferred music of
We sing plainchant sometimes in our church. However, I have some difficulty with the settings provided - for example - in Laudate.
(1) I find the form of notation unsatisfactory. Neumes, of course, are archaic and alien for many people and anyway less precise than 'modern' notation. The trouble with the 'modern' notation usually provided is that it still, in some ways, tries to replicate the layout of the neume system. For example, given that with all other forms of music using 'modern' notation we use bar lines and time signatures as well as 'beaming' to denote rhythmic articulations, we should do the same with much more extensively when 'translating' plainchant neumes into modern notation. I myself have observed looking at some (not all) old plainchant mss (especially those of the C16th-C18th) that the 'bar lines' relate to divisions in the text, not the music. In such cases the scribe first writes out the text below the stave, then -following the text- he marks in the bar lines and after that squeezes the notes into the spaces. In such instances following the bar line systems in a piece of neum notation is musically treacherous, to say the least.
(2) Next there are matters of interpretation and style. There is no single method of singing plainchant. Even if you confine yourself to the Solesmes system you can still choose between the systems advocated by Pothier, Mocquereau, Cardine, their successors and acolytes. If you go beyond that, you have the interesting world of 'measured' chant used from the Late Middle Ages up till the end of the C19th and revived by Murray and Vollaerts in the late 1950s. Even if you do not go in to this I still find myself allowing my (admittedly subjective) musical judgement to adjust points of detail. For example, following Pothier and 'measured chant' exemplars I prefer to match the rhythms of the music to those of the text; whereas Mocquereau (who still exerts a significant influence on plainchant singing styles directly or indirectly through printed music) often creates a tension between the musical and textual rhythms which in my (subjective) experience sometimes makes the plainchant perversely awkward to sing.
For these reasons I almost invariably provide the choir with 'my' versions of the notation and do not draw the congregation's attention to the versions in the hymnal. Provided the choir gives a firm lead this usually does the trick. In this situation, if the congregation had the hymnal music in front of them, you would have confusion. Note that in the Middle Ages, before the invention of printing, most people would have had to follow the lead in the version given to them by the cantor/choir anyway.
On a slightly different matter, I think there is a strong case for just having a Hymnal with hymns only pure and simple rather than huge ominbus editions that attempt to cover everything. The cost of choir copies (i.e. versions with the full musical score rather than those with melodies only) of Laudate is very high and the two volumes are heavy and bulky to handle. What is more I do not use much of this other music. This especially applies to the psalm settings. Indeed, whenever I look in Laudate or other hymnals for psalm settings for a particular week I usually find they do not have one, perhaps because their policy is to provide the 'Common Psalms' only. A hymnal the size of the old 'Praise The Lord' editions or, better still, the 'Parish Hymnal' seems much more appropriate to me. Other music (Mass, Responsorial Psalm settings etc) I find can be dealt with more effectively and flexibly on a separate leaflet/booklet.
Thomas
(1) I find the form of notation unsatisfactory. Neumes, of course, are archaic and alien for many people and anyway less precise than 'modern' notation. The trouble with the 'modern' notation usually provided is that it still, in some ways, tries to replicate the layout of the neume system. For example, given that with all other forms of music using 'modern' notation we use bar lines and time signatures as well as 'beaming' to denote rhythmic articulations, we should do the same with much more extensively when 'translating' plainchant neumes into modern notation. I myself have observed looking at some (not all) old plainchant mss (especially those of the C16th-C18th) that the 'bar lines' relate to divisions in the text, not the music. In such cases the scribe first writes out the text below the stave, then -following the text- he marks in the bar lines and after that squeezes the notes into the spaces. In such instances following the bar line systems in a piece of neum notation is musically treacherous, to say the least.
(2) Next there are matters of interpretation and style. There is no single method of singing plainchant. Even if you confine yourself to the Solesmes system you can still choose between the systems advocated by Pothier, Mocquereau, Cardine, their successors and acolytes. If you go beyond that, you have the interesting world of 'measured' chant used from the Late Middle Ages up till the end of the C19th and revived by Murray and Vollaerts in the late 1950s. Even if you do not go in to this I still find myself allowing my (admittedly subjective) musical judgement to adjust points of detail. For example, following Pothier and 'measured chant' exemplars I prefer to match the rhythms of the music to those of the text; whereas Mocquereau (who still exerts a significant influence on plainchant singing styles directly or indirectly through printed music) often creates a tension between the musical and textual rhythms which in my (subjective) experience sometimes makes the plainchant perversely awkward to sing.
For these reasons I almost invariably provide the choir with 'my' versions of the notation and do not draw the congregation's attention to the versions in the hymnal. Provided the choir gives a firm lead this usually does the trick. In this situation, if the congregation had the hymnal music in front of them, you would have confusion. Note that in the Middle Ages, before the invention of printing, most people would have had to follow the lead in the version given to them by the cantor/choir anyway.
On a slightly different matter, I think there is a strong case for just having a Hymnal with hymns only pure and simple rather than huge ominbus editions that attempt to cover everything. The cost of choir copies (i.e. versions with the full musical score rather than those with melodies only) of Laudate is very high and the two volumes are heavy and bulky to handle. What is more I do not use much of this other music. This especially applies to the psalm settings. Indeed, whenever I look in Laudate or other hymnals for psalm settings for a particular week I usually find they do not have one, perhaps because their policy is to provide the 'Common Psalms' only. A hymnal the size of the old 'Praise The Lord' editions or, better still, the 'Parish Hymnal' seems much more appropriate to me. Other music (Mass, Responsorial Psalm settings etc) I find can be dealt with more effectively and flexibly on a separate leaflet/booklet.
Thomas
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Angela Barber
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Re: I can prove that Latin Plainchant is the preferred music of
We do sing the plainchant mass in Celebration Hymnal during Lent and at the Mass of the Dawn on Christmas Day but the congregation response is poor although they've done it loads of times - the choir often appear to be on their own! One big disadvantage for us is that the previous pp (with no consultation) threw out CH and introduced Laudate in its place. I do not get on with Laudate and use my personal copy of CH at every opportunity. The congregation copies of Laudate have worn badly and are already coming apart - not fast enough if you ask me - but I think the expenditure involved in replacement would be beyond our means. Wonder if anyone else has thoughts on Laudate; our organ copy has half the index missing which does not add to my good humour should I have to use it. Only plus is that the printing is bigger than CH!
I always get the choir to run through the psalm antiphon with the congregation before mass in the hope that someone will open their mouths but, inspite of the words being printed in the newsletter they sit there like a lot of dummies so I wonder why I bother. One advantage of doing this is that it enables our pp to get the gist of the music - he has a lovely tenor voice but can't read music so often goes off on his own track!
Incidentally, can someone with a better knowledge recommend a unison Tallis piece apart from those in the hymnals?
Angela Barber
I always get the choir to run through the psalm antiphon with the congregation before mass in the hope that someone will open their mouths but, inspite of the words being printed in the newsletter they sit there like a lot of dummies so I wonder why I bother. One advantage of doing this is that it enables our pp to get the gist of the music - he has a lovely tenor voice but can't read music so often goes off on his own track!
Incidentally, can someone with a better knowledge recommend a unison Tallis piece apart from those in the hymnals?
Angela Barber
Please help the choir to keep in tune
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organist
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Re: I can prove that Latin Plainchant is the preferred music of
Angela Good for you for rehearsing the psalm antiphon before the Mass. Don't give up! If you think about it if you do not do that the people would only get the folowing before being expected to sing - organ playover, cantor sings antiphon.
The finest Tallis I know is the hymn tune Third mode melody Vaughan Williams used for his Fantasia set to "To mock your reign" by Fred Pratt Green (More hymns for today 184 (iii)) Common Praise, etc. He wrote the words to fit the tune and it is a perfect marriage. It does need the harmony but it could be sung in unison with accompaniment. We sing it on Maundy thursday and during Lent.
The finest Tallis I know is the hymn tune Third mode melody Vaughan Williams used for his Fantasia set to "To mock your reign" by Fred Pratt Green (More hymns for today 184 (iii)) Common Praise, etc. He wrote the words to fit the tune and it is a perfect marriage. It does need the harmony but it could be sung in unison with accompaniment. We sing it on Maundy thursday and during Lent.
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Nick Baty
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Re: I can prove that Latin Plainchant is the preferred music of
Amgela, Have used your name to start a new thread on psalms – hope you don't mind – I'm always looking for new ideas, perhaps someone will come up with some good ones.
Re: I can prove that Latin Plainchant is the preferred music of
Couldn't think in which topic to put this.
Very long story, tinged with humour, no time to recount it now, but, being unable to put my hands on a Latin dictionary, can anyone please tell me the Latin words for "Pink" and "Teddy Bear" (may have to be just "Bear") ....
Very long story, tinged with humour, no time to recount it now, but, being unable to put my hands on a Latin dictionary, can anyone please tell me the Latin words for "Pink" and "Teddy Bear" (may have to be just "Bear") ....
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Gwyn
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Re: I can prove that Latin Plainchant is the preferred music of
Just a stab in the dark - would Bear perhaps be Ursa?
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nazard
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Re: I can prove that Latin Plainchant is the preferred music of
According to my dictionary the Romans did not differentiate colours very much, but used the word puniceus to mean red, pink or purple. It must have been a dress maker's nightmare.
As for Teddy Bear, the normal translation is Ursus Edwardius. If you believe that...
As for Teddy Bear, the normal translation is Ursus Edwardius. If you believe that...
Re: I can prove that Latin Plainchant is the preferred music of
Hare wrote:Couldn't think in which topic to put this.
If it is to do with pastoral music and/or liturgy - i.e. what this forum is about - please start a new topic. If it is not, then don't post it here at all.
Either way, please DO NOT hijack an existing topic.
Back to Oops's original topic now please...
musicus - moderator, Liturgy Matters
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Re: I can prove that Latin Plainchant is the preferred music of
Hare wrote:can anyone please tell me the Latin words for "Pink" and "Teddy Bear"
How about ursula rosea? That has a nice ring.
OK, back to the Leeds United fans.
