Feast of St. Ann: Missa Canonica by Josquin Des Prez and Gregorian Chants Proper to the Feast

Are you going to be anywhere near Palo Alto, CA Thursday July 26?

All are invited to celebrate the Feast of St. Ann with a sung Mass in Latin Thursday July 26, 2007 at 8:00 p.m. at St. Thomas Aquinas Church. In honor of its patron saint, the St. Ann choir will be singing Missa canonica by Renaissance composer Josquin Des Prez along with Gregorian chants proper to the feast.

To receive notifications about future St. Ann choir events, contact choir director Prof. William Mahrt (mahrt@stanford.edu).

If you are local and willing, please forward the following announcement to be submitted to your parish bulletin, local newspaper, or other publication.

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All are invited to celebrate the Feast of St. Ann with a sung Mass in Latin Thursday July 26, 2007 at 8:00 p.m. at St. Thomas Aquinas Church, Waverley at Homer, Palo Alto, CA. The St. Ann choir will be singing Missa canonica by Renaissance composer Josquin Des Prez along with Gregorian chants proper to the feast. To receive notifications about future St. Ann choir events, contact choir director Prof. William Mahrt (mahrt@stanford.edu).

The clip art is from an illuminated chant page for the feast by choir member, artist Susan Altstatt.




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If you would like a copy of the poster for yourself or for printing and distributing, you can get it here.

Thank you, Holy Father! from the Rector of the Oratory of Our Mother of Perpetual Help

The Oratory of Our Mother of Perpetual Help in Santa Clara, CA, on Sunday July 8 celebrated the event of the Apostolic Letter Summorum Pontificum (otherwise known as the Motu Proprio on the use of the traditional Latin Mass) as a “great occasion of thanksgiving.”

Since January 6, 2007, the oratory has been the only place in the diocese of San Jose allowed to use the traditional rite. The oratory’s Rector Rev. Michael Wiener (Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest) preached a sermon about the event, which was based almost entirely on a sermon on this topic by Msgr. R. Michael Schmitz, Vicar General and Provincial for the United States of America. Fr. Wiener intoned a Te Deum of rejoicing that was completed by the small choir and the congregation at the end of the 5:30 p.m. Sunday High Mass.

The sermon happily quoted Pope Benedict XVI,: “What earlier generations held as sacred remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place.”

The history of the Oratory is interesting in the context of current events. Before it was an oratory, the traditional Latin Mass had been celebrated at all Masses at the little chapel near Santa Clara University every Sunday without the bishop’s permission for several years. At one point, Bishop Patrick J. McGrath sent a letter to all churches in the diocese of San Jose admonishing Catholics not to attend the chapel’s services because he had not given it canonical status.

Then a turn-around took place. Perhaps responding to requests from Catholics who desired to worship in the traditional rite, the status of the chapel was raised last January 6 to an oratory. The care of the oratory was placed in the hands of the Institute of Christ the King Sovereign Priest, and Rev. Wiener was appointed rector.

A letter was sent out around the same time to another Santa Clara Church, Our Lady of Peace. The founding pastor, Monsignor John Sweeny, had long ago begun the approved-by-the-bishop practice of offering Mass in the Tridentine rite on First Saturdays along with Latin Novus Ordo Masses on the other Saturdays of each month.

Choir members from St. Ann choir sang the Latin Masses at Our Lady of Peace for years under the direction of Stanford Professor William Mahrt and choir member David Webb. The monthly Tridentine Masses continued when Monsignor Sweeny retired. and the bishop gave the care of the parish to priests from the IVE order, but the Latin Novus Ordo Masses dwindled away. The letter from the bishop to the parishioners at Our Lady of Peace put an end to the remaining once a month Tridentine rite Masses.



Above: Some St. Ann choir members and regulars attenders of the Our Lady of Peace Tridentine Mass (with some family members) after the last Tridentine Mass sung at the parish in January 2007.

As noted in a Q and A at The New Liturgical Order, one effect of the Moto Proprio will be to do away with the either/or principle. Having a dedicated chapel like Our Mother of Perpetual Help will no longer mean that the traditional rites will be forbidden at other parishes.

Fr. Wiener's sermon did not mention the backstory I have here at all. He ending by thanking both the pope and the bishop.

“We feel very blessed that here, at the Oratory of Our Mother of Perpetual Help in the Diocese of San Jose our Bishop Patrick J. McGrath, in a profound pastoral understanding has anticipated the decision of the Holy Father by entrusting the oratory to the pastoral care of the Institute of Christ the King. ... Thank you, Holy Father! Thank you, your Excellency!”

Liberty's Birthday 2007

Today the 4th of July is my son Liberty's birthday.

This morning, I was planning to start the day with a visit to a rehab center to visit Dorothy James, the 96 year old mother of one of the choir members (who is out of town and won't be visiting her mother this week). Mrs. James broke a hip around Easter and because she hasn't been able to bear any weight, the bone is healing slowly. At first she kept asking to come home. If she was only back in her own bed she would be all right, she thought. So far, that just has not be able to happen.

Susan Weisberg, another choir member, and I had planned to make the visit together. Around 9 am, I called Susan to tell her my throat is raw and swollen. We agreed that it would not be a good idea to bring germs into a place like that where the residents are so vulnerable.

Susan told me that she doesn't like 4th of July. Her mother died on that date. So, she thought, why not visit someone else's mother? I love the way she thinks.

While I was pregnant with Liberty, I was studying art at City College of San Francisco. I remember one sunny Spring afternoon I was walking down a sloping expanse of lawn on the campus in a long red corduroy dress and sandals, very pregnant. A young perhaps-drug-addled man came up to me and told me I looked beautiful with my long brown hair blowing in the wind, and he asked if I would hold him like I would hold my baby. I just laughed and kept walking.

Liberty doesn't like to plan anything. It's 11 a.m., and He is still in bed. I am prepared to put together food for a BBQ he was going to have at a friend's house and to make his favorite birthday pie.

He never liked cake. This pie is basically whipped cream, cream cheese, and sugar in a homemade crust topped with glazed red and blue berries in honor of the day. Strawberry, sometimes Raspberry, Blueberry, Cream pie.

I hope I have the energy.

For decades, almost all births were medical events, doctor-managed. While the mother was under anesthesia the doctor would do an incision at the vagina and go in with a forceps and drag the baby out. The woman would stay in the hospital for two weeks. The baby would be kept in a nursery and fed either by the mother or the nurse on a strict schedule.

Breast feeding was not supported and hardly ever practiced. Feeding a newborn entailed sterilizing glass bottles and preparing batches of baby formula using evaporated cow's milk, corn syrup or sugar and vitamins and pouring the formula into the bottles to be refrigerated. If the baby was hungry before four hours were up, the baby would just have to wait. Achieving success as a mother was like achieving success as an efficiency expert, preparing the right amount of "formula" as needed and training baby to live according to the routine.

There was a lot of between schedule crying going on in the nurseries. I always thought that it must be traumatic for the babies, to be born and taken away from their mothers right away without a hug or a kiss, wrapped and put in a hard little bed by themselves under bright lights, surrounded by other crying infants. What kind of a world have I been born into? wouldn't the poor newborn wonder?

Bottle feeding took away the intimacy of mouth to breast contact between the baby and its mother. Parents could feed the child without even holding it. It was very common for a baby to be laid on its back alone in the crib with a bottle propped up at an angle into its mouth.

I believe that vast amounts of psychological and physical harm was done because of those practices, and I have some stories I could provide as anecdotal evidence. Scientific evidence has now established the physical benefits of nursing are clear along with the bad health consequences of bottle feeding. (Oddly enough, the scientific demi-gods had proven to a couple of generations of mothers that bottle-feeding was a superior way to feed their babies. But that's a big subject I won't explore further here.)

Hippies and others who wanted to return to nature in many aspects of their lives championed natural childbirth without medications along with a return to nursing. The ideas made sense to me. Giving birth is a natural thing done with the help of midwives for all of human history. It's not a disease requiring medical intervention. And as for giving children formulas made from cow's milk: Calves grow big and bovine on cow's milk. Humans grow human on human's milk. There wasn't much soy formula around in the 70s, but I cannot imagine a human child thriving on a bean-based diet.

Two anti-anesthesia in childbirth books called _Childbirth Without Fear_ and _Thank You Dr. LaMaze_ were very popular at the time. Even so and even though I was living in San Francisco at the time, in 1970 I could find only one obstetrical office that offered natural childbirth, Miller, Moss, Wench, and Boyce. The hospital I picked, French Hospital, pioneered letting the babies stay in the rooms with the mothers, but you had to request "rooming in." And you had to be very firm in making sure the nurses knew you didn't want them feeding your baby with bottles to avoid waking you up or to save themselves the trips back and forth to your room to drop the baby off and pick it up again.

I had devoured the books about the method of breast feeding, and George and I had taken natural childbirth classes. We were supposed to practice the breathing methods they taught that were supposed to ease labor pains. But we worked so badly together as a couple that we didn't practice at all.

Liberty was due on June 22 two weeks before he was finally born.

The weekend before he arrived, we chanced to visit a friend of a friend, a school principal in her Forest Knolls Marin county home and stayed overnight. I remember sitting up against a tree in the backyard most of the night with heartburn. Around dawn, I was shocked from a doze by the sound of a donkey braying in one of the neighbor's yards.

One day a few weeks earlier, in San Francisco, a woman came up to me outside of the Palace of the Legion of Honor and said, "You are going to have twins. I know. I'm a doctor." What she didn't know was that because of scoliosis (curvature of the spine), I didn't have much room between my rib cage and my hips, so the baby bulge was much bigger than she was used to seeing.

On July 3, I had what I thought was an attack of indigestion as I was clambering up a sand dune after a picnic on a beach south of Santa Cruz.

I was surprised by back labor. I had never heard of it, but I had it. Maybe it was made worse by the spinal operations I'd endured as a teenager. I had a metal rod in my back.

I probably still have a photo somewhere of me sitting in a wheelchair at the registration desk, grimacing. Oh yes, another new fad was the taking of pictures during the birth. As video cameras became readily available, 20 years later, everyone was making movies of births. Sometimes I wonder, "Do people show these photos and videos at dinner parties?" That question has never been answered to my satisfaction. But moving right along . . . That was the only picture George took after all.

In the labor room, as I grimaced some more, George smilingly quoted me something I'd read him from one of the natural childbirth books, "The pain is only in your head." I was not amused.

I caved early. I ended up taking some pain medication after only an hour or so. I don't remember what kind they gave. All I remember is that this was the first step in the disintegration of my dream of natural childbirth.

After 24 hours of labor with little progress in the dilation of my cervix, the doctors decided to take an X-ray. The X-ray confirmed that the baby was in breach position and revealed that my pelvis had spurs extending at the point where the head would pass through.

During a normal birth, the baby's head is pushed into the birth canal gradually by the contractions. (Sometimes this results in some newborns having oddly shaped heads.) Since Liberty's feet would be coming first, his head would be coming last. It would not undergo the gradual compression that happens during a normal birth and could be stuck in the narrow opening for quite some time. The doctor explained to me that there was a good chance that the umbilical cord would be caught in the narrow opening along with the head, which would prevent the flow of oxygen to the baby. He could be born brain damaged from oxygen deprivation if I didn't have a C-section.

So I did, very reluctantly, because I had set my heart on having a natural birth.

I don't remember how I learned I had a boy.

When I awoke, he wasn't in the room even though I had asked for rooming in. The nurses were observing him in an "isolette" in the nursery. I was surprised when my friend Carol appeared from where she had been hiding behind a curtain so the nurses wouldn't see she was there. She had flowers for me. I told her I was upset that my baby was in the nursery in spite of my best-laid plans to spare him that trauma.

George came in jubilant with a bunch of orange roses for me. Orange was my favorite color. We had painted our VW bus that color in house paint before we had started out from Boston on the trip that had brought us to San Francisco 3 1/2 years earlier. I wore a lot of orange clothes.

A nurse found him a white plastic ice cream bucket, and George put the roses in the bucket on the windowsill.

George had been gazing for quite some time at Liberty with his hands cupped around his mouth pressed up against the glass nursery window. Our son lay in his little isolette with only his diaper on, serene and white skinned, his head perfectly shaped. George told me that the other babies around him, who had been through the birth canal had lumpy mottled red heads.

Contrary to how some say that the birth trauma is an essential part of human formation, George was now convinced that all babies should be born by C-section. Thinking about my incision, I said, "That's easy for you to say."

We had picked out the baby's name when we thought he would be coming on his due date on June 22. There had been no connection with the 4th of July. We liked what we'd heard about the Indian practice of naming children for qualities. And our hippy friends were calling their children a wide range of new agey names. Just to cover the first part of the alphabet, I remember three girls named Artemis, Branch, and Calliope. Carol's boy had been named Alaric until his repeated bad behavior caused her to rethink her decision and rename him Michael at 6 years of age. My friend Judy Delmar had changed her first name to Denali. And in a commune in Northern California, I'd run into two children, a boy and a girl, both named Buffalo. The name we chose, Liberty, stood for the highest good according to the philosophy we held then. Freedom above all! His middle name, Russell, was after the famous athiest philosopher Bertrand Russell, a favorite of his father. I had lost my Catholic faith as a freshman in college, and it would be six more years before I regained it, so I didn't mind naming my son after an atheist.

When I finally I held my new baby boy in my arms, my sister Joe-anne had arrived. She told me that she had seen George leaving the hospital on his way out to get the flowers. Normally undemonstrative, bearded long-haired George had been skipping across the parking lot on his way to our van.

I gazed at my darling little boy and I said, "I don't think I can name him Liberty after all. He is a person, not a concept." But my sister Joe-anne piped up that because he was born on the 4th of July that I had to name him Liberty. It was cosmic!

I couldn't argue that. So cosmically-named Liberty is 37 years old today.

He stopped using the name Liberty when he started in a new Catholic school as he was entering sixth grade. Legally a person can use any name as long it is not for fraudulent intent. When I was enrolling him, I told the religious sister who was the school's principal that I thought his choice of John was kind of boring. As the principal reminded me of the many great Johns, John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, John Kennedy, a light bulb went on in my head. Oh yes, I chimed in, "Sister Mary John! John is a fine name."

Then when we all as a family started acting in the Minnesota Renaissance Fair when Liberty was 13 or so, he found that the other kids in the acting troupe thought Liberty was a cool name, so he started using it again. When he was 15, he went to Japan as an exchange student, and he took the name John back while he was there. He told me that to put yourself forward as unusual is so frowned on, that Liberty was looked on as a bad name. Then since his return to the US, he has been Liberty ever since.

Liberty is dark-haired and has a wonderful expressive handsome face, with a strong jaw and huge brown eyes and long eyelashes. Unlike some of the other family members I could name, he is always reasonable and never impulsive. I have seen him lose his temper perhaps twice in his whole life. He is intelligent, creative, funny, and kind. I thank God for the gift he has been to me with all my heart.

More sights and sounds from the Sacred Music Colloquium

I'm posting an email here that I sent to St. Ann choir this week because I lack time to write anything more about the CMAA colloquium. Some choir members who have sung under the direction of Prof. WIlliam Mahrt for years were not aware of his involvement with the Church Music Association of America, until they read the email.


From: Roseanne Sullivan
Subject: Church Music Association Colloquium Photos and Sound Files
Date: June 26, 2007 10:22:11 PM PDT

As many of you know. Professor Mahrt is President of the CMAA (Church Music Association) and editor of its journal, Sacred Music. The CMAA held its yearly Sacred Music colloquium in Washington DC at the Catholic University of America last week.

I'm writing to give you links to photos I took while I was there and to sound files of the 140 voice choir made up of attendees singing the music we practiced and then sung at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception and during a Tridentine Mass at old St. Mary's Church in Chinatown.

I also brought back about 40 free copies of two issues of the Sacred Music journal, which I'll bring to rehearsal tomorrow (Wed. night), first come, first served.

By what I believe is the grace of God, I was able at the last minute to take time off from work and get a place at the colloquium (even though registration has been closed for months due to unprecedented demand). The size of the event doubled from last year, and for lack of space the organizers had to turn away people for three months. Naturally, they are happily looking for a bigger space for next year.

Here is my photo gallery.

In my humble opinion, I was able to capture some great photos of Bill teaching, of the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the largest church in the western hemisphere, and of the particiipants of all ages and backgrounds.

Links to my colloquium gallery, other photos and, most important, sound files are at the CMAA website. You have to scroll down the page a bit to find them. The Monteverdi Cantate Domino and the Bruckner Os Justi were so moving to sing that hearing them again brings tears to my eyes.

A lot of the works we performed are in the St. Ann choir repertoire, so take a listen to see how they sound when they are performed by 140 voices.
For example:
Kyrie from Missa o quam gloriosum and
Sanctus from the Croce Mass:

If you get a chance to check these out let me know what you think.

In the interest of musical fellowship,

Roseanne

The Responsorial Psalm reexamined

At the June 2007 Sacred Music colloquium, CMAA President Prof. William Mahrt gave a talk Friday night about the Responsorial Psalm, which is commonly used after Vatican II instead of the Gradual. Some believe that the Gradual was superseded by the Responsorial Psalm after Vatican II. Actually, guidelines currently in effect say that either is permissible.

The Gradual needs to be sung or at least led by a choir. It is proper to the occasion, which means a new one needs to be prepared for almost every Mass. Its form is in keeping with its liturgical function. Coming directly after the Lesson, it seems to be designed to complement it. In the Gradual, a small amount of text is sung to "the greatest number of notes," in tune with its purpose of aiding reflection while the congregation is absorbing the lesson. Prof. Mahrt said that in his experience, white noise stops dramatically after the Gradual is sung, because after the music has done its job, the congregation has effectively become recollected.

For an example of the beauty of the Gradual, Prof. Mahrt had those of us in the women's schola sing the Gradual for the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, which we had been practicing for the upcoming feast day. He contrasted the ornate richness of the Gradual with the relative insipidity of the feast's prescribed responsorial Psalm, for which the congregation sings the Antiphon: I praise you, for I am wonderfully made to an awkward melody.

The antiphonal singing of the Responsorial Psalm engages the congregation in an activity. Its melodies are not interesting or effective. Even though the documents say that its purpose is meditation, Mahrt wonders, since it does not further recollection, what purpose does it have, then? Some liturgists say that it is designed to give the congregation something to do.

In his writings and in his lectures, Mahrt often explains that the post-Vatican II guiding phrase "active participation," which is quoted often to justify keeping the congregation busy by singing in parts of the Mass where the choir used to sing, does not actually mean the congregation must be singing. Active participation can and should be attentiveness and contemplation during the times when it is most appropriate, such as during the opening procession, or when the lessons should be absorbed and pondered, or when the congregation is approaching the altar for Communion.

Prof. Mahrt then gave some well-developed suggestions for gradual (no pun intended) musical compromises that a choir director might introduce in stages that could lead to the full use of the Gradual in a Church's Masses.

Related to this topic, here is a little adventure of mine that reinforced what I'd learned from the lecture. On the last day of the colloquium, I wandered into the upper Shrine of the Immaculate Conception while in last minute search of subjects to photograph. I chanced into the middle of a Mass with multiple concelebrants at the moment when the cantor was leading the people in the day’s simple little antiphon for the responsorial psalm: I will praise you for you are wonderfully made.

And I was struck by the contrast between the loftiness of the Church and the impressive appearance of the multiple vested concelebrants on the one hand and the flatness of the text and the triviality of the melody. Any of the treatments Prof. Mahrt provided in his talk on the Gradual would have been much more in keeping with the solemnity of the moment and the surroundings.

Here is the Gradual sung by the women's schola in Mahrt's Gradual class and at two Masses we sang for the Feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist.

P.S.
Since I first wrote this, I found a good discussion on how to include the Gradual by Jeffrey Tucker and a lot of educated comments at the New Liturgical Movement blog.

Hint: Winter, Spring, Summer, and Fall. Question: What's an Ember Day?

Reading Apel's Gregorian Chant Chapter Two about the liturgy, I came across the term Ember days. I remember hearing the term when I was a kid, but I never understood them or remember seeing them observed.

What I do know at this point is that Ember days used to be observed during one week at the start of each of the four seasons of the year. During those weeks, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday were set aside for fasting and prayer.

Ordinations to the diaconate and the priesthood occurred on Ember Saturdays. I recently attended the ordination of my brother in Carmel, Lawrence Poncini OCD, on the Saturday after Pentecost, which is an Ember Week. So, it seems that even though the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has downplayed Ember days, and even though their observance has just about disappeared, ordinations are still performed according to the old observance.

The Latin name for those four times was Quatuor Temporum -- which means Four Times. They occurred in Winter during Advent (after St. Lucy's feast on Dec. 13), Spring (after Ash Wednesday, between the First and Second Sundays of Lent), Summer (the week after Pentecost), and Fall (the week after the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

The term Ember Days evolved from Quatuor Temporum as follows, according to Essays on Liturgiology and Church History by Anglican Divine, Rev. J. M. Neale, D.D.. "In French and Italian the term is the same; in Spanish and Portuguese they are simply Temporas. German converts them into Quatember, and thence, by the easy corruption of dropping the first syllable, a corruption which also takes place in some other words, we get the English Ember." From "Church Festivals and Their Household Words" in Neal Lectures of Litergiology

I found some good answers to my related question, "Whatever Happened to Ember Days?" about the post Vatican II decision to drop Ember days from the Church calendar at Benedictus Deus blog. He references a 2003 meeting of the USCCB discussing and downplaying Ember Days. Also important on this topic is the Ember Days posting at the 1938 Catholic Encyclopedia online, which ends "Some of these lessons [from the Ember Days readings from the Roman Missal] contain promises of a bountiful harvest for those that serve God."

Part Two: Gregorian Chant, my Introduction to an Introduction to an Introduction

Today's Points from Apel's Gregorian Chant, Chapter One, Definition and Terminology

---

Polyphonic (multivoiced) music developed from chant. (This development was illustrated very well for me the first time I saw Professor Mahrt teach, at a Saturday singer's workshop. He began by teaching us to sing a chant whose single melodic line was incorporated into a later polyphonic piece that we then sang together in parts. So during that hour, we sung through the evolution of polyphonic music from chant.)


+ After chant's first one thousand years of vital growth, polyphonic music started to challenge its parent.

+ Beginning in the fifteenth century, organ music too "became a successful competitor."

+ Ideas "arising in the sixteenth century ... led to a revision of the old melodies, a revision actually amounting to a complete distortion of their essential qualities."

+ In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, chant "was only a shadow of its former self, and . . . threatened with extinction."

+ A group of scholars, mostly French, rescued chant by studying the medievel manuscripts and "brought the old tradition to new life." L. Lambillotte was one of the first, and the monks of Solesmes followed.

+ In 1903, chant was "officially adopted by the Roman Church" under Pope Pius X, starting the third millennium of Gregorian chant.

Chant is purely melodic, purely vocal, sung by one or several singers. It does not use harmony, counterpoint, or any other kind of accompaniment. And it does not have strict meter and measure.

Gregorian refers to Pope Gregory I (590 - 604). He played an important role in the final arrangement of the chants. Scholars disagree about the exact nature of his contribution. Sometime, either during or after Pope Gregory, the chants were assigned to specific occasions of the Church year.

To avoid some difficulties, some use the term "Roman chant" instead of Gregorian. But, Apels points out, Gregorian chant is not merely of Roman origin. Another term whose first documented use was in the tenth century and which was "universally employed in the later Middle Ages is cantus planus" plain song or plain chant.

From a footnote:
The original meaning of cantus planus (which means plane chant, with plane meaning lying flat), was used for chants in plagal modes.

Gregorian or Roman chant is one of several that devoped in Western Europe, all using Latin. Interestingly enough, the official language of the Church was originally Greek, not replaced with Latin until the third or fourth century.

Four branches or dialects of Western chant are:
+ Gregorian in Rome
+ Ambrosian (after St. Ambrose) in Milan
+ Gallican in France
+ Mozarabic (or Visigothic) in Spain

Little remains of the Gallican and Mozarabic. But both Gregorian and Ambrosian chant are in use until this present day.

In 1958, when the book was written, research revealed another dialect of Western chant, "Old-Roman" or "City-Roman."

Gregorian Chant, my Introduction to an Introduction to an Introduction

This is the start of my second year of singing with St. Ann choir, which performs Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony mostly at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Palo Alto, CA.

Not knowing how ignorant I was about this music when I started, I blissfully put out into the deep, and after a year, this fragile barque I've constructed of the flotsam and jetsam of whatever I could pick up in my not so copious spare time is barely keeping me afloat. After reading the first two chapters of a book I recently bought for $7.60 (used but like new) at Amazon, I believe it may help me get my sea legs (or chant legs?). The title is Gregorian Chant, by Willi Apel [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958].

I want to take use this blog to take notes on the many points from Willi Apel's book that are striking me as essential for getting the point about chant. I may try to create a slide presentation as an orientation that might benefit other new chantophiles too.

When I asked if I could join the choir, director Prof. William Mahrt, renowned chant scholar and medievalist, asked if I had sung Gregorian chant in the past, and with blithe assurance I said that I learned to sing chant in parochial grammar school. To my mind then, I knew what I was doing! Besides, I had some sight reading ability from studying piano for five years as a reluctant student, some experience playing trombone and trumpet. What else would I need to know?

My estimation of my knowledge has gone downhill since then, until now I realize that I know next to nothing, even though I've been reading books and articles and attending extra workshops, beyond practicing and singing with the choir from four to twelve hours a week, depending, of course, on the season of the Church year.

Here is what I learned in the book's preface:

+ Apel pledged to provide only known verifiable facts clearly separated from conjecture and imagination, because, as he wrote, "the reader has a right to know what kind of food he is being given" p. xi. [I wish modern Bible critics and theologians would make the same pledge.]

+ Since a standard three volume Introduction to Gregorian chant (tranlsated from the German title) by Peter Wagner is foundational for Apel's studies, Apel wrote "Since I could not call it [Apels' own book on the topic] an 'Introduction to the Introduction,' I had to resign myself to giving it a name it hardly deserves" p. xi.

+ Apel deplored a then-present trend [in 1958] to setting chant to organ; he saw it as a practice destructive to chant, rendering it something "other than it really is and what it should be" p. xii.

The first principle derived from the above is this: Gregorian chant is unaccompanied singing. A second point, not mentioned in this book but elsewhere, is that Gregorian chant is prayer.

Chapter One Definition and Terminology Main Points
=================================

+ Chant is the traditional music of the Roman Catholic Church.

Chant:
+ "is rooted in the pre-Christian service of the Jews,
+ "adopted distinctive characteristics as early as the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era,
+ "was fully developed in the seventh century,
+ "expanded during the ensuing four hundred years,
+ "deteriorated in the sixteenth century,
+ "was restored in the late nineteenth century"

Pre 1958, when Apel was writing, chant was being used "essentially in the same form it had about a thousand years ago."

Comments on "Of Crucifixion and NFP" from CalCatholic.com

In this posting are three comments I made at CalCatholic.com to Christopher Zender's post titled "Of Crucifixion and NFP: An invitation to a discussion about contraception, NFP, and related topics" under "Notes from a Cultural Madhouse"
See the full discussion.


Note: CalCatholic is an online site that has replaced several print newspapers published by James Holman, one of which was San Francisco Faith, for which I wrote some articles for a couple of years. Christopher Zender, who wrote the post, is the former editor.

My comments:
I used to believe that NFP was a good thing because it is allowed by the Church, so I started to try to write up a defense of NFP for a niece who is Catholic but who does not accept many Church teachings, including the teachings on contraception. Then I looked into various places on the web where good people like you were discussing the topic. Some think that we should never do anything to limit the number of children we have, seeing each child as a gift from God. Every child we bring into the world has the potential for eternal life of joy in the presence of God. Come to think of it, the human race lived that way for most of its existence. That idea gave me pause.

I pretty much my opinion on this thought: that NFP could be practiced if there was a grave reason, but not as Catholic family planning. For most modern Catholics who have been subtly and not so subtly taught by Catholic moral theologians and even their confessors that contraception is ok, NFP would be a big stretch, and accepting all the children God gives you would be an even bigger stretch.

I never thought about how NFP results in sex being possible only during times when women are not much interested in sex. That would be another argument against its use. Wouldn't women feel pressured to make love with their husbands during their infertile periods because of the desire not to remove that intimacy totally from their lives?

I cannot speak to this personally, but in the old days, couples often stopped marital relations when they reached the family size they wanted. I can believe it would just happen naturally, sort of dropping out of the picture. Freud and his wife stopped sleeping together after they had four . . ..

Comment 2:
Hello again Christopher and all,

For some reason, the paragraphs in my last comment all ran together. Oh well.

I mentioned Freud's arrangement with his wife only because he is the only public figure that I know of from before the time of wide-spread contraception who went on record stating that marital intimacy ended because the couple did not want any more children.

You are right, there probably isn't anything wrong with a spouse accepting intimacy even when he or she doesn't feel like it. But [from what Zehnder wrote[ it sounds to me that NFP might result in the wife accepting intimacy ONLY when she didn't feel like it. Speaking as a woman, of course, facing a life of intimacy ONLY as an act of charity to my husband would not be a bright prospect. Consenting to this course might truly be heroic.

I don't think accepting all the children God sends us even when it is hard to raise and educate them is necessarily heroic. Otherwise, all married couples in straitened circumstances before the advent of birth control would have been heroic.

If a person is forced into complete abstinence by needing not to have any more children, that would not justify adultery any more than a person who is single would be justified in fornication.

Think about it from this angle: The Lord does not ask of us anything He doesn't give us the grace to do. We can offer our sufferings in raising our children or in living celibately with a spouse [or not] in reparation for our sins and those of the whole world.

I'm trying to suggest that marriages that end up not being intimate might have been (and still might be) a lot more common than our current mindset can imagine, with a lot less suffering involved than we think. I've even heard comments from very secular new parents about how intimacy between the husband and wife loses its importance when they move into building the family together.

Perhaps there are stages of marriage and life-long intercourse may not be as important as our culture makes us think it is.

Comment 3
No problem with what you are saying. However, whenever you use the word "Church" I substitute "Christ." As St. Joan of Arc said, there is no difference. So, for example, your final sentence is read by me this way: "Christ has very high standards but is also quite realistic." Does that ring true to you? It doesn't quite, for me. It makes the Church sound very Mosaic, as in "Moses allowed divorce because of the hardness of your hearts."

I personally find that abstinence as a single person is an occasion of temptation too, but the temptation isn't overwhelming enough for me to face the temporal and spiritual consequences of straying from what God intended in the matter. I would hope that husbands tempted to find comfort would find the same things holding them back. A man who strays would have to chose between having a contraceptive relationship with a prostitute or a mistress versus risking impregnating the woman in order not to be deprived. The consequences, again, would be more than one might bargain for spiritually, emotionally, and physically.

You haven't addressed the problem I pointed out based on what you said about NFP that a woman may never be able to have intercourse except during her times of least interest except for the times when the couple is trying to have a child. JP II's theology of the body is pretty frank about how a woman's needs must be respected.

Thanks for bringing up and maintaining a discussion on a very interesting topic.

How I Became a Lapsed Catholic Part I

When I look at myself in my First Communion photo, with my hands folded flat together with fingers pointing to the ceiling like a saint in a holy card, dressed in my cheap white veil and dress, holding my plastic rosary, I remember that I started out a pious little girl. I was so serious about the Catholic faith, that I often wonder how I could have diverged so far away from the beliefs of that little girl as I did.

One possible way that I can account for the loss of my early pious faith is to speculate that my religion back then, as is true for many other Catholics then and now, was mostly in my head.

I am tentative about this, because I have yet to explore this idea fully, but I sense that the pre-Vatican II priestly, religious, and social life of many Catholics, while externally staid and observant of all the rules, often hid a secret lack of love for Jesus and lack of heartfelt trust in the rightness and loving guidance of His teachings as handed down by the Catholic Church. Jesus said this, loosely quoting Isaiah, in Matthew 15;8: 'This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.' He was talking about the scribes and the Pharisees. I think for most of us, our religion was that of the scribes and Pharisees.

Why do I sense this? I'm trying to recall some memories. One clue to my eventual apostasy might be in the difference between what the Church taught and what I (and everyone around me) practiced when I was old enough to date. For example, even though we believed in the teachings of the Church about the serious sin involved in occasions of sin, such as passionate kissing, when we were teenagers, we did what was societally tolerated.

Since our group of Boston Irish and Italian Catholic peers did not frown on necking (passionate kissing for hours on end), everyone did that on dates. But because it was still commonly understood that a girl would lose her respectability and chance at a good marraige if she "went all the way," only the wild or stupid girls or girls made drunk by their boyfriends would take that risk. Most of the good Catholic boys in the mean time, even though they wanted to marry a virgin, were trying as hard as they could to seduce any girl that would allow it. The double standard was in full force. The boys weren't anxious to preserve their own chastity, even though they were Catholic. They were anxious to experience intercourse, enough so that they didn't seem to care what damage they would be doing to any girl who would find herself seduced and despised at the same time. And the girls were anxious, I think, more to preserve their reputation and avoid the condemnation of society than to do what the Church taught. We went to Catholic schools and confession every week and Mass every Sunday, but our hearts were not converted.

During the times when strikes by long range nuclear missiles were being talked about in the news, I remember my sisters and close girl cousin and I talking about what we would do if we knew that a missile was on its way to destroy the East Coast. Somebody came up with a novel idea that we should rush out and have intercourse with our boyfriends if we could be sure that we would be able to get to confession before the bomb struck. Talk about nuclear brinkmanship! There was a lot of that kind of behavior going around those days. Do something sinful Friday night, confess it on Saturday night and be forgiven so you would not have to skip Communion on Sunday and face questions about why you stayed in your pew when everyone else went up to the altar rail.

You don't have to tell me that those confessions were probably not valid, because they lacked one of the vital conditions, a firm purpose of amendment.