Plainsong - it gets everywhere

Someone on Holy Smoke had a link to this.


'UK music publisher Kevin Mayhew said his firm would be commissioning many new Masses, but said worshippers would take months to learn new settings, and felt sure that favourites such as the “Clap-Hands Gloria” and the “Israeli Mass” ( folks are still singing this and some people complain about the Missa de Angelis?)would remain in use. '

Course you you could just pick up the Gregorian Missal for Sundays and find all the words in there in a language not about to change.

Time for the dibber

Leaving things to the last moment whilst blaming the weather for my sloth, this am was the time to plant out some winter veg. That would be the stuff that says May, June, July and this being the end of the month and the day to avoid Post Offices (cos everyone is renewing their car tax, been there got the T-shirt,) I now have five rows of small plants -3 of leeks and 2 of kale. Later it's the turn of the purple sprouting broc and then I shall feel that my winter larder is ready.

My email to the Council got a reply saying that I have til April 2010 to get the plot fully working. March will be a busy month then.

Hopefully, come the Autumn I will be able to get back into the routine of doing an hour's digging before going to Mass on Sun. It was slow work, but I did sift through quite a bit of land and the weeds have not grown back, well not the same ones anyway.

So despite set backs I shall be taking to Wales tomorrow potatoes, onions, tomatoes, blackberry jam, parsnips and a loaf of bread from the bread machine. The lone courgette will do for tea!

The Slippery Slope

Just heard an interview with Mrs Purdie where she said that no she did not believe the Law Lords ruling yesterday would lead assisted suicide to become commonplace.

Apart from the 'how many is too many?' line of thinking, didn't we have this in 1967 with both the number and ease with which one may procure an abortion?

More than 10% of the UK (excluding N Ireland where it is still illegal,) population is now missing.

Solesmes some thoughts 2

So on to the chant.

The routine from Dom Saulnier was all centred around the text.

He pointed out that the people engaged in the music originally had a very high level of knowledge of Latin and therefore much was obvious and intuitive for them.

• Memorise the text.
• Say it taking care with the accent of each word.
• Consider the subject of the sentence, that the verb and its compliment may not be separated and the circumstances.
• Then vocalise on one note, maybe raising the pitch for the accent.
• Then and only then add the actual melody.

Also illuminating was the idea of conducting horizantally rather than vertically. This was a

means to communicate the ebb and flow of the music. The music then took on a dynamism I had not experienced before. As someone used to lots and lots of rhythmic notation and primarily an instrumentalist, this approach was very useful as I it placed the emphasis entirely on the text. Only that way can you begin to have an understanding individual notes fit into the whole, when to dwell and when to push on.

The B word

Not since I unwittingly revealed myself a Papist amongst some employees of HM The Queen, have I caused a table of people to stop and stare at me. (Tip, knowing that the Feast of the Immaculate Conception is 8th Dec is all it took folks, take care.)

And so it was that in Solesmes I uttered the B word, Blackfen, and found that Fr Tim has lots of readers in Singapore and elsewhere all wishing him well.

Happy Jubilee, Fr Tim.

Solesmes some thoughts 1

First of all thanks to TCD (The Choir Director from Brighton) for the photos that I have pinched from facebook.

I have explained before that we had three classes per day, punctuated by Mass and the Offices, so we had plenty of opportunity to hear the chant in practice. Someone asked me yesterday (at Fr Tim's Jubilee,) if we joined in with their singing and we did a bit with the Ordinary at Mass, but nothing else. It would have been to intrude into their community. They make an extraordinarily unified sound and so without being part of their community (and how could I be?) I don't see how you could just pipe up with the Propers.

What I didn't mention was that TCD and I had e mailed to ask if we could attend the course and received a 'yes' and that was that. Everything was very simple, you just showed up. All the monks we had dealings with were charm itself.

Solesmes is a very beautiful village, covered with carefully tended gardens, a monastery and two convents. TCD has already described how quiet it is. We did indeed see only one car when we went out to explore the first evening. Thus our lives for 5 days telescoped into listening to monks chanting psalms and listening to Dom Saulnier expounding on chant, with two trips to the supermarket for food and some eccentric cooking experiences.

I've written before that the history of western music is often described as, 'vague squiggles and then the stave, phew, now we know the pitches, all is clear.' That is not the perspective that we received. Infact it's not one that performing musicians subscribe to. I went to a pre-concert talk at the wigmore Hall in April where two experts in period performance were in conversation with the Professor of Music from Bristol and he looked slightly taken aback when they related how they have studied the score yes, but have also explored what is possible on the instruments of that time and gulp, made a musical decision to play things in a certain way. A piece of music is not its score. One of my lecturers at university said that as you cannot put into notation everything about the music, you have to select what is most important and focus on notating that. Dom Saulnier however also made the point that as we were primarily dealing with an oral tradition, what is notated is maybe for other reasons. Modern musical notation is so bound up with pitch being communicated vertically and the passage of time horizantally that it is hard not to think like that. Much of the pre-stave notation seems to attempt to communicate the ebb and flow of the music.

Since in Catholicism tradition is very important, you wouldn't expect that just reading a book was going to communicate the message. (That would be evangelical Protestantism.) This was the magic of studying in such a place with such a Monk. Most English language histories of music are of course written by non-Catholics and in some cases are anti-Catholic. It's a funny old country, one that smashed its religious culture in the 16thC, but loves the music - how many ex-Oxbridge Choral Scholar choirs do we have specialising in renaissance polyphony and before? Similarly we love Italian art, but white washed our churches and smashed our windows. Consequently, we laugh at monasteries and characterise monks as the likes of Friar Tuck. The historical baggage means that the writers do not believe their sources or relentlessly apply bad motives for the actions of others.

The only thing to do then, flee the country and head for a monastery. Who better to learn about chant from than someone singing it daily? Since so much is missing from the historical record what remains can only usefully and successfully be interpreted by one seeking to live the life, because only such a person stands a chance of filling in the gaps and providing the reasons accurately.

Home again

Back home after a fantastic week in Solesmes and my brother's wedding in the Midlands on Sat.
When the dust has settled I shall write about it.

It's not all over, because today one of my Mum's kiwi cousins and her husband along with Auntie D are staying with my parents. Tomorrow they are going to Paris to visit Grandma's only surviving sibling, Auntie L. I'm on pudding duty... what to make?

Kiwi cousin has the same Christian name as me as we are both named after Grandma's Mother who died in 1919. She got Spanish 'flu which lay her open to TB. She died aged 27 leaving a husband and five children, the youngest twin girls, who included kiwi cousin's Mother. Infact, kiwi cousin looks like my Greatgrandmother.

The eldest, Uncle B stayed in County Clare. Auntie L got a scholarship to the Sorbonne and married a Frenchman, Uncle J-H, living through occupied France with small children. Grandma lived in England and married Grandpa, (obviously.) The twins, Auntie E and Auntie S, emigrated to kiwi land after WW2 and the rest is history.

The kiwicousins are great. Very relaxed and warm.

And now to the washing-machine.