Tag: CMOQ

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Pentecost 2015

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The story of Pentecost where everyone was able to speak different languages and share the message of the Gospel demonstrates clearly for me that from the beginning of the church, the Gospel was not meant to be proclaimed in only one way, but in a multitude of ways so that it can reach and be understood by a large diverse group of people. Music is a language of communication, and just as the spoken word exists in multiple languages, so does music. While we recognize French, Spanish, and Chinese (for example) as foreign languages, it is possible to learn to communicate using these languages (so that they no longer are foreign). Musical languages are called styles and include classical, romantic, contemporary and a whole host of other classifications depending upon how refined you wish to be.

Liturgical music today must reflect the multicultural diversity and intercultural relationships of the members of the gathered liturgical assembly. … Liturgical leaders and musicians should encourage not only the use of traditional music of other languages and peoples, but also the incorporation of newly composed liturgical music appropriate to various cultural expressions in harmony with the theological meaning of the rites. (Sing to the Lord, #60)

I know from my experience learning French that when we try to speak or understand a new language, we may encounter some difficulties, but it is also an opportunity to expand and grow. Changing our language requires us to shift perspectives. When we have to think about our words, we become more aware of our choices and can learn more about our own perspective.

In the next few weeks, we will be learning a new musical setting of the Eucharistic acclamations. The words will be familiar, but where the music we have been singing was adapted from music for the previous translation or for other sets of words, this music was written specifically for the most recent translation. As we learn the new music, trust in the Holy Spirit to give you the voice to proclaim God’s praise in a different tongue just as on the Feast of Pentecost.

Glenn

Bulletin Notes for the Cathedral of Mary, Our Queen, May 24, 2015

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Mutli-tasking at Communion

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Multi-tasking is a very difficult skill, and at least according to some studies something that we never really can do. Regardless of how much it may appear that we are doing at the same time, researchers have found that our brains can only focus on one task at a time. To multi-task, our minds simply switch between tasks very quickly. Compared to our busy lives, attending Mass may not seem like multi-tasking, but there is at least one moment I’d like to mention today when the norms given for celebrating Eucharist expect us to do different things at the same time: receiving communion.

The General Instructions of the Roman Missal indicate:

“While the Priest is receiving the Sacrament, the Communion Chant is begun, its purpose being to express the spiritual union of the communicants by means of the unity of their voices, to show gladness of heart, and to bring out more clearly the ‘communitarian’ character of the procession to receive the Eucharist. The singing is prolonged for as long as the Sacrament is being administered to the faithful.” (GIRM, no. 86)

The implication of this instruction is that we have to walk and sing at the same time. Further help is provided in Sing to the Lord: “In order to foster participation of the faithful with ‘unity of voices,’ it is recommended that psalms sung in the responsorial style, or songs with easily memorized refrains, be used.” (STL, no. 192) By using music with refrains, we are less dependent on a book where we have to read every word of the song. We will have some time where we can focus simply of walking and receiving Eucharist while the cantor or choir sings verses. Because the song is expected to continue “for as long as the Sacrament is being administered,” there will also be a chance to sing while you do not have to walk.

Reading the words to a song while walking around definitely qualifies as difficult multi-tasking, which is why every song I plan for us to sing during Communion has a refrain. I hope these refrains are simple enough and become familiar enough that even if it seems a daunting task, you will be able to meet the challenge and become a successful multi-tasker.

Glenn

Bulletin Notes for the Cathedral of Mary, Our Queen, May 3, 2015

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Choral Vespers

Stanford-1921On Sunday, April 26th, at 5 PM, The Cathedral of Mary Our Queen of Baltimore presents Solemn Choral Vespers. The Cathedral Choir will sing solemn Vespers for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, also known as Good Shepherd Sunday. All music (hymn, anthems and organ pieces) will be by Charles V. Stanford. This concert is open to the public, no tickets required.

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Choral Vespers featuring Charles Stanford

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Stanford-1921The Liturgy of the Hours is the means of sanctifying the day, and though primarily practiced by religious communities and clergy, it may be prayed by anyone and has an office appropriate for any part of the day. By the sixth century, the eight offices of the day were established as Matins, Lauds, Prime, Terce, Sext, None, Vespers and Compline. After the Second Vatican Council, Prime was abolished and Lauds as Morning Prayer and Vespers as Evening Prayer became the primary celebrations of the Liturgy of the Hours.

The structure of the Liturgy of the Hours includes hymns, psalms, canticles and a reading from Scripture. Over the course of four weeks, all 150 psalms will be recited during the celebration of Morning and Evening prayer. In Laudis Canticum, the document that promulgated the revised book of the Liturgy of the Hours, Pope Paul VI remarks, “The very celebration of the Liturgy of the Hours, especially when a community is gathered for this purpose, expresses the genuine nature of the praying Church, and stands as a wonderful sign of that Church.”

This Sunday afternoon we have the opportunity to celebrate Evening Prayer here at the Cathedral in a service where most all of the music was composed by Charles Villiers Stanford. Stanford was an Irish composer born in 1852 in Dublin. In 1882 at the age of 29, he was one of the founding professors of the Royal College of Music, where he taught composition for the rest of his life. In 1887, he also became Professor of Music at Cambridge. His students included Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, and Herbert Howells. Stanford died on March of 1924 and is buried in Westminster Abbey near the graves of Henry Purcell and John Blow.

I hope you will come this afternoon to experience both the music of Charles Stanford and the beauty of the Liturgy of the Hours.

Glenn

Bulletin Notes for the Cathedral of Mary, Our Queen, April 26, 2015

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A Stranger on the Road

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On the road to Emmaus, the disciples enter into conversation with a stranger. How often do we enter into conversations with strangers? I’m guessing that most of us tend to speak to the same people week after week, ignoring any strangers in our midst, and that our musical habits follow the same as our speaking habits. We listen to the same radio station every day and, if we go to concerts, it’s probably to hear the same music we hear on the radio. We like the music we like, and we stick with it until something forces us to change.

Have you ever driven far enough that you lost the signal for your favorite radio station? Maybe you flew somewhere, rented a car and needed to find a new radio station. Emmaus was a long journey for the disciples. They left behind what they knew and were headed to a new location. The journey forced them to move outside their comfort zone and known territory. Their conversation with the stranger gave them a chance to learn more about their faith until their eyes were opened and they recognized Jesus. While a radio signal grows weaker as we move away from it, the disciples grew stronger through their encounter with the stranger as they moved away from what was familiar.

Music can be the stranger that leads us closer to Christ. Familiar songs can reinforce what we already know and believe, and new music can shed light upon aspects of our faith and practice that we might not have considered or understood yet. While the cliché says we should not judge a book by its’ cover, music (and people) can get labeled very quickly. Whether you like “traditional” or “contemporary” music, I’d like to suggest that you not let the label keep you from interacting with a stranger. The disciples walked many steps with the stranger before they recognized him. So too, our own musical journeys might require a lot of time with the unfamiliar before we understand. Explore, reach out, listen (and sing!) so that you too might discover Jesus along the way beside you.

Glenn

Bulletin Notes for the Cathedral of Mary, Our Queen, April 19, 2015

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How many verses?

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How many verses of a hymn should we sing?

In planning music for Mass, one of the items I have to consider is how long a hymn is. Most usually, there is a liturgical action taking place at the same time as the music, so I need to figure out if the music is too long, too short, or just right for the time that the liturgical action takes. If the action goes faster than I expect, will the hymn still make sense if we leave out the last verse? Just as our lectionary will skip certain verses in the readings from the Bible, sometimes we can skip verses in the hymns and still have a coherent story, but sometimes we need to finish the hymn in order to not leave Jesus in the tomb or not leave the Holy Spirit out of the Trinity.

The text for our entrance hymn this weekend was written by Jean Tisserand in the 15th century. Tisserand was a Franciscan monk, founded an order for penitent women, and possibly served as confessor to King Charles VIII of France. With nine verses, there is rarely time for us to sing all of O filii et filiae at Mass, though there certainly would have been plenty of time at Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament on Easter Sunday, the liturgical moment when the French Missals placed the hymn.

With a hymn like this that has a refrain and many verses, another option might have been to sing it during the Communion procession. Would we be able to sing all the verses then? Would anyone besides the cantor actually sing the verses then? There would be time to sing all the verses if it were the Recessional hymn, but how many people would actually stay to sing them all? The Offertory is definitely too short for a long hymn like this, so that leaves us the Entrance as the best option. Because our Gospel reading today focuses on Thomas, we will skip verses two through four in order to sing the verses that tie in more closely to our celebration of the Second Sunday of Easter. Hopefully this will provide a match between the sensibility of the hymn and the liturgical action and keeps the music a partner in our celebration of Mass.

Glenn

Bulletin Notes for the Cathedral of Mary, Our Queen, April 12, 2015

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Easter Sequence

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Alleluia! Today as we celebrate Easter, we include a special piece of music, the sequence. In the Middle Ages it became expected practice at Mass to extend the music for the Alleluia to cover the time that it would take for the deacon to process from the altar to the ambo before proclaiming the Gospel. These extended melodies were called jubilus because of their joyful tone. Eventually, these melodies became long enough that people started to put words to them. In the ninth century, Notker Balbulus created a collection where he called them sequences perhaps because the words provided a way to memorize the sequence of notes or because these chants followed in order the alleluia.

After the Council of Trent, only four sequences were preserved in the liturgy: Victimae paschali laudes for today, Veni Sancte Spiritus for the feast of Pentecost, Lauda Sion for Corpus Christi, and Dies Irae for the Requiem Mass. In 1727, Pope Benedict XVIII added the Stabat Mater as the sequence for the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows. The text for the Easter sequence often attributed to Wipo of Burgundy, an eleventh century priest and chaplain to the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad II, but it has also been attributed to Notker Balbulus, Robert II of France, and Adam of St. Victor. It is uncertain if Wipo also wrote the melody.

While the most recent revision to the Roman Missal places the sequence before the Alleluia, singing the chant gives us an additional chance today to reflect on the resurrection. Notice how the lyrics tell the story of the empty tomb and prepare us to hear the Good News. As this song is only sung for the first week of Easter, it may not be so familiar to you, but as an expected part of the celebration of Easter, it is a staple that will return year after year.

Happy Easter,

Glenn
Bulletin Notes for the Cathedral of Mary, Our Queen, April 5, 2015

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Looking forward and back through the Passion Chorale

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The text of our closing hymn today, “O Sacred Head Surrounded,” is ascribed to Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153), but some scholars now attribute it to the Medieval poet Arnulf of Louvain (c. 1200-1250) as the collection of poems that contains the text only began to appear in Bernard’s collected works some two hundred years after his death. Any documents that could have shed light on the origin were probably destroyed in the French Revolution when all the monasteries were suppressed.

The melody we sing for this text was originally written by Hans Leo Hassler around 1600 for a secular love song, “Mein G’müt ist mir verwirret.” Johann Crüger adapted the melody in 1656 to fit a German translation of Bernard’s text prepared by Paul Gerhardt. Johann Sebastian Bach arranged the melody and used five stanzas of the hymn in his St Matthew Passion. Bach also used the melody with different words in his Christmas Oratorio. The hymn was first translated into English in 1752 by John Gambold, and the translation in our hymnal was prepared by Henry Baker (1821-1877).

I find it fascinating to consider the evolution of sacred music as found in this hymn. Several hundred years after the text was written, someone combined it with a popular tune to create a piece of music that now is considered an old traditional standard in our sacred repertoire. While it might seem scandalous now to fit sacred words to a tune by Taylor Swift or One Direction (my niece’s two favorite artists), which texts might people still be singing in two hundred years? Will they be using the same melodies we know, or might Adele might be the next Hassler? Hmmm……

Bulletin Notes for the Cathedral of Mary, Our Queen, March 29, 2015

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Out of the Depths

Out of the Depths600
A concert of organ music for Lent and Holy Week presented by Wm. Glenn Osborne at the Cathedral of Mary, Our Queen in Baltimore, MD. Music selections listed below or PDF of the program here:

Aus tiefer Not, BWV 686
Johann Sebastian Bach
Herzlich tut mich verlangen
Johannes Brahms
Psalm Prelude, Set 2, no. 1 – De profundis
Herbert Howells
IV. Longing for Death from Job
Peter Eben
Dominica in Palmis
Jean Langlais
Suite in French Classical Style on ‘Vexilla Regis’
Wm. Glenn Osborne
Da Jesus an dem Creutze stundt
Samuel Scheidt
III. Crucifixion from Symphonie-Passion
Marcel Dupré
Improvisation
Wm. Glenn Osborne

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Bulletin Notes – Out of the Depths

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Out of the Depths600Everyone has heard the expression that to sing is to pray twice. Music provides an additional dimension to our prayers that can add meanings beyond what the words alone can say. Instrumental music therefore can express thoughts and feelings that we may not have found the words to express.

The pipe organ with its variety of musical colors (especially the large instrument here at the Cathedral) has the capacity to convey a wide range of emotions. The US bishops make this clear in Sing to the Lord:

Among all other instruments which are suitable for divine worship, the organ is “accorded pride of place” because of its capacity to sustain the singing of a large gathered assembly, due to both its size and its ability to give “resonance to the fullness of human sentiments, from joy to sadness, from praise to lamentation.” Likewise, “the manifold possibilities of the organ in some way remind us of the immensity and the magnificence of God.” (STL, #87)

While we rejoice the triumph of Jesus Christ over death, there are many stories of pain and suffering also in the Bible: the slavery of the Israelites, the trials of Job, and even the crucifixion of our Lord. The concert this afternoon will explore how different composers have chosen to paint in music these songs of lament. Beginning with settings of Psalm 130 (Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord), continuing through the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem, and concluding with the death of Jesus on the cross, the program offers a wide palette of musical styles and emotions that I hope will bring you not into the depths of despair but into a deeper relationship with God. If you are able to be here, please come.

More information about the event including a complete program listing may be found here.