Categoria: Articles in English

All the world knows that Americans are peculiar people when it comes to language. If it is not in English or if an English translation isn’t nearby, we tend to treat the text as if it belongs to someone on another planet. Foreign tongues boggle our minds, and rather than get busy and actually learn another language (never!) we just toss it aside.
It’s my own private theory that this tendency has long hindered the dissemination of the church’s music in the United States. The Graduale Romanum, the official songbook of the Roman Rite, is entirely in Latin.
Hand it to a typical musician and it will not penetrate their brains. It’s not the Latin in the music so much as the absence of English. Call it ignorance or bigotry if you want but it is a fact of reality. Latin chant will never go anywhere in this country until singers can feel a sense of ownership over the meaning, and that means translations.
This is why the CMAA produced The Parish Book of Chant as the new book for people. It opens up the Latin chant tradition to all English speakers.
The complementary book for the scholas — the book containing the propers of the Mass — is the Gregorian Missal published by the Solesmes Abbey in France. This book is a treasure, a glorious thing to behold. The running headers are all in English. All Latin texts are translated. And this allows the great revelation to unfold: here is the music of the Mass.

(from Sing like a Catholic by Jeffrey A. Tucker, p. 180)

The reforms of the liturgy resulting from the Second Vatican Council have greatly increased the freedom of choice of liturgical music; the council also encouraged the composition of new music for the sacred liturgy. However, every freedom entails a corresponding responsibility; and it does not seem that, in the years since the council, the responsibility for the choice of sacred music has been exercised with equal wisdom in all circles. To judge by what is normally heard in the churches, one might even conclude that the Church no longer holds any standards in the realm of sacred music, and that, in fact, anything goes.
The council did not leave all up in the air, however, and if its Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy had been seriously heeded, a living tradition would still be alive everywhere, and we would have added musical works of some permanence to the “store of treasures” of sacred music. The council laid down some rather specific norms which can serve as a basis for developing an understanding of sacred music and thus for choosing wisely.
In its chapter on sacred music, the council declared that the solemn sung form of the liturgy is the higher form, that of all the arts music represents the greatest store of traditional treasures of the liturgy, that music is the more holy insofar as it is intimately connected to the liturgical action, and that Gregorian chant is the normative music of the Roman rite. Moreover, in speaking of innovations in general, it required that new forms derive organically from existing ones.

From Sacred Music 102, no. 3 (1975), reprinted in The Musical Shape of the Liturgy by William Peter Mahrt (2012)