The Chant Café

For some years, our schola at the parish has worked hard to get away from singing hymns in place of propers. This has been a huge relief, and an end to endless headaches over finding the right hymns and additions.

Now that we have Mass propers, we have clean editions, we know what to sing, everyone is on the right page, we are singing the right thing, and there is confidence and clarity all around.

And yet sometimes, we still need to sing hymns, as during recessional. You might think that this would be no big deal. Surely there are hymns in the hymnbook you can sing with a choir. Surely this can't be too confusing. And truly, most of the time, all is fine.

But then every once in a while -- and it happens when you least expect it -- there is chaos over editions, pitches, tempo, text, and much more.

For those who use OCP materials, you know about this problem. The various books don't match each other. The choir arrangements are completely un-singable in places. Even rhythms can be different between the pew books and the choir books.

This morning was one such case. We wanted to sing "Come Holy Ghost" for the recessional. How hard can that be? This is one of the most familiar hymns in Christendom.

Well, as is well known, the pew books don't have simple SATB parts. In fact, I don't think any OCP materials have that. I find that annoying but it is a well-known problem. Less well known is that the choir books -- if you are lucky enough to find the same hymn in there -- doesn't always have them either -- not even for this hymn standard.

The choir book offers fully three versions of "Come Holy Ghost" -- but not even one of them has a plain SATB arrangement. The first arrangement has piano, melody, and a soprano descant. The presumption is that surely every choir has one singer who wants to be a big star and sing above everyone else in a thrilling sort of way. Well, ours doesn't have such a person and it is not what we want to do. We sing without instruments and our main musical purpose with hymns is not the show off some one dazzling singer but to provide a rich environment for the people in the pews to feel confident about singing.

We could use this version and attempt to sing the piano parts but they are not voiced property for singers, and the words end up far from the notes. This is not a workable solution.

The second version is set up like some kind of canon or round or something. It is ridiculously complex and would require substantial rehearsal time and still probably not be a successful. It would completely confuse the congregation -- no question. Plus it is barely readable at all. In fact, it is actually preposterous.

So much for inspiring people to sing. 

All this just for one simple hymn! 



The third version is an SAB version of the same, as if this is any value added to an already incoherent and chaotic SATB version that I would guess has only been sing or one twice in human history, if ever. Why not a SAT and a ATB version too? </sarcasm>

Meanwhile, not a single plain-jane SATB hymn arrangement exists in a single OCP book in our parish's vast collection of OCP materials. To be sure, there is probably one that exists somewhere from this publisher, somewhere among the hundreds and thousands of things they publish.  Someone will probably post in the comments something like "oh sure, it is right there on page 323 of JourneySongs or page 212 of MakingPraise," etc. We just don't happen to have it.

So, worried about this problem, I keep looking for something during liturgy, digging through other Catholic materials. I ended up finding three others hymnals, published by three other publishers, with three additional versions. What did I find? Three additional unison versions of this hymn, all with different words.

It is not rocket science to provide a SATB hymn. It is beyond me why Catholic publishers seem to have such a problem with this.

Singing propers is so much easier, so much clearer. I have no desire to put a permanent ban on hymns at Mass but events like today certainly make such a position tempting.

Well, this is a moment we've dreamed about. Finally the audio CD of Words with Wings is out. For those who don't know, this is a series for teaching chant and music generally to children. It compresses the wisdom of a century into a small program for any parish, school, or home.

An essential component is a CD that has all the music so that the teacher and students can hear good singing, well modeled.

The CMAA put vast effort into this recording. It uses some of the country's best voices of children from the Cathedral Choir School of the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City. The quality is truly astonishing. I enjoyed just listening to the energy and enthusiasm of the singers even apart from the program itself.

The recording, editing, and  production values are super professional - the best in the industry.

It is an essential complement to the books in the series. Together they make it possible to actually have a children's choir program -- a feature of Catholic life that fell into decline a half century ago and never recovered. This series makes that recovery possible for everyone.

If we are looking for long term change, this is the solution. Nothing else like it exists. If you know someone who is looking for music for kids in a Catholic context, please send them this link. It is an illustration of the kind of work we are doing at the CMAA, trying to find positive paths forward.

If you're coming to the Sacred Music Colloquium and you've been putting off booking your room, don't wait.  Today (Friday, May 17) is the last day you will be able to receive the guaranteed low, CMAA rates.  If you stayed at the Little America Hotel last year, you'll know that it is a spectacular place.  Incredible quality and service. At $72, $97, or $117 a night, these rooms are a steal.  Reserve your room directly with this link.  Register for the Colloquium here. 

At the risk of looking like I am trying too hard to cling desperately to whatever fame I have recently garnered  (which I would totally do), I thought I should tell this story for at least three reasons not having to do with my own narcissism:

You probably know that about a month ago I wrote an article announcing that we have created a CMAA account at GitHub, and that I am hopeful it will become a useful tool for collaboration on larger projects (like an Open Sourced set of the Propers, or something...).

I had (and have) high hopes for this, but it's still just an idea- a first step. I have some plans, I hope some other people have some plans- but the whole thing is just an unrealized potential.

Then, last week, I got an email from Bob McMillan at Wired. Wired has something of a thing for GitHub (I know the feeling). Somehow or other, the people at GitHub (I am told) had read my article here at the cafe (they must Google themselves prodigiously) and thought it was a good explanation of how GitHub might be used in a non-software context. Also, I guess they thought it was cool. (Gregorian Chant is very cool, if you didn't know.)

So Bob gets in touch with me, asks me some questions about what we're trying to do. He thinks it's cool, but- there's really no story if there's no active project- which at that point there wasn't. Oh- and he's got a deadline.

I rush around trying to find something worthwhile to post to Github with just a few hours notice. The only thing I have access to and permission to use is a handful of Lilypond transcriptions from the Nova Organi Harmonia. Forum user "cantorconvert" (who I still haven't heard back from...) had posted these a couple weeks ago and had already given me permission to post them on GitHub.

I sent a quick email to Jeff Ostrowski, asking him to call me. I had no idea about the copyright status of the NOH, and I didn't want to make a major blunder here. His words: "You couldn't pay people to care about this stuff." Apparently back in 2008 when he and some others worked to get the set online, they tried without success to track down anyone who might have a copyright interest in it, or even anyone who might know who did. I gathered from our conversation that they found no one.

So I posted what I had, which wasn't much. I tried to explain to Bob the significance of the NOH and Gregorian Chant generally. ("Do you know anything about church music?" "Not really.") We talked about the general reception Open Source philosophy has had among the community around CMAA. We talked about the nature of text-based music engraving.

I sent him the only decent pictures I had of myself (the one he used is over six years old, and my wife thinks its ridiculous... but I like it), some links to the NOH and as much background info as I could muster together quickly.

And now there's this article over at Wired.

I'm particularly excited that we've managed to open our weird little church music echo chamber enough to get some outside attention. I really believe that the beauty and power of Sacred Music can change people's lives and be a source of grace for them.

The not-great part of this 15 nanoseconds of fame is that the article, by it's nature as a narrative profile, didn't address the fact that I just happen to be the current moment's loudest voice on the matter of Open Sourcing sacred music. I'm an evangelist, not a pioneer. People have been working on making this music ever more available and free for a good long while now- even a few who have already been using tools like GitHub.

Jeffrey Tucker has been beating this drum for awhile, and a growing number of composers, editors, and publishers have been contributing to the Open Culture movement, which itself is a continuation of the long history of social sharing at the heart of Gregorian Chant's history.

It's all very exciting, humbling, and not a little ridiculous. Ah well... back to work.

Thanks to Adam Wood's techno-entrepreneurship. Gotta see this. Talk about old meets new.