Today during Mass I was reminded of an idea I had several months ago: Mass music really needs to start using the propers again.
This idea does not necessarily mean going back to the music from the Graduale Romanum. I had suggested using the texts of the propers before on a forum somewhere several months ago when I first had this idea, and almost all the responses thought I was advocating a return to exclusive reliance on Gregorian chant. Admittedly, I am a big chant fan (and you would be too if you access to biannual concerts from an excellent chant choir for six years), but I realize that chant does not necessarily work for most churchgoers presently. Additionally, I'm not the biggest fan of jazzy Mass music. I do like music that inspires the sacred, though, and in my opinion there's plenty of room in the spectrum between Gregorian chant and organum on one side and jazz + rock 'n roll on the other that includes music that inspires the sacred.
Anyway, I digress. The varying musical tastes of modern churchgoers is exactly why I suggest using the texts of the propers with the composers figuring out the other details. This does not mean falling back to Latin text either. Propers are almost exclusively excerpts from scriptural texts, and there are vernacular translations of scripture approved for liturgical use. All that is needed are good composers who, instead of coming up with their own lyrics, would be willing to use words that had been in the liturgy for centuries and should be back again. These composers would be doing a great service to the liturgy by keeping the liturgy scripturally anchored.
4 comments:
An excellent observation. It seems so obvious that you have to wonder why composers write "lyrics" rather than use the propers texts. An easy question to answer though. A setting that uses the propers texts from, let's say, the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time can only be used on the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time! It would be difficult to sell a song that can only be used once a year. And so settings for the propers texts, even in English, tend to be of the type found in the Chabanel Psalms or the Communio Project: Plainchant type settings. The bottom line? There's no money to be made in setting the proper texts... why would someone buy a new setting of a text they use once a year when they can just use the one they bought last year (or three years ago given the liturgy cycle!). The music publishing industry depends on "newness" to keep going. That's why all of this talk of reform of Catholic music has them in a fit!
Please see my weblog entry:
http://pauca_lux_ex_oriente.blogspot.com/2008/08/why-modern-roman-catholic-music-sucks.htm
For these reasons, I sincerely doubt that there will be any effective use of the ICEL texts in musical settings.
chironomo,
You've hit the nail on the head. As a liturgical composer myself, it's pretty thankless to write a piece that might only be used only once a year at most.
However, though it's true that the entrance antiphon for a particular sunday can only be used on that sunday *as a proper,* what's stopping it from being used on other days as a "suitable song"? If a hymn is a legtimate option for the opening song, why not an antiphon from another sunday?
These are all good points. I think there are rather important/famous Sundays or feasts for which composing music only used once a year wouldn't nearly be as thankless. Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost are the obvious ones. Others include the other non-Sunday days of obligation, Gaudete/Laetare Sunday (the names of which mean nothing without the introit), and possibly the Sundays of Advent and Lent.
The only problematic aspect of having propers for every week of the year would be the Sundays of ordinary time and to a lesser extent the Sundays of Christmas and Easter. That problem could be resolved by relying on the Graduale Simplex. It has an official English translation (unlike the Graduale Romanum). The simplex uses cycles of antiphons instead of weekly antiphons. Reliance on the antiphon cycle could remedy the thankless task of having music used only once a year for not-amazingly-special Sundays.
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