Do you want to learn more about Gregorian chant? This highly pedagogical presentation by a monk of Solesmes, Dom Daniel Saulnier, is read by Sarah Moule and gives the amateur listener basic notions about the chant, its history, musical forms and genres, with a generous selection of examples culled from Solesmes recordings.
This seems to be the order of program on the video; I haven't watched it through yet.
History of Gregorian chant
1 Gloria With ringing of the bells
2 Gloria Ambrosian
3 Antiphon In mandatis & Psalm 111
4 Psalm Psalm 110
5 Psalm Psalm 111
PROPER OF THE MASS
6 Introit Nos autem
7 Gradual Concupivi
8 Alleluia Pascha nostrum
9 Offertory Lætentur
10 Communion Pascha nostrum
ORDINARY OF THE MASS
11 Kyrie III
12 Gloria IX
13 Sanctus XVIII
14 Agnus XVIII
DIVINE OFFICE
15 Antiphon Dixit Dominus & Ps 109
16 Antiphon Si offers & Magnificat
17 Response Credo
18 Hymn Lucis creator
19 Hymn Salve festa dies
Here's something interesting from a page at the National Library of Spain (Spanish language page here); a Chantblog reader just pointed it out to me:
Choir books
The collection of choir books belonging to the Biblioteca Nacional de España, which originated in large from the ecclesiastical confiscations of the 19th century, comprises almost one hundred liturgical books which came from a number of ecclesiastical centres and are now held in our library.
These lectern books provide key testimony to the tradition of Gregorian chant in Spain. It is very different from any other cathedral or monasterial a collection as its features are heterogeneous, both in terms of origin and format. This collection contains a wide codicological and melodic representation of the copious production of choir books over the centuries, which is of great interest both to musicologists and Gregorian experts and for philologists and scholars of ancient Spanish books.
All of this reveals the need to develop the current database to provide a solution and service to the various essential issues regarding cataloguing and research. On the one hand, it will enable the Library to achieve a more detailed level of bibliographic description, in accordance with the peculiarities of this repertoire. And on the other, this systematisation and standardisation of all the aspects of the lectern books (missals, graduals, antiphonal books, etc.) should become a benchmark for the Spanish-speaking world and any institution with this singular kind of bibliographic collection.
The Ecclesiastical Confiscations of Mendizabal, Spanish: Desamortización Eclesiástica de Mendizábal, more often referred to simply as La Desamortización, encompasses a set of decrees from 1835–1837 that resulted in the expropriation, and privatisation, of monastic properties in Spain.
The legislation was promulgated by Juan Álvarez Mendizábal, who was briefly prime minister under Queen Isabel II of Spain. The aims of the legislation were varied. Some of its impulses were fostered by the anticlerical liberal factions engaged in a civil war with Carlist and other reactionary forces. The government wished to use the land to encourage the enterprises of small-land owning bourgeoisie, since much of the land was underused by languishing monastic orders. The government, which did not compensate the church for the properties, saw this as a source of income. Finally, wealthy noble and other families took advantage of the legislation to increase their holdings.
Ultimately, the desamortización led to the vacating of most of the ancient monasteries in Spain, which had been occupied by the various convent orders for centuries. Some of the expropriations were reversed in subsequent decades, as happened at Santo Domingo de Silos, but these re-establishments were relatively few. Some of the secularised monasteries are in a reasonably good state of preservation, for example theValldemossa Charterhouse, others are ruined, such as San Pedro de Arlanza.
Shades of Henry VIII; I didn't know about this.
The database, though, is very interesting. Things are happening!
For Pentecost, "O fire of the Spirit, the Comforter," by Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179); this is among my favorite texts. The original Latin, with an English translation, is below the video.
O ignis spiritus paracliti,
vita vite omnis creature,
sanctus es vivificando formas.
Sanctus es unguendo
periculose fractos,
sanctus es tergendo
fetida vulnera.
O spiraculum sanctitatis,
o ignis caritatis,
o dulcis gustus in pectoribus
et infusio cordium
in bono odore virtutum.
O fons purissime,
in quo consideratur
quod Deus alienos colligit
et perditos requirit.
O lorica vite
et spes compaginis membrorum omnium
et o cingulum honestatis:
salva beatos.
Custodi eos qui carcerati sunt
ab inimico,
et solve ligatos
quos divina vis salvare vult.
O iter fortissimum
quo penetravit omnia
in altissimis et in terrenis
et in omnibus abyssis
tu omnes componis et colligis.
De te nubes fluunt, ether volat,
lapides humorem habent,
aque rivulos educunt,
et terra viriditatem sudat.
Tu etiam semper educis doctos
per inspirationem sapiente
letificos.
Unde laus tibi sit,
qui es sonus laudis
et gaudium vite,
spes et honor fortissimus
dans premia lucis.
O fire of the Spirit, the Comforter,
Life of the life of all creation,
Holy are you, giving life to the Forms.
Holy are you, anointing
The dangerously broken;
Holy are you, cleansing
The fetid wounds.
O breath of sanctity,
O fire of charity,
O sweet savor in the breast
And balm flooding hearts
With the fragrance of virtues.
O limpid fountain,
In which it is seen
How God gathers the strays
And seeks out the lost:
O breastplate of life
And hope of the bodily frame,
O sword-belt of honor:
Save the blessed!
Guard those imprisoned
By the foe,
Free those in fetters
Whom divine force wishes to save.
O mighty course
That penetrated all,
In the heights, upon the earth,
And in all abysses:
You bind and gather all people together.
From you clouds overflow, winds take wing,
Stones store up moisture,
Waters well forth in streams --
And earth swells with living green.
You are ever teaching the learned,
Made joyful by the breath
Of Wisdom.
Praise then be yours!
You are the song of praise,
The delight of life,
A hope and a potent of honor,
Granting rewards of light.
Note: The English version is adapted from Barbara Newman's literal English translation, in Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia: A Critical Edition of the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum, 2nd ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 151.
Here's a wonderful recording of Guilliaume Dufay's (ca. 1400-1474) setting of the exquisite Pentecost Sequence hymn, Veni, Sancte Spiritus. It's sung here, I believe, by La Capella Reial de Catalunya; M. Figueras, M.C.Kiehr (sopranos); K. Wessel (contre-ténor):
The original hymn is one of the most beautiful in the entire Gregorian repertoire, especially in its text (Latin and English below the video):
Veni, Sancte Spiritus,
et emitte caelitus
lucis tuae radium.
Veni, pater pauperum,
veni, dator munerum,
veni, lumen cordium.
Veni, Sancte Spiritus, known as the Golden Sequence, is the sequence for the Mass for Pentecost. It is commonly regarded as one of the greatest masterpieces of sacred Latin poetry ever written. Its beauty and depth have been praised by many. The hymn has been attributed to three different authors, King Robert II the Pious of France (970-1031), Pope Innocent III (1161-1216), and Stephen Langton (d 1228), Archbishop of Canterbury, of which the last is most likely the author.
A great post from catholicity and covenant
today. He's referring to the Church of Ireland here, but TEC has the
same Daily Office reading today. Sometimes Augustine's allegorical
readings get on my nerves - but this one is fantastic!
Today
the CofI daily office lectionary NT reading for MP was the parable of
the Good Samaritan. It is appropriate, therefore, to revisit
Augustine's Christological reading of the Good Samaritan, reminding us
that the parable - rather than being a moralistic addendum - coheres
with and flows from the Church's proclamation of the Cross and
Resurrection:
A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho; Adam himself is
meant; Jerusalem is the heavenly city of peace, from whose blessedness
Adam fell; Jericho means the moon, and signifies our mortality, because
it is born, waxes, wanes, an dies. Thieves are the devil and his angels.
Who stripped him, namely; of his immortality; and beat him, by
persuading him to sin; and left him half-dead, because in so far as man
can understand and know God, he lives, but in so far as he is wasted and
oppressed by sin, he is dead; he is therefore called half-dead. The
priest and the Levite who saw him and passed by, signify the priesthood
and ministry of the Old Testament which could profit nothing for
salvation. Samaritan means Guardian, and therefore the Lord Himself is
signified by this name. The binding of the wounds is the restraint of
sin. Oil is the comfort of good hope; wine the exhortation to work with
fervent spirit. The beast is the flesh in which He deigned to come to
us. The being set upon the beast is belief in the incarnation of Christ.
The inn is the Church, where travelers returning to their heavenly
country are refreshed after pilgrimage. The morrow is after the
resurrection of the Lord. The two pence are either the two precepts of
love, or the promise of this life and of that which is to come.
Alleluia, Emitte Spiritum Tuum is the first Alleluia for the Day of Pentecost; here it's sung by the monks of Prinknash Abbey.
The text is from the wonderful Psalm 104, v. 30; here are the words and a translation from a William Byrd page at CPDL (the text of the second Alleluia is in brackets, following that of this, the first):
Alleluia. Emitte Spiritum tuum, et creabuntur et renovabis faciem terrae.
[Alleluia. Veni Sancte Spiritus, reple tuorum corda fidelium: et tui amoris in ei ignem accende. Alleluia.]
Alleluia. Send forth Thy Spirit, and they shall be created, and Thou shalt renew the face of the earth.
[Alleluia. Come, O Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Thy faithful: and kindle in them the fire of Thy love. Alleluia.]
Here is the full chant score for Alleluia, Emitte Spiritum Tuum:
Here's Byrd's setting of this text; beautiful!
Recorded LIVE June 2012 as part of the Pentecost Concert "A Musical Festival of Joy and Thanksgiving".
Location: Holy Spirit Catholic Church, Annandale, VA
Singers:
Sopranos: Allison Mondel & Emily Noel
Altos: Chris Dudley (Director) & Kristen Dubenion-Smith
Tenors: Joe Regan & Jerry Kavinski
Basses: Doug Yocum & Karl Hempel
Classical Concert
For some reason, I always really like Pentecost icons; here are three. The first is described as 18th Century Russian, "egg tempera on a wood panel":
There's no information at all on this one (although it's clearly Russian):
This one comes from the website of St. Mark's Coptic Church in Toronto; it's described as "above the South Altar Door by Bedour Latif and Youssef":
And wow! How great is this 1534 painting by "Vasco Fernandes, aka. 'Grão Vasco'"? It's "da capela da portaria do mosteiro de Santa Cruz de Coimbra" - "over the door of the Santa Cruz de Coimbra monastery," that is.
We're people with what some may think quirky habits.
When we first learn a route through a city, we tend to keep using that route even if navigation software tells us there is a better or shorter one. On Sundays, we sit in the same pew week after week. We eat the same lunch nearly every Thursday, and read the newspaper in the same spot nearly every Thursday evening with the same beverage at our side. On Tuesday mornings, we drink coffee in the same spot with the same company. We like to sit to the left of our conversation partners, and to read The Towers of Trebizond once a year. We choose a window seat when we can on trains and aeroplanes. We take off our shoes as often as decent, and wear pyjamas whenever possible. These habits aren't objectively good, and we have enough self-knowledge to understand that. But they are little bricks in the architecture of our days and weeks, and they help us to bring comfort and order out of what might tend otherwise in the direction of chaos.
One of the most consistent of our habits over the last decade has been reading The Economist on Saturday mornings. We often find ourselves a little more bolshy than they; a little amused at their reference to themselves as a 'newspaper'; somewhat vexed by the incessant gift subscription solicitations; and sometimes wishing the price were a bit lower; but always a touch refreshed by contrariety, consistency, hilarity—have you seen the photo captions?—and variety.
The first thing we read every week is the obituary (singular, as there is only ever one) printed on the second to last page of each issue. This is no morbid fascination; the obituary is written in exquisite English without fail, and it is never a bare recitation of dates and places. Instead, one learns something about the shape of a person's life and impact on the wider world. Ecclesiastical obits in The Daily Telegraph—especially those by Trevor Beeson—also do this, but they only appear when someone churchly and important dies, rather than every week without fail.
Our devotion to the penultimate page of The Economist is the only reason we learned of the death in Belgium on 14 April this year of Marcella Pattyn, the last Beguine. Though this 92 year old was touted as the last living link to a way of life stretching back some 800 years, her death went unnoticed in wider news outlets. We felt compelled to write in praise of Beguines and their distinct way of living out the Beatitudes.
Beguines* were lay women throughout what are now France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany who organized their lives around shared religious ideals but did not take vows as nuns—and, in fact, could and did leave their communities to return to their families or to marry if they wished. From the 1200s until 2013, they lived out Christ's declarations about the blessedness of the poor in spirit, the peacemakers, the meek, the merciful, the persecuted, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, and those who mourn, in ways that were and still are revolutionary. These women retained rights to own and inherit property. They were highly educated, and shared their education with the inhabitants of the cities where they lived. They chose to form urban families of affinity whose temporal stability was rooted in the beautiful béguinages that are still the architectural-historical pride of many northern European cities. The names of some Beguines are bright stars in the history of Christian mysticism: Hadewijch, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Marguerite Porete, for example. It may come as no surprise that some of them were also accused of heresy, and that they suffered their own persecutions at the hands of the Church whose best ideals they refreshed and enlivened through many generations.
To our mind, one of the most significant things about the Beguines was their decision to live lives of Christian fruitfulness, simplicity and seriousness not in isolation or rural retreat, but rather in the heart of bustling cities. With remarkable wealth around them thanks to the cloth trade in particular, Beguines situated themselves outside of prevailing economic patterns in favour of an individualism-in-community that allowed them both urban solitude and opportunities for effective service. Urban solitude is a thing known well to thoughtful persons who live in cities, but generally experienced only by individuals, and not in ways that make for wider cultural constructiveness. Whilst sleeping and rising alone-together, Beguines prayed bright fires of joy into being through dark nights near the North Sea, and they forged attitudes of apostolic generosity outside the conventions of their time.
As Anglicans, we believe that there are many good flavours and streams in the broad river of Christian spirituality. When identifiable emphases—in this case, on the gift of the individual to community without a loss of autonomy, on the ability of women to make their own religious decisions, on the primacy of mystical, contemplative prayer to bring about the soul's right relationship with its creator, and on the humble goodness of the created world—we can't help but see a wonderful way of doing something beautiful for God. Nobody who has read and understood John Keble could reject this confluence of attitudes as outside the inheritance of all Anglicans and Episcopalians.
We also can't help but reject the idea that Marcella Pattyn was really the last of her kind. Maugre the fact that all the béguinages of the middle ages are now empty but for scents and books and ghosts, we don't have enough fingers and toes to count all the urban mystics we have met in our lives. Some have jobs in cubicles or at desks in nondescript office buildings; some are homeless; some are clergy who have bloomed where they were planted, and never sought other soil or toil; some are waitresses; one is a barber; one shined our shoes last week; one is a phlebotomist; two are cooks; and most are not aware themselves of the reality of the effect of their concentrated prayer on the lives of the world around them. We feel a fair certainty that the things separating today's Beguines from the now-defunct Beguines who perpetuated much that was beautiful and good from the late medieval northern European world are linguistic, cultural, chronological and structural rather than otherwise substantial.
The Economist's obit ended with a line from Agatha Christie: 'And then there were none'. Our preference would be the more joyful 'Their sound has gone out unto the ends of the world, and their words unto the ends of the earth'.
See you next week.
12 May 2013
http://anglicansonline.org
* Some men, called Beghards, also embraced this way of life, but they were never the dominant participants in the movement.
I'm
especially moved by the idea that "The beguinages had originally been
famous for taking the 'spare' or 'surplus' women who crowded into
13th-century cities in search of jobs." We are headed towards this
kind of society today, if we're not already there; global poverty is
rising, and unemployment among
some sectors of the population is very high. Decent jobs are
becoming scarcer. The world doesn't seem to care for its "surplus"
people much these days, either. And, of course: it's easy to
understand why Marcella Pattyn would have been attracted to the
Beguines; "But she was blind, or almost so, and no other community
would accept her. She wanted to work, too, and was not sure she could in
an ordinary convent."
AT
THE heart of several cities in Belgium lies an unexpected treasure. A
gate in a high brick wall creaks open, to reveal a cluster of small,
whitewashed, steep-roofed houses round a church. Cobbled alleyways run
between them and tiny lawns, thickly planted with flowers, grow in front
of them. The cosiness, the neatness and the quiet suggest a hortus conclusus, a medieval metaphor both for virginal women and the walled garden of paradise.
Any
veiled women seen there now, however, processing to Mass or tying up
hollyhocks in their dark habits and white wimples, are ghosts. Marcella
Pattyn was the last of them, ending a way of life that had endured for
800 years.
These places were not convents, but
beguinages, and the women in them were not nuns, but Beguines. In these
communities, which sprang up spontaneously in and around the cities of
the Low Countries from the early 13th century, women led lives of
prayer, chastity and service, but were not bound by vows. They could
leave; they made their own rules, without male guidance; they were
encouraged to study and read, and they were expected to earn their keep
by working, especially in the booming cloth trade. They existed
somewhere between the world and the cloister, in a state of autonomy
which was highly unusual for medieval women and highly disturbing to
medieval men.
Nor, to be honest, was it the first thing Juffrouw Marcella
thought of when, as a girl, she realised that her dearest wish was to
serve her Lord. But she was blind, or almost so, and no other community
would accept her. She wanted to work, too, and was not sure she could in
an ordinary convent. The beguinages had originally been famous for
taking the “spare” or “surplus” women who crowded into 13th-century
cities in search of jobs. Even so, the first community she tried sent
her back after a week, unable to find a use for her. (In old age she
still wept at the thought of all the rejections, dabbing with a
handkerchief at her blue unseeing eyes.) A rich aunt intervened with a
donation to keep her there, and from the age of 21 she was a Beguine.
Contentedly,
in the beguinage at Ghent from 1941 and at Courtrai from 1960, she
spent her days in tasks unaltered from the Middle Ages. She knitted baby
clothes and wove at a hand loom, her basket of wool beside her chair,
chatting and laughing with the other women. At lunchtime, like the
others, she ate her own food from her own cupboard (identified by the
feel of the carvings under her hands), neatly stocked with plates, jugs,
coffee and jam. Cooking she was spared, ever since on the first
occasion she had failed to see the milk boiling over, but she washed up
with a will.
A good part of the time she prayed, all
the prayers she could remember, but especially her rosary whose bright
white beads she could almost see. Most usefully, since she was musical,
she played the organ in chapel; and she cheered up the sick, as she
nursed them, by serenading them on banjo and accordion. Almost her only
concession to modernity was the motorised wheelchair in which she would
career around the alleyways at Courtrai in her later years, wrapped in a
thick knitted cape against the cold, her white stick dangerously
levelled like a lance.
Love’s light
In
her energy and willpower she was typical of Beguines of the past. Their
writings—in their own vernacular, Flemish or French, rather than men’s
Latin—were free-spirited and breathed defiance. “Men try to dissuade me
from everything Love bids me do,” wrote Hadewijch of Antwerp:
They don’t understand it, and I can’t explain it to them. I must live out what I am.
Prous
Bonnet saw Christ, the mystical bridegroom of all Beguines, opening his
heart to her like rays blazing from a lantern. But a Beguine who was
blind could take comfort in knowing, with Marguerite Porète, that Love’s
light also lay within her:
O deepest spring and
fountain sealed, Where the sun is subtly hidden, You send your rays,
says Truth, through divine knowledge; We know it through true Wisdom:
Her splendour clothes us in light.
When she was known to be the last, Juffrouw Marcella
became famous. The mayor and aldermen of Courtrai visited her, called
her a piece of world heritage, and gave her Beguine-shaped chocolates
and champagne, which she downed eagerly. A statue of her, looking
uncharacteristically uncertain, was cast in bronze for the beguinage.
The
story of the Beguines, she confessed, was very sad, one of swift
success and long decline. They had caught the medieval longing for
apostolic simplicity, lay involvement and mysticism that also fired St
Francis; but the male clergy, unable to control them, attacked them as
heretics and burned some alive. With the Protestant Reformation the
order almost vanished; with the French revolution their property was
lost, and they struggled to recover. In the high Middle Ages a city like
Ghent could count its Beguines in thousands. At Courtrai in 1960 Sister
Marcella was one of only nine scattered among 40 neat white houses,
sleeping in snowy linen in their narrow serge-curtained beds. And then
there were none.
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