Octaves of Christmas

New Year's Day this year was the Sunday within the Octave of Christmas. That is a phrase I love, the Octave of Christmas.

I think of the first line of "Joy to the World." That is an octave! Joy to the world, the Lord is come. Handel just goes down that scale. It is an octave.

Also in "The Nutcracker," Tchaikovsky goes down the scale in the great Pas de Deux.

There must be other octaves of Christmas however I will have to think of them.

For now I am thinking of the 1,000-year-old carol we got to sing at church on the occasion of the Octave of Christmas, which was Sunday, New Year's Day.

That is it at the top! In English it is "Of the Father's Love Begotten." In Latin it is "Corde Natus Ex Parentis." That is what we sang.

That melody!

As someone wrote in the comment section of the above video: "Magical song!"

The melody just gets better and better as the song goes on and it has a haunting feel. The words lare beautiful. When I was singing it I thought about that.

"Psallat altitudo caeli, psallite omnes angeli..." My Latin is not great -- my Latin teacher father would be horrified! -- however I believe that says, "Sing heights of heaven, sing all angels..."

Sure enough! I just did Google translate: "Let the height of heaven sing, let all the angels sing."

Someone writes in the comment section:

Created: circa 4th century AD (between 348 and 413). 

Written by: Aurelius Prudentius Clemens

Country of Origin: Roman province of Tarraconensis (modern-day northern Spain).

Everything I know in life I learned from comment sections! This song is older than I thought. Our church song book said it was around 1000.

Who knows. It seems Aurelius Prudentius Clemens was a poet, so perhaps he wrote only the words. The melody likely came later. Aurelius Prudentius was not only a poet, he was a lawyer, and apparently a good one. Also he was the provincial governor for a while. Later in life he renounced the vanities of this world, I am reading, and fasted and became a vegetarian. He wrote his Christian poems during this time of his life.

You know who that reminds me of, Clemens Brentano. Brentano was one of the most famous Romantic poets however he dropped all that and devoted the second half of his life to promoting the Catholic faith. That is a coincidence, another Clemens.

Now that we have covered all this ground, it is time just to listen. The recording above, it seems just to be a husband and wife recording it in an attic. That is also in the comments. I like how the singer just sticks to the melody. I also like how they show the music and the translation.

Here is the schola of St. John Cantius where I virtually attended Christmas Day mass this year.

You feel you can hear all the centuries echoing in this song.

One thousand six hundred years!

Just listen...

My Gregorian Chant adventure

ne thing is different at church and that is that we have a new priest and his name is Father Kluge. His last name means "clever" in German. And he is clever.

He has us singing Gregorian Chant!

It is even more thrilling than it sounds. It is as if we have turned the calendar back to the year 450 or thereabouts. Mozart is way too modern!

We have to get together and practice so that nobody's voice stands out. We are all supposed to be together and it is like swimming because you have to take deep breaths and try to make it all the way through a long and meandering phrase without a break.

Father Kluge had a great way of describing chant, how it can be like a butterfly, going this way and that.

Early last Sunday morning I was cramming because I had forgotten a lot of what we had practiced. So I was practicing beautiful Mass I, which is what we are singing, off of a YouTube video. I worked in this practice while I was brewing our coffee. We do pour-overs with a Melitta cone and the water drips through pretty slowly and so while I was pouring, I was watching the score on the video ...



.... and singing along.

Son of a sea cook, I overpoured Howard's cup of coffee! Coffee was everywhere!

But we did OK. Father Kluge was up in the choir loft directing us because one of our other priests, Father Justus, was the celebrant. That is us in the illuminated "O" at the top of this post! I was able to step back and take a quick picture.

We look good! And we sounded good, too. It was like we were in school all over again because we were all trying really hard and after the Agnus Dei Father Kluge gave us a discreet thumbs up.

A great moment!

Terror in the organ loft

I wrote before about the "Ave Verum Corpus" Gregorian chant that comes up now and then at Mass. This is the Latin text that Mozart famously set to music. But today we sang it as the Gregorian Chant.

What a beautiful chant!

The only trouble was, as I noted before, the women have to sing that one phrase by ourselves. We are always understaffed on days when this happens, I do not know why. Today it was pretty much me and a group of teenage girls. Nobody else was there. We got through it.

O Jesu dulcis
O Jesu pie...

And then the guys come in with us. Whew!

There are just these couple of lines the ladies sing by ourselves and it is tremendously stressful. At the end of the "Ave, Verum Corpus"  I turned to the teenagers and we all smiled and gave each other thumbs up.

"Good job," I whispered. I added: "This always makes me nervous."

That is the truth!

It is one thing to listen to Gregorian chant. It is another thing to sing it in your everyday life. With an entire church listening, I should put that out there too. It is beautiful but frightening to be in the organ loft during a Tridentine Mass. At the start, I always love that moment, all of us standing there waiting, nobody breathing, waiting for the priest to start us all off.

Then sometimes during the mass there is a screw-up. We might do the wrong verse or something and everyone looks at each other afterwards, and there are grimaces and rolling of eyes.

How did we mess that up??

This was the kind of thing I worried about when I was invited to join the choir at church. I know what goes on in organ lofts.

It is not pretty!

Beer and the Monks of Norcia

Today arrived Benedicta, an uncompromising disc from the Monks of Norcia. That is it pictured above!

It is a kind of cool picture. And the music is, too. The Monks of Norcia sing track after track of Gregorian chant. It puts you into a kind of coma. I mean that in the best sense. More like trance. It puts you into a trance. Not the best thing for a Wednesday afternoon in the office but beautiful all the same.

I love when a previously obscure monastery comes out of nowhere and releases a CD.

Here are the very cool Monks of Norcia explaining what they do.



Those are some tremendous beards, folks.

And some tremendous chant.

And as if things were not perfect enough, they also make beer. Fifteen thousand bottles a month!



"Many people might not go to Mass, but by buying beer, they have a connection with us, which is safe for them, in a setting, over a product they feel comfortable with us, so there's a spiritual gain for them, even though they're not looking for it."

And:

"I said, we make beer, immediately the person was interested and wanted to talk, and before we knew it we were talking about Christ and truth..."

And:

"As many people have negative experiences with the Church, if they can have a very simple but positive exchange with a monk over something like beer, it does wonders to open them up. It's not like automatically they're becoming monks and nuns and priests, but it starts them on a path which we hope will lead them back to the Church..."

Marvelous monks of Norcia.

We drink to them!

The music of Lady Day

It is the Feast of the Annunciation, once known as Lady Day.

One chant traditional on this day is the beautiful "Rorate Caeli." It always makes me think of Advent because that is when I have heard it. In the comments section on YouTube you can see people wishing each other a Merry Christmas.



It is kind of thrilling for me to hear it now. Sort of the way it was fun a few weeks ago to go and have lunch in East Aurora where they put their Christmas decorations back up because a movie is being shot there. I have not been hearing these chants my whole life, but I have been for the last few years, and it is funny but after a while they become part of your life and you forget you did not grow up with them.

If I had my way the whole year would be Advent and Christmas. It is my favorite time of year even though I do love summer because I like running around in summer clothes.

The music of Lady Day.

Beautiful!

Ode to joy

After hearing Beethoven's Ninth the other day I have been thinking about the "Ode to Joy."

I read how scholars think he was inspired by Mozart's K. 222, his "Misericordias Domini." Listen for it, you will hear it! And what is weird to me is, it sounds like Beethoven's orchestration. I have not sat down or studied the scores or anything. It just does.



 And you know what, I wonder if in turn Mozart were inspired by the ancient "Asperges" chant. The first notes are the same as the "Ode to Joy" which is how I was able to learn the melody.



Whatever the situation, as our Italian priest at St. Anthony's used to say, there is nothing new under the sun.

But there are great themes, handed down one master to another.

Joy!

Composers and cats

Because of our new cat I am wondering what musicians in history had cats. It is hard to think of any specifically. Richard Wagner had a big Newfoundland dog, at least for a while, named Robber. He had Robber at the time he wrote "The Flying Dutchman." Mozart had a dog and a bird.

Howard says we do not hear about musicians having cats because probably they all did. Cats used to be part of the landscape because they roamed free and you needed them for the mice that were and are around. Everyone had them! That is what we figure anyway.

Now I am looking for more details.

Ah! Alexander Borodin had a lot of cats. And one of them, Ryborov, could go ice fishing. He could fish through holes in the ice.

I bet our cat could do that if we were Russian!

Borodin is on a list of famous cat lovers including Pope Benedict XVI and Edward Lear, two of the greatest gentlemen who ever lived. Edward Lear had a tabby cat and, speaking of music, it was named Foss. I interviewed Lukas Foss once! I wish I could have mentioned that.

You might guess that Maurice Ravel loved cats and you would be right. He had Siamese cats, so says this list. That is Ravel up above with a cat! Here is another picture.

John and Cynthia Lennon had up to 10 cats. No word on how many cats he owned with Yoko.

Pope St. Gregory the Great had only one possession, so says the list, and it was a cat. He would pet the cat while meditating. 

And perhaps while creating his famous Gregorian chant.

En-chanting

Today, the funniest thing.

I am driving to church, listening to this new disc of various treatments of the "Ave Maria." This is life of a music nerd! And I come to the Gregorian chant "Ave Maria."

The chant I was listening to is the first piece in the video above. Anyway, I liked the sound of it and I think we had sung it once before at St. Anthony's, where I go to church. And I had thought it was so beautiful.

On the way to church I listened to it a bunch of times, even though after it was this Palestrina "Ave Maria" that I also loved. I thought for some reason: I should learn this Gregorian chant, I might have to sing it.

And it was funny. I mean, I wouldn't need it today, it's not as if it's May or anything. So I get to church, sure enough, it's not in the program, or whatever you would call it. At Offertory we do this hymn we often do. And at the recessional there is this Haydn hymn.

So I have my hymn book ready. But all of a sudden the friar stops, after blessing us. These are the visiting friars from Binghamton.

And he starts in on the "Ave Maria."

Did I call this or what??

Here was my payoff from listening to it all these times! Not that I could sing it that well, but still, better than if I had not been listening to it all the way to church.

The moral of the story: Learn your Gregorian chants!

You never know when you might need them!

A walk in the clouds

For all the millions of times I have listened to Mozart's "Ave Verum Corpus" -- above conducted by Riccardo Muti -- I never actually followed the text. I know, how dumb is that? But it is so beautiful anyway, and usually the words are not right in front of you, so I never bothered.

It is terrible how nobody Catholic knows any of the ancient prayers that have come down, or should have come down anyway, through the centuries. Think of all the prayers that Mozart and Beethoven grew up with and knew just like breathing.

On the other hand it is a great experience to be learning this all bit by bit as a grown-up.

Yesterday at church we had to sing the Gregorian chant "Ave Verum Corpus." That is new to me and it is in its own way just as moving.



God love Leonard Bernstein, he knew what the words meant. I have posted this before but I never get over it. Look at his face. Look at him getting ready. He was not Catholic but he tapped into something universal in this hymn, in this prayer. I know millions of Catholics who are not half as reverent, I will tell you that.



Here is our crash course in the "Ave Verum Corpus":

Ave, verum corpus

Natum de Maria Virgine,
Vere passum immolatum
In Cruce pro homine,
Cujus latus perforatum
Unda fluxit et sanguine,
Esto nobis praegustatum
In mortis examine.

Hail, true Body,
born of the Virgin Mary,
who having truly suffered,
was sacrificed on the cross for mankind,
whose pierced side
flowed with water and blood:
May it be for us a foretaste [of the Heavenly banquet]
in the trial of death.

Enchanting chanting

Yesterday at church we soared like eagles and attempted the Gregorian "Salve Regina." Well, I attempted it. Everyone else knew it better than I did.

Which did not stop me from singing two lines pretty much solo. Ha, ha! We hit a part where the women were supposed to sing a line separately from the men and that is what I sang. Unfortunately none of the other women really stepped up to the plate and so there was my voice, echoing through the church.

That was a funny feeling!

Especially since I really did not know what I was doing.

I sang the lines: "O clement, o pia." That is "O clement, o loving." You can hear it from about 1:30 to about 1:38. Please note, this is not our performance! These are singers from somewhere else in this recording.

After Mass the organist, Josephine, and I got talking and we agreed it is too bad that the average person no longer knows any of these chants. I mean, I did not know the "Salve Regina." I know the prayer because it is my favorite prayer. I love the words: "Hail, holy Queen, mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope." But I did not know the chant melody.

Imagine back when people knew all these chants off the top of their heads. You would know when Mahler worked one of them into a symphony, when Verdi or Puccini or Respighi quoted one. You would recognize it. But alas, no more.

There are various versions of the "Salve Regina." It is a famous prayer.

There is one horrifying instance in opera where you hear it. At the end of Poulenc's "Dialogues of the Carmelites" the nuns sing the "Salve Regina" as they go to the guillotine one by one. This opera was unfortunately based on a true story. There were these nuns who were martyered in the French Revolution. Their feast day is July 17. What savage days. What an awful thing the French Revolution was. A terrible time and a big blot on the history of France if you ask me.



That is a Metropolitan Opera production with Jessye Norman as the Mother Superior. She has such presence. If I were, God forbid, in that situation, I would want Jessye Norman as my Mother Superior, I will tell you that right now.

Anyway. Not a good thing to watch before bed, you know?

I think I will go back to the chant.

Springtime in Paris

My friend Professor G posted this beautiful link on my Facebook page. It is of a Mass in a church in Paris.

The video is so beautiful. As the choir sings you see the children in the congregation. A baby sleeping in her crib. So pretty. At the Tridentine Mass people do not whisper and chitchat the way they do in modern Masses. That is one thing I like about it. I used to chitchat back in the day but as soon as I walked in to my first Tridentine Mass I knew right away not to.

They sing the same Kyrie we sing at St. Anthony of Padua Church here in Buffalo. 9 a.m. Sundays, folks. Come and sing that beautiful Kyrie with us!

They also sing the same Gloria. That is the Gloria of St. Gregory the Great that the great Ottorino Respighi works into his sparkling  "Church Windows." Listen to the end and you will hear that Gloria ring out. Isn't that marvelous over-the-top music? I know it well because the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra recorded it.



I love how in the top video, the choir and congregation alternate in the Gloria to make it a kind of call and response. Prof. G pointed out that they do that.

Can a giant hand pick me up and put me down in Paris so I can go to this Mass?

And after that I could hit a nice little place on the Left Bank. ...

Well, I am sure God would not mind.

Live from the 9th century

It is Advent and so I am hitting the Gregorian chant. The "Rorate Caeli" is a chant I love.

It is haunting, that the Nativity was foretold in the strange and poetic words of Isaiah.

This is strange but I never thought about any of this before I started going to the Tridentine Mass ...



(cool video) ...

...just about, yikes, four years ago. How time flies! Now I have this new feeling about going through the seasons. I never knew the "Rorate Caeli" before but now when I hear it, it gives me the feeling of this time of year. Just like other chants and melodies now mean other times of year to me. Music I never knew before.

We also got to sing "O Come, O Come Emmanuel." I was thinking how old that song is! And most people know it. It is actually hard to find a version not sung by a rock or pop singer.



Most sources say that the hymn dates to the 12th century. However. However! The jacket to my record of the Roger Wagner Chorale says that hymn dates to the 9th century!

To the 800s! Imagine! You could go back in time to the year 850 and go into a cathedral and be able to sing "O Come O Come Emmanuel." "Veni Veni Emmanuel," that is. It is advised to learn the hymn in Latin because you never know when you might inadvertently wind up in the year 850.

So here, as a public service:

Veni, veni Emmanuel;
Captivum solve Israel,
Qui gemit in exilio,
Privatus Dei Filio.

Refrain
Gaude! Gaude! Emmanuel,
Nascetur pro te, Israel!

Veni, veni, O Oriens;
Solare nos adveniens,
Noctis depelle nebulas,
Dirasque noctis tenebras.
Refrain

Veni, Clavis Davidica!
Regna reclude caelica; 
Fac iter tutum superum,
Et claude vias inferum.
Refrain

Veni, veni Adonai!
Qui populo in Sinai,
Legem dedisti vertice,
In maiestate gloriae.
Refrain

If Mannheim Steamroller can do it so can we.



An incredible hymn. Timeless!

The Advent season has officially begun.