12 October 2009

And Octoberfest

made me quite grateful for the simplicity of the LSB Psalm tones. True, they are no match for the beauty of the Gregorian tones; but they enable us to focus upon the words of the Psalter and even a musical idiot can pull them off!

6 comments:

Sean said...

if you had some modified gregorian tones in the "LSB 3 note" form, would you use them? anyone can throw together an LSB style tone just as easily as anyone can throw together their own liturgy. That doesn't mean it's catholic. The LSB tones have no basis in the western tones, and are all toni peregrini.

Chris said...

Why were the Gregorian psalm tones abandoned?

William Weedon said...

Sean,

I'd LOVE to see some tones in LSB form that rang along more traditional lines. The LSB/LW/LBW tones have had this great blessing: they taught us to sing the Psalms again, and anyone, but anyone can use them.

Chris,

They were abandoned in Lutheranism when the Latin itself was abandoned. As I indicated to Sean, the challenge was: how do you teach a congregation that is used to speaking Psalms to chant them once again? I don't think attempting to plunge them into the Gregorian Psalms is the way to go (though the Lutherans in Germany have pulled this off with some success). The simple pattern provided a way to engage the whole congregation in chanting them once again, and it's been successful that way over all. But it is a simple pattern that a musician could seek to adapt the more complex Gregorian forms to. I'd love to see some of those!

Chris said...

Fr. Weedon,

AS you know Latin was retained in Lutheranism for about 300 years after its inception and so were the Gregorian Psalm tones. So, once the vernacular was adopted for everything, those went with the Latin? How unfortunate.

William Weedon said...

More serious and deforming than the loss of the tones, were the loss of the old Latin hymns. Those have come back to us only gradually and usually as borrowings from Anglican work.

mlorfeld said...

Personally, I prefer the 4 part Anglican tones (TLH 662-667). Of course, teaching a congregation to chant even the one of the parts, I have found to be challenging (as we tried Matins for the first time without even a runthrough...) It was completely my bad in assuming they would be familiar with Matins. I've been blessed to have been "raised" on pages 15 and 32.