You know, of course, that adding instruments and parts to chant was the contemporary worship of its day, considered an unwarranted intrusion of the secular into the sacred.
Not to mention that this Sequence is, out of the dozens that existed and at least a dozen others for Easter like this one, one of exactly four that were allowed to survive after the promulgation of what is now called the Tridentine Rite in 1570. Guess that common language wasn't common enough.
Wipo of Burgundy? That's the usual attribution these days, but anything as good as the Sequence itself -- minus all the stuff -- had to have been composed by a Benedictine, which would have been Notker the Stammerer, aka Balbulus, of the Abbey of St Gall.
Or maybe the little known Wipeout of Bordeaux, of the Abbey of St Bladder?
And, of course, the Lutherans retained them. Not just the few Trent preserved. Each Lord's Day has its sequence and each festival. Tons and tons. They were all "correcta" where needed (and the reason from Scripture notated on the side in some instances), but Lossius has them and so does the Magdeburg Cathedral Book.
We have two rubrical difficulties here! For one, the sequentia arose from the practice of jamming on the last syllable of Alleluia on the way to the ambo to read the Gospel. The novus ordo directs that sequences, which get their name from following the Alleluia, be done before the Alleluia. So then, we should do them where they have always been done when it's DSIII, but do the sequence out of sequence with DSI?
The other is, in many parishes, like mine, there is but one speaker's stand, not both an ambo and a lectern, and it's on the epistle side. Now howduya melismatically jubilate on your way to read the Gospel from the Epistle side (let alone doing the sequence out of sequence to stay in tune so zu sagen with the novus ordo if its DSI)?
Next thing you know, some disaffected praise band member will become a veritable latter day Golliard will start troping to beat hell on all sorts of stuff and we'll have a 21st Century Carmina burana!
Gott hilf mir, "burana" itself referring to Kloster Benediktbeuern, a fine old OSB hang out until the bleeding Salesians got it. Why, die Christine had a distant relative, a fourth cousin twice removed and once reproved, who left in protest when that happened! Godfrey told me all about it.
What? More knee jerkism? I appeal to my predecessor, Jacobus Leodiensis, whose Speculum musicae is a mirror -- that's what a speculum is -- if not a guide and curb, so it at least has one use.
"Wherein does this lasciviousness in singing so greatly please, by which, as some think, the words are lost, the harmony of consonances is diminished, the value of the notes is changed, perfection is brought low, imperfection is exalted, and measure is confounded?"
Everyone knows duple time is unsuitable in worship since it does not reflect the perfection of the Trinity as triple time does. Which is also why everyone likes Strauss waltzes. Thus did Pope John XXII write in his bull (a real bulla, not the usual papal bull):
"Certain disciples of the new school, much occupying themselves with the measured dividing of time, display their method in notes which are new to us, preferring to devise ways of their own rather than to continue singing in the old manner; the music, therefore, of the divine offices is now performed with semibreves and minims, and with these notes of small value every composition is pestered. Moreover, they truncate the melodies with hocket, they deprave them with discantus, sometimes even they stuff them with upper parts made out of secular song. . .We now hasten therefore to banish these methods. . . and to put them to flight more effectually than heretofore, far from the house of God."
4 comments:
You know, of course, that adding instruments and parts to chant was the contemporary worship of its day, considered an unwarranted intrusion of the secular into the sacred.
Not to mention that this Sequence is, out of the dozens that existed and at least a dozen others for Easter like this one, one of exactly four that were allowed to survive after the promulgation of what is now called the Tridentine Rite in 1570. Guess that common language wasn't common enough.
Wipo of Burgundy? That's the usual attribution these days, but anything as good as the Sequence itself -- minus all the stuff -- had to have been composed by a Benedictine, which would have been Notker the Stammerer, aka Balbulus, of the Abbey of St Gall.
Or maybe the little known Wipeout of Bordeaux, of the Abbey of St Bladder?
And, of course, the Lutherans retained them. Not just the few Trent preserved. Each Lord's Day has its sequence and each festival. Tons and tons. They were all "correcta" where needed (and the reason from Scripture notated on the side in some instances), but Lossius has them and so does the Magdeburg Cathedral Book.
aka Past Elder.
We have two rubrical difficulties here! For one, the sequentia arose from the practice of jamming on the last syllable of Alleluia on the way to the ambo to read the Gospel. The novus ordo directs that sequences, which get their name from following the Alleluia, be done before the Alleluia. So then, we should do them where they have always been done when it's DSIII, but do the sequence out of sequence with DSI?
The other is, in many parishes, like mine, there is but one speaker's stand, not both an ambo and a lectern, and it's on the epistle side. Now howduya melismatically jubilate on your way to read the Gospel from the Epistle side (let alone doing the sequence out of sequence to stay in tune so zu sagen with the novus ordo if its DSI)?
Next thing you know, some disaffected praise band member will become a veritable latter day Golliard will start troping to beat hell on all sorts of stuff and we'll have a 21st Century Carmina burana!
Gott hilf mir, "burana" itself referring to Kloster Benediktbeuern, a fine old OSB hang out until the bleeding Salesians got it. Why, die Christine had a distant relative, a fourth cousin twice removed and once reproved, who left in protest when that happened! Godfrey told me all about it.
What? More knee jerkism? I appeal to my predecessor, Jacobus Leodiensis, whose Speculum musicae is a mirror -- that's what a speculum is -- if not a guide and curb, so it at least has one use.
"Wherein does this lasciviousness in singing so greatly please, by which, as some think, the words are lost, the harmony of consonances is diminished, the value of the notes is changed, perfection is brought low, imperfection is exalted, and measure is confounded?"
Everyone knows duple time is unsuitable in worship since it does not reflect the perfection of the Trinity as triple time does. Which is also why everyone likes Strauss waltzes. Thus did Pope John XXII write in his bull (a real bulla, not the usual papal bull):
"Certain disciples of the new school, much occupying themselves with the measured dividing of time, display their method in notes which are new to us, preferring to devise ways of their own rather than to continue singing in the old manner; the music, therefore, of the divine offices is now performed with semibreves and minims, and with these notes of small value every composition is pestered. Moreover, they truncate the melodies with hocket, they deprave them with discantus, sometimes even they stuff them with upper parts made out of secular song. . .We now hasten therefore to banish these methods. . . and to put them to flight more effectually than heretofore, far from the house of God."
Yikes.
If duple time was considered Satanic I wonder how many people outright cursed the 8787 55 56 7 of LSB 656...
:)
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