Sing Like a Catholic, by Jeffrey Tucker: order now from Lulu.com

Along with other print-on-demand volumes offered by the Church Music Association of America, Jeffrey Tucker’s new book Sing Like a Catholic — about which I have neglected to blog thus far — is currently storming the best-selling charts of self-publishing enabler Lulu.

We are thrilled to see that the CMAA is listed as #4 in this sales list from the MusicaSacra.com storefront.  If the CMAA emerges as the winner, it will mean an additional $1,500 available for scholarships to attend the Colloquium.  There are two weeks remaining. If you have thought about purchasing a book, please do it now. It might put us over the top and mean so much to many students who want to learn chant.  Thank you!

Sing Like a Catholic is an excellent book, an entirely fitting and inspiring response to Thomas Day’s 1990 bombshell Why Catholics Can’t Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste. For those who wish to peruse the volume before buying, the entire book is available online at Lulu and Scribd.

If it means anything, the author receives nothing in the way of revenue; all proceeds go towards the CMAA scholarship fund. So, simply by purchasing Sing Like a Catholic, you would still be doing a wonderful service for advancing the cause of sacred music in service to the Church, even if CMAA weren’t to win this contest.  However, if enough people spread the word and buy it (and the other valuable books in the CMAA’s Lulu catalog), winning it is absolutely doable.

In your charity, help win scholarship money for a future parish (or cathedral!) director of music — purchase this book or another of the many useful CMAA books from Lulu today!

Like the interlectionary chants in the Graduale Romanum, all of these are in Mode VIII. The melodies are adaptations of those commonly found in the antiphons of the Divine Office, and the psalm tones for the verses (8G or 8c) are fully notated and follow somewhat closely the guidelines given by Bruce Ford in his “Setting English to Gregorian Psalm Tones”. Nothing stunning, but I think they’re reasonably graceful and prayerful.

There is no accompaniment to these settings, but an organist of reasonable ability should be able to improvise an unobtrusive underpin; the settings employ square notation.

These are available on Chabanel individually; alternatively, you may download the .zip archive containing all ten.

At the moment, most of them are based on Gregorian settings from the Graduale Romanum and the Graduale Simplex; the remaining handful are based on Ambrosian and Mozarabic settings found in the aformentioned volumes.

There are MP3 recordings of some of these chants; if there is enough demand, I will create another autoresponder to deliver these to subscribers’ inboxes.

Note that these translated antiphons are not the ones found in the 1974 Graduale Romanum or Gregorian Missal for Sundays (the latter of which Solesmes has made freely available to download from MusicaSacra.com); these are the antiphons found in the Missal.  While there is occasional Scriptural concordance, the passages are just as likely to vary between the Missal and the Gradual.  The story behind that peculiarity is worth another post, but by someone else; I don’t have the history behind it down pat.

These antiphons, besides being in English, are compact enough to be sung either before or after a hymn (in the case of the Entrance and Communion processions). As they are literally a part of the Mass (as opposed to hymns, which are in most cases additive at best), more of the Mass will be sung when these are employed.

Anyway, go ahead and visit SacredMusicProject.com and check out Fr. Kelly’s work.

[Via Jeffrey Tucker @ NLM]

For the musically inclined and the curious, refer to this article where Jeff explains in depth the differences between different schools of Gregorian chant harmonization, and why he believes the Belgian school is superior.

Download the Nova Organi Harmonia here.

* A friend of mine points out that these harmonizations may serve as the basis for harmonized a capella chant as well.

** Perform a search on Graduale Romanum Comitante Organo to find the latest pricing on Solesmes’ three-volume set ordered to the 1974 Graduale Romanum.