Monastero San Benedetto, Norcia Italy: Requiem

Here's another monastic community - that's a link to their blog - that posts daily audio files of their masses and of the Divine Office; they are Benedictines in Norcia, Italy.  Here's a 2-minute video about their community; they talk about chant but unfortunately don't include any here. 





Today's Mass - "AD MISSAM DE FERIA II : 2 SEP 2013" - is a Requiem, apparently; here's the mp3 of that.  Beautiful.

Choir Books, at the Biblioteca Nacional de España

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.

There are two links on the page:  one that gives Access to the database; the other links to The music and musicology collection.  I believe that "the ecclesiastical confiscations of the 19th century" is a reference to this event described at Wikipedia:

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!

"Hallo again to all....."

Anglicans Online's article about Marcella Pattyn is so lovely that it actually deserves its own post. Here it is, in full.

Hallo again to all.

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.

Chanted monastic offices, live for desktop or iPhone

Here's something pretty interesting, from the Abbaye Sainte-Madeleine du Barroux:

Listen to our offices live

“There is only one problem in the whole world: restoring spiritual sense in people. Showering on them something like a Gregorian chant.”

- Saint-Exupéry

The monks of Le Barroux invite you to follow live the liturgical offices, entirely sung in Gregorian in the extraordinary form of the Roman Catholic rite. This initiative is supported by Mgr Jean-Pierre Cattenoz, the archbishop of Avignon.

Four times a day, on your iPhone with the Barroux application, or on your computer, you will be able to connect to the great liturgical prayer of the Church.

The offices broadcast live are :

Prime: 7:45 or 8:00 (see the time-table)
Sext: 12:15 every day.
Vespers: 17:30 every day.
Compline: 19:45 every day.

They offer some help with office materials, too:

Books to follow the offices — Two choices are available :

Latin/French booklets containing the main part of the offices: psalms, antiphons and hymns of various liturgical periods : see the selection.

Monastic ‘Diurnal’ containing all of the day’s Benedictine office, in Latin/French (from Lauds with Compline), according to the monastic breviary of 1963, with all the festivals of Temporal and the Sanctoral : see the diurnal.

I had some problems getting the files to play on my PC from that site, and I don't have an iPhone - but there is another site, barrouxchant.com, that seems to post all four daily files for listening at any time during the day.  (Obviously, time zone differences have to be taken into account).

Here's the blurb from the barrouxchant.com site:

The monks of the Abbaye Sainte-Madeleine du Barroux stream their chanted Office each day as explained on their website. For those of us who do not live in European time zones, this project attempts to automatically record their hours and make them available for download.

You can also subscribe to the hours as a podcast or on iTunes.

These are automatically generated, so there may be some errors. If you find any (or if you have any other comments), please let me know!

I did have some problems playing a couple of the files from that page; perhaps they'll work out the kinks eventually.  (The podcast seems to work well, though; I just listened to Vespers in its entirety, without a problem.  The feed is run through Feedburner and points to files on archive.org.)  There are links at barrouxchant.com to the office texts at DivinumOfficium.com; the texts are side-by-side in Latin and English, so it's very easy to follow along. (You can always go to DivinumOfficium.com directly and find these texts, anyway!  Use the arrows at the top of the page to get the right date, and choose the office itself in the links at bottom; the BarrouxChant seems to point generally to "Pre-Tritdent Monastic.")

So, interesting things are happening!   As far as I can tell, this is a new monastery; the history given at the site begins in 1970, and starts this way:

August 24th, 1970: A Benedictine monk arrives on a moped, with a few belongings, at the Chapel of St. Mary Magdalen in the Vaucluse region of south-east France. What is he doing here ? At a time of turbulent change, he intends simply to continue his monastic life with his Abbot’s permission and to live according to the tradition of prayer, silence, manual work, the divine office in latin and the traditional liturgy. What will the future hold ? “That’s God’s business !”, replies Dom Gérard.

Here's a picture of the place; image by "Jean-Marc Rosier from http://www.rosier.pro."

New York Polyphony: Devices & Desires

About:

The outcome of a highly successful online Gregorian chant remix competition sponsored by Indaba Music, Devices & Desires puts a modern spin on the Medieval. Newly expanded for 2013, this experimental 11-song digital-only EP features groundbreaking remixes of ’Victimae paschali laudes’, ’Gaudeamus in omnes Domino’, and ’Beati mundo corde’, three of plainchant’s most celebrated melodies.

From the pointillistic explorations of David Minnick to the halo of Eileen Carpio’s vocal harmonies, the remixes chart new creative ground. And when paired with the original chants—recorded exclusively for this collection by New York Polyphony—they combine to create a fascinating juxtaposition of ancient and modern music.

For more information on Devices & Desires and to go behind-the-scenes with the remix creators, follow this link. (And if you really want a treat, check out the music video for Alex B’s remix of ‘Victimae paschali laudes’!)

Here's that video:  



Apparently many interesting things have come out of this project!   From NYP's Facebook page:

Last year, with the help of Indaba Music, we sponsored the FIRST-EVER online Gregorian chant competition. It was a huge success. We received hundreds of remixes in a dizzying array of styles from musicians all over the world!

The winning remixes (alongside our original chant recordings) are available on DEVICES & DESIRES, an 11-track digital-only release. More details on our website.

One of the winners, Alex B, produced a music video for his remix of Victimae paschali laudes. (WARNING: his guitar solo at 4:48 will blow your face off.)

Messe des Rameaux

Palm Sunday mass, broadcast in French, from St. Peter's:



If you don't speak French, though, that voice-over narration might be kind of annoying.  Here's the straight-ahead stream, without narration; really beautiful:



Here's another one in French, from (perhaps?) Notre Dame:

"Palm Sunday Liturgy and Procession 03.24.13" from Trinity Wall Street

Here, including the sung Passion - not Gregorian, but their own composition - from Luke's Gospel.

"Praying Our Lives: Daily Videos for Lent 2013" from the SSJE

At their site.  Here's today's video:

Webcasts from the Choir of New College Oxford

Thanks to Saturday Chorale for pointing out this page of Webcasts from the Choir of New College Oxford.

Mostly Evensong, there are some Communion and Carol services here, too; check the archives page as well.  Listening just now to February 17; the canticles are Howells' Collegium Regale - and both the choir and the sound quality are really very, very good.

The Liber Hymnarius wiki

A new (to me) and very interesting-looking website, the Liber Hymnarius wiki. From the main page:

Liber Hymnarius wiki

Dedicated to Our Lady, in memory of her nativity.
Welcome to the Liber Hymnarius wiki, a place where recordings and translations of the contents of the Liber Hymnarius can be collected.

And an information box there says this:

Under Construction The vast majority of the pages on this wiki have not yet been created. Blue links lead to pages that have already been worked on, while red links lead to pages that are still waiting to be made.

Which means that those of us with an interest in these things can contribute to this project.  The Community Portal page says this:

There are two big goals for the Liber Hymnarius wiki:

• to provide recordings of the hymns of the Liber Hymnarius
  
• to provide translations of the hymns.
  

For recordings, please try to keep the third line from the bottom on A.

“What can I do to help?”

Plenty! There are one big and two smaller areas that have yet to be tackled:

• The big one: cross-reference of the melodies. Noticed how many
  of the melodies are the same? It would be great to easily be able to
  pull up all the hymns with the same melody. Right now, the only way to
  do that is to sift through the category each hymn is placed in according
  to meter. Huge thanks to Benstox for getting this going!
  
• A littler one: cross-reference of the authors. For example, it
  would be nice to search for St. Ambrose and find a page for him with
  links to his hymns. Again, thanks to Benstox for putting in the time necessary to make this happen!
  
• A littler one: cross-reference of the liturgical usage. Right
  now, coming to a particular hymn page from an outside website (like a
  search engine) won't tell you for what the hymn is used.
  

Many thanks also to Brennansia for providing so many translations!


Anything you can do to help is greatly appreciated!

Recordings that Contain Errors

• Festiva vos, archangeli
• Angelum pacis

In any case, it means that there is now a resource on the web dedicated to the hymnody of the hours, which is certainly an excellent thing.

The site contains, at the moment, these sections:

• Proprium de Tempore
• Tempus per Annum
• Communia Sanctorum
• Proprium de Sanctis
• Alia

And links to these external sources:

• Errata corrigenda
• Abbaye de Solesmes, the publisher of the Liber Hymnarius
• Liturgia Horarum

"The World at Our Fingertips: 23 Beautiful Old Texts, Available Online"

Fantastic! A 10th-Century Iliad! The Magna Carta! The Dead Sea scrolls, if you can believe that! Here: The World at Our Fingertips: 23 Beautiful Old Texts, Available Online - Rebecca J. Rosen - Technology - The Atlantic.

The Internet's collection of old manuscripts is not only growing in size but improving in quality. With a few clicks of the mouse you can zoom in on some of the earliest Hebrew scrolls, the handwritten works of Leonardo da Vinci or Jane Austen, and the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence. The British Library's digital editions include supplemental materials such as translations, explanatory essays, and, in the case of Mozart's notes, audio files of the songs he sketched out. Below, a gallery of some of the best examples of the original manuscripts online.

The Whale Song Project

Whales | Home

Welcome to the Whale Song Project You can help marine researchers understand what whales are saying. Listen to the large sound and find the small one that matches it best. Click 'Help' below for an interactive guide

Quite wonderful. Go here.

("And there is that Leviathan, which you have made for the sport of it!")

Dead Sea Scrolls Are Now Online : The Two-Way : NPR

Dead Sea Scrolls Are Now Online : The Two-Way : NPR

Sebastian Scheiner/AP.Shai Halevi, a photographer working for the Israel Antiquities Authority, IAA, photographs fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are 2,000 years old and very sensitive to direct light. At the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where they are housed, the scrolls are rotated every few months to minimize the damage. As Bloomberg explains it, the Great Isaiah Scroll, which is the most ancient biblical manuscript on Earth, is so sensitive that only a copy of it is on display.

Now, though, in cooperation with Google, the museum has digitized five of those scrolls and today they were made available online.

The scrolls are searchable in English and they were digitized using a $250,000 high-resolution camera, so you can zoom in and get a feel for the animal skin they was written on.

Here's a video explaining the digitization and the importance of the scrolls:

Source: YouTube

And the AP provides further background:

The five scrolls are among those purchased by Israeli researchers between 1947 and 1967 from antiquities dealers, having first been found by Bedouin shepherds in the Judean Desert.

The scrolls, considered by many to be the most significant archaeological find of the 20th century, are thought to have been written or collected by an ascetic Jewish sect that fled Jerusalem for the desert 2,000 years ago and settled at Qumran, on the banks of the Dead Sea. The hundreds of manuscripts that survived, partially or in full, in caves near the site, have shed light on the development of the Hebrew Bible and the origins of Christianity.

The most complete scrolls are held by the Israel Museum, with more pieces and smaller fragments found in other institutions and private collections. Tens of thousands of fragments from 900 Dead Sea manuscripts are held by the Israel Antiquities Authority, which has separately begun its own project to put them online in conjunction with Google.

Studio Access: New York Polyphony Gregorian Chant Remix Opportunity - Indaba Music

Studio Access: New York Polyphony Gregorian Chant Remix Opportunity - Indaba Music

It's an interesting idea; check it out, and send them something!

New York Polyphony Gregorian Chant Remix Opportunity

Enter the 3 Opportunities Below to Win $1,500 in Cash and a Release on Sony's Ariama Online Classical Music Store!

Gregorian chant lies at the very heart of Western music. It's a thread that runs unbroken through nearly two thousand years of musical expression and its presence can be felt not only in countless creative works, but also in our modern concepts of harmony, melody and form. The influence of plainchant is so complete, it’s as if we know these melodies—consciously or not—at the genetic level.

For centuries, Gregorian chant has been subjected to every compositional technique, treatment and device imaginable—remixed long before anyone even thought to call it that. But now, with the tools available to musicians in the 21st century, it’s time for the next generation of reinvention. Now it's your turn.

Acclaimed classical vocal quartet New York Polyphony and Indaba are giving you the opportunity to put your own unique spin on Gregorian chant. They are providing the stem sets to three different plainchants: "Victimae paschali laudes”, “Gaudeamus in omnes Domino”, and “Beati mundo corde”. Each chant is featured in its own contest, allowing you to remix your favorite.

Submit your music and breathe new life into these ancient melodies.

A New View

Today, March 31, Blogger - i.e., Google - put out a preview of some new formats called "Views." At some point I will be able to change the layout of this blog to my favorite of these formats ("sidebar"), but at the moment a user is required to append the word "view" to the URL. Here's what the views look like - there are 5 of them; use the little dropdown to switch between them - but you will have to do the appending each time. There are still some glitches, but you'll get the flavor.

Better still - I'll put a link in the sidebar here so that you can switch when you come to the page. They are much nicer than the whole long scroll thing you have to do currently - especially on a blog like this one, which is so heavy with video that it takes a long time to load the whole page. I cut down to only 8 posts on the main page (from 12) because of this problem, but I'm sure it's still very slow. That will change once I can use the template; meantime, it's got to be done by you, by hand - if you want.

Download Ockeghem, Dufay, Dunstable MP3s: Antioch Chorus

Download Ockeghem, Dufay, Dunstable MP3s: Antioch Chorus

There's some really wonderful early polyphony at the above link - with mp3s available for download for free; they ask only that you send a thank-you note. These were recorded live on two different European tours; more about that here.

Here's what they're offering:

Guillaume Dufay

Missa Ave Regina caelorum (1973 recording)

Antiphon Ave Regina caelorum (1975 recording)

Cantilena Flos florum (1975 recording)

Alleluia from Missa Sancti Jacobi (1975 recording)

John Dunstable

Textless Motet (1973 recording)

Textless Motet (1975 recording)

Textless Motet (low-quality 1996 reunion recording)

Johannes Ockeghem

Requiem (Missa pro defuntis) (1973 recording)

Kyrie from Missa Cuíusvis toni, mixolydian mode

Kyrie from Missa Cuíusvis toni, phrygian mode (1973 recordings)

Missa Prolationum (1975 recording)

Kyrie and Gloria from Missa Prolationum (low-quality 1996 reunion recording)

So listen, download - and send the note! thankyou@antiochchorus.com.

The Global Chant Database

I've posted on this before, but here's an updated version, at a new web address.

This is a beta version of the new Global Chant Database - Gregorian Chant Research Interface. The old version is available at www.globalchant.org.

The main ideas of the Global Chant Database:

• Everyone searching for a concrete chant or medieval manuscript should find the information on what is the content of the manuscript, in which editions the repertory can be found, which publications concern with the manuscript and which scholars have done research on this manuscript.
• Everyone doing research on a plainchant manuscript can share the results with the scholar community.
• The database aims to follow the principles of the Cantus Planus Study Group, concerning the free exchange of data in electronic form.

Please register to access the full content of the database. Only registered users can add a new data.

More:

The Global Chant Database was developed by Jan Koláček - PhD student of the Institute of Musicology at the Charles University in Prague. The database is intended as an easy tool for scholars and students to search and identify plainchant melodies with a possibility of displaying the sources. The purpose of the database is to comprise the chant incipits of all important editions of plainchant and medieval manuscripts.