Views from the Choir Loft

Catholic Line Art, Black and White • Installment #02

Cynthia Ostrowski · January 12, 2013 ·

EFORE THE CAMPION MISSAL could be published, it was necessary to collect, scan, sort, clean, and carefully digitize more than 300 religious line art drawings. Credit for this goes to Kristen Ostrowski, who combed through hundreds of 19th century Missals, Antiphonals, Breviaries, and Graduals from a Benedictine Abbey and extracted the pictures which had survived intact.

The St. Edmund Campion Missal & Hymnal for the Traditional Latin Mass (ccwatershed.org/Campion) contains approximately ninety (90) of these exquisite “woodcuts.” In my Blog entries over the next year or so, I will be releasing hundreds of these pictures for general use by Catholics everywhere.

The following piece of line art was used for the Feast of the Epiphany in the Campion Missal:

* * 7922 • B/W Epiphany / Religious Line Art [download this pdf]

Traditionally, the Feast of the Epiphany celebrated three events: (1) The visit of the Magi; (2) Our Lord’s first Miracle at Cana; and (3) The Baptism of the Lord at the River Jordan. The above picture focuses on the visit of the Magi, but we will also be releasing Epiphany drawings that stress all three events.

* To learn more, you may want to visit the Campion Missal website [url].

About Cynthia Ostrowski

Cynthia Ostrowski holds a bachelor's degree in Geographic Information Science and a minor in Computer Science from Texas A&M University Corpus Christi (2005). She is currently a stay-at-home mother of two children. A former GIS analyst, Cynthia's interests include photography, french horn, and singing polyphony.

Could Pope St. Pius X Sing?

“On 12 March 1908, the complete publication of the Roman Gradual was issued by the Vatican Press. On that very day, Dom Pothier solemnly presented the first copy to the Holy Father. A witness of the audience says that Pius X wished to be the first to see the new book; he opened it at random, at page 128 of the supplement pro aliquibus locis—it was the Introit of the new Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. The Pope sang it with perfect taste to the last note.” (Catholic Choirmaster, February 1915)

—Jeff Ostrowski

Julius Bas Accompaniment

A very prolific harmonizer of Gregorian chant in the early 20th century was Mr. Julius Bas. He often uses a very strange technique, wherein he employs rests to eliminate the Alto, Tenor, and Bass voices. Consider what he did with “Lumen ad revelationem” here:

* JPEG • Lumen ad revelationem

It seems quite lazy, and I’ve never seen anyone else use such a technique, although Dr. Peter Wagner often switched to parallel octaves when he ran out of ideas… (Yuck!)

—Jeff Ostrowski

Hitting wrong notes

Fr. Valentine Young, OFM, used to say: “The organist can play 1,000 correct notes and one wrong note—and the only thing people will care about is the wrong note.” Last Sunday I hit some wrong notes, and felt bad. Then I remembered a story about Rudolf Serkin and started to chuckle. Charles Rosen (or was it Leon Fleisher?) told the story of Serkin playing a Beethoven Sonata in front of a large audience. The theme is all in octaves; but Serkin hit some wrong notes, and played parallel 7ths instead. This so unnerved him that every time the theme returned, he played the entire thing in parallel 7ths! We must remember that even the greatest hit wrong notes. Alfred Cortot, Vladimir Horowitz, Wilhelm Backhaus, Edwin Fischer, Sviatoslav Richter, Egon Petri—they all hit wrong notes, which we can hear on recordings. (Josef Hofmann was an exception, but he was super-human so he doesn’t count!)

—Jeff Ostrowski