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Views from the Choir Loft

The first ever Graduale Romanum in English?

Guest Author · August 12, 2013

A guest article by Deacon William Patrick Cunningham.


509 GRADUALE URING THE LATE 1960s, I was a temporary professed with the Society of Mary, pursuing a degree in chemistry with a music minor at St. Mary’s University. At novitiate, we had experimented with the first texts in English for the Mass, and we thought we were God’s gift to liturgical music. When we began our college studies the following year, we found that the music director was Fr. Charles Dreisoerner, SM, who looked to our teenage eyes like he was a hundred years old, and who expected us to be able to sing Gregorian chant from the Liber Usualis. We had not picked up one of those since the English Mass was introduced early in 1965. To Fr. Charles’ credit, he was experimenting with the new English texts being forced into the given Gregorian melodies. I don’t believe any of his mimeographed work has actually survived to this day, but that might be something for an MA thesis-seeker. At any rate, we spent most of the year demanding a new music director, and we got one. I spent the next couple of years with my colleagues introducing the “folk Mass” (actually lite rock) to our Archdiocese. It caught on nationally, and I have been repenting and doing penance for my sin ever since that time.

In 1978, my wife and I learned from Col Roger Darley that the main chapel at Ft. Sam Houston was in need of a Catholic choir director and organist. We had just left a local parish, where the new pastor had tried to get us to abandon any music with a connection to the past. We were under the impression that the chapel wanted to use chant. That was not correct, but it got me thinking about taking up the challenge laid down by Vatican II and Fr. Dreisoerner almost two decades earlier.

After a couple of years, we left the Post chapel ministry and shortly afterwards got involved with the Anglicans seeking union with the Catholic Church. This was a group that later became the Anglican use community of Our Lady of the Atonement in San Antonio. They wanted to use the Gregorian propers with the translation from the Anglican missal, so I got to work putting them together from the 1974 Graduale Romanum, week by week. I was doing some music scribing with K&E engineering hardware for another music publication, so I transcribed the chant into five-line notation. Ultimately our little publishing company put it together in two volumes, which together were called Chants for the Church Year.

Initially, some modest advertising brought a spate of single-copy orders, and a couple of larger ones, especially from Msgr. Francis P. Schmitt of Boys Town. We left the Anglican use parish not long after it was established as a Catholic parish. Msgr. Schmidt lost the Boys Town appointment a couple of years later. The English chant Gradual project languished until CMAA and its members brought it back three decades later.

To download a 270-page “Englished” Psalter by Deacon Cunningham, click here.

Opinions by blog authors do not necessarily represent the views of Corpus Christi Watershed.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Deacon Patrick Cunningham Last Updated: August 17, 2024

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Corpus Christi Watershed

President’s Corner

    PDF Download • “Polyphonic Extension” (Kevin Allen) for Gloria III
    EVIN ALLEN was commissioned by Sacred Music Symposium 2025 to compose a polyphonic ‘middle section’ for the GLORIA from Mass III, often denoted by its trope name: Missa Kyrie Deus sempiterne. This year, I’m traveling from Singapore to serve on the symposium faculty. I will be conducting Palestrina’s ‘Ave Maria’ as well as teaching plainsong to the men. A few days ago, I was asked to record rehearsal videos for this beautiful polyphonic extension. (See below.) This polyphonic composition fits ‘inside’ GLORIA III. That is, the congregation sings for the beginning and end, but the choir alone adds polyphony to the middle. The easiest way to understand how everything fits together is by examining this congregational insert. You may download the score, generously made available to the whole world—free of charge—by CORPUS CHRISTI WATERSHED:
    *  PDF Download • Gloria III ‘Middle Section’ (Kevin Allen)
    Free rehearsal videos for each individual voice await you at #24366. Related News • My colleague, Jeff Ostrowski, composed an organ accompaniment for this same GLORIA a few months ago. Obviously, the organist should drop out when the polyphony is being sung.
    —Corrinne May
    “Booklet of Eucharistic Hymns” (16 pages)
    I was asked to create a booklet for my parish to use during our CORPUS CHRISTI PROCESSION on 22 June 2025. Would you be willing to look over the DRAFT BOOKLET (16 pages) I came up with? I tried to include a variety of hymns: some have a refrain; some are in major, others in minor; some are metered, others are plainsong; some are in Spanish, some are in Latin, but most are in English. Normally, we’d use the Brébeuf Hymnal—but we can’t risk having our congregation carry those heavy books all over the city to various churches.
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    “Yahweh” in church songs?
    My pastor asked me to write a weekly column for our parish bulletin. The one scheduled to run on 22 June 2025 is called “Three Words in a Psalm” and speaks of translating the TETRAGRAMMATON. You can read the article at this column repository. All of them are quite brief because I was asked to keep within a certain word limit.
    —Jeff Ostrowski

Quick Thoughts

    Antiphons Don’t Match?
    A reader wants to know why the Entrance and Communion antiphons in certain publications deviate from what’s prescribed by the GRADUALE ROMANUM published after Vatican II. Click here to read our answer. The short answer is: the Adalbert Propers were never intended to be sung. They were intended for private Masses only (or Masses without music). The “Graduale Parvum,” published by the John Henry Newman Institute of Liturgical Music in 2023, mostly uses the Adalbert Propers—but sometimes uses the GRADUALE text: e.g. Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul (29 June).
    —Corpus Christi Watershed
    When to Sit, Stand and Kneel like it’s 1962
    There are lots of different guides to postures for Mass, but I couldn’t find one which matched our local Latin Mass, so I made this one: sit-stand-kneel-crop
    —Veronica Brandt
    The Funeral Rites of the Graduale Romanum
    Lately I have been paging through the 1974 Graduale Romanum (see p. 678 ff.) and have been fascinated by the funeral rites found therein, especially the simply-beautiful Psalmody that is appointed for all the different occasions before and after the funeral Mass: at the vigil/wake, at the house of the deceased, processing to the church, at the church, processing to the cemetery, and at the cemetery. Would that this “stational Psalmody” of the Novus Ordo funeral rites saw wider usage! If you or anyone you know have ever used it, please do let me know.
    —Daniel Tucker

Random Quote

Using the shoddiest, sleaziest material we have for the purpose of glorifying God is not very sound theology or even very good common sense. […] (In general, when you see a diminished seventh chord in a hymn, run.) And these chords are usually used in bad hymns in precisely the same order in which they occur in “Sweet Adeline.”

— Paul Hume (1956)

Recent Posts

  • PDF Download • “Polyphonic Extension” (Kevin Allen) for Gloria III
  • “Booklet of Eucharistic Hymns” (16 pages)
  • PDF Download • “Text by Saint Francis of Assisi” (choral setting w/ organ: Soprano & Alto)
  • “Yahweh” in church songs?
  • “Music List” • Pentecost Sunday

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