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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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President’s Corner

    Luis Martínez Must Go!
    Sevilla Cathedral (entry dated 13 December 1564): The chapter orders Luis Martínez, a cathedral chaplain, to stay away from the choirbook-stand when the rest of the singers gather around it to sing polyphony—the reason being that “he throws the others out of tune.” [Excerpt from “The Life of Father Francisco Guerrero.”]
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    Urgent! • We Desperately Need Funds!
    A few days ago, the president of Corpus Christi Watershed posted this urgent appeal for funds. Please help us make sure we’re never forced to place our content behind a paywall. We feel it’s crucial that 100% of our content remains free to everyone. We’re a tiny 501(c)3 public charity, entirely dependent upon the generosity of small donors. We have no endowment and no major donors. We run no advertisements and have no savings. We beg you to consider donating $4.00 per month. Thank you!
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    “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

Quick Thoughts

    Pope Pius XII Hymnal?
    Have you ever heard of the Pope Pius XII Hymnal? It’s a real book, published in the United States in 1959. Here’s a sample page so you can verify with your own eyes it existed.
    —Corpus Christi Watershed
    “Hybrid” Chant Notation?
    Over the years, many have tried to ‘simplify’ plainsong notation. The O’Fallon Propers attempted to simplify the notation—but ended up making matters worse. Dr. Karl Weinmann tried to do the same in the time of Pope Saint Pius X by replacing each porrectus. You can examine a specimen from his edition and see whether you agree he complicated matters. In particular, look at what he did with éxsules fílii Hévae.
    —Corpus Christi Watershed
    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

Random Quote

In the place of liturgy as the fruit of development came fabricated liturgy. We abandoned the organic, living process of growth and development over centuries, and replaced it—as in a manufacturing process—with a fabrication, a banal on-the-spot product.

— ‘Pope Benedict XVI, describing the postconciliar liturgical reforms’

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