• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Corpus Christi Watershed

“What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too…” Pope Benedict XVI (7 July 2007)

  • Our Team
  • Pew Resources
    • Brébeuf Catholic Hymnal
    • Jogues Illuminated Missal
    • Campion Missal, 3rd Edition
  • MUSICAL WEBSITES
    • René Goupil Gregorian Chant
    • Noël Chabanel Psalms
    • Nova Organi Harmonia (2,279 pages)
    • Lalemant Polyphonic
    • Saint Antoine Daniel KYRIALE
    • Roman Missal, 3rd Edition
    • Emporium Kevin Allen
  • Miscellaneous
    • Site Map
    • Saint Jean de Lalande Library
    • Sacred Music Symposium 2023
  • Donate
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 Last Updated: January 1, 2020

Subscribe

It greatly helps us if you subscribe to our mailing list!

* indicates required

Primary Sidebar

Corpus Christi Watershed

Quick Thoughts

    Vespers Booklet (4th Sunday of Lent)
    The organ accompaniment booklet (24 pages) which I created for the 4th Sunday of Lent (“Lætare Sunday”) may now be downloaded, for those who desire such a thing.
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    Vespers Booklet, 3rd Sunday of Lent
    The organ accompaniment I created for the 3rd Sunday of Lent (“Extraordinary Form”) may now be downloaded, if anyone is interested in this.
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    Weeping For Joy! (We Hope!)
    Listening to this Easter Alleluia—an SATB arrangement I made twenty years ago based on the work of Monsignor Jules Van Nuffel—one of our readers left this comment: “I get tears in my eyes each time I sing to this hymn.” I hope this person is weeping for joy!
    —Jeff Ostrowski

Random Quote

Legitimate and necessary concern for current realities in the concrete lives of people cannot make us forget the true nature of the liturgical actions. It is clear that the Mass is not the time to “celebrate” human dignity or purely terrestrial claims or hopes. It is rather the sacrifice which renders Christ really present in the sacrament.

— Pope Saint John Paul II (20 March 1990)

Recent Posts

  • Question: “How Do You Read The Official Edition?”
  • PDF Download • “Organ Accompaniment Booklet” (Passion Sunday Vespers) — 24 pages
  • Vespers for Easter Wednesday, Thursday and Friday
  • Hidden Gem: Ave Regina Caelorum (Steven Talley)
  • Four (4) Shimmery Hymns for Lent & Passiontide

Subscribe

Subscribe

* indicates required

Copyright © 2023 Corpus Christi Watershed · Isaac Jogues on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in

Corpus Christi Watershed is a 501(c)3 public charity dedicated to exploring and embodying as our calling the relationship of religion, culture, and the arts. This non-profit organization employs the creative media in service of theology, the Church, and Christian culture for the enrichment and enjoyment of the public.