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Views from the Choir Loft

PDF Download: Father Charles Dreisoerner’s “Graduale Romanum” In English (202 pages)

Guest Author · December 22, 2014

537 Graduale Romanum ETWEEN the years 1964 and 1968 I was temporarily professed as a religious brother with the Society of Mary. At the end of 1964 the American bishops gave us the first English texts of the Mass. They were literal translations of the Propers and Ordinaries of the Mass. There were a few musicians, or aspiring musicians, in our novitiate class, so, in the absence of any real training in Gregorian chant, we set to work providing music for the Propers. In time, we began using guitar accompaniment to rhythmic settings of the set text.

After taking vows, we were sent to St. Mary’s University, where the brothers’ choir director was Fr. Charles Dreisoerner, SM, a classically trained musician and chant expert, as well as a professor of classics at the school. He found us young brothers to be unenthusiastic about singing chant, even though he had spent many hours matching the chant to the new English translations. Squeaky wheels got oiled back then, and our rebellion led to his being replaced by a younger musician after the first year. The idea that chant could set the English text, however, never left my mind.

      * *  PDF Download: Complete ROMAN GRADUAL in English (1984)

When I had the opportunity to direct a schola for an Anglo-Catholic parish some seventeen years later, I realized that the Anglican missal texts, being very close in meaning to the Latin originals, could be adapted to the authentic chants as found in the Liber Usualis. I had been hired to do some music engraving for a liturgy publication, so I had the tools and some time to take up Fr. Dreisoerner’s work. The result was Chants for the Church Year, which I self-published. It was produced in 8 ½ x 11 loose-leaf fashion, or spiral bound for use with church choirs. Because of the difficulty of the Gradual and Alleluia chants, those were set in simpler styles. I concentrated on the Introit, Offertory and Communion chants, and also engraved some of the chants from Tenebrae in Holy Week. I also wrote a short paper in defense of vernacular chant, which frankly admitted that the ideal was to sing chant in Latin and Greek, but suggested that the best way to preserve and promote it would be to introduce it to choirs in the vernacular.

534 Cunningham Economically, Chants for the Church Year was a losing proposition from the beginning. Fr. Francis Schmitt, who was in the early 1980s the choir director at Boys Town in Nebraska, championed the collection, as in a letter to The American Organist. He purchased a large number of copies for the boys choir at Boys Town. His support was heartening, but the project was, I now see, premature. My wife and I attended the 1983 International Symposium on chant in the liturgy at the Catholic University of America, where we heard several speakers denounce the idea of matching chant to the vernacular. Not long afterwards we left our positions as organist and choirmaster with the Anglo-Catholic parish, which had become one of the first parishes in the Anglican Use in the United States.

I still consider Chants for the Church Year to be a kind of homage to Fr. Charles Driesoerner, who patiently tried to teach us chant in the vernacular. He was right fifty years ago, and we were too cheeky to recognize it. It was at least a comfort to know that he was aware of my efforts to set the vernacular to authentic chant before his passing. May he rest in the peace of Christ, where he sings with all the other monks to whom we owe some of the most beautiful music on earth.


We hope you enjoyed this guest article by Deacon W. Patrick Cunningham.

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

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Chants for the Church Year, Deacon Patrick Cunningham, Graduale Romanum Roman Gradual Propers Last Updated: August 17, 2024

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President’s Corner

    “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
    “Music List” • Pentecost Sunday
    Some have expressed interest in perusing the ORDER OF MUSIC I prepared for Pentecost Sunday (8 June 2025). If such a thing interests you, feel free to download it as a PDF file. Because our choir is on break this week, the music is relatively simple.
    —Jeff Ostrowski
    “Truly Great Processional” • (Pipe Organ)
    I stumbled upon this live recording of a PROCESSIONAL I played on the pipe organ in 2002. It’s an excerpt from a much longer composition by Sebastian Bach. In those days, there weren’t sophisticated recording devices allowing one “fix” wrong notes. (Perhaps they existed, but we didn’t have machines like that.) So it was necessary to play the entire piece from beginning to end. If you’re a church organist, feel free to download the PDF score. I suppose it’s only a matter of time until some joker uses “artificial intelligence” to play music at church … but there’s something so satisfying about playing an organ in real life.
    —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

[Let there be:] “The Latin, the whole Latin, and nothing but the Latin.”

— Cardinal McIntyre (one of the Vatican II fathers)

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