Views from the Choir Loft

Music Conference at the Vatican

Fr. David Friel · January 27, 2021

HE VATICAN’S Pontifical Council for Culture (PCC) has announced that it is organizing its fourth conference on sacred music. The PCC, which organized its last conference in September 2018, will host this event entirely online, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The positive result is that attending the conference is now much easier for those who do not live in Rome.

Cardinal Ravasi

The upcoming conference is only a few days away, scheduled for 4–5 February 2021. The virtual gathering is entitled Church and Music: Texts and Contexts , and it will include themes such as hermeneutics, translation, language, and form.

The announced program includes numerous presentations from a wide range of speakers, including:

“The Reverse of a Tapestry”: Text and Translation — Gianfranco Cardinal Ravasi (President of the Pontifical Council for Culture)

Sung Word, Spoken Word: Liturgical Forms — Jordì-A. Piqué Collado, OSB (Composer, organist, and monk of Montserrat)

Non-Verbal Language in the Liturgy — Pierangelo Muroni (Liturgy Faculty, Pontificio Ateneo Sant’Anselmo)

The conference will feature a message from the Holy Father, Pope Francis, and simultaneous English-Italian and Italian-English translation.

Registration for this conference closes on 29 January 2021. Sign up here.

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

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About Fr. David Friel

Ordained in 2011, Father Friel served as Parochial Vicar at St. Anselm Parish in Northeast Philly. He is currently a doctoral candidate in liturgical theology at The Catholic University of America.—(Read full biography).

Surprising Popularity!

One of our most popular downloads has proven to be the organ accompaniment to “The Monastery Hymnal” (131 pages). This book was compiled, arranged, and edited by Achille P. Bragers, who studied at the Lemmensinstituut (Belgium) about thirty years before that school produced the NOH. Bragers might be considered an example of Belgium “Stile Antico” whereas Flor Peeters and Jules Van Nuffel represented Belgium “Prima Pratica.” You can download the hymnal by Bragers at this link.

—Jeff Ostrowski

15 February 2021 • To Capitalize…?

In the Introit for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost, there is a question regarding whether to capitalize the word “christi.” The Vulgata does not, because Psalm 27 is not specifically referring to Our Lord, but rather to God’s “anointed one.” However, Missals tend to capitalize it, such as the official 1962 Missal and also a book from 1777 called Missel de Paris. Something tells me Monsignor Knox would not capitalize it.

—Jeff Ostrowski

15 February 2021 • “Sung vs. Spoken”

We have spoken quite a bit about “sung vs. spoken” antiphons. We have also noted that the texts of the Graduale Romanum sometimes don’t match the Missal texts (in the Extraordinary Form) because the Mass Propers are older than Saint Jerome’s Vulgate, and sometimes came from the ITALA versions of Sacred Scripture. On occasion, the Missal itself doesn’t match the Vulgate—cf. the Introit “Esto Mihi.” The Vulgate has: “Esto mihi in Deum protectórem et in domum refúgii…” but the Missal and Graduale Romanum use “Esto mihi in Deum protectórem et in locum refúgii…” The 1970s “spoken propers” use the traditional version, as you can see.

—Jeff Ostrowski