OUR DIGITALLY SATURATED AGE offers us many possibilities for Lenten devotions that connect us to the beauty of the Church’s liturgical tradition. One can read about the pope’s ancient station liturgy, perhaps making a sort of spiritual pilgrimage to those wonderful churches. In my diocese, our bishop is instituting a similar local practice. Or one can read the daily gospels, an ancient sequence of readings that nourish us spiritually and guide us to the great mysteries of the font on the Easter vigil. Today I would like to propose another ancient liturgical series for the season: the communion antiphons for the Lenten weekdays.
Psalms in Order • Scholars have long known that the communion chants on the weekdays from Ash Wednesday to the Friday before Palm Sunday are taken in order from the first twenty-six psalms, one psalm for each day. I think this is less well known among parish musicians because so few of us have an opportunity to sing Gregorian chant at enough Lenten weekdays to notice the pattern. For instance, I mentioned this fact in passing at Mass yesterday to one of my chanters, a man who has many of the Sunday propers by heart and has sung his way around the liturgical year for decades, and he did not know it.
Why only twenty-six psalms? A few days are left out of the sequence; in those cases the communion antiphon comes from the gospel of the day. The other missing days are the Thursdays, since Lenten Thursdays originally had no proper Mass; these were added later. The sequence is interesting in terms of how the chant was put together, because we can see the composers of the Roman schola working systematically through a series of texts, and it is always revealing to see the slight alterations they make to a text to turn it into a suitable Communion chant.
Psalms 1, Distilled • The Mass of Ash Wednesday begins the series, drawing from the first psalm, which offers a comparison between the faithful man and a wicked, unfaithful one. Here is the portion of the text about the faithful man:
Beatus vir qui non abiit in consilio impiorum, et in via peccatorum non stetit, et in cathedra pestilentiae non sedit; sed in lege Domini voluntas ejus, et in lege ejus meditabitur die ac nocte. Et erit tamquam lignum quod plantatum est secus decursus aquarum, quod fructum suum dabit in tempore suo : et folium ejus non defluet; et omnia quaecumque faciet prosperabuntur.
The Douay-Rheims gives the following:
Blessed is the man who hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly, nor stood in the way of sinners, nor sat in the chair of pestilence. But his will is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he shall meditate day and night. And he shall be like a tree which is planted near the running waters, which shall bring forth its fruit, in due season. And his leaf shall not fall off: and all whatsoever he shall do shall prosper.
Whenever I read this psalm, I am always struck by the three verbs in the first part: the things we must avoid to be blessed. There is a progression of falling off the path, first one walks toward sin, then stands with it, and finally sits in the chair of pestilence. The only true remedy, of course, is to fix our eyes on the Lord, to meditate on his law day and night, and we shall be planted like a tree by the running waters. The future tense of this is so hopeful, and offers us a view of continuing conversion; the things the blessed man has not done are in the past, but he shall meditate on the law of the lord. The running waters and the tree evoke all kinds of images, including baptism. We can also easily read this as a poem about Christ, the God-man who came among us but offered his perfect will to his Father. The tree then calls to mind the tree of life but also the tree of the Cross, and the fruit in that reading is his own Body. Perhaps such thoughts are suitable for meditation at Holy Communion.
Whatever we make of this poetic imagery, the composer of the chant does a remarkable job distilling all of this into a short text that is a good length for a communion chant. I have shown the chant text in bold in the Latin above. We might translate it thus; “The one who shall meditate on the law of the Lord day and night shall bring forth his fruit in due season.”
The chant is in Mode 3, the mode of mysticism; the opening gesture on “qui meditabitur” is characteristic of the mode. The music divides neatly into two phrases, with identical cadences on E at the end of each one. I love the way the classic Solesmes authors analyze the melodic contour and accentuation of a chant, and I still recommend this to singers who want to make a beautiful song out of the melody. Most of the words fit the bill for proper melodic accent, with the accent tending to the high notes mimicking the natural melodic shape of beautiful rhetorical declamation. But this kind of thing is even more musically rewarding at the elvel of the phrase. We look for the high point in each melodic arc; this is the word for which we are striving and away from which we go reluctantly, and our dynamic shape and phrasing can work accordingly. In the first phrase, this is “Domini” that receives this emphasis: “The one who shall meditate on the law of the Lord day and night.” In the second phrase, the same is true of “fructum:” “shall bring forth his fruit in due season.”
Singing the Psalms for Lent • Coming at the head of the solemn fast of Lent, we could perhaps fix our minds on Easter as the promised fruit of our devotions, especially if we take this chant as the beginning of a series designed for our own sanctification. I have never done it yet, but I suppose that a weekday walk through the psalter with the Communion chants could be a fruitful Lenten observance. These chants are seldom done in parishes and would probably reward some study and some devotional reading and singing. At any rate, I wish all of our readers a fruitful and holy Lent; may it be full of chant.
