AN OUTSIDE VIEW

The Hail Mary has been changed. Or rather, the Swedish translation has. Having gone to the trouble of learning the old one I am not going to be caught out again so it is Latin for me in future. At least one can be sure that no committee is going to get together and come up with yet another translation. AVE MARIA, gratia plena, Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. Here is the rest of the Rosary . You can download it, format and print on a card. It needs to be in two columns to fit on one side of A4. But when one thinks about it, the prayer is undignified. Hailing is what you do when one wants to get a taxi driver to stop and pick you up. Our Lady is not a taxi and I have never heard of anyone calling "Ave" when they wanted one.

Italian devotion in London , a photo by TheAltruist on Flickr. My first encounter with the Catholic church was here, the Italian church of St Peter's in Clerkenwell Road, London. It was January 1975 and I was there to check out if there was enough light to enable me to take the photographs for some friends whose wedding was due to be held there a week later. As it happens, the only time available was for a Sunday Mass. I will say only that this was an instant conversion and that I did not understand a single word of the proceedings, since the Mass was in Latin and the readings in Italian. It is impossible to say what would have happened if things had been otherwise, but I doubt if my path would have been an easy one if the Mass had been said in English and the music had been the kind of thing that became the norm in Catholic churches a decade later. These things would have been obstacles. I suspect that is true for a lot of people and is a good reason why Mass should not be sai...

It is encouraging that more enlightened counsels are prevailing in some quarters. Musica Sacra , the website of the Church Music Association of America, offers ICEL’s English missal chants in 4-line square-note Gregorian notation for the Order of Mass. ICEL itself offers these chants along with all the other English chants (prefaces, antiphons for particular days, etc.) at its website . ICEL provided the chants to the English-speaking bishops’ conferences in 5-line notation. ICEL considered offering both 4-line and 5-line, and even planned on that for a time. Then it was decided that this would be a waste of ICEL time and resources, since no conference would choose to publish 4-line chant in its liturgical books anyway. Then the question arose: What about those who want to publish the missal chants in 4-line in their own publications? Would that be permitted, though it was not the ‘approved’ ICEL notation? Yes, the thought was, there was no reason not to allow that. ...

The problems with the new Swedish Cecilia referred to previously are a re-run of those caused by ICEL when introducing the new English Mass settings. Here is the dialogue at the introduction to the Preface in the two forms of notation. The upper one is as published by ICEL, the lower is the the Solemnes setting of the Latin text. The flying eggs are not, in fact, part of the musical sequence of breve, semibreve, minim, crotchet, quaver, etc, which have their familiar long-established forms of notations. So far as I can tell they are an invention which has popped out from nothing and nowhere. They are not included in the popular music setting programme Musescore . They are less readable as they do not show the phrasing anything like so clearly as either the traditional square notation or, for that matter, conventional musical notation with tied quavers. The wobbly eggs look ugly in themselves and the musical staves out of place in the context of a page consisting mostly of text. ...

  Here is a comparison of the beginning of Credo 3 in traditional Gregorian chant notation and in modern notation, both to the same scale. The upper example is from Plainsong for Schools, first published around 1930 and the lower example is from the latest edition of Cecilia. It shows how the traditional notation illustrates the phrasing and rhythm of the music in a way that the round-note style does not. The porrectus in "omnium", for instance, is replaced by three spots, which lacking even the indication of a tie which would help to emphasise the fact that here is a group of notes belonging to a single syllable. It is also slightly more compact, making the words easier to read and saving some paper into the bargain. The comparison also demonstrates the superior clarity achieved by putting the music on a stave with four lines instead of five. The notes are larger, the spaces between the lines are bigger, and four lines are easier to read than five. A further benefit of...

The new edition of Cecilia, the hymn book for the Swedish Catholic church, was published today. It retains the same general arrangement as the previous one, which dates from the mid-1980s. The most-used pages are in the middle, which means that the book is less likely to fall apart than when the most-used pages are at the front. The centre pages with the Canon of the Mass are edged with grey, to make them easy to find. The typeface is Palatino and the paper is very thin and pale cream in tint. A large-type version is available. First impressions The ancient Swedish favourites are in, as they should be, since they form an important part of the national musical heritage. And the lesser-used hymns have been weeded out. As the introduction explains, the recommendations of Sacrosanctum Concilium have been faithfully followed: " The universal treasury of Gregorian chant has been given a prominent place, in accordance with the desire of the Second Vatican Council that all believers sh...