AN OUTSIDE VIEW

Eventually went to Mass at the Franciscan monastery chapel at Jonsered where for the first time for many years I got the opportunity to join in the singing of Mass I (Lux et Origo), the Ordinary for the Easter season. All of the Proper was sung by the cantor to the full setting as in the Liber Usualis, exactly as should be, including the sequence Victimae Paschalae Laudes. If only this could happen in our own parish. It isn't asking a great deal and takes just a little bit of practice for a choir, but what could once be taken for granted has become a rarity.

I have been singing in Catholic choirs since 1976. We always sang at the main festivals such as Midnight Mass, Christmas Day, the Easter Vigil and Easter Sunday, and spent many weeks preparing the music. This consisted mostly of Gregorian chant and some of the easier polyphonic pieces. Apart from a bleak period during the 1990s when the parish priest was an out-and-out philistine, this has been the pattern for over three decades. Assuming the same would be required this year, I set the time aside and did not take the opportunity I had to go away. But on Good Friday our new choir director, who, since taking over at the start of the year, has never bothered to find out what music the choir are familiar with - they have about 300 years' experience between them - told us that we would not be required for the most important church feast of the year and that the liturgy would consist of congregational singing ie mostly protestant hymns. Had I attended the liturgy I would have been co...

There has been a surprising amount of criticism of the Pope since he was elected less than a month ago. As Catholics were are supposed to believe that the election was the work of the Holy Spirit. Since it is impossible to assess the performance of someone in the situation of a Pope for at least fifty years after they have died, how about relaxing, keeping quiet, watching and getting on with the business that we can actually attend to on our own doorsteps? Obviously what happens in Rome is important but it does no harm to take our eyes off what is happening there for a while.

We have spent about five hours over the past couple of weeks trying to learn this piece for the Good Friday liturgy and eventually got it right. But for a couple of minutes of music? It is a fine piece, but there is no shortage of opportunities to hear it, as it forms part of the St Matthew Passion. It is an adaptation of part of a Latin poem, Salve mundi salutare, a long meditation on the sufferings of Christ on the cross. The music was written by Hans Leo Hassler, around 1600, for a secular love song. The tune was adopted and simplified for a German translation of the poem by Johann Crüger in 1656. Whether it belongs in a Catholic liturgy is a moot point. There seems, unfortunately, to be no original setting for the music. The music itself has a distinct Lutheran flavour, both by association and in spirit. A parish church choir is not going to match King's College, Cambridge (above), and to sing it is to invite the comparison. Given the difficulty of the music, there must be be...

We have a new choir director, which has got me thinking about what the position entails. Some of the essential requirements are so basic and practical that they get taken for granted. The director should know what pieces of music each of the choir members has learned and can sing reliably. The director should have a good idea of the capabilities of the choir and select music which is just within the members' comfort zone, so that they are challenged without being unduly stressed or becoming demoralised due to over-reaching. If it is apparent that a piece of music is close to the limits of a choir's capability, the director should recognise this promptly and not waste endless amounts of time trying to get the choir to master it. The choir should be supplied with clear and legible music to sing from. A lot of musical scores leave much to be desired; singing from them can be like trying to find a path through an overgrown wood. A particular difficulty can be when the music is...

RT8 top deck interior 03/08/10 , originally uploaded by Ledlon89 . Why have things gone so wrong since?

St Peter's, Portland Road, Hove , a photo by Elmar Eye on Flickr. At the end of 1976 I moved to Hove where my parish church was St Peter's, Portland Road. The Parish Priest was Fr Dickerson, a big man with a severe limp, possibly a war wound. He was of fearsome aspect and in his sixties. There were two curates, Fr Chris Benyon, and a big amiable Dutchman, Fr van der Most, both in their early thirties. Fr Dickerson was clearly not enthused by the changes of Vatican Two. The altar remained in its original position and Mass was celebrated facing the liturgical east, which was also true east. The building was a basilica in the classical style with a barrel-vaulted ceiling, built in 1915, when the neighbourhood had been developed and the congregation had grown out of its smaller church which then became a church hall. The main Sunday 11 am Mass was in the Novus Ordo, entirely in Latin apart from the readings and sermon, and there was also a folk mass at 12 o'clock, with a ...

Vexilla regis is the classic Latin hymn for the last two weeks leading up to Good Friday. It did not feature last Sunday at St Lars, Uppsala, and I will be pleasantly surprised if I will get to hear it at all this year. The Catholic faith and teaching is built up by, amongst other things, the succession of traditional hymns that are heard in the course of the succession of the church's seasons, and in turn play their part in marking those seasons. Without them, faith ebbs away. One has to wonder whether the clergy know what they are doing and what kind of instruction they received at their seminaries.

I have tried without success to convince people that the proposed IEP length of 26 metres is too long for vehicles on the UK system. One of the arguments being put forward for the extra length is that the seating capacity of a train is higher if the vehicles are longer. I would have expected this but when the calculations are done I am left wondering. So what is the difference in the number of seats between 12 x 22 metre vehicles and 10 x IEP vehicles, of almost identical length? To make a fair comparison you have to assume equal seating density. Because the IEP has its luggage space outside what can be termed the "furnishable area", when it can actually be between seat backs within the furnishable area, this comparison is not so easy to make. However, furnishable area is a fair proxy. The furnishable area in a 22 metre vehicle can be taken as 17.1 metres, the rest of the space being occupied by a toilet, luggage shelves, vestibules and a total of 1 M crumple zone. This gives...

The shortcomings of the new Cecilia are starting to emerge. In our parish, it seems that some people will want to continue to sing music that has been weeded out. Others will find the 1300-page books cumbersome or will want to protect them from excessive use. The Franciscans of Jonköping have already produced an 8-page booklet with the mass tax. There is still no musical setting for the Swedish translation of the Creed. The "flying eggs" notation system for the Swedish and Latin Gregorian chants is difficult to read and leads to flat and expressionless singing. There are remedies for all of these, but they mean that parishes will continue to produce their own material, which partly defeats the object of the publication. As regards the Latin, the easiest solution is either to buy sets of Liber Cantualis at €8.40 from Solemnes, or to produce leaflets, one with the Creed, Pater Noster and responses, and others with the most-used Ordinaries ie Lux et Origo, De Angelis, Cum j...

Mass yesterday went better than I expected, with the introduction of the new translations and the new Cecilia. We got off to a bad start with " Den kärlek du till världen bar " (Cecilia 276), which is not right for the fourth Sunday in Lent, when the rigours of the season are relaxed, with the Introit Laetare Jerusalem (Rejoice Jerusalem). But we had the Swedish version of Mass XVII to sing from in Gregorian chant notation (unfortunately not how it is written in Cecilia), and that sounded fine. The high point was a rendering of Illumina oculos meos at the Communion, sung by the director of the Gosskör, who has studied the additional neum notation to the chant in the Graduale Triplex . It gives an exciting, exotic and slightly oriental edge to the music which lifts it a level above the ordinary method of singing Gregorian chant. When Gregorian chant was put into the notation invented by Guido d'Arrezi 1000 years ago, a lot of the ornamental detail could not be written...

Revelations of outrageous behaviour by senior Catholic prelates, and now the Papal election naturally leads to the assertion that the Resurrection is delusion, or a myth, or an ancient confidence trick. That begs many questions, two of which are "what is the gain?" and why would anyone persist in asserting something that would mean they could end up as cat food?

I have just spent three hours trying to put a Swedish version of Mass XVII for Advent and Lent, into the correct Gregorian chant notation, using the Meinrad font sets. The music is in the new Cecilia as items 516 to 518. Cecilia, as mentioned in a previous entry, uses a flying egg notation which is not only exceptionally difficult to read, but also wipes out the nuances of the music. The choir noticed this the moment we started to sing these pieces. The sound was dead. The deficiencies of the new Cecilia is very apparent in the settings of the Latin texts, especially to anyone familiar with the conventional four line/square note system. Musical vandalism, one might say, but it easy enough to get hold of Gregorian chant in the traditional notation. But so far as I am aware, the Swedish settings have never been done. So the job is possible, the music becomes easier to read and the use of the system would lead to a better standard of singing. Whether it is worth the effort is anothe...

Den 4de söndag under fastan kallas för Laetare söndag. Ingångsantifonen är en av den vackraste i kyrkans år. Tyvärr ska vi inte sjunga musiken i vår församling, varken på latin eller svenska. Den motsvarande ingångsantifonen är "Glad dig Israel, och fröjdas över henne, alla ni som har henne kär; jubla högt med henne, alla ni som har sörjt över henne. Ni skall få tröst och skall få mätta er vid hennes bröst." Antifonen på svenska kan helt enkelt sjungas på Gregoriansk psalm ton 5, liksom den ursprungligen Latin, och den kan låter ganske bra. Ingångsantifonen ingår i dagens läsningar, samt evangelium och bör helt enkelt inte ersättas av en psalm.

Cardinal O'Brien confessed that his “sexual conduct has fallen below the standards expected”.

Graduation at Digby Stuart Chapel , a photo by Miranda Ash2006 on Flickr. In the autumn of 1975 I started a PGCE course at Digby Stuart College at Roehampton. This was a Catholic College, with the redoubtable Sister Dorothy Bell RSCJ as head. It had been founded as a secondary school for girls, by two Victorian upper class ladies who had joined the Sacred Heart Order. It is the original of the Convent of the Five Wounds referred to in Antonia White's autobiographical novel Frost in May . The Victorian Gothic chapel had been destroyed in the Second World and replaced, probably in the 1950s, by the rather dull concrete structure in the picture. By the time that I arrived, the post-Vatican Two reforms were in full swing. The students, then mostly in their early 20s, were keen on guitars and folk masses in English. I was about fifteen years older, like most of those in the group, and we complained to our tutor, who was fully in agreement with our sentiments. This led, somehow, t...