www.byzcath.org Forums Mysteries: The Life of Worship Vespers, Matins & the Divine Liturgy The Revised Divine Liturgy Disambiguation - Music

The eparchy of Parma now has a webpage upon which may be found a sung version of every revised chant. It would really help if people here could give a listen and then write some feedback here, as I do not know too terribly well how this music compares.

I just gave a bit of a listen - it's gone! The Litany of Offering is all gone! It has been reduced to "may God remember in His Kingdom all you Christians of the True Faith" sung twice. "Now and ever and forever" is now chanted in a like manner to "forever and ever" in the Roman Rite; completely ear-grating! I am sorry, but those chants seem very artificial; the Liturgy has definately lost some of its life.
Lord, have Mercy!

-Uspenije

Dear Uspenije,

I would be interested in knowing WHICH "now and ever and forever" you are referring to; we sing it to literally dozens of different melodies in the various services. In paticular, there is no "canonical" melody for the priest's and deacon's exclamations; to some extend each priest has his own melody, since this is (and has been) very much an oral tradition. (The same applies with the melodies for reading Scripture other than the psalms and canticles.)

Yours in Christ,
Jeff Mierzejewski

There are very few hymns of the Divine Liturgy that are the same. The new music is very different. It is very difficult to sing. I know this post will be deleted because the people here only allow you to praise the Revised Liturgy. If I hear "new translation" one more time I'm going to puke. It's a whole new Liturgy. It's all new music. Everything is different.

Want to hear how bad the Revised Liturgy is? Visit St. John Cathedral. We left because no one sings anymore. We are at St. Elias right not but if Father Eugene is forced to take this Revised Liturgy we're going to St. Nicholas in Homestead.

Thanks Archbishop Schott for wasting $1 million of OUR money on something no one wanted.

I refer to the chanted forms during the reading of texts. I would think that this singular form would become mandatory, given the other documents.

-Uspenije

Where's the link?

This whole business is so sad. This process could have been a means to revitalize but it has been turned into a source of consternation. Lord, have mercy!

CDL

Carson, the Eparchial page [parma.org] just links back to the MCI recordings [metropolitancantorinstitute.org].

It is the MCI who is in the driving seat, not anybody else.

And they were meant to lead our Church in prayerful singing uniting us like never before.

But they've launched a missile, dividing us like never before. This music is terrible, the cantors say so, and I say so. It has accents in the wrong syllables, more notes than are necessary, idiotic innovations that achieve no useful purpose other than to tell the people, we want 'professionals' in charge, music pros. who are paid to do this. Singing from the heart, from the congregation, the way my grandmother taught me to sing, is now no longer wanted here. You're voices, you're opinions, amount to nothing. We're just going to use your money to pay for these 'professionals' to sing instead of you.

It is a cluster bomb, that is going to do damage, long after it is fired.

Nick

I'm not a trained singer but I notice that it sounds like Latin Monastic chant and far less robust than what I'm used to. Does that make sense?

CDL

I think you're just reacting to the CDs. The group singing on those recordings are not Byzantines. They are professional musicians. And the interpretation is given by the director, Prof. Thompson (also a Roman Catholic).

Dear Carson,

The recordings are intended for cantor education; one of the recurring requests for cantors was that the recordings be extremely "clean" (no harmony, no vibrato, nothing that would get in the way of learning the melodies). As a result, they are NOT going to sound like a recording of a parish service.

Yours in Christ,
Jeff Mierzejewski

P.S. The claim that Professor Thompson is a Roman Catholic has been dealt with elsewhere; the schola he directs has a long history of singing Eastern chant. (I first ran into their recordings being played at the ACROD seminary in Johnstown.)

P.P.S. If the bishops REALLY wanted to turn over the singing to "professionals", why did they produce books with complete music?

Maybe they had to hire Roman Catholics and professionals to do this tape, because ordinary people can't sing it, it is so badly done?

Trying to fit the words to the music, IMHO, is not the correct approach. It's the words that are important and not the music. The music should serve to highlight them, and not the other way around. It's like trying to translate antiphons from Latin into English and then expecting to sing them to the Gregorian chant, unaltered from how it was sung in Latin.

It will take time I guess, and there will be a lot of stumbling, both by the cantors and the people who sing. Eventually it'll get there.

Dear John,

The prostopinije melodies are almost ideally designed for use in singing ANY text. The only real issues are:

(a) whether one adapts to the text by counting syllables from the beginning or end (the FREQUENT method in Slavonic, but which produces bad accents in English) or by matching text accents to musical accents. The latter method was used in both the 1970 and 2006 musical settings, but the accents in 1970 were applied inconsistently and sometimes ignored.

(b) whether one simplifies the melodies; this was done a LOT in the 1960's. In the proces, the features that made all instances of a given tone sound "the same" were often dropped; for example, different notes were eliminated in the prokeimenon and alleluia in each tone, making two very different versions of the same melody. In my experience, this makes it actually HARDER to sing any text except the ones that have been memorized - which in turn is the primary reason the music for Vespers and Matins has been thought "hard." (Remember that between the World Wars, our people in Europe sang the SAME melodies for all different texts, without particularly abbreviating or "simplifying" them, and even now many of our cantors naturally use the unabbreviated melodies.) The MCI settings of the tones were done with consistency AND adaptability to the text in mind.

Certainly the words have priority, but the melodies should not be - and need not be - distorted in the process. They have more than enough flexibility to make that sort of "dumbing down" unnecessary. In many cases the Music Commission DID shorten the melodies, but in most cases they did so in a natural manner rather than arbitrarily.

Yours in Christ,
Jeff Mierzejewski

After listening to the B & C melodic renditions of the New Liturgy, it appears as if most of the music replicates what we have been using here at St. Nicholas in Orlando for years. I'm looking forward to moving back towards our Easter(n) Roots,

Alex Cooke

Does anyone feel that this whole "revised" Divine Liturgy issue will cause a schism in the Ruthenian Catholic Church?