In the Dominican parish in Seattle, the Dominicans kept their tradition of chant, and for Holy Week they commandeered a group of music students from the University to sing all the Gregorian chants (from the Dominican books) for the five days of Holy Week from Palm Sunday to Easter Sunday.

I was one of those students, and after this, on Easter Monday, I signed up for the chant choir at the cathedral, which sang a Missa Cantata every Sunday morning with chant ordinary and proper. There was also a daily high Mass, sometimes a requiem Mass, but mostly the Mass of the day, with the chants being sung by a soloist accompanied by the organ; one summer, I was that soloist.

In all of these there was a substantial role for the choir and very little or no congregational singing.

Keith Wildenberg :
Now, both choir and assembly are painful to hear, if you are a purist. We use organ accompaniment, and it doesn’t help much. But people sing!

God bless them!

I had tried for years to convince our choir director to include an occasional chant (possibly and Agnus Dei for Lent).

I got my wish one year when we got a new choir director who decided I had a good idea and we would do Holy Thursday completely with Latin and chant.

We had organ accompaniment, and we were not as perfect in our Latin pronunciation as we could, but when we launched into Pange Lingua, I could hear a dozen strong elderly voices singing with us.

At the end of the mass an older lady with tears running down her face said “Thank you. I can’t remember the last time I sang that!”.

It’s not every week. It’s for special occasions. That reminds me… I have to speak with our new choir director and pastor about the possibility of a chanted Agnus Dei for the services during Lent.

High Mass may mean:

* Solemn Mass, a Tridentine Mass celebrated with deacon and subdeacon (international and general United States[1] usage)
* Missa Cantata, a sung Tridentine Mass without deacon and subdeacon (usage among United States Catholics)

The renowned liturgist Adrian Fortescue declared that the Missa Cantata “is really a low Mass, since the essence of high Mass is not the music but the deacon and subdeacon”.[2]

from me again: As far as Fortescue, that seems to be his opinion. I know of no masses with a deacon and subdeacon that is not also sung, seems to be no point to that becasue of how complicated the rites are, but in all Masses, the priest and deacon do recite all the parts that the choir would sing in addition. The 1965 missal explicitly tells the priest not to do this and this is the Tridentine Mass, not the 1970 Mass. I think the reform of the Tridentine Mass should be the 1965 instruction which I presume was based upon Sacrosantum Concilium, but I could be wrong. Pope Benedict decries the fact that the EF often was disconnected from what the people were doing, lack of unity between clergy and laity, priest doing his thing, laity as represented by the choir doing its thing. I think that is certainly an aberration, not inherent in the EF Mass, but imposed upon it.

No, not really.

A true High Mass has a deacon and subdeacon and a choir of some kind. A Missa Cantata has neither deacon nor subdeacon, and perhaps not even a choir. But it is not a High Mass. A Solemn High Mass was either one for a major feastday or solemnity, or one celebrated in the presence of a Bishop (who did not have to preside at it, incidentally). I suggest that the confusion is yours rather than mine, or perhaps the result of an erroneous usage of terminology in the US. Once again, I refer to the Wikipedia entries cited earlier.

This may be a pond difference, but my understanding is that in the US “High Mass” was the typical designation for the Missa Cantata, which was more common that the Solemn Mass (with deacon and subdeacon). But I’m relying on second-hand information so would welcome correction.

May I refer you to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Mass
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missa_Cantata
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Mass

which should tell you more than you need to know. If indeed US usage was that Missa Cantata (literally ‘Sung Mass’) was used for High Mass (as Allan McDonald maintains), then that only proves that some Americans at that time mostly did not know what a true Missa Cantata as properly defined actually was.

You seem to be saying that Missa Cantata was used for any form of sung Mass, and Solemn Mass was used for High Mass, which is interesting, but certainly not an accurate reflection of the terminology in common use in other parts of the world.

Anyone yawning yet?

Perhaps I should have reworded it to make clear that I was speaking only to the non-existence of chant after the Council and to the gentleman who wrote the commentary in the first place.

I do get the impression that, as abysmal as certain aspects of the liturgy in the US were prior to the Council, things were worse in England. As I recall, Evelyn Waugh was so repelled by the dialog Mass that he compared it to a Nuremberg rally.

My current parish raises the roof every Sunday with their chanting, at least with the Ordinaries, Credo, and Pater Noster. And the choir have their chants, too.

Now, both choir and assembly are painful to hear, if you are a purist. We use organ accompaniment, and it doesn’t help much. But people sing!

I contrast that with post-Vatican II compositions. On a typical Sunday you hear some diva cantrix crooning away whilst the assembly tries to follow their part.

Rather than starting slowly, with a Kyrie or Agnus Dei, why not start with a bang, but with a single mass and a new choir?

A friend of mine is pastor at the parish in which I grew up, where there is a long tradition of contemporary music. Finding that the young people want something “deeper,” he got a youth schola going. They took to chant like ducklings to water.