For scholas, it is a great pleasure when the celebrant sings as much of the Mass as possible. This ennobles the liturgy, inspires congregations to sing, and offers a vote of confidence to the place of music in the liturgy. The Mass can be sung in English or Latin or some combination. In fact, the rubrics have long specified that the sung Mass is the normative form: the rule rather than the exception. For priests hoping to learn Latin, singing provides a special and advantageous pedagogical benefit. New languages are generally easier to sing than say.

For this reason, the Schola strongly recommends this conference: Missa in Cantu: A Seminar in the Sung Mass for Celebrants, October 17-19, 2007, Chicago, Illinois. Every priest who aspires to sung the Roman Rite, new and old forms, should attend.

We’ve been captivated by this beautiful hymn for sometime, as a model of a postcommunion motet. A schola member has typeset both the original version by Heinrich Isaac (1450-1517) (download here) and the redone version by J.S. Bach. Which version do we like better? Depends on the week!

O Food of travellers, angels’ Bread,
Manna wherewith the blest are fed,
Come nigh, and with Thy sweetness fill
The hungry hearts that seek Thee still.

O fount of love, O well unpriced,
Outpouring from the heart of Christ,
Give us to drink of very Thee,
And all we pray shall answered be.

And bring us to that time and place
When this Thy dear and veiled face
Blissful and glorious shall be seen -
Ah Jesus, with no veil between.

For those celebrants who want to sing the Sign of Peace, here is the music and a sound file.

For priests who want to learn to sing the entire Mass in Latin, old form or new form, consider this marvelous seminar at St. John Cantius parish, Chicago Illinois: Missa in Cantu, October 17-19, 2007. The faculty is outstanding. It is two days toward a more wonderful liturgy.

In the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture. What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forbidden or even considered harmful. It behooves all of us to preserve the riches which have developed in the Church’s faith and prayer, and to give them their proper place.

• Summorum Pontificum (Latin)
• Explanatory Letter (English)
• Documents and Explanation from the USCCB

Here is a project that the St. Cecilia Schola was involved with from the very beginning: The communion antiphons with Psalms. We do them every week at our parish.

The musical heart of the American Church is changing. See this job opening solicitation from the North American College in Rome.

Members of the St. Cecilia Schola are pleased to have the opportunity to sing at special Mass on Memorial Day at our own parish, a classical Roman Rite said according to the 1962 Missal. The time is 12:10pm in the main Church. A special thank you should be given to the pastor and Archbishop Oscar Lipscomb for making this possible.

Here is our favorite simple, English Mass, to be used without accompaniment. It appears simple, and it is, but that makes it no less beautiful. It can be learned very quickly, and used any time of the year. It requires only one cantor or it can be sung by the entire choir.

We are very pleased to announce that our Sacred Music Workshop, February 1-2, 2008, in Auburn, Alabama, is taking shape. Our guest conductor is Wilko Brouwers from the Netherlands, a famous and brilliant expert in chant and polyphony who is also a master teacher and a joyful presence in the world of Catholic music. He will lead this two-day seminar that culminates in a sung liturgy on Saturday evening. This is the fifth annual conference that continues to grow year by year. You won’t want to miss this wonderful event. Please read more and join us!

Many people have written to ask what is the best introduction to chant. There are many on the market today, and some of them actually increase confusion rather than clarify. Ideally, an introductory book should explain how to read neumes, with a clear description of both rhythm and pitch, provide a bit of history about why we sing chant, and get the reader singing as soon as possible with the core repertoire for parishes — with as few unnecessary complications as possible.

Overall the best introduction available is not a new book but a newly in print book from the 1940s: Sister Mary Antonine Goodchild’s Gregorian Chant for Church and School. It is now available from the Church Music Association of America.

The National Catholic Register publishes an excellent letter that mentions the St. Cecilia Schola, and also a response that praises our efforts. Very nice.

As we recover from a glorious but exhausting Easter, we look to May for Marian motets, and we are particularly drawn to two new pieces, one simple and one exceedingly difficult.

The first is Ave Maria by Jacob Arcadelt. It is very pretty and nearly sight-readable.

The second is an amazing piece by Robert Parsons, also an Ave Maria. Here is the score. All you need to know about this 16th century English piece is found in this MP3.

Here is our Good Friday program.

Here is our Palm Sunday program.

And here is a wonderful edition of the Exsultet for Easter Vigil.

Like most scholas around the country, we have spent months in preparation for Holy Week. We took on our biggest challenge to date: Miserere by Allegri. It is such a wonderful piece, and very famous for being the exclusive possession of the Sistine Chapel until Mozart himself copied it out and released it from memory. We are not singing it in two choirs but just one. It is an incredibly difficult piece to keep together. We’ve had to live with it for months before the text began to flow well.

And yet, now we must look to Easter. We are especially enjoying this vigorous arrangement of O Filii et Filiae, by Jeffrey Ostrowski. The tempo is a medium fast two. It is the sort of piece that makes you rethink the entire song. Also new for us this year is Di Lasso’s Jubilate Deo.

Next year, our hope is that the Passion chants will be sung. They are quite difficult, and we just didn’t have the time to put it all together this year. But this is part of the joy of our work: the ideal is ever present and ever elusive.