Tag Archives: Catholic Church

The Vatican’s Top 10

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The Vatican has recommended ten pop and rock albums as perfect listening for being marooned on a desert island. The recordings serve as an alternative to the mediocre songs featured at Italian pop festivals and on the radio.

The Top 10 list includes the Beatles’ Revolver, David Crosby’s If I could only remember my name, Pink Floyd’s The dark side of the moon, Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, Donald Fagan’s The nightfly, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Paul Simon’s Graceland, U2’s Achtung baby, Oasis’s (What’s the story) Morning glory?, and Carlos Santana’s Supernatural. Bob Dylan is excluded from the list because he spawned generations of singer-songwriters who have harshly tested the ears and the patience of listeners with their tormented stories.

This according to “Dieci dischi per sopravvivere ai festival: Prontuario semiserio di resistenza musicale” by Guiseppe Fiorentino and Gaetano Vallini (L’Osservatore Romano CXLVIII/37 [14 February 2010]).

Below, the concluding track from David Crosby’s album.

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Filed under Curiosities, Popular music, Renaissance

A Christmas Eve reconciliation

Gebhartshagen_Nicolaikirche_Merian

A musical event 330 years ago today sought to forge a bridge between the Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches in Germany.

In the second half of the 17th century it became customary to perform music on Christmas Eve at the Palazzo Apostolico Vaticano. The repertoire was embued with Arcadian sensibility, as the choice of the Nativity theme makes clear, and had an explicit didactic aim: to edify listeners through references to Holy Scripture and the basic principles of Christianity, both ethical and religious. Quite often, too, a desire was evident to celebrate the greatness of the Pope himself.

One of these Christmas Eve compositions, Li pastori alla cuna del Redentore, set to music by Giuseppe Pacieri, had an unusual fate: In 1685, two years after its performance in Rome, it was heard again in the ducal chapel in Wolfenbüttel (above) under a new title, Musica alla vigilia del Sto. Natale, and the praises of Pope Innocent XI at the end of Pietro Giubilei’s text ended up being sung at a Lutheran court.

An exceptional witness to and commentator on the event was the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, whose interest in musical events and unwavering commitment to the cause of religious reconciliation between the different Christian churches in Germany are well known. The 1685 performance was probably not accidental—it was likely a sign of the desire for politcal renewal on the part of Prince Anton Ulrich von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. The performance therefore represents an extraordinary event in the history of music at German Protestant courts.

This according to “La cuna del Redentore a Wolfenbüttel (1685) e i tentativi di conciliazione religiosa in Germania” by Andrea Luppi (Rivista italiana di musicologia XXIV/5 [1999] pp. 47–66).

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Filed under Baroque era

Search the Liber usualis

Liber usualis

The Liber usualis is a valuable resource for musical scholars; as a compendium of the most common chants used by the Catholic Church, it is particularly useful for identifying the origins of chants used in polyphonic compositions.

Using Optical Music Recognition and Optical Text Recognition, Search the Liber usualis presents a scanned, searchable version of this important resource. Published by the Distributed Digital Music Archives & Libraries Lab and sponsored by the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis  (SIMSSA), this is a proof-of-concept demonstration for the larger task of providing search capabilities for all digitized musical works.

Below, a Palm Sunday antiphon with scrolling notation.

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Filed under Middle Ages, Resources

CANTUS: A database for Latin ecclesiastical chant

CANTUS: A database for Latin ecclesiastical chant is a free online resource that assembles and publishes indices of over 380,000 chants found in manuscript and early printed sources for the liturgical Office. The database is searchable by text incipit, keyword, Corpus Antiphonalium Officii identification number, or Liturgical occasion.

CANTUS is supported by the University of Waterloo and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Terence Bailey serves as the project’s director.

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Filed under Middle Ages, Resources