Rob Howe wrote:
>Perhaps we should make mention of the liturgical nature of the music.
>The chant (with other early liturgial music) and liturgical text are
>theoretically inseperable. The above questions may be tantamount to
>asking which prayers we find the 'most beautiful or pleasing' or
>misguided, etc. While we can make judgements like this, this is simply
>not what a prayer is about.
> If we assume that Peres has a thorough grounding in Roman Catholic
>liturgy (as seems likely considering his position) then we must ask what
>of his recordings fulfil their liturgical role the best.
[snip]
> So I posit an additional question:
>
>Which Ensemble Organum recordings/interpretations would you find most
>affective/effective for real liturgy?
Wait a minute... Which recordings fulfill their liturgical role best?
Are Peres' recordings being used for actual worship in actual celebrations
of the liturgy in churches in the place of live church musicians? This
seems unlikely.
While I acknowledge that individual listeners may use the recordings as part
of their own private devotions -- and that this practice may be very
meaningful to them -- we need to keep in mind which is the proverbial cart
and which the horse.
Liturgical music and its text may be theoretically inseparable (as would be
the case in most sung Western art music); this is, of course, why Peres and
others (though not enough of them!) perform a polyphonic Mass Ordinary along
with chant propers, for example. But Peres isn't performing and recording
the music -- and we, as a rule, aren't buying and listening to his
records -- for use in a liturgy. (If so, Peres would presumably be a
working church musician rather than the scholar and concert performer he
is.) Peres is presumably reviving this music and we are presumably
listening to it because it appeals to us AS MUSIC -- and possibly as
atrifacts of a given time and place. From the point of view of
*worship/liturgy* for *listeners/worshipers* in 1998, the issues of
performance practice which led to this thread in the first place are
ultimately irrelevant, aren't they?
Matthew Westphal
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