Before Chanting On More Notes

I'M ALMOST RELUCTANT to give you this right now because I really want to encourage you to work on recto tono chanting on one note for a while,  you really can learn a lot from it and it is extremely useful for deeper study of texts.    Before going on to some ideas for chanting on more than one note I'll get some old stuff out of the way.  

This is the project I said I was working on last month.   Well,  me and a colleague who is also interested in encouraging a New Chant practice in which People compose new chants in their own language - I say in Esperanto as well,* potentially the "The New Latin for the Church and for Ecumenism" as well, he's not an Esperantist.  That wouldn't be as a replacement for singing Gregorian or other ancient chant but to continue with chanting as a developing and living practice instead of antiquarianism.  

And about the antiquarian stuff. 

In his highly eccentric but interesting and at times useful "Music Primer" the American composer Lou Harrison said:

Old Jewish chants** & also in both kinds of Catholic Christianity (in only slightly modified form).  [Note there are more than two kinds of even Western Catholic chant.] They are sung in Temples & Synagogues too, of course.   The Psalmtone form is lovely, & one may compose new ones at pleasure.  Its full form includes an "Intonation" (beginning tones), a "Tenor" (the "chanting-many-syllables: tone) a "Flex" (a small cadence formula used only to accommodate sentences with several subordinate clauses) "Tenor" again; the "Mediant" (a half cadence formula for the middle of a sentence) "Tenor" again, & lastly a "Termination" (a melodic, slightly ornamental ending motive).  An "Interrogation" ending should be provided for questioning sentences.  Willi Apel's book "Gregorian Chant" is good on this subject - as are authors Idelsohn & Fox-Strangways on similar subjects.   [Look for Idelsohn and Fox-Strangways at Archive.org.]

You are probably confused by that, I've studied chant and it is both confusing and, in at least one aspect wrong, I think, AND, IN ANY CASE, YOU ARE THE ONE WHO GETS TO DECIDE WHAT YOU DO IN YOUR OWN CHANT PRACTICE.   You can follow the several outlines of medieval practice - the ones in the Solemnes editions of the Catholic liturgy are more informative and clearer - or any other practice someone else has come up with or you can do what you want to do.  

More useful than the above,  Lou Harrison finished his Primer with this

Whether rhythmic or not - & there are two basic forms - the Chant is perdurable, a basis to underlie the serious coming together of music & words, & though it is among the oldest kinds of music, still stimulates to hear &to make. 

Speaking of "rhythmic" I should note that an alternative to chanting can be found in various traditions of folk spirituals though their purpose is somewhat different.   Walter Brueggeman suggested that Psalm settings in the style of blues or country song might helpfully express, especially, the Psalms of protest and complaint and lamentation.   I think for more on that James Cone's "Spirituals And The Blues" is especially rich.   I'll only deal with chanting here but as this continues I think you'll find information that would be useful for those who want to go on with more of a folk spiritual practice.  I intend for there to be lots of ear training involved and am already well into working on that.

I am a bit unhappy to hear someone has made a movie purportedly about the Shaker prophet Ann Lee in which a number of Shaker Spirituals are used in the music.  Other than the unaccompanied singing of them, preferably by Shakers themselves, I have never heard any use of them I didn't dislike, not even as set by Aaron Copland.  I haven't seen the movie and don't intend to but I doubt they're likely to do any better by that subject than the movies do about any others.  I recall hearing the late Sr. Mildred Barker, who was one of the living repositories of Shaker spirituals and, I believe, the last survivor of the Alfred community which had its own singing tradition, talking about how she would repeat a song over and over again to meditate on it, to "labor" on it.   I think that's probably a good approach to folk spirituals as prayer.  

* The translation of the "Old Testament" by Dr. Zamenhof, the inventor of Esperanto is very good and very singable,  it is not a Scripture Scholar's translation from the Hebrew but of someone who could read Hebrew and someone than whom there is no such thing as a more authoritative expert on the language that he invented.   Zamenhof's translation is,  I think, something of a literary classic in the same way that Jerome's Vulgate, the King James Version, even more so the Tyndale and even earlier Wycliffe translations that the KJV kind of cribbed and the Luther translation is for German culture.   Zamenhof's  many translations of secular literature are very good, especially Hans Christian Anderson's tales.  

I don't hold the New Testament translation into Esperanto done by a number of Christian scholars in as high regard, it's certainly grammatically correct and probably as accurate as any of the other such scholar committee translations are but I find it cumbersome.   I don't have the translations of the Gospels by Gerrit Berveling  to compare,  I've only read his translation of the so-called Thomas Gospel.  A good, modern not to mention singable translation of the New Testament into Esperanto probably lies in the future.   

** I would suggest, if you want to look into old Jewish chanting of Scripture you in addition to the approved academic points of view,  check in to the very controversial work of Suzanne Haïk-Vantoura who claimed to have decoded the musical indications in ancient Hebrew manuscripts of the Scriptures.  While most if not all academic experts in the topic rejected her claims, the recordings I've heard of performances informed by her theories are rather stunningly musically coherent, often unexpected and moving and anything but expected.   You can hear a number of those on Youtube, though I have to say the ones in which she composed accompaniments for them kind of obscure the musical chanting.  Whatever you make of her claims of authenticity,  it's worth hearing them put into actual music.   Its worth as music is clear to me, at least. 

I Checked To See If She Had Before Posting This, I May Revise If I See She Has Since

IF THE VENEZUELAN OPPOSITION FIGURE  Maria Corina Machado, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year doesn't come out soon in opposition to Trump ruling her country as he intends to,  and very soon,  the reasonable conclusion is that she's OK with that.    If she agrees to being installed by Trump - and if that happens the reasonable conclusion,  no, the absolute certainty is that she's an American puppet,  if by "America" you mean Donald Trump and his criminal regime.     She didn't oppose him blowing up fishing boats, a clear international crime,  absolute murder,  she supported him doing that, so I'm not expecting she's going to do anything to support the independence of Venezuela now.

Though I'm far from enthusiastic for the Madurro administration he did something that she has not done, he won an election.  I'll get into whether or not the election he ran was a clean one when my country gets rid of the Electoral College,  the media lying for Republican-fascists with impunity and the partisan gerrymandering that the Roberts Court is rubber-stamping.   

I am always seriously skeptical of any "opposition" figure who is a right-wing capitalist from the oligarchic class as Machado is,  if she became the president of Venezuela I'd expect she would  be far less about an attempted reform than Violetta Chamorro was in Nicaragua - her win in 1990 was heavily influenced by George H.W. Bush's quite similar illegal act in Panama the year before,  it was widely feared in Nicaragua that he would invade their country, too.   You remember,  that's the illegal war and abduction of a national leader that led to George H.W. Bush pardoning all kinds of criminals like Caspar Weinberger , Robert McFarlane, Elliott Abrams, though some interpreted that as him pardoning them so they wouldn't testify about him re Iran-Contra.   You might find this old show about how the crimes of daddy Bush set things up for Trump's grant of impunity for his many crimes prescient and very timely. 

If I were a Venezuelan,  I'd count on Machado selling the country out, especially the lower classes.  She's an elite-trained capitalist oligarach.   I stopped being impressed with the Nobel Peace Prize when they gave one to that massive criminal responsible in the deaths of literally millions, both during his time in government and after,  Henry Kissinger.   I like to think of him in hell right now and I don't like to think anyone's in hell.  I expect Poppy Bush is there with him, twisting in the flames or some such torture.  They would be if anyone was.   

What Is Allowed To Happen Under The US Government IS What Is Really Constitutional, To Pretend Otherwise Is To Perpetuate The Most Dangerous Lie

 The Congress shall have Power . . . To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces;

To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress; . . .

BOMBING ANOTHER COUNTRY, abducting its elected leader and kidnapping them as Trump reportedly did during the night is an act of war by any unabridged meaning of the phrase "act of war."   The U.S. Constitution supposedly gives the power to make war to the U.S. Congress but that's clearly a lie,  Trump has committed war on Venezuela, certainly with the motive of getting its oil for his billionaire and millionaire friends and you can be certain that his crime family, including his in-laws are in it for their cut of the action.  

The Library of Congress website both claims that Article I of the Constitution establishes that sole power to declare war, claims  that "The Declare War Clause is a central element of Congress’s war powers," and oh, so conveniently, show how under the Constitution as it really is, that most important feature of the thing has been made meaningless by a combination of Congressional cowardice and Supreme Court corruption. 

ArtI.S8.C11.2.1 Overview of Declare War Clause: 

[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water; . . .

The Declare War Clause is a central element of Congress’s war powers and its meaning is among those most heavily debated.1 The Supreme Court has observed that only Congress has the power to declare war,2 but the implications of this exclusive assignment are not well-settled. In particular, the relationship between Congress’s power to declare war and the President’s war powers granted under Article II of the Constitution is a subject of significant disagreement.3

The first draft of the Constitution considered in Philadelphia in 1787 would have given Congress the power to make war, but the Framers substituted the word declare in what James Madison described as an effort to ensure that the President was empowered to repel sudden attacks.4 Under Congress’s interpretation of the Constitution, the President may introduce troops into hostile circumstances if Congress has (1) declared war, (2) specifically authorized the President to use force, or (3) there is a national emergency created by an attack on the United States or its territories.5 The executive branch claims much broader authority and asserts that the Constitution empowers the President to initiate and engage in many types of military action without congressional authorization.6

While this interbranch debate remains active, other questions concerning the Declare War Clause have been settled by longstanding practice and judicial opinions. For example, the Supreme Court has recognized that Congress need not issue a formal declaration of war to authorize the United States to engage in military action.

It must be pointed out that none of those loopholes apply in the case of Trump bombing Venezuela and kidnapping its president, though that won't matter in the slightest.  I doubt the Library of Congress will even bother to revise this clearly lie filled posting in the future to match reality as it really is. 

It is to be assumed that the Congress, so notably full of lawyers, some of them actually deemed "Constitutional scholars" and that those who are appointed to the Supreme Court are similarly expert in the document - though as the Republican members of the Rehnquist and Roberts Court, with exactly two exceptions, show, that assumption is, itself, bullshit - have made the most serious and momentous of powers delegated to the most democratically vulnerable branch utterly meaningless.  Such is the true nature of the U.S. Constitution, its lore and history and its reality as opposed to the lies that comprise such "Constitutional scholarship."    The next stupidly written part of that comprises not only an open barn door but an entirely open side of the horse shed that doesn't need to be escaped.  

7 Congress also can, by statute, authorize the President to use force within defined parameters that do not rise to the level of a general declaration of war.8 The United States has issued declarations of war against eleven countries during five conflicts, but it has not formally declared war since World War II.9 As a result, statutory authorizations have become the predominant method for Congress to permit military action since the Second World War.10

The Supreme Court has also observed that the Declare War Clause confers broad authority upon Congress to pursue the war effort.11 The power to Declare War, the Supreme Court stated in 1870, involves the power to prosecute it by all means and in any manner in which war may be legitimately prosecuted.12 In line with this interpretation, Congress has enacted an extensive set of statutes that trigger a host of special wartime authorities concerning the military, foreign trade, energy, communications, alien enemies, and other issues if Congress declares war.13

The United States doesn't have a Constitution that means a goddamned thing, the Roberts Court , the most corrupt Supreme Court in our history, up to and most of all legalizing open bribery and corruption, as long as payment is made after what is bought is delivered and, worst of all, making Donald Trump an absolute dictator for four years - or more if he seizes power for longer, and don't think Vance won't try that as well.   The United States is a lawless country due to the lies and dodges and corruption of the lawyers on the Supreme Courts since WWII who have allowed that power grab by the executive with the acquiescence of partisans on both sides of the Congress - again many of those giving that non-Constitutional power to presidents being not only lawyers but "Constitutional scholars."  

Once a road through the actual meaning of the Constitution has been cut by the goddamned Supreme Court, it is there until it is sealed up by an amendment.   Actually, under the real as opposed to the pretend Constitution, that's not true because the Marbury power, as has been seen over and over again, especially in the most corrupt of Courts, which is a majority of them, gives them the real power to nullify and amend the Constitution at their whim or ideological desire or, now under the corruption of the Roberts Court, as their patrons so order it up.   Destroying the Marbury power grab is essential as the history of the United States proves, any court which is granted or grabs for itself such a power means that no written or unwritten Constitution means a goddamned thing in and of itself. 

I doubt that anything but a total revision of the Constitution INCLUDING A CHANGE FROM THE INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS PRESIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT OURS INVENTED will reign in the most corrupt, the most overtly and literally criminal president from committing he most serious of crimes, especially if the Court has been as corrupted as ours is.   Trump is that and the Roberts Court and the Republican-fascist congress is as guilty as he and his drunken, steroid stimulated Secretary of mayhem, Hegseth and the military officers and others who have carried out these grotesquely illegal acts.    I don't expect any of them will suffer any consequences because the United States is a lawless country.  

How to do a spiritual reset for 2026

To kick off 2026 and the second season of “The Spiritual Life" podcast, host James Martin, S.J., welcomes Trappist monk, poet and photographer, Br. Paul Quenon, to do a "spiritual reset." Br. Paul entered the Trappists in 1958 at the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, where Thomas Merton was his novice master. Together they discuss:

00:00 Who is Br. Paul Quenon?
2:30 Doing a spiritual reset
8:00 How Br. Paul became a monk
13:55 Living with Thomas Merton
18:34 How to do a "spiritual reset"
24:27 Making sense out of tragedy
28:47 Does our hubris anger God?
34:31 Should I give all my possessions away?
38:07 How to focus less on yourself during prayer
43:00 Building a personal relationship with God

Among the good ideas is to not make New Years resolutions.  

To encourage you to listen,  James Martin drives right wingers nuts on a regular basis,  probably at least as much as the late Fr. Richard McBrien did 

More On Chanting On One Note

THE PASSAGE from Willi Apel's book on Gregorian Chant given yesterday was right, the primary value of the musical recitation of Psalms,  Canticles such as the Magnificat or Nunc Dimittis, passages from the Prophets, Writings, Gospels and Epistles isn't the music, it's the words.   You could write your own psalm or canticle or paraphrase of scripture, you get to decide what you're going to do at home on your own. 

But that doesn't mean that there isn't any musical value to it.  When the rhythm of the text is the focus you can learn a lot about the rhythm of it, which in musical terms means lengths of notes, different lengths of notes and pauses of different length.  To an extent also the varying loudness of softness of what is sung .   Just learning how to sustain a tone on pitch has musical value.  Added to that is the clarity and naturalness of pronunciation of the consonants as well as the vowels.   But those can't be separated from the meaning of the words in the context of the text. 

You can learn a lot from recto tono chanting, it will be a lot more subtle than chanting with elaborate melodies, which have their own lessons to teach.  But those subtle lessons are some of the most important if meaning in music is what you're after. 

If you have an instrument you can play, checking the pitch with it can help a lot.  If you have a keyboard or guitar (make sure it's in tune) accompanying yourself with it with a single chord or note can help a lot.  This is your practice, you get to decide how you're going to do it.  

Wicked Is Pure Torture

IN THE COURSE of my new years day,  I was involuntarily exposed to the movie Wicked.   L. Frank Baum must have gone to hell because if he's aware of what they did to his story it must be torture for him.  

My advice, read the book and forget the movies. 

Update:

Well, I felt eternally damned after about an hour of the thing. 

I'm With Tabitha And Hunter Biden When It Comes To Clooney Chickening Out To His Estate In Provence

And this is after Clooney not only played a major role in sandbagging the most successful Democratic president since LBJ - also sandbagged by media figures and celebrities - in not only after having a hand in handing the country over to something much worse than the 50s red-scare and being unapologetic for it.  It's after he did that he struck that pose on Broadway rehashing the legend of Edward Murrow WHO VERY MUCH DID NOT CHICKEN HIS WAY TO AN ESTATE IN PROVENCE AS THE SHIT HE HAD NO HAND IN CREATING GOT DEEP.  

George Clooney,  good bye and fuck off.  I sure as hell won't be watching anything that he's in from now on. 

I agree with Tabitha,  Hunter Biden is fast becoming one of my favorite commentators on the scene.   He said it just right, except I think Clooney likes his celebrity and money and public image a hell of a lot more than he does the United States.  Tapper and the others mentioned, too. 

Start The New Year Singing

100 Sing to the Lord, all the world!

2 Worship the Lord with joy;

    come before him with happy songs!

3 Acknowledge that the Lord is God.

    He made us, and we belong to him;

    we are his people, we are his flock.

4 Enter the Temple gates with thanksgiving;

    go into its courts with praise.

    Give thanks to him and praise him.

5 The Lord is good;

    his love is eternal

    and his faithfulness lasts forever.

Good News Translation

The most elementary stage of the liturgical recitative is represented by the melodic formulae used for the musical delivery of the readings and prayers that form a part of the Office and the Mass.  In view of the close relationship which generally exists between degrees of musical elaboration and degrees of liturgical significance, it is perhaps surprising to encounter such rudimentary types of chant not only in the Office Hours, but also (in fact, much more prominently) in the solemn liturgy of the Mass.  The explanation is that these are not musical items in the proper sense.  They are essentially spoken texts, the meaning of which would be destroyed by any but the simplest manner of musical delivery.  Here, as well as in the slightly more developed formulae used for the Psalms, the music has no independent significance and value,  but only serves as a means of obtaining a distinct and clearly audible pronunciation of the words so they will resound into the farthest corners of the church.  Today, these texts are often recited recto tono,  that is on one unchanged pitch and with a slight pause to mark the end of phrases or sentences.  This, however, is not a medieval practice.  It was introduced, together with many other modifications, through the reforming work of Giovanni Guidetti (1530-92) whose Directorium chori of 1582 is perhaps the most important of the various reform editions of that period,  much more so than the notorious Editio Medicea of 1614.  

Willi Apel, Gregorian Chant p. 203

Even the most vocally challenged among us can manage singing on one tone.  And you can build on that. 

Good News Translation is better for singing than the Common English Bible I think.  I hate to say it but some of those more influenced by the KJV are pretty good for that too, as are the Coverdale translations, the Douay-Rheims translation, too though those aren't really in current English.