"The St. James Infirmary Blues

Janis Joplin Doing "The St. James Infirmary Blues

Sarah Connor: Muttersprache - TV total

Sarah Connor: Muttersprache - TV total Sarah Connor will international durchstarten - TV total

Links to Chants

You can find chants and music for Sundays and feasts at:

Jogueschant.org

There are links for both the Ordinary and the Extraordinary Forms of the Roman Rite.

Men at Work playing "Land Down Under"

This is the real deal!

Peter Allen's "I Still Call Australia Home "

A More Sydney oriented version:

John Williams: Gallereries of Pink Galahs

Nothing Without You: Chandelier of Stars

Great country song by John Williamson: Chandelier of Stars. All rights belong to him. If you would like to buy it: http://bigpondmusic.com/Album/John-Williamson/Chandelier-Of-Stars2.aspx?searc...

John Williamson Malle Boy

A Pub With No Beer

Unthinkable - A Pub With No Beer, here's the great Slim Dusty.

I Am Australian

This is a song written by Bruce Woodley (him you see here starting to sing the song) and Dobe Newton and should warm the cockles any Aussie's heart where every he or she might be.

Fourteen Easy Ways to Improve the Liturgy

Arlene Oost-Zinner and Jeffrey Tucker provide a straightforward guide to improving your parish's liturgy according to the true meaning of Vatican II's dogmatic constitution on the Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Consilium.

Jeffrey Tucker Explodes Some of the Myths About the Proponents of Chant

Chant is the natural music for the full and active participation of the people in the divine liturgy of the Eucharist. Yet the liturgical elite dismisses it as undemocratic.

What gives?

On the New Liturgical Movement, Jeffrey Tucker, a young spark plug of liturgical renewal, and a lover of liturgical music explores (beware your prejudices may be endangered!):

The Sociology of the Chant Movement

The most conventional critique of the push for Gregorian chant in parishes is that chant is elitist, and not for regular people. The words are in Latin. It uses unfamiliar notation. It draws its melodies from traditions unfamiliar to the modern ear. It might be loved by “conservatory trained” musicians with high sensibilities, this argument goes. The establishment might go for it. But it is inherently alienating to the regular person, who longs for ecclesial art that is more common and accessible.

Whoever says these things knows nothing about the current music situation in the Catholic Church. The archetype of the chant director today is that he or she is a volunteer, not a professional. He or she has been trained not at conservatory but at a seminar or colloquium, the tuition for which was paid out of pocket. The singers in chant scholas are also volunteers, people who discovered this music only a few years ago and who are inspired by its beauty and role in liturgy. They do not know Latin; what they do know they have learned without formal instruction. [read on.]

Sequences

Michael Lawrence explores sequences on the New Liturgical Movement.

You can hear it sung on the same site.

The Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross

Today, The Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross, is the day Pope Benedict set as the Liberation Day for the Extraordinary Usage of the mass of the Latin Rite (i.e., the mass according to the Missal of John XXIII, sometimes called by the misnomer "the tridentine mass.")

I heard a marvelous mass on EWTN this morning. How better to start the day than with Gregorian chant. I would love to get a podcast of the beautiful homily!

The New Liturgical Movement informs me that there is a DVD of it from EWTN. To find more follow the link. [Added this Sunday morning.]

The mass ended with "Lift High the Cross!" This was neither Latin nor Chant, but a great hymn. You can here it on two sites:

The Oremus Hymnal

and The Cyber Hymnal

I bounced into my classes with more life than all semester!

Listen to the Dies Irae on Saint Rita's Prayer Book

Simon-Peter Vickers-Buckley is an Englishman exiled in North Carolina, a liturgical wasteland that may be in for a renewal. You can leave prayer requests there. You also hear the Dies Irae. This was the sequence for the mass of the dead for the better part of a millennium and perhaps longer. It survived Pius V's reductionist reform of the medieval mass after the Council of Trent only to fall under Bugnini's ban, the bane of the ancient rite.

He has another blog: Simon-Peter's blog.