He once produced good music. It is the most important in all. Recently, in London, somebody was talking about the problem of language, and he said something which I think expresses a fundamental point. Languages codify immemorial reflexes and twists of feelings, remembrances of action that transcend individual recall. Contour the communal experience as subtly decisive as to contour the sky and land in which a civilization ripens. An outsider can master a language as a writer masters his mind. He rarely becomes as one with his undefined subterranean motion. Now it is that undefined subterranean motion Latin for a long time has left for the ordinary man, for the composer, that subterranean motion.

[01:14]

A mother no longer in touch speaks to her child in Latin. Lovers no longer address one another. And this is a very serious point, because it means that the language is nowadays deprived of all those overtones and undertones which come from being used in the most intimate actions of the human race. It is still an interlingua in certain parts of the world, among certain people and communities, but it is no longer a language in the sense that it is a living language, renewed, altered and developed by the experience of humanity. That's the first thing to remember. Therefore the rhythms of Latin, the phrase language, the syntax, all this is something which every year, month and day is slipping further and further into the past, as far as the experience of contemporary man is concerned. And therefore a composer can never really set Latin in the same way and with the same feeling as he does his own native language.

[02:22]

I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing. I'm just pointing out that the two things, setting English in American and setting Latin, are now fundamentally very different. Before we go further, I think, too, I want to point out that there are certain myths and legends which may get in the way when we are thinking about music for the vernacular literature. You, as Benedictine, of course, have a particular heritage in the guardianship of Gregorian chants. And I do not think that the Gregorian chant need be uprooted from the liturgy. I think it can be adapted in many ways, and I think it can also serve as a basis for many future experiments. But the first thing we've got to realise about Gregorian chants, and it's something I think that even Benedictine tends to forget, is that in the form we have it now, it is primarily a monastic creation.

[03:31]

The big extent of the proper chants, the elaborate melismata of the graduals, the tracts of Alleluia, are, as we have them now, a creation, not of the Roman Church at all, but of the French and West German monasteries of the eighth to tenth century. We do not know, and we cannot know, except by surmise and inference, what the simple basis of Roman chant was in the sixth century. You can say definitely that it comes from a Jewish original, that the methods of plain song are not the normal methods of composition used in Western Europe at all. They are Semitic methods. They consist of assembling together little tiny units of melody of two, three, four, and five notes, which are all built according to stereotype patterns. And this mosaic method of putting music together is a fundamentally Semitic way of composition. Therefore, Gregorian chant is, in its oldest origin, Semitic.

[04:34]

but there is no certainty now that we can get back to anything like the primitive form of the Jewish chants which was adapted first to the Greek language and then altered again to be readapted to the Latin language in the 4th and 5th centuries and which then in the Dark Ages became the provinces of the monastic communities of the West and chiefly of the monastic communities of France and Western Germany and was further developed, added to, elaborated, expanded Therefore, if you are going to use Gregorian chanting, always bear in mind that its present form is that of a chant created for a liturgy. And one of the things, I'm sure I need to remind you of this, that St. Benedict lays down his rule is that the monks must have plenty to do. That's the implication behind the great many of the commands and the prisms that are given, aren't they? And one of the reasons why the later medieval development of the the leisure of the condom.

[05:42]

Now this development was French and German, particularly French, and therefore it has many French characteristics in its love of decoration and in its love of elaboration. And you know, too, that when polyphony started, it started as a decoration of the already decorated portions of chants. Instead of performing the decorations at the end of the existing chants, you performed them simultaneously. And so you got transfiguration. And then the idea came up of singing different texts simultaneously, the so-called Gothic meditation of the 13th century. Then in the 14th century comes the polyphony, which is not created by church students is created by the new capelle, the musical institution, first of all, of the papacy, and then of the bishops, and then of kings and princes in imitation of the papacy, where each potentate had his own group of musicians, singers, and instrumentalists, who wrote music which was not designed so much to give honor to Almighty God, but to show what a big guy the chapel was, whose chapel it was.

[07:02]

This is a very important point. And the growing secularisation of music throughout the 14th, 15th and early 15th centuries can be traced directly to the ostentation and the lavish display of the rulers of Europe. Now when the Count of Tent laid down the lines on which the supposed reform of the church music would take place, he emphasised something which for the first time in music has become important. That the music should, as far as possible, make the words easily heard, they should underline the meaning and the mood of the words set, so that the people listening might thereby be moved to devotion and contemplation. Now this is another frequent myth about Gregorian chants, that Gregorian chants very often illustrate the meaning of the words and bring about their mood, And this is largely illusory. The idea, since ancient Greece, of bringing out the meaning and mood of your words by the music has been lost.

[08:10]

It is something you find no reference to in any medieval treatise on chants. You find no composer talking about it at all until you get to the middle of the 16th century. And there are certain passages that may seem to bear the doubt in chants. For example, there's one famous antiphon, Ashen. And there are many other examples of that. Now the 16th century does see this concern for the word. I won't go into all the ramifications of it now, why and how, it just happened at this time. It links up with the beginning of the idea that the word is not only a thing you hear, and for a minority of being a thing that they read, but it now would come for a very great number of people, something they could see as a printed book.

[09:17]

The word of God was no longer something they just heard from the priest at the altar, it was something they could actually see for themselves in a book. And with the growth of cheaper printing, more and more people came to think of the word not only as a heard thing, but as a seen thing. And therefore they wanted more and more to represent both visibly and audibly in newness. word which they now heard and saw. Well now, in bringing up the meaning of the word, music became more and more dramatic, and it led, in secular music, to the opera. And the history of church music, from the late 16th century onwards, is the incorporation of more and more dramatic traits set up what was in many ways a false ideal. One of the books that still remains to be written is an examination of papal musicology.

[10:20]

And it's one of those books that ought to be published posthumously. Because there are certainly no radical oversimplifications We get a false picture. We also get a false historicism. The idea that a certain style of music can be held up as an invariable model. It doesn't work because people feel differently about music in different ages. The Gordian Chant seems to the average man today to be rather a slow, to be a rather sad affair, rather gloomy. In other words, our whole musical aesthetic has changed with 1,000 years of musical history.

[11:26]

And therefore, if we are devising new music, we have to take into account the greatly increased experience of humanity in music. The fact that the average educated man today can and often does know a good deal of music has made us superior. All hours of the day, if he lived in an American city, for example, he's likely to be surrounded with music, whether he likes it or not. You have two great periods of Gregorian chant. The period represented by our proper chant, which are the more ancient, probably. And then you have the period represented by our Kyriale, nearly all the melodies of which go from the 10th to the 14th century, which are based on very different musical principles, which are much more obviously true. Why should there not, therefore, now be a new, third body of music? It is. The beauty of the church is ancient, but it is also new. And if the Church cannot produce a new body of music in response to the demand now being made, I think there would be something radically wrong.

[12:36]

There is no reason why the old should not be preserved. But equally, there is no reason why the old should be preserved to the exclusion of the new. This is something which has never happened before. We don't perform the music of the 13th, 14th and 15th centuries in church now. It would be quite unsuitable liturgically. It is kept alive by many devoted bodies, choirs, groups of musicians who perform it. It's recorded. It's still there. It's still alive. But it is no longer suitable for our liturgy. And therefore, a great deal of our 16th and 17th and 18th century music will become something which is no longer suitable for the liturgy. It will still survive and have value as music. but it cannot now serve our needs. And if you really think about the situation in the Church of the world today, in a real sense, the Middle Ages are, although a very important part, of course, in the history of the Church, almost an interlude. The real Church atmosphere, or the surroundings in which the Church lives, is much more typically the cosmopolitan society of our time.

[13:45]

Remember, right up to the end of the fourth century, that was the milieu, it was the church. far larger than Augustine could ever have dreamed of. Whereas the Middle Ages is a comparatively restrictive period. It is, contrasted with the Roman period and with our own period, a narrow-minded period by virtue of circumstance and situation, inadequate knowledge, inadequate communication. And it was a time, from the end of the 12th century onwards, when you had a radical hardening, you may say, of mental outro. When the church became more and more codified, you had the canon law, you had the strict codification of theology, the whole thing began to become more and more bureaucratic, more and more systematized. And the Reformation, as can be seen today, did in one sense begin a breaking of the artificial barriers which the Church had tended to erect around the doctrine and message that it was built to broadcast to the world.

[14:57]

And now we're starting to do it again, we're beginning to relax, we're beginning to take in the fruits of our secular civilisation and realise that the Church doesn't create, to reuse for itself all the good that is in the world. Therefore, there can be no false distinction between secular and sacred in this way. Everything can be used in a sacred way, provided it is used in the proper way. And the only thing to judge whether we are using it in the proper way are what we want to do in our worship, whether we want to make our worship as simple for people to understand as possible, and whether we are prepared, really, to go right back to the root the roots of our worship of music in producing the right sort of art for these purposes. Now we come down to the question of words again, which I mentioned at the beginning because it is important, and because all these ways of looking at music have primarily been musical ways of treating words which have not necessarily stressed the meaning of the words.

[16:07]

For example, so many of those cheerful piano games fount of goodness, unbegotten Father, radiant with splendour, and at the angel get they lay upon. They are full of interpolated texts, which is why so many of the chants in the Kyrie Ale seem to us today to be unsuited to their wording. There's hardly a mournful Kyrie in the Kyrie Ale, apart from Mass No. 18, which is one of the few really good of future. Have you ever stopped to think, why is it that we always sing Lord of Mercy, Christ of Mercy, that joyful music? If the music really is supposed to fix the world. Now to get back to the problem of words. First of all I think it would be highly disastrous if any attempt to make a permanent fixed text was imposed on us today for music. There has to be a great deal of experiment and in the next 25 or 30 years it is important if we are to produce a really great body of music that there should be as much experiment as possible.

[17:17]

There should be no attempt It can only be temporary, as far as the mass is concerned, because the final shape of the mass ordinary has not been fixed. It's still under discussion in Rome. I have been told that it has been discussed, and almost settled, that it's been largely pigeonholed, and that it may be produced at a later date. You know how slowly these things go. But until that is happened, we cannot really proceed with any certainty about the final shape of our literature. we can always start making experiments based on principles. Everything spoken aloud or sung must be intelligible to those listening, not to those reading. And it must be not only easy for the congregation to take part in those places where they should take part, but it must be made desirable. If only we can write the right a good composer should be able to write music that will make people want to sing it.

[18:29]

If we can do that, a great deal of the opposition to singing in the vernacular can still meet, and the more die-hard sections of the church will disappear. Now, in England, and I think in America, I don't know very much about it, we have a very bad tradition of what I might call liturgical English. We have it in our manual to prayer, sanctioned for us by our bishops and archbishops, We have it in the constant Latinization of our Catholic influence. We still talk about the visitation and the Annunciation. We still even sometimes talk about the invention of the Holy Cross, with all the regrettable misunderstandings that come about. Then there are the peculiarities of English to consider in writing words for music.

[19:33]

The way English continually alters the pitch of the voice, something that other languages do not necessarily do. A mixture of vowel sounds with a nearly old diphthong. Then that strange sound which phoneticists call the neutral E. A word like the, the sort of strange half-vowel sound you get on unstressed syllables. something which isn't nearly so noticeable in American pronunciations of English as it is in English, because you people do possess a lot of the older pronunciations of English. You also tend to give far more attention to syllables which in English would be so unessentious to be hardly vocalized. Therefore, I think there may be a difference between English and American settings of the literature. one studied in the history of language in ways which are those or shall we say 17th and 18th centuries in many ways where you pronounce certain syllables where you stress certain syllables all can be traced back to the 17th century when your ancestors came over here and therefore i think in many ways you do preserve a far healthier in these languages and we do it in

[20:50]

I have been listening to American singing in church, and again, it is noticeable how it alters the whole setting of words. For example, take a word like sanctuary, which I had to set some years ago in a word. Now, in English, if you're going to make it convincing in English, you can only do sanctuary. You can't do sanctuary, whereas the American language intends, I can't imitate it myself, to bring out those three syllables without stressing them. In other words, you do tend to give a little more weight and time, when you have a mini-syllable word, to the syllables which follow on the accented part, and therefore make it much easier to set them in. We have many variations of stress and of weight. The variety in our mono-syllable, the word like length, There are some examples of translations which I am discussing entirely from the beautiful point of view.

[22:04]

It's a translation of the Exsultet, which is surely a piece of liturgy we could want to keep in any vernacular liturgy. I'll just read the Latin to remind you of the rhythm. Exsultet iam angelica turba cellorum. Exsultent divina mysteria. Ex procenti regis victoria. Turba internet salutare. You noticed the wonderful song with him, but he didn't breathe first, did he? Exultant divina mysteria. Et potentii regis victoriae, tuba infernit salutaris. Now here is the worst translation I could find. Deliberately chosen as an example of things which are not quite so bad, but which you can find over and over again in translations made in the literature. It's taken from a booklet published in India.

[23:08]

Why the Indians should be that afflicted, I don't know. There it is. Rejoice now, you angelic choir. Notice the sort of chatty tone there at the beginning. and let the trumpets of victory blare for the great triumph of our King. Rejoice, O Earth, flooded with such great light. Illumined by the splendors of the eternal King, may it know that the darkness of the entire universe has been dispelled. Wherefore, beloved brethren, who stand here in the marvelous splendor of this holy light, I beseech you, add your voices to mine, invoking the mercy of Almighty God. Well, it is an accurate template. It has no rhythm. To set such a thing well to music is impossible. Also, notice what I can only describe, it would be described in England as form 3B Latin. To make it know that's the darkness of the entire universe, it's like a small child who's just discovered a subjunctive mood.

[24:17]

Illumine by the splendor of the eternal king. You see, a Latin word where an English word would do Now here is Monsignor Knox, which of course is much better. It's not very suitable for musical setting. He didn't design it for that. And he always found great difficulties in writing text for music. He once said to me in a letter, I haven't a note. And his hymns, which are beautiful pieces, are perfect. and beautiful sensations are often very difficult to sing by a convocation because he always lets the sense run over from one line to another whereas the average convocation looks upon the end of the line as a place for taking breath to the next and therefore you find yourself in a not sensation breaking off at awkward moments here is his sensation of the exalted now let the angelic heavenly choirs exult let joy pervade the unknown beings who surround God's throne And let the trumpet of salvation sound the triumph of our mighty King.

[25:19]

Let her too be joyful in the radiance of this great splendor. Enlightened by the glory of her eternal King, let her feel upon the whole round world the darkness has been lifted. Well, of course, it is very, very much so. And yet, for putting the music, it lacks direction. Why the subjunctive voice all the time? Now, let the angelic heaven require the exult. Why exult? Why not rejoice? Let joy pervade the unknown being. I'm not quite clear why that is a translation of exultant divina misteria. Let joy pervade the unknown being to surround God's presence. Why can't you use the imperative mood rather than the subjunctive? Well, four years ago I was writing an oratorio about Easter and I wanted to use a large section of this.

[26:21]

And so I was looking for texts. And after looking through many texts, these included, I decided to prepare my own but using a basis of Knox where he provided a happy phrase. Now this is my selection. Rejoice, O choir of angels in the heavens, Rejoice, ye mysteries, around the throne of God. Sound the trumpet of salvation for the triumph of our mighty King. You notice it's direct all the time. You've got a rhythm there. Rejoice, O choir of angels in the heavens. Rejoice, ye mysteries, around the throne of God. Sound the trumpet of salvation for the triumph of our mighty King. Rejoice, O earth, in the radiance of this great splendour. Know that from all thy globes darkness has been scattered. of the darkness has been shattered. O dear brethren who are here with me at this wondrous lighting of the holy flame, join me and proclaim the mercy of our God. Now we come to the problem of music in the mass.

[27:29]

What sort of music? Or what portion of the mass? The mass ordinary, I think, it will be agreed by everybody, Some simple Gregorian chants, I think the very simple ones of the Kyriale, could be adapted to the church. Now, these adaptations would have probably to follow the lines of those made by the Lutheran composers in the 15th century, who took many Gregorian tunes and adapted them for the German world. There are people who, in England and in America, I wonder if you find yourself off with an elaborate melisma on the word learn.

[28:42]

Dutch adaptation. Do not take into account that music should be made to fit words, not words music. You can't get a really artistic result if you fit words to a music in music. If you want to do that, you must radically alter your music. Now, our Gregorian chant is in a highly decorated form. It contains lots of what the harmony teachers would call unessential notes, notes that are not fundamental to the real shape of the melody. And it would be easy to strip away some of those repetitions, little decorations, in making a tune which would fit in this world. some of the melodies and materiality and this I think would still be done you would have a course to analyze your charm find out the radical shape behind it that again would demand some scholarship and some musical

[29:45]

I was up at St. John's, Minnesota, last weekend, and several of the fathers there had been working on this problem. They hadn't been sticking to any fixed translations. They had been choosing from several translations and trying to make a set of words for each chant which could flow naturally with music. But I pointed out to them that a lot of their chants were still too elaborate. They had one or two melismas, an and, and there. They didn't think of getting rid of these because they had the mistaken notions. and use that. That's us with the divisor camera anywhere. I could show you some examples. I'm not good at singing until I lose interest in the sound of the fish. This will also apply to the proper. Of course, the proper chant will not be maintained in that particular form.

[31:08]

As you know, in any restored liturgy, we will have the full intro chants Now, not all of these are necessarily the prerogative of the people. And there are two particular jobs that I think should not be the prerogative of the people. The first is the operatory, when the collection is made. The second is the gradual, which from time immemorial has been the province of the professional singer in the church. The whole shape of the gradual, its organization, the style, the complexity, all these elaborate charms, I am sure, can be adjusted if we want.

[32:12]

There is no reason why you should always have a pulse by a Gregorian graduate. The graduate could be the place, probably enlarged to a sound text, should be made the basis of any polyphonic music at this point. We shouldn't import devotional literature into the mass after the office. In setting these texts, we must always be aware of the different types of texts we are setting, and therefore of the necessary functions of the texts in the mass. The Kyrie, the Sanctus, the Agnus Dei are simple texts. The Kyrie and Agnus Dei are repetitive texts. and therefore they are thick, which adapt themselves easily to musical repetition or some kind of rondo structure where you have two tunes which alternate with one another.

[33:18]

Also, such chants easily adapt themselves to synaptic setting. It's not good, I think, if we're going to have On the other hand, the gloria and the creed will require a more elaborate organization. I'm sure you know the so-called embriagin gloria in the Carriale, which is really a kind of psalm, isn't it? You have a simple tone which is repeated over and over again for each phrase or sentence in gloria. That would be one way of handling the vernacular gloria. It could also be the way of handling a vernacular creed. Something would have to be done with the text of both those prayers in order to make them really easily sound, if I need to conjugate, because so many of our present translations are not very good. With the Creed, of course, you would have the difficulty.

[34:20]

There's an English poem which says, the moral is, it is indeed, you mustn't monkey with the Creed. Defising a new translation for the Creed that would really Now the people should properly, I think, share in the intro and they should share in the communion. You know the many uses that have been made of responsorial singing. Other people sing an antiphon, a short antiphon. And it would be possible to build up a repertory of short antiphons that the congregation could learn. It might even be possible, as has been suggested I hear, I told it to St.

[35:21]

John, that there should only be a few in-choice psalms for the whole year, perhaps four for the main liturgical season, which could be used over and over again, and thus the congregation would come to know the psalms, and in time the congregation might therefore be brought to singing the psalms instead of being confused. because although the responsorial method of psalm singing is helpful and it's easy and it's effective, I think these days we should not rest content with that. We want the Christian people to be able to know the psalm once again as their normal prayer and therefore we must devise ways of singing them which will make it as easy as possible for them. I think the Gelino method of psalm singing is good. I think the Gelino and one that people can pick up very quickly. On the other hand, while I admire the Jelena Psalms in the original language, I do not think that the translations that have been made of many of these psalms to the original children are good.

[36:28]

For example, take the 23rd Psalm, which begins, The shepherd is my Lord. I didn't think that to be the same as saying, The Lord is my shepherd, did I? And then you come to the end of that verse where you have, to revive my drooping spirit. Well, that is reversible in itself. But you get a word like spirit. Now, spirit is one of those words where you do not in any way stress the final syllable. The second note is the same as the first, but unaccented. But of course, it is the other note sound that gets too rich, which of course means that if any congregation sings that tune, they are going to have a great deal of emphasis placed on the last syllable of that word. That's what I mean by bad musical technique. It's the sort of thing that always happens. imitated either in England or in America.

[37:48]

In fact, I think we ought to be especially careful in view of our past from him to avoid anything that is mawkish or sentiment. We want a much more robust religion distributed in every way. And while, of course, it must be truly devotional, I think we ought to realize that a lot of our devotions, our devotional practices, are still surrounded by an almost 19th century romantic which has very, very little to do with our present century outlook on life and men. Also, too, there is no need for imitation modalism. There are many people who think that a piece becomes immediately religious in tone if you just have a few flattened leading notes in the Dorian mode. There is no need for this at all. I am convinced that there are many new ways of writing music. We've got to produce music which sounds really contemporary, and I don't mean by that it's got to have full of jazz-eating idioms, but it's got to be popular in style.

[38:57]

It should be popular in the real meaning of that word. It should be a music that people will want to see, and then it will become a people's music. And a good deal of propaganda is going to be necessary. You know how the Lutheran chorales were played in Germany. They were itinerant. the people would gather round and they would teach them the new Lutheran doctrine with this new chorale, and thus the tune played to our generation. Now these tunes were not in the form you know them today. You take something like a sacred hymn to round it, which is really in four beats to the bar, we know it now, but originally it was in a mixture of triple time and duple time. And nearly all the Lutheran chorales were in a free mixture of triple and duple rhythm. And it was only through the 17th century that the differences in the rhythm were gradually ironed out until you got our 4-4 time and our 3-4 time in which we sing the chorale.

[40:07]

We should also, I think, look at Anglican and Episcopalian settings of the English book texts have been texts for 400 years now. And there's a great deal of accumulated tradition and experience there. We can learn an enormous amount from the studies. In fact, if you want to preserve your 16th century music and churches for a while, while the congregation is still learning some of the new music, why not sing some of the Anglican churches? Why not sing a bird's because you would be introducing these words to the congregation. You'd be making them expect high musical standards. And you would also be preserving that heritage of musical tradition, which, of course, the church must always preserve.

[41:15]

There can be no radical breaks of the past. Anything that is new must be grafted on. And we must realize that it would take time, because there are people's feelings to be considered. There's also the fact that even the ordinary common man doesn't like changes normally. And it will be a most persuasive argument for the new music and the new text if we can show how much that is good in them comes from the past. I don't think we need emphasise the newness. What we are doing is so new. If we can link it up with what has been new in the past and which we now think of as being old, then we will have a very good argument to recommend it. Also, many of the so-called anthems of the Anglican and Episcopalian liturgies are translations of the proper sections of the Mass. They can therefore be used as choral introits, gradual, operative, and communion. We have a great deal of vernacular liturgical music for the choir ready made if we want to use it.

[42:23]

A lot of choral music will be used at the beginning when the ministry becomes almost wholly vernacular because we won't have enough good music written. Also, congregation will take time to learn their full share in the text. Now, I want to promise to write about this. The reading of prayers, lessons, and Gospels. I am not sure that this should be observed always. The reason, of course, for the chanting of prayers and lessons in a large building and a spoken voice. But now that in all modern churches you have a built-in loudspeaker system, is it really necessary to have monotone lessons in prayer? It will mean that the clergy will have to be trained more than they are

[43:23]

But if monotone is wanted, and why should it not be kept for certain occasions, following occasions, as on typical masses, then it will be a very easy thing indeed to adapt to the Gorgian system of intonation, flex, intone, and the special tones that are used for question. I thought his chanting of the lessons worked very well indeed. I thought the rest of the music was very, very dull. In fact, I think that's the sort of music that will put people off the natural sound that it is, not encourage them to sing it. There is no need for religious music to be quite so dull, and there is no need either to influence your conversation A congregation would like to be credited with intelligence, and if you could provide the stimulating news that people will want to see, I anticipate no real difficulties.

[44:49]

I'm basing this on the experience that I've had here. I bought over a vernacular complex, made the text newly translated from the Hebrew in the rhythm of the original But to get back to the reading and the chant, here again, new texts can help very much indeed. You do not have to prepare a new text of a lesson that is going to be read or chant in a monotone. On the other hand, many of the existing translations are awkward and ugly in many places. They lack a sense of cadence. And one of the things about 20th century prose is that it seems to avoid the cadences of the 18th, 19th, and 17th centuries. And while it may be undesirable in contemporary writing, like novels and newspaper articles, if you want language to sound effectively in a large building, when it is addressed to a great many people, then occasioned prose is necessary.

[46:03]

You must have language that has a very strong rhythm. I don't mean meter, poetic meter, but I do mean a language that is organized with an ear of rhythmic cadence. Here again, There are a great many wonderful pieces in this place. I'm sure you know them. And these again could serve as our models. We mustn't follow them slavishly, because the syntax, the grammar, and the cadence of the language, of course, have altered very profoundly since then. But at least we can use them to inspire us in the way we should go. Last of all, simple music does not mean dull music. It does mean, though, that you've got to have good composers, because to compose truly first-class simple music is perhaps the most difficult task a composer can set himself. We'll have to arrive at what Eliot, in another context, calls a condition of utter simplicity, costing not less than everything.

[47:08]

And it may seem that sometimes we are paying a very high cost. For a composer, I think it may be very difficult. A composer may, many times, cases appear to have to abandon all that he could learn. And I think only if he puts himself at the service of the liturgy, if he doesn't think of any personal style, if he tries always to produce something which is really going to make people want to sing, which will be an effective vehicle for the liturgical system, then he will produce something really worthwhile. of experimentation, and we've all of us got to realise that many of our experiments are necessarily going to disappear. All we can hope is that we can start now to make a basis which, in the next hundred years, can be purged, sifted, and, let us remember, adapted and developed just as a Gregorian chant wanted its own day and the

[48:10]

to make something which becomes a really shared body of musical time, something that can be shared by the clergy and the people alike, something that can become a real tradition of music and thus preserve all the best in our experiment, just as Gregorian chants in its present form and the Lutheran chorales in their present form preserve the best. made to me at St. John's, Minnesota, when I was there last weekend, how much they could do just by being an independent abbey, largely independent of the bishops, although he could advise, could not command them in matters liturgical. And by having this liturgical independence, they were therefore able to make all sorts of experiments which would not necessarily have been tolerated elsewhere.

[49:15]

And also, places like this have, as I'm sure you feel, of focus, make sure that experimentation is used In this period, then, the composer and the church musician have what must seem, in contrast to their almost dictatorial position this past century, a very humble task. It may sometimes seem a very unrewarding one, but I like to think that we have a model, remember, in Christ himself, We can look at our experiment and check with it that way. We can find a material, we can find an inspiration, and we can still produce something which will I bought some coffee, but I didn't know if there would be any time, because we have a very tight schedule here, don't we?

[50:52]

Do you have a recording of it? I have a recording, yes. And you have a gramophone? Yes. Couldn't we all move now up to St. Joseph? No. No, unfortunately. Can it be played into the refectory? It's only 15 minutes long. I think I've got a copy at least for every pair of you, if not one each. Well, it would take a long time without a piano to accompany and whatnot. I think you'll find it much easier if you listen to a bit of it first and then try it once again. Why don't we go and listen to it?

[51:47]

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