Join Archbishop Cordileone for Solemn Vespers, a public lecture by on English early music and reception
By Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music & Divine Worship
November 7 · 4:30pm – November 10 · 7:30pm PST
Location St. Patrick’s Seminary & University
320 Middlefield Road Menlo Park, CA 94025
Join us at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park for an evening featuring Sung Vespers, A Scholar’s Talk followed by a reception with Archbishop Cordileone PLUS Prof. William P. Mahrt and Kerry McCarthy, a musician and author known for her work on the English Renaissance music.
November 7 is the opening day of an amazing 3-day conference organized by the Catholic Institute for Sacred Music celebrating the life and work of Stanford Prof. William P. Mahrt. While the conference is only open to those who register (for a fee), this opening night cosponsored by the Benedict XVI Institute is open to you, your friends, and all the public free of charge.
The gathering begins at 4:30 pm with sung Solemn Vespers celebrated by Archbishop Cordileone and accompanied by Prof. Bill Mahrt’s St. Anne’s Choir with an expanded group of singers from conference participants
At 5:45 the renowned musician and biographer Dr. Kerry McCarthy will teach us about “Low Style and High Style in Catholic England,” with new insights into early music.
Dr. McCarthy’s talk will be followed by a reception.
Kerry McCarthy is a musician and author known for her work on the English Renaissance. Her new biography of the composer Thomas Tallis, published with Oxford University Press, won the 2021 American Musicological Society award for early music book of the year. She is now working on her fourth book, an exploration of the lives of professional singers in Tudor England. Kerry discovered the delights of early music while in high school, joined Cantores in Ecclesia in 1994, and has been part of the Byrd Festival in Portland, Oregon since it began in 1998. She attended Reed College and Stanford University, and spent eleven years teaching music history at Duke University in North Carolina. She now lives in Portland, where she was born and raised.
Having devoted his life and scholarly activity to the study and praxis of the Roman rite and its music, the work of Dr. William Mahrt has become a touchstone for countless scholars and active church musicians. Professor Mahrt’s insights into the characteristics of Gregorian chant have elucidated the nature of the chant as integral to the sacred liturgy, and even explicated the nature of the sacred liturgy itself. His devoted direction of the St. Ann Choir and Stanford Early Music Singers remains a pillar in the practice of sacred music in the United States.
From EventBrite
Excellent sounds will be forthcoming from Menlo Park, but I don’t think my ears will pick them up down here in Pasadena. Will any of this be recorded?
Will there be wine and cheese at the reception?
The music at Mass at Stanford University Catholic Community isn’t good at all. They play and sing tired old 80s songs. I’m surprised. I thought they would have chant and polyphony. It’s like a Boomer parish. Not even many students attend Mass in the Stanford chapel.
Mass attendance by college students at Newman centers and the like is down all over the country. I have a friend who is a campus minister at a Catholic university. She told me that, before Covid, the “hangover Mass” at 9PM would be packed with over 300 students; now they barely get 50 students at that Mass, and that’s at a Catholic university, remember. There is a huge problem with grey-haired “permanent community” members taking over and overly influencing the character of what were established to be and intended to be and should be campus Catholic communities that serve the college student population. The grey-haired people should go to Mass at a regular neighborhood parish. There are plenty around Stanford: Nativity Parish in Menlo Park, St. Raymond Parish in Menlo Park, St. Anthony Parish in Menlo Park (but heavily Latino and Spanish speaking), and St. Denis Parish in Menlo Park/Portola Valley. Stanford Catholic Community also lets women preach the homily sometimes, which is a liturgical abuse because preaching by laity at Mass is prohibited. So, that lets you know what kind of “catholic” community Stanford has. Don’t know why Bishop Cantu allows that.
Bishop Cantu can’t even control his local high school
Can’t or won’t?
There is little to recommend the music at most masses these days. Good music doesn’t have to be from the Dark Ages to be good, as much as we may like it. I’ve come to the conclusion that most Catholics just don’t know how to sing and don’t have a history of good singing. I have a 60+ year acquaintance with some Protestant churches (horrors) and find that there is robust singing in their services and that they seldom sing the same song more than once a year. So, how do they do it? Often, it starts in the pre-K Sunday school where there is always a song to be sung, along with the memorization of Bible verses. Singing is just part of their patrimony.
“Good music doesn’t have to be from the Dark Ages to be good…” If that age was indeed Dark, how then such fine music?
Dark Ages is a slur against Christianity used by people who think Enlightenment rationalism and postmodern deconstructionism and relativism are superior to Christian faith. Sometimes it’s just used unthinkingly as a synonym for the (Early) Middle Ages; same time period in European history. The Middle Ages was a time of intellectual flourishing in its own way, mostly thanks to the Catholic Church, after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Just as liberals consider the F-word and the N-word to be slurs, they should avoid using the DA-word too.
“Dark age” is a generic term for some historians referring to a period of civilizational collapse leaving few written records, such as the Egyptian First and Second Intermediate Periods or the post-Mycenean Age in Greece. By that standard, the European Early Middle Ages (500-1000 AD) were hardly “dark”, since written documents are plentiful, if somewhat concentrated geographically. The Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) was not “dark”, and neither were the Benedictine or Irish monasteries. It certainly was a time when culture struggled and the number of moderately educated people (who would have served as clerks in the Roman bureaucracy or NCOs in the Roman Army) shrank dramatically. But interest was high even among “barbarian” leaders not fully literate themselves: the Visigoths in Spain, for example or a Frankish king named Charlemagne, by who assistances much of classical Latin literature was preserved.