Pronunciation of church Latin

Groan, groan. It happened again this evening. Somebody with a smattering of the Latin learned 50 years ago in school felt qualified to lecture an ad-hoc group of church choristers about how to pronounce the Latin in Ave Verum - the Elgar, actually, not the Mozart - absurdly the choir will be singing the Elgar in Latin, and the Mozart in its usual weak English translation (at the same service, I might add, as O sacred head, sore wounded is being sung in an appallingly cack-handed translation).

Don't these self-appointed didacts realise the extent of their own ignorance? In the age of instant Googling choir people and didacts need no longer remain in ignorance. There are millions of sites that explain the pronunciation of church Latin, so there's no excuse.

Here's a quick resumé.

Church Latin is not classical Latin, the language that some of us were lucky enough to get a couple of years  of in grammar schools (remember them?) Church Latin is a language created by the Church in about the 4thC AD. Its structure and its basic vocabulary is taken from classical Latin, but there the resemblance ends. How classical Latin might have been pronounced is irrelevant: Pope Pius X decreed (at the turn of the 19th/20thC) that henceforth church Latin would be pronounced as it was pronounced in Rome.

So, to cut a long story short, church Latin should be pronounced as though it were the Italian spoken in Rome (and not the Italian spoken in the south of Italy.) Choristers who know what they're doing make slight changes in pronunciation if they are singing a Latin text by a German composer, or an early French composer, and, if they are very, very clever, a Russian or Finnish composer, but the Italian of Rome is the default pronunciation.

The problem is that people who vaguely remember their schooldays Latin probably don't know any Italian, which is why they still think Ave Verum is pronounced Ah Way Way Rum and Virgine Weir-ghin-ay.

So - quis custodiet ipsos custodes? You might well ask.

---------------------------------

To read Pius X's words, and the reasoning, go here:

http://choirstalls.blogspot.co.uk/2009/01/parish-mag-february-2009.html 

One body, one vote?

Someone chucked into the proceedings at PCC last night that there might be a ban on husbands and wives both being members (she’d read it or heard it somewhere. It’s great fun when people chuck in things like this, which they’re never able to give chapter or verse for – it wastes time wonderfully, generates heated argument, and saves everybody the trouble of having to worry about things like parish share, the leaky roof and requests for exhumations.) I can just about accept that somewhere, once, probably in the US of A*, some bright Herbert thought it would be a wizard wheeze to ban one of a married couple in case they started a domestic during a meeting. But let us for a moment suppose that this potty idea is true, and that diocese has decreed it.

For a start, in our household there would immediately be only one person working for the church, not two. Next there would be a legal challenge on one of two grounds – discrimination against married couples, and/or infringement of human rights and individual liberties, and that would go right up to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary.

And why just ban one of a married couple?  Would the ban extend to one of a cohabiting couple? Or one of a gay couple? Would a candidate have to declare the nature of his or her relationship with somebody, even a putative one, a sort of twinkle in the eye, in case that somebody had to be blacklisted?

And what would be the idea behind such a ban anyway? An assumption that husband and wife, or partners, think and vote in exactly the same way? Or that somehow a married couple is denying a place on PCC to somebody more worthy – a sort of National Church Service  bed-blocking? After all, worthy and well-qualified candidates are queuing up for the opportunity to serve, aren’t they?

My wife and I are different in many interesting ways, she being a woman and I not, and so we have come to an understanding.  I don’t run the Mother’s Union, and she doesn’t sing bass in the choir. But she is a member of PCC because she is secretary to deanery synod, and I am a member because I was elected to sit on deanery synod. We have full speaking and voting rights on PCC, although that might be because our PCC doesn’t actually have Standing Orders to say that we can't, and the rules of conduct are made [or made up] by the people with the longest memories – ‘we’ve always done it like that here.’

But try getting advice or even model standing orders out of diocese! Diocese people are very canny – they know very well that if PCC members were made fully aware of their legal responsibilities as trustees of a charity, and their possible personal liability if something went badly wrong, like sacking an organist who then goes to an employment tribunal and wins [case reports available on request] the PCC chairs would be empty.

But what I really, really want to know is this – which one of us in our household would fall victim to such a ban: me or my very independent and differently skilled wife? Because if PCC was minded to take this nonsense seriously, it wouldn’t see one of us for dust. Until the court case came up, that is.

*’A small Kentucky church finds itself at the epicenter of a battle over racism and the gospel. Gulnare Freewill Baptist Church, a small, 40-person congregation located in Pike County, Kentucky, is catching widespread grief over its recent decision to target interracial couples. The church has decided to forbid these couples from partaking in worship activities and will not allow them to become members...’

Read the full report here

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/kentucky-church-bans-interracial-couples-from-becoming-members-leading-worship/

April 2012 Choirstalls column, n't

Another sacrifice to the spike. This should have appeared in the April 2012 parish mag, but didn't.

Quite apart from the bling proudly displayed as choristers clink and clank their way back to their stalls after prizegiving, the annual RSCM festival service at Blackburn Cathedral has many other things to commend it, not least the fact that you don’t have to fork out a small fortune to be allowed in.

On a holiday last year we wanted to see the new font in Salisbury Cathedral, and in Annie marched, confident and unchallenged. I hesitated, and was lost. “Get in the queue, Sir,” a voice barked from the Box Office, meaning “Hand over your six quid or hop it.” I hopped it, I’m afraid, and waited without while Annie hobnobbed with vergers within, and it was while I was waiting and seething not a little that another brilliant idea landed - attendance cards! It is quite simple, and it works like this.

Every time you attend a service in your local parish church a sidesperson stamps your card. The idea is that you produce that card at the box office of any cathedral in the land, and if you’ve got enough points you’ll be whisked past the lady flogging tickets to sightseers asking what time the bar opens and straight into the VIP lounge for a small sherry with the Bishop, followed by a guided tour by the Dean himself. It won’t affect cathedral takings all that much, judging by the decline in regular church attendance. And choir persons are particularly privileged, ho-ho, being under a three-line-whip on every Sunday in the year – we can practically fill our cards in Holy Week alone.

I was ticked off last month by the Editor-in-Chief for being longwinded (as if!) so this month’s column is correspondingly short. But I couldn’t let this snippet pass without a mention.

A new Methodist hymnal, Singing the Faith, was published earlier this year, and was reviewed in Church Times by Dr J R Watson, Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Durham.

The review is a masterpiece of the art of damning with faint praise, or so I read it. Dr Watson enumerates one or two good points, notes pointedly that the number of hymns by the Wesleys has been virtually halved, and concludes thus:

“It is to be hoped...that the music, and the best of the contemporary texts, will help to make this book successful with a new generation of Methodists, who will never know how much they have lost.”

Quite.