In Assembly the CD Recording Project the Background
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In Assembly The CD Recording Project The Background Who is Bernard Huijbers? A Dutch liturgical composer, who was born in 1922, and in 1940 entered the Jesuit novitiate. In the mainstream of European liturgical renewal inspired by the great minds of the day, such as Pius Parsch in Strasbourg and Josef Jungmann in Innsbruck, he collaborated with fellow Jesuit Joseph Gelineau in France to begin composing a new liturgical music for The Netherlands. With the collaboration of former student and emerging poet Huub Oosterhuis, he became The Netherlands’ foremost liturgical pioneer in developing new music and forms for the Liturgy, a decade before Vatican II. Strongly influenced by the liturgical reforms of the French Church, especially the Saint-Séverin in Paris, he experienced the dynamic of assembly singing as the formative element of Liturgy. Discarding Sacred and Popular Hymns, he regarded these as no longer being appropriate for singing the Liturgy. The work he was doing with that of his Dutch and other European colleagues was to lead to the liturgical reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s. He was effortless in his analysis of the distinction between singing during the liturgy and singing the liturgy itself. But due to being Dutch, whose language was not mainstream European, he never gained the recognition given to Gelineau, yet in many ways outshone him, as Gelineau himself testified on his first visit to Amsterdam. Huub Oosterhuis, Joseph Gelineau & Bernard Huijbers Since Gelineau, Huijbers, Deiss, were not transitional but foundational, the importance of ritual music can never be underestimated. Yet in the aftermath of Vatican II, the Church has been inundated by songs and hymns which bear little resemblance to the music proposed by the Council. The Constitution on the Liturgy # 30 calls for acclamations, responses, psalmody, antiphons and at the end of the list, songs. In the immediate post-conciliar years, in the UK I was involved with the experimental St. Thomas More Centre for Pastoral Liturgy, where as parish music and liturgy director, I was also a member of both the Center’s workshop team and the emergent composers forum. I was able to introduce Huijbers’ ritual songs both in weekly liturgies and programs around the country. Working alongside Bill Tamblyn, Paul Inwood, Bernadette Farrell, James Walsh and Christopher Walker, we all met on a three-monthly basis to critique one another’s work and to explore new liturgical music forms which gave voice to ritual music. As we were not influenced by the requirements of the publishers, we were free to delve into Huijbers’ as laid out in his 1969 Door Podium en zaal tegelijk, published in English as The Performing Audience in 1974. In America, Huijbers was having his own direct personal influence there, through his teaching at Loyola, Baltimore, and his collaboration with Bob Albright at St Matthew’s parish and in Newman Centers around the country. Bob Albright continues this tradition beyond campus ministry of the Newman Center, Towson University, into his retirement church community which meets at his house, TCTMAYH (The Church That Meets At Your House) in Middle River, MD. Bernard Huijbers Recording Project 1 March 7, 2020 Huijbers initially gained traction in the UK in the late 1960s due to the publisher Burns & Oates, which fed into Herder & Herder in the States. There, his music was taken up by World Library Of Sacred Music (WLSM) in Cincinnati and North American Liturgy Resources (NALR) in Phoenix. But popular tastes after Vatican II were shifting rapidly, always seeking the new, drifting further from Vatican II. I’d first met Huijbers in 1968, forming Jabulani Music to publish the fresh translations of his work we were making jointly. Jabulani offered these to Oregon Catholic Press, who had acquired the rights to the original NALR collection in the 1990s, but this new round of publishing languished by the end of the decade. Huijbers’ challenge excites because it is based on a thriving Amsterdam ecclesiology. My translation work is still on-going, refined by the advice from colleagues in the Netherlands, the UK and in Baltimore. It’s genius is that it is the voice of the entire assembly, choir, cantors, instrumentalists, people and clergy - singing as one voice in Assembly Together. Huijbers and Oosterhuis have embraced the liturgical challenges of Vatican II’s theology of People of God, taking their mandate from 2 Peter 2:9 about the priesthood of the all the baptized. In The performing Audience, Huijbers’ analysis of history noted the practice of the Early Church, where local communities celebrated as Jesus had. But the 4th Century saw the emergence of clericalism, with Constantine diminishing the ministry of the baptized by imposing a sacral priesthood modeled on his Roman Court. Vatican II’s reforming vision was to stress the priesthood of the laity, yet a sacred caste still prevails to this day, in contrast to the Apostolic Church and its pristine condition as disciples of Jesus. Among those early communities of Jesus, women played a key role akin to a priestly ministry. For 4 centuries, worship belonged to the people, who were responsible for empowering their own leaders of worship. Huijbers was striving to restore this. The Recording Project But how did he do so through in music? This recording demonstrates his craft of shaping ritual song. My challenge is to music directors looking for songsfor their liturgies, and to composers to learn from his craft of shaping ritual songs rather than producing endless streams of self-regarding exercises. In his book, he identified four categories of ritual song, which I have chosen as examples. Psalms Gelineau was a pioneer in restoring the psalm as the song of the people in their Liturgy. Deiss took this idea further by writing open-form songs culled from the Scriptures, inspired by the practice of the Church before Ambrose and his strophic hymn forms emerged. No longer biblical, these tended to be doctrinal in content. Huijbers, with Oosterhuis, went further by developing his praxis of ritual song and literary form essential for singing the liturgy. He likewise prioritized psalms as the most important songs of worship. These had been the songs of Jesus. But he looked to take their musical and textual forms much further than Gelineau had in his model of response-psalm verse-response. He did imaginative things with the responses, often subdividing them into sections within psalm verses to further involve the assembly. The examples chosen here are of differing forms, whose texts were much closer to the original texts than had been the chanting of metrical psalms. Bernard Huijbers Recording Project 2 March 7, 2020 The Earth Is From God from Psalm 24 is a processional gathering psalm with 3 melodic formulas. The first is sung by the choir men on verse 1 and the women on verse 3. The second is sung by the entire assembly on verses 2, 4, 6, and 8. The third us sung by unison choir on verses 5 and 7. Originally, this psalm was a Jewish Enthronement Song, but in the editorial process required by the Exile for synagogue non-cultic worship, it lost all of its dynamism, accounting for the form handed down to us today. In this redacted form, it was an integral part of the late harvest Feast of Tabernacles, describing the three stages of the rite: the pilgrims gathering outside the City in their makeshift tents singing psalms of praise; then being called to climb Mt. Zion, where they were confronted by the Temple gatekeeper determining their worthiness in terms of Covenant fidelity before allowing them to enter the Temple courts; finally, on finding the Temple doors barred, they demanded of the priestly choir the right to enter, since with them was the God of Glory! This makes for a dramatic entrance song, and Oosterhuis revised an earlier text to not honor the King of Glory but the God of Justice. When Israel Made Her Way From Egypt is a dialogue song from Psalm 114, between alternating sides of the assembly, ending with a two-voice canon. Celebrating the escape from Egyptian captivity and their safe passage through the seabed to dry land, they rejoiced in the freedom which lay ahead of them. The oscillation of voices in this song of one simple melodic phrase, emulates the actions of the waves, as the verses sway from side to side. Already, the excitement, the anticipation of a mountain top experience and eventual arrival in the land of promise, is present in the singers’ rapturous recounting of the story, which was obviously written in hindsight. This is a synesthetic experience which lifts the story off the pages of the reading of Exodus 15 into a dance and dramatic response of the singers, who have interiorized the text in ways transcending proclamation alone. Sung during the Easter Vigil, this experience of Exodus is tangible and visceral in ways which transcend the words. Not To Us Comes The Glory is from Psalm 115. It is a companion psalm to the above, celebrating other aspects of the delights of the Exodus. To this end, it was set as a bolero. It likewise is based on a common melodic formula, but the dynamics are different. There are four verses, each consisting of three tropes . The first is sung by a male or female voice, the second by the unison choir, and the third as a common refrain by the assembly. At the end, the common refrain is sung many times, as in a bolero. The mantra throughout is For on you can we depend for mercy and love, God here among us.