A blog chronicling the research and development of the first missal for English-speaking Lutherans
For those of you who have made inquiries regarding the Confession of St. Peter, noted in some places on the 18th of January, but in our work on the 22nd of February, this recent post at Gottesdienst should answer many of your questions.
The editors of The Lutheran Missal are pleased to announce the beginning of our third comprehensive round of field testing, coinciding with the release of the newly-translated Sunday collects.
A new field testing page has been updated with the latest texts for the Readings, Psalmody, and Collects. Click here to sign up and receive the link, located at the end of the survey.
The Sunday collects of the church year are a treasure of the Western church, most of which trace to the Leonine, Gregorian, or Gelasian Sacramentaries (400s–700s). As such, these collects predate the problematic developments of the late-medieval period and clearly articulate the evangelical doctrine of the ancient, catholic and apostolic church.
The Lutheran Reformers retained the Latin Sunday collects, and they were republished both in Latin and vernacular languages for centuries following. (Lutherans did not move quickly or entirely to the vernacular—as late as the mid-1700s, the Latin collects could still be found in Lutheran prayer books and hymnals for the laity.)
Meanwhile, Thomas Cranmer, founder of the English Reformation, had translated the collects into English for the original edition of the Book of Common Prayer. Cranmer’s translations, though at times somewhat florid and expansive, were generally faithful, but later revisions of the BCP took rather greater liberties with the Latin texts. The evangelical sense of the original collects was often weakened, and, in a few egregious cases, brutishly disfigured. When the Lutheran liturgical tradition was being rendered into English in the Common Service of 1888, it was these altered forms that were in current editions of the BCP, and thus were taken up into the English-language liturgies of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, up to and including The Lutheran Hymnal (1941).
This is why the editors of The Lutheran Missal found it necessary to produce a fresh translation of the Sunday collects from the original Latin texts. However, we also found it necessary to keep one eye on the English texts that we have received (via the original BCP tradition), as these have been in continuous use among English-speaking Christians for the last 500 years, and particularly among Lutherans from the publication of the 1888 Common Service until Lutheran Book of Worship (1978) and Lutheran Worship (1982).
Here is the basic process we followed:
We divided the collects among twelve expert Latinists, who translated them from scratch without referencing any existing English rendering, so as to reduce any influence (intentional or otherwise) from existing translations. Our thanks are due to the following translators: Rev. Andy Richard, Rev. Dr. Benjamin Mayes, Rev. Chris Neuendorf, Rev. Dr. Eric Phillips, Mr. Eric Silver, Rev. Josh Hayes, Rev. Kyle Brown, Rev. Mark Preus, Mr. Matthew Carver, Rev. Paul Cain, Rev. Shawn Barnett, and Mr. William Cloninger.
The editors then compared the following sources and translations: the original Latin, the new Latin translations, German translations by the Lutheran reformers, Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer, TLH, and any number of other existing English translations. Then we asked, “Does our received English text depart from the Latin in any significant way? If so, is it worth overturning the familiar language of BCP / TLH in order to restore what has been lost?”
In many cases, the differences were inconsequential—the choice of one synonym over another, or a matter of word order that had little effect on the overall meaning. When possible, we left the language of TLH intact, in keeping with Luther’s counsel to pick a version of a text and stick with it. No changes, for example, were made to the collects for the first three Sundays of Advent.
When it was necessary to alter a collect, we tended toward simplification. Cranmer’s prose, which is the basis for nearly all subsequent English translations (at least, outside of the Roman tradition), is often wordy, frequently rendering a single Latin word as two in English (hendiadys). Thus, “familiam” becomes “household and Church”, “protegendum” becomes “help and defend”, and “multiplica” becomes “increase and multiply.” Cranmer’s renderings, while fairly accurate, often lose something of the concise elegance of the original Latin. For example:
BCP (1549) / TLH (1941)— Epiphany 1:
O Lord, we beseech Thee mercifully to receive the prayers of Thy people who call upon Thee; and grant that they may both perceive and know what things they ought to do and also may have grace and power faithfully to fulfill the same.
The Lutheran Missal — Epiphany 1
O Lord, we beseech Thee mercifully to receive the prayers of Thy people who call upon Thee, and grant that they may both perceive what things they ought to do and also may have power to fulfill the same.
The petition in the above collect is twofold. We ask for perception and power. But this simple structure is obscured by the unnecessary doubling of each half of the petition.
In some cases we simplified the collect by removing entire phrases that were not part of the Latin text. For example:
BCP (1549) / TLH (1941)— Epiphany 3:
Almighty and everlasting God, mercifully look upon our infirmities, and in all our dangers and necessities stretch forth the right hand of Thy majesty to help and defend us.
The Lutheran Missal — Epiphany 3:
Almighty and everlasting God, mercifully look upon our infirmities and [] stretch forth the right hand of Thy majesty to defend us.
In a few cases TLH had adopted a corrupted version of the English text, and we were compelled by fidelity to the evangelical truth to restore Cranmer’s original translation of the Latin. For example:
BCP (1662) / TLH (1941)— Trinity 10:
O God, who declarest Thine almighty power chiefly in showing mercy and pity, mercifully grant unto us such a measure of Thy grace that we, running the way of Thy commandments, may obtain Thy gracious promises and be made partakers of Thy heavenly treasure.
BCP (1549) / The Lutheran Missal — Trinity 10:
O God, who declarest Thine almighty power most chiefly in showing mercy and pity, give unto us abundantly Thy grace, that we, running to Thy promises, may be made partakers of Thy heavenly treasure.
For those who are interested, a full catalog of changes from TLH can be found here, set side by side with the original Latin for comparison. This includes such changes as making reference to the Church as “she” rather than “it,” reordering some collects in accord with the original Latin, and restoring a number of historic collects not found in TLH. A handful of collects were rewritten in part or in whole.
Finally, we assigned collects to Trinity 25 and Trinity 26. These Sundays occur so infrequently that before the Reformation they had no propers of their own. Late medieval missals would simply give instructions following Trinity 24 to repeat the texts of a prior Sunday, or to say the masses for the Sundays after Epiphany that were not said earlier in the year, before proceeding to the Last Sunday after Trinity (“Dominica ultima”), noted in some earlier uses as the “Fifth Sunday before the Nativity”. The Lutheran Reformers assigned Gospel texts to these rare occasions (the Abomination of Desolation [T-25] and the Sheep and the Goats [T-26]), but they did not write or assign collects, and so the practice of repeating at least some of the propers from previous Sundays continued in some fashion up until TLH. Rather than writing new collects for these occasions (Lutheran Service Book does so, but we avoid outright innovation whenever possible), we found suitable collects from the broader corpus of ancient prayers in Corpus Christianorum (vols. 160–160H).
In some earlier iterations, Advent—sometimes called “St. Martin’s Lent”—was a seven-week season of fasting that began on the feast of St. Martin of Tours (Nov. 11). This became standardized as the four-week Advent that we currently observe, with the fast largely omitted, but echoes of its previous nature remain: subdued violet vestments and the omission of the Gloria in Excelsis in Advent, as well as the Excita prayers that characterize three Sundays (and Ember Friday) in Advent and the Last Sunday after Trinity. While the newly appointed collects were chosen from a dozen possibilities and were selected on their thematic merits, they ended up fitting beautifully into this scheme, both being orations that begin with Excita and having connections to this time of the Church’s year. The collect for Trinity 25 is no. 2551 in Corpus Christianorum 160C and was appointed in various earlier uses for Advent 1, first vespers of Advent I, and Trinity 25, 26, or 27. It has, in many ways, returned home again by being appointed for Trinity 25. The Latin text follows:
Excita, domine, potentiam tuam et veni et, quod ecclesiae tuae promisisti, usque in finem saeculi clementer operare.
The collect for Trinity 26 is no. 2556, and was appointed in various sources for, among other days, Trinity 24, either as a collect or super populum.
Excita, domine, tuorum corda fidelium, ut, sacris intenta doctrinis, et intellegant, quod sequantur, et, sequendo, fideliter apprehendant.
If you would like the translations of the aforementioned prayers….you should sign up for field testing. The complementary complends for these collects, which are not included in this year’s field testing, have a similar late-Trinitytide and Advent provenance.
It should be noted that while the Last Sunday after Trinity is invariably celebrated on the Sunday before Advent, Trinity 25 and Trinity 26 occur very infrequently, when Easter falls exceptionally early. As the newest Sundays of the Church Year, they were never intended to displace the far more ancient Sundays of Trinitytide, and the three-week skip to the end of the Church Year popularized by Lutheran Worship (1982) and still observed in some parishes seems to be entirely an innovation of the late twentieth century.
As mentioned above, we have first and foremost striven in these translations to be faithful to the original Latin texts, largely continuing in the trajectory of Cranmerian liturgical prose. To this end, when modifications have been deemed necessary, or when entirely new translations have been required by a lack of English-language precedent, we have endeavored to speak clear and recognizable English, avoiding unnecessarily contorted phrases that leave the hearer wondering exactly what the prayer said due to an excess of subordinate clauses, which can, as in this sentence, make for a great deal of confusion on the part of the hearer, and leave one wondering precisely what has been said, due to a multiplicity of words that were only ever intended for the eye and not the ear, and stand as a great impediment to memorization and internalization. We have also sought to use vocabulary that is prayerful and recognizably English, not a set of Latin cognates strung together with a handful of articles and prepositions, as is common in some traditions.
With the release of these Sunday Collects, we are especially eager to hear feedback from our field testers. We have tried to strike the proper balance between avoiding language that is overly archaic and overtly modern. As you pray these collects over the course of the next year, please do let us know if anything strikes you as sounding out of place. We will happily receive all feedback and consider further revisions to the texts. Sign up here to join us in this exciting new year of field testing!
The complete liturgical calendar with readings and colors for the upcoming liturgical year can be found in a Google Sheet for your convenient reference here, or viewed below.
If you haven’t already, you can also subscribe to the Google Calendar for The Lutheran Missal, which provides an easy reference for Sundays and feasts throughout the year. Once subscribed, all subsequent updates in the future will automatically populate your calendar. If you’re adding directly to your calendar app rather than subscribing by means of email, you can use this link.
So far more than half a dozen artists have submitted their portfolios and a rough bid to illustrate The Lutheran Missal. Any artists who have yet to make a submission are encouraged to do so before Luther’s hammer strikes the Wittenberg church door (Friday, October 31st, 2025). More details about the scope of the project can be found here. Please share this flyer with anyone who may have the necessary skills and desire to be part of this historic project.
Once the deadline passes, the editorial committee for The Lutheran Missal will review all applications and make a determination in early November.
We are seeking an artist to illustrate The Lutheran Missal. More details about the scope of the project can be found here. Please share this flyer with anyone who may have the necessary skills and desire to be part of this historic project. We ask applicants to submit a portfolio and bid by October 31st.
The previous article in this series discussed the texts of the Propers. While very important, the texts are only one half of the package. The present article will discuss the other half of the package: the melodies, specifically the historic Gregorian chants to which the Propers are sung in the Western Church.
In our contemporary minds, the music and the texts of the Propers are separate things. They are like a hymn text that may be sung to any of dozens of hymn tunes. But historically, the Proper texts and melodies were intrinsically linked—they were one single unit. Western musical notation was literally invented in order to notate the Propers, which had been sung from their inception. This can be seen in the first musical notation, an example of which appears here:
This manuscript from the Baylor University Library shows the Propers for the mass for Epiphany: The Introit Ecce advenit appears with a large capital letter so the musician can find the mass quickly. (Incidentally, one can see here the customary linkage between the Introit and the name of the occasion—to find Epiphany one does not look for “Epiphanium,” but for “Ecce advenit.”) The squiggles above the text are the musical notes—more properly, they are non-diastematic neumes (i.e., notes that appear without a musical staff, which are differentiated from diastematic neumes, notes that appear on a staff). This manuscript dates from the mid-twelfth century, so this is actually a rather late example of such notation (the first notes attached to staff lines appear around 1000 AD).
The indissoluble linkage between text and melody continued even into the era of polyphony, in which the traditional melodies were retained while additional voices were added. Here we see a three-voice composition by Perotin, the director of music at the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris around 1200:
This composition is a vertical expansion of the Alleluia for the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Nativitas gloriose. The music is in systems of three staves. The chant melody is on the bottom staff of each system, in very long notes. The upper two voices dance above the chant in faster notes, illuminating and greatly extending the chant. This is but one of myriad examples of polyphonic settings of the Propers that were still intimately connected to the traditional melodies.
Only at the beginning of the sixteenth century did composers finally began to write freely-derived polyphonic settings of the Propers. However, they did not displace chant-based settings. As an example, see the Introit motet on Rorate caeli by Netherlandish composer Heinrich Isaac, writing at about the time Luther was appointed professor in Wittenberg:
The most obvious references to the chant melody are highlighted in yellow. The lowest voice carries the entire melody verbatim, just as it did in Perotin’s Alleluia setting, but now the counterpoint in the other three voices is derived from the chant as well. The chant truly permeates the musical texture. There are more subtle nods to the chant throughout the polyphony than are highlighted here, but to highlight them all would mean highlighting virtually every note in the piece. For the sake of comparison, here is the Introit Rorate caeli as it appears in Cantica Sacra (1613), the use of the Lutheran Cathedral in Magdeburg, p. 20, displaying almost note for note the exact melody used by Isaac in spite of it being printed 100 years later and 300 miles away:
All this does not mean that the Propers must be sung to one specific melody in one specific way, lest the singer be “doing it wrong.” Rather, it is to underscore that the Propers are musical by nature, and have always been understood that way. Furthermore, the historic melodies have been treated with respect by centuries of composers. As the phrase goes, “the medium is the message.” Throughout the history of the Propers, it has been the medium of music that carried the their message. Aside from not using the Propers at all, the closest one can get to “doing” the Propers “incorrectly” would be speaking them instead of singing them.
The melodies to which the Propers of the Western rite have been historically sung are variously referred to as “chant,” “Gregorian chant,” “plainchant,” and “plainsong.” A full survey of the history of monophonic unaccompanied singing in the Church is beyond the scope of this article. We will restrict this discussion to a few salient points, the details of which the interested reader may find elsewhere. Suffice it to say for the moment that Gregorian chant is the music of the Western rite. It is inextricably bound up with the liturgy and its development. There is no other music that “sounds” so much like the Christian faith as Gregorian chant. There is a reason that even the documents of the Second Vatican Council gave chant pride of place. Even if we have other types of worthy sacred music now (e.g. polyphonic motets, chorales, and organ music) such that chant is not used, we nevertheless must acknowledge chant’s importance and ties to the liturgy, and we therefore should be willing to entertain its use. Of the significance of Gregorian chant in the liturgy, Mark Daniel Kirby writes:
The Missal, in fact, contains the very same texts found in the Graduale, but in the Missal they are printed without the musical notation that allows them to be brought to life in song and, in a certain sense, interprets them in the context of the liturgy. The melodic vesture of the texts functions as a liturgical hermeneutic, allowing them to be sung, heard, and received in the light of the mysteries of Christ and of the Church.
The moniker “Gregorian chant” denotes the influence of Pope St. Gregory the Great (r. 590–604), who is credited with the invention of this body of music. As the legend goes, which is emblazoned in all manner of artwork depicting him, including the illumination below, St. Gregory wrote down the chant as it was dictated to him by the Holy Spirit (which legend is demonstrably false, as vestigial Western musical notation would not be invented for another three hundred years). Nevertheless it is true that St. Gregory oversaw the compilation of the repertoire of chants to be used in Rome and arranged for the Roman Schola cantorum to sing it according to a prescribed standard, and in this sense it is reasonable for his name to be attached to the repertoire as a whole.
By the ninth century, various regional traditions of chant had developed in the Western Church, including Celtic (Britain), Mozarabic (the Iberian peninsula), Gallican (modern-day France and surrounding lands), Ambrosian and Beneventan (both Italian), and Roman chant (Rome, usually called “Old Roman chant“). Each of these chant repertoires differed considerably in character. As Rome asserted its influence over Europe, by the thirteenth century the predominant body of chant in Western Europe would come to be a synthesis of Old Roman chant and Gallican chant, and it is this synthesized repertoire that is most precisely understood to be “Gregorian chant.” This melodic corpus appears in all Western European notated missals, graduals, and breviaries from the High Middle Ages on.
Though the plainsong melodies themselves are remarkably consistent across Europe, differences are discernible in the written melodies from different regions. These “dialects” point to differing local customs and to the ways that different regions sang the chants and recorded the melodies. For the purposes of a discussion grounded in the Lutheran tradition, the most important dialect is the so-called “German dialect,” in which the note B is disfavored in certain contexts. Thus melodic formulae that appear with B or B-flat in sources from Gaul or Rome typically appear with that note moved up to C in more northern sources such as those from Paderborn or Magdeburg. The characteristic incipit found in Mode I Introits will serve as a clear example. In Da pacem Domine, the Introit for the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, we find this reading in Magdeburg 1613 (see especially first six notes, D-A-C, A-C-A; as well as the figure A-C-G on the rightmost syllable in the image):
And in the Liber usualis, which reflects the Roman tradition, we find this reading in which the Cs mentioned above are lowered to B-flats:
The casual mention above of the various types of liturgical books requires a brief note on the names of the books in which these chants appear. The following therefore summarizes the necessary terminology for the foregoing discussion and subsequent articles. The interested reader may turn for details to the much more comprehensive survey by Andrew Hughes, Medieval Manuscripts for Mass and Office: A Guide to Their Organization and Terminology (University of Toronto Press, 1995).
We must address also the sense among the modern churchgoer that Gregorian chant is “boring” or “too long.” This perception is due to at least a couple of factors.
The first is the nature of the modern listener, who is not trained to listen to music in the same way as people used to be. Consider what Quentin Faulkner writes concerning the fundamental nature of art, with respect to music:
Which of the other arts exists primarily in time (as does music) instead of in space (e.g. painting, sculpture, architecture)? Beside music, the arts that exist primarily in time are literature, poetry and drama. (Dance is unique in that it exists equally in time and in space.) (Wiser Than Despair: The Evolution of Ideas in the Relationship of Music and the Christian Church, p. 149)
Thus art exists in either time or space (or a combination thereof, in the case of dance). Music and literature exist in time but not in space. For a listener to perceive music, therefore, time is required—perhaps a significant amount of time. While one can conceivably look at an entire painting in an instant, it is impossible to listen to an entire symphony in an instant, because it is necessary for time to pass in order for that art to be perceived. Literature enthusiasts are aware of this phenomenon with respect to that form of art: nineteenth-century English novels are written in what we today perceive to be an especially long-winded style. To fully appreciate these novels, one must be aware of that style, and be acclimated to experience that art as it exists. The situation is the same with chant: the modern populace is not able to listen or absorb what it perceives to be “long-winded” chant, because it is not trained to engage with such an art form.
An additional factor is the lack of acoustic in our modern churches when compared with those of former centuries. Modern American church buildings are not designed to organically reinforce musical sound. Rather, they are designed with artificial sound reinforcement in mind. Setting aside for the moment the ontological unsuitability of using artificial electronic amplification in the conduct of liturgy performed in a sacramental church, such buildings do not help music to sound its best, because they do not proceed from the assumption that organic, natural, acoustical sound is to propagate through the space from a single source. They rather proceed from the assumption that any sound will be artificially amplified and propagated from one or multiple non-organic sources (i.e., speakers). Thus they are not designed to let music bloom naturally, but they depend on a sound reinforcement system to make sound (whether music or the spoken word) audible throughout the space. They do not provide a suitable canvas on which an aural art can be produced, because that was not the designers’ intent.
Those of us who have not experienced a truly musical acoustic are unaware of the stunning effect a properly-designed space can have on music. But we can demonstrate this effect through recordings. Audio technology is now able to sample an acoustic and apply it to any recording, thereby allowing us to hear what that recording would sound like if it were rendered in that acoustic. The following recording of Eastern rite chant uses this technology, placing the recording in the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, where it would have been sung—literally placing the chant back in its home where it belonged and was sung before the most unfortunate invasion and desecration of that magnificent edifice. Listen and hear—experience—what a building can do to chant:
Now with this indescribable sound in mind, read what the emissaries of Prince Vladimir of Kyiv said upon their visit to Constantinople, ca. 1000 AD, as the combination of liturgical music and building created an incarnational encounter:
[W]e went to Greece [Constantinople], and the Greeks (including the Emperor himself) led us to the edifices where they worship their God, and we knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men, and their service is fairer than the ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that beauty. (Emphasis added)
Though this is admittedly a reference to the music of the Eastern rite, which is a different animal than the Gregorian chant of the Western rite, nevertheless, this effect is palpable in the music of the Western rite as well. Monophonic Gregorian chant, sung from the gallery of a large European-style church at the appropriate broad tempo, is reinforced by the building in such a way that the sound “rolls” continually over itself, creating a thickening blanket of sound that washes over the listeners below, only diminishing well after the choir finally stops singing at the end of the chant. It is an enthralling aural depiction of eternity.
The recording above and ensuing discussion should demonstrate that chant is not boring, but rather intrinsically thrilling. It is our buildings that make it boring. Chant is supposed to sound like this, because the Church’s tradition is to build buildings that do this to sound: to literally cause it to depict the Incarnation (“We only know that God dwells there among men“). The sound of the liturgy brings God to man and man to God. It brings heaven to earth and earth to heaven. This is why musicians are so fastidious about acoustics, and why they eschew such atrocities as acoustical tile and carpeting and pew pads: because they know what a truly ethereal effect a building can create when it is designed to reinforce sound, and how necessary that effect is to church music’s ability to do what it is supposed to do.
Having explored the history and milieu of the Church’s liturgical music, let us turn now to a more in-depth examination of the traits of the melodies themselves.
The melodies of each genre of Proper exhibit different characters according to that Proper’s function. Let us begin by considering the Introit. Its melodies are relatively syllabic, reflecting the deliberate steps of the procession to the altar which it accompanies. This trait is visible in the following Introit for the First Sunday in Advent, Ad te levavi (excerpted here from the Psalmodia of Lucas Lossius (1579), fol. 7r, and then transcribed into modern notation):
The Gradual and Tracts are by contrast highly melismatic and florid, even meandering, and thus they take a good bit of time to sing (N.B.: the word “melisma” is a musical term referring to multiple notes appearing on one syllable). This characteristic is intentional, as it provides the hearers the freedom to chew on the readings and the text they are hearing, to enter into a deeper meditation on the mysteries expounded therein. Whereas the Introit averages perhaps three to four notes per syllable of text, the Graduals can approach forty or more notes per syllable. The Introit is so staid that it comes off as metrical by comparison. Take for example the Gradual for Sexagesima, Sciant gentes, as it appears in Magdeburg 1613, p. 339:
Especially lengthy melismas occur on altissimus (Most high), rotam (wheel), stipulam (stubble), and faciem venti (the face of the wind). These are some of the most crucial words of the text, on which the meaning of the Gradual hinges:
Let the nations know that Thy name is the LORD: Thou alone art the Most High over all the earth.
℣ O my God, make them like a wheel; as the stubble before the wind. (Ps 83:18, 13; emphasis added)
In addition, the word rotam features the highest note of the Gradual (about halfway through its melisma), further underscoring its importance and giving the chant a large-scale arc shape. These features are admittedly subtle, but they are there by design and they are intended to sink in slowly, communicating their message in a subconscious way. It is very much a situation of the sum being greater than its parts.
The words emphasized by the music are sometimes not what we expect. Take for example Jacta cogitatum, the Gradual for the Third Sunday after Trinity (Magdeburg 1613, p. 410):
The text is from Psalm 55:22a: “Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and He shall sustain thee.” The word enutriet (“sustain”) receives a melisma as expected, as that word is the operative verb in the second half of the antiphon text. However, the seemingly throwaway word te (“thee”) receives a melisma of almost twice the length, including multiple “stopping points” where one note is held (in the current context one might say they are sustained) for a longer duration (these moments are depicted with multiple consecutive diamond noteheads on the same line or space of the staff), which creates a sense of the melody “hanging” (sustained) in space and time. Such a treatment on the word te is meant to give that word the primary weight in the text. Thus, the hearer is not to appreciate only that the Lord will sustain him, but that he specifically will be sustained. The music thus emphasizes the personal dimension which is present in the text, but liable to be missed by the hearer.
The Tracts are even longer than the Graduals. Such length is a reflection of the general expansion of the length of the Mass from Septuagesima onward, and especially during Lent: during this time not only are the Tracts longer than the Graduals they replace, but the readings are longer on average; the number of temporal Masses increases from three per week to seven; and an additional prayer over the people (the Super populum) concludes each Mass. The longest Tract in the repertoire, Qui habitat, the so-called “Great Tract,” is appointed for the First Sunday in Lent and sets almost the entirety of Psalm 91; it takes about twenty minutes to sing in its entirety. To give a sense of the size of this chant, see this image from Magdeburg 1613 showing but two pages of the “Great Tract,” which spans five pages of the volume:
While the Graduals and Tracts foster an atmosphere of meditation, the Alleluia chants convey a palpable sense of excitement. The titular word in each of the Alleluia chants has the sense of an airplane taking off (to use an anachronistic analogy), and it continues through the so-called jubilus. This long melisma on the final syllable of “Alleluia” is a “jubilation,” highlighting that this syllable is an abbreviation of the unutterable name of God. It is in this way an effective departure from the text, a vocalization that transcends the limitations of words and concepts. What more fitting way could there be to herald the proclamation of the Holy Gospel? See below the Alleluia Veni Domine from the Fourth Sunday in Advent (from Magdeburg 1613, p. 23):
Note the jubilus: after the barline following the initial “alleluia” come almost 30 more notes, sung to the final syllable “-ia.” Note also two further details: firstly the extremely long melisma on facinora (misdeeds), calling attention to that crucial word of the text. Secondly, and much more subtly: see the capital letters in the word “alleluia” (ALleluIa) at the beginning. The capital L is due to the prevailing orthography of the time with respect to illuminated works: the decorated A at the beginning of the staff “doesn’t count” as a capital letter, so the ensuing L is capitalized (this is somewhat similar to some modern text designs that capitalize the first few words of the lede of an article or chapter). This can be verified by checking the “alleluia” at the end of the chant: the initial L is no longer capitalized. However, the I in the final syllable remains capitalized, and it is so in all the Alleluias throughout the 1000 pages of the volume. Just as the jubilus is an aural acknowledgement of the name of God, so is this capital I a visual acknowledgement that that syllable “-ia” is an abbreviation for the name of God. A more obvious method to our modern eyes might be to print “allelu-Ya” or “hallelu-Jah.”
After the exceedingly florid Gradual/Tract and Alleluia, the Offertory is more reserved. In the medieval Mass it accompanied the celebrant’s Offertory prayers, which were rightly discontinued by the Lutherans on account of their being intolerably sacrificial. In this role the Offertory does not draw attention to itself, but rather accompanies the ritual action at the altar. Thus, in character the Offertory lies somewhere between the syllabic chants and the florid chants. A representative Offertory, Deus convertens for the Second Sunday in Advent, appears in this image from the Graduale Argentoratum 1510, fol. 3v (the Communion Jerusalem surge is also visible):
As the last minor Proper, the Communion mirrors the Introit, the first minor Proper, not only in its structure, but also in its syllabic character. However, instead of accompanying the clerical procession to the altar, this chant accompanies the congregational procession to receive the Sacrament. In its fullest form, the Communion so parallels the Introit as to include a Psalm verse and Gloria Patri (pointed in the same tripartite fashion as in the Introit) and a subsequent repetition (either partial or complete) of the antiphon, thus tying the musical Propers of the liturgy in a lovely bow. As an example of this treatment, see below the Communion for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity, Unam petii, in its translated form in Matthew Carver’s The Lutheran Gradual: Offertories & Communions. The Psalm verse appears after the double bar, fully notated. The Gloria Patri and repetition are indicated by shorthand abbreviations, a centuries-old technique borrowed from the missals themselves:
The Communion chants are perhaps the most picturesque melodies of the Mass propers. This will be explored in greater detail in the article to come devoted to that Proper, but at present a single example will suffice: the Communion for Pentecost, Factus est repente, shown here in the Graduale Argentoratum 1510, fol. 58v, with the first half subsequently transcribed into modern notation:
This chant is incredibly dramatic, befitting its text:
Suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, coming upon where they were sitting, alleluia. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, speaking the wonderful works of God, alleluia, alleluia. (Acts 2:2, 4a, 11b)
The dramatic ascent at the beginning on the text Factus est repente (“all of a sudden there was…“) is balanced by a leap back to the initial note; and then reaches even further to the highest note of the chant on the word sonus (“sound”). This high note is also the most characteristic note in this mode (Mode VII) to our ears, representing what we would call the flattened seventh degree of the scale. While plainsong phrases usually tend to come to a relaxing cadence (such as the “alleluia” at the end of this excerpt), this phrase does the opposite, and that right at the start. It highlights the drama inherent in the text as well as in the narrative for the day—tongues of fire and the baptism of 3000 souls can hardly be said to be relaxing.
Such a drama, such a subtext communicated through music, is baked into the chant melodies—and not just this particular chant melody, but every chant melody. It is subtle, to be sure. But sophisticated communication—writing, oration, filmmaking, artistic expression, etc.—is an art of subtlety. The pious listener perceives all of this, even if he does so incompletely on a very subliminal level. He is being catechized by the liturgy in ways he may not even notice. In this sense, the historic chant corpus of the Western Church is a musical lectio divina: it is a musical form of praying with Scripture. It gives life to the Word which itself is already alive, by making that life palpable to the hearer. This is why the Lutheran tradition has always called music the viva vox evangelii, the “living voice of the Gospel”—a more picturesque phrase to describe Kirby’s idea of music as a liturgical hermeneutic.
The foregoing discussion hopefully has articulated to the reader why the Church, even today, should use the historic Propers along with their historic melodies: they allow the congregation to more fully enter into an appreciation and understanding of the texts. Luther had this to say about the use of chant:
“[I]t would be the best for the fine Latin de tempore songs to remain, though they are nearly overwhelmed by the new holy-songs and are scarcely considered anything [anymore]. But we would hold them fast and have a heartfelt affection for them.” (Christhard Mahrenholz, “Luther und die Kirchenmusik,” in Musicologia et Liturgica: Gesammelte Aufsätze (Bärenreiter, 1960), 142.)
The “Latin de tempore songs” of which Luther speaks are the chanted Propers of the medieval liturgy (de tempore meaning “of the time;” that is, the chants proper to the day). By “new holy-songs” he means the new hymns (neue geistliche Gesänge) that have been taken up by congregations. As he makes clear, Luther loved the historic chant melodies. He grew up singing them in the choir school in Eisleben, and he sang them later in life as a monk. He knew them intimately, and they were an integral part of his liturgical experience. His use of the term de tempore shows that he is not talking about the mere chanting common to modern Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod parishes (that is, singing a string of text to a simple reciting tone), but rather the authentic, florid, beautiful Gregorian chants passed down from antiquity.
Luther’s comment describes the two kinds of sacred monophonic music familiar to Lutherans of his day: the received Gregorian chant from the medieval Mass, and the newer chorales (many of which were actually just metricized Office hymn chants, though that phenomenon is beyond the scope of this article). These two kinds of music lived side by side in the Lutheran Mass into the eighteenth century, and were seen as two sides of the same coin: they were simply referred to as “the music” (“die Gesänge”). Lutherans continued to use the received chant corpus, because it is an authentic expression of the orthodox faith—thus the use of Gregorian chant is authentically Lutheran.
To fully appreciate the historic melodies of the Propers requires a discussion of how they operate on a technical level—this has to do with the church modes and the historic Gregorian Psalm tones. That will be the topic of the next article in this series.
The Propers (that is, the Introit, Gradual, Tract, Alleluia, Sequence, Offertory, and Communion) are an integral part of the Divine Service. More than any other part of the liturgy, they give shape and life to the rhythm of the liturgical year. Unfortunately, the Propers frequently are misunderstood textually, musically, and liturgically. This series of articles will explain the significance of the Propers, giving the sense of their history, structure, and purpose both generally and specifically, and will explain how to sing them such that they best fulfill their liturgical function. What follows in this introductory article is a discussion of various aspects of the Proper texts, both on their own and within the context of the liturgy.
The Propers use archaic language. This is intentional for a number of reasons. Firstly, the Propers are sung texts, and archaic language simply sings better than modern language. The vowel shapes and the progression of the verbiage flows better in archaic English than in contemporary English. In particular the archaic familiar singular pronouns (“thee,” “thou,” “thy”) are more pleasing than their modern equivalents (“you,” “your”). It is inexplicable, and yet it is bare truth. To quote but a single example, let us examine the second stanza of the hymn Shepherd of Tender Youth as it appears in TLH and LSB:
| TLH 628, st. 2 | LSB 864, st. 2 |
|---|---|
| Thou art our holy Lord, O all-subduing Word, Healer of strife. Thou didst Thyself abase That from sin’s deep disgrace Thou mightest save our race And give us life. | You are the holy Lord, O all-subduing Word, Healer of strife. Yourself You did abase That from sin’s deep disgrace You so might save our race And give us life. |
The superior rendering is self-evident, and the inferior rendering is pathetic by comparison. When the music is applied to these texts, incredibly, the aesthetic chasm between the two grows.
Furthermore, the Propers largely consist of psalmody, and the Church has always used archaic language to chant the Psalter. The early Church sang out of the Hebrew psalter or the Septuagint, both of which would have qualified as archaic or “high” speech even in the first few centuries. In the fifth century, when the readings were updated from the vetus Latina to Jerome’s Vulgate, the missals retained the vetus Latina Propers through the Middle Ages alongside the Vulgate readings. In the sixteenth century, the Anglicans retained the Coverdale Psalter and canticles, even when the Authorized Version replaced the rest of the Coverdale Bible in the early seventeenth century. It is likely that nobody ever sang out of a modern-language Psalter from the beginning of the Christian era until the second half of the twentieth century. Using contemporary language in the Psalms is therefore a modern trend, which is at variance with the historic trend to use archaic language.
Finally, singing the Propers in archaic language underscores their importance, for important things are best rendered in a heightened tongue. We see this today in secular ceremonies like graduations and presidential inaugurations: the vulgar tongue has no place in view of such important occasions. How much more should this be so when we are dealing with the sacred liturgy! We will now continue on to explain in greater detail why the Propers are important and thus merit this treatment.
Though the various evidences are beyond the scope of this article, from the time of the Edict of Milan in 313 and likely before, the Mass was sung throughout, as opposed to being spoken. The Propers post-date this time, and so when they were added to the Mass, they were naturally sung because they were being inserted into a preexisting musical context. The following quotation from a lecture given by Fr. Mark Daniel Kirby best explains the significance of this situation:
Originally Mass was always sung. Not until the eighth or ninth century did the so called Low Mass or missa privata come to be celebrated at the lateral altars and private chapels of abbatial and collegiate churches. The Chants of the Proper of the Mass were not omitted at these Low Masses; they were recited by the priest alone. This fact, of itself, suggests that well before the eighth century, the Proper Chants were, in effect, considered to be constitutive elements of the Mass, deemed indispensable to the very shape of the liturgy. (https://www.chantcafe.com/2011/10/the-propers-of-the-mass-then-and-now/)
So the Propers were considered integral to the Mass, so much so that if they were to be omitted, the Mass would have been at the very least illicit, if not invalid. What function do the Propers supply that is so crucial to the shape of the liturgy? Briefly, the Propers provide the liturgical and theological context for the readings, sermon, and Eucharist. They fulfill their roles to the fullest extent because the Propers are helping them to do so. This will become progressively evident as we examine further the role of the Propers.
Most of the Propers accompany something: the Introit accompanies the procession into the chancel; the Offertory accompanies the preparation of the altar; the Communion accompanies the distribution of the Sacrament; the Alleluia accompanies the procession of the Gospel. The Gradual does not accompany anything, but rather comments on the readings, about which more will be said later.
Historically, the Gradual and Alleluia were a single musical-textual unit. As there was no Old Testament reading before the twentieth century, the Gradual and Alleluia were glued together between the Epistle and Gospel. Thus, by the seventh century, the shape of the first part of the liturgy was: Introit—Kyrie—Gloria—Collect—Epistle—Gradual/Alleluia—Gospel. In fact TLH has the Gradual and Alleluia written this way, and this structure is also reflected in the musical settings of the Propers from that time like Healey Willan and Paul Bunjes.
The majority of the Proper texts consist of verses from the Psalms. Occasionally the texts include bits from the prophets, Gospels, or the Apocrypha. The LSB propers give Biblical references for all the Propers, excepting those from the Apocrypha, which are denoted merely as “Liturgical Text.” This apparent fear of referencing the deuterocanon is unfounded, as the Apocrypha was printed in Luther’s translation of the Bible, as well as the King James Version until the end of the 19th century, and even appears in Bibles published by Concordia Publishing House. Nevertheless there are some Propers that are legitimate Liturgical Texts; that is, composed texts that reflect Biblical language but are not direct quotations or paraphrases from Scripture, of which two examples will suffice at the moment:
But it behooveth us to glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ: in Whom is our salvation, life, and resurrection, by whom we are saved and set at liberty. (Nos autem gloriari, Introit for Maundy Thursday)
The Good Shepherd is risen, Who laid down His life for His sheep: and for His flock was pleased to die. (Surrexit pastor bonus, Second Alleluia for the Second Sunday after Easter)
The Propers are rarely more than a couple verses in length. They are sometimes referred to as the “minor” Propers for this reason, which separates them taxonomically from the readings (the “major” Propers). The primary exceptions to this brevity are the Tracts and the Sequences, which will be discussed in their appropriate articles.
A brief word must be said about local traditions. While the Propers and especially the lections are incredibly consistent throughout the Middle Ages and across Europe, particularly in the temporale, there are regional patterns and local traditions that emerge. These local traditions are beyond the scope of these articles, but they must be mentioned lest the reader gain the erroneous assumption that all dioceses have been in lockstep uniformity in all aspects of liturgical use and practice in all times. The fact that there were diverging local customs and minority traditions does not at all undercut the remarkable consistency in liturgical use. The foregoing notwithstanding, in order to promote simplicity and clarity, and to remain true to the overarching purpose of this series of articles, the lessons and Propers as compiled by the Lutheran Missal Project will be treated as normative.
The Propers draw out connections between the lessons of the day and the seasons of the liturgical year—they “connect the dots,” so to speak. That the Propers are rendered as music makes them a unique vehicle for this purpose, because music makes use of the same rhetorical techniques as exhortatory speech (i.e. a sermon). The music can convey additional significance and meaning that would require additional speech to unpack. One example of this would be a musical illustration of the parable of the Pharisee and the publican (Lk 18:9–14). Whereas a straightforward reading aloud of the text places the Pharisee’s words prior to those of the publican’s, a musical setting of the text (such as this setting by Heinrich Schütz, SWV 444) can present them simultaneously, without compromising intelligibility. Indeed in such a situation the prayers would be occurring simultaneously, and so the musical presentation is in some ways a better approximation of the situation described than a mere reading of the text.
The way in which the Propers “connect the dots” may be illustrated by several examples. Let us begin with the Communion for Palmarum:
O My Father, if this cup may not pass away from Me, except I drink it, Thy will be done. (Mt 26:42)
℣ I will take the cup of salvation: and call upon the name of the Lord. (Ps 116:13)
This text combines verses from Matthew 26 and Psalm 116. It reinterprets the cup of the Father’s wrath drunk by Jesus in His Passion as the cup of salvation from Psalm 116. This naturally draws a connection with the Cup of Salvation that those present for the liturgical celebration are receiving in the Eucharist, even as the choir is singing this text, which Salvation was earned for us by Christ taking up the cup of His Father’s wrath, which itself is the cup of Salvation. Furthermore, that this text is sung in this way on Palm Sunday is significant, because the Gospel lesson, such as it is, for the day is the entire Matthew passion, which begins with the Last Supper in Matthew 26, featuring Jesus consecrating the Cup for the first time. All of this is being communicated as this text is being chanted.
The Communion for the Fourth Sunday in Advent provides a similar connection:
Behold, a Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son: and shall call His name Immanuel. (Is 7:14)
℣ Which rejoiceth as a strong Man to run a race: His going forth is from the end of heaven. (Ps 19:5b–6a)
This text combines verses from Isaiah 7 and Psalm 19. It is assumed that the hearer understands the surrounding context of Psalm 19, namely:
The heavens declare the glory of God… in [which] he hath set a tabernacle for the sun, which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and rejoiceth as a strong man to run a race. His going forth is from the end of heaven, and his circuit is unto the end of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof. (Ps 19:1a, 4b–6; emphasis added)
Psalm 19 is only superficially about the sun, of course; it is actually about Christ, as are all the Psalms. Unexpectedly using verses 5b–6a of the Psalm in the context of the Fourth Sunday in Advent underscores the Incarnation, which feast is but a few days away. It connects to the Isaiah prophecy via third-party references to the sun (as in the Sun of Righteousness, cf. Malachi 3) and the Bridegroom (cf. Matthew 25), and “nothing being hidden from His heat:” as indeed the Logos is that by which all of creation was created, and is that which permeates and upholds it all—even the wilderness, where John cries out “prepare ye the way of the Lord” (Isaiah 40:3; Luke 3:4), which, in the historic lectionary, he did the day prior, on Ember Saturday in Advent. Furthermore, the verbiage of the “strong Man” recalls Luke 11:14–28, the Gospel for the Third Sunday in Lent: the strong man who guards his palace is attacked by the stronger Man, Jesus, who then divides up the spoil. This in turn points us to the second Alleluia for the Ascension, Dominus in Sina:
The LORD is in Sinai, in the holy place. Ascending on high, He hath led captivity captive, giving gifts to men. (Ps 68:17b–18)
Another fine example of the integration of the Propers and the liturgical year is found on December 24, the Vigil of the Nativity. Note that this is not the same as Christmas Midnight, the first mass of Christmas, but is a proper mass for the day before the Nativity. While the Propers for the Fourth Sunday in Advent continued that season’s theme of penitent waiting for the Savior, the Christmas Vigil Propers focus with potency on the impending coming of the Christ Child. The Introit reminds us that He is coming literally tomorrow:
Today ye shall know that the LORD will come and save us: and in the morning ye shall behold His glory. (Ex 16:6b, 7a)
℣ The earth is the LORD’s, and the fullness thereof: the world, and they that dwell therein. (Ps 24:1)
This text adapts God’s words concerning His provision of manna in Exodus 16 to an unexpected context: the appearance of the glory of God as a newborn Child. And one of the minority Alleluias for the day, Crastina die, which also appears in the daily office, echoes the sentiment:
℣ Tomorrow the iniquity of the earth shall be done away: and the Savior of the world shall reign over us. (Liturgical Text)
It is worth exploring the less-obvious connections as well. The Offertory for the Twelfth Sunday after Trinity provides such an opportunity. To fully appreciate what is going on, we need to have the entire occasion’s Propers in mind:
| Proper | Citation |
|---|---|
| Introit | Ps 70:1–2a, 2b |
| Epistle | 2 Cor 3:4–11 |
| Gradual | Ps 34:1–2 |
| Alleluia | Ps 90:1 |
| Gospel | Mk 7:31–37 |
| Offertory | Ex 32:11a, 12b, 13a, 14 |
| Communion | Ps 104:13b, 14c–15, 1 |
The Epistle concerns the ministry of death and the ministry of glory:
“[I]f the ministry of death, written and engraved on stones, was glorious, so that the children of Israel could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of the glory of his countenance, which glory was passing away, how will the ministry of the Spirit not be more glorious?” (2 Cor 3:7–8)
The Gospel is the “Ephphatha” narrative, in which Christ opens the ears of the deaf to hear the Word, that is, the Law and the Gospel, thus giving him life. The connection to the Epistle is clear: both aspects of the Word are glorious, yet the Gospel predominates. As the Epistle says, “the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life“ (verse 6). With this in mind we can turn to the Offertory, Precatus est Moyses:
Moses besought the LORD his God, and said, LORD, why doth Thy wrath wax hot against Thy people? Turn from Thy fierce wrath. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, to whom Thou swarest to give a land flowing with milk and honey. And the LORD repented of the evil which He thought to do unto His people. (Ex 32:11a, 12b, 13a, 14)
On its face this selection is confusing. What does this have to do with the “Ephphatha” narrative, or the ministry of glory? It depicts the two glories of the Law and the Gospel in juxtaposition: the Law glorious in its perfection and its justice, and the Gospel glorious in its breadth, sufficient to cover every sin. On another level, it connects Moses’ intercession on behalf of Israel with Jesus’ opening the ears of the deaf man: not that God was ever deaf, of course, but the theme of conversation is there. This is next-level exegesis, accomplished by the liturgy and its music. This exegesis extends to the following Proper, the Communion:
The earth is satisfied with the fruit of Thy works, O Lord. Thou bringest forth food out of the earth; and wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil to make his face to shine, and bread which strengtheneth man’s heart. (Ps 104:13b, 14c–15)
Whereas the Introit and Offertory are requests and pleas for salvation, the Communion rejoices that God has given us that very salvation in His glorious Gospel via the Sacraments. The text mentions wine and bread, which should always bring to mind the Sacrament of the Altar; and the oil recalls the anointing of Baptism, which “makes [our] face to shine,“ just as Moses’ face shone in the Epistle. The Propers for Trinity 12 illustrate that, even in the midst of the so-called “boring” green season, the Propers bring life to the liturgy and shape the celebration.
The First Sunday of Lent is one day on which the Propers create an especial unity. It is one of the few days of the year on which all the Propers come from the same Psalm; in this case, Psalm 91:
| Proper | Citation |
|---|---|
| Introit | Ps 91:15a, c–16a |
| Gradual | Ps 91:11–12 |
| Tract | Ps 91:1–7, 11–16 |
| Offertory | Ps 91:4 |
| Communion | Ps 91:4, 11 |
The reason for Psalm 91’s use on this day is clear: it is the Psalm quoted by Satan in verse 6 of the Gospel text (Matthew 4:1–11). The Introit antiphon is taken from the very end of the Psalm:
He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him: I will deliver him, and honor him: with long life will I satisfy him. (Ps 91:15ac–16a)
God’s answer to our cry from the wilderness of sin is the “long life” of salvation given to us in the Sacrament of the Altar. The Offertory and Communion are both the same snippet of the Psalm, albeit sung to different melodies and covering different liturgical actions:
“He shall cover thee with His feathers, and under His wings shalt thou trust: His truth shall be thy shield and buckler.” (Ps 91:4)
The Tract for the First Sunday in Lent is known as the “Great Tract,” for it is the longest minor Proper text in the entire calendar, featuring almost the entirety of Psalm 91 with merely three verses omitted in the middle. Thus by the end of the Divine Service we have heard almost the entirety of Psalm 91, several verses twice, and a few verses even three times. Such repetition is not superfluous but intentional, for in receiving communion on the first Sunday of the Lenten fast, it is salutary to hear that God’s truth, the very Word made flesh that delivers His long life of salvation into our mouths, “shall be [our] shield and buckler.”
Though we could treat every occasion of the liturgical year in such a manner, let us restrain our discussion to but one more brief example, the Introit for the First Sunday in Advent:
Unto Thee do I lift up my soul: O my God, I trust in Thee. Let me not be ashamed: let not mine enemies triumph over me. Yea, let none that wait on Thee be ashamed.
℣ Show me Thy ways, O LORD: teach me Thy paths. (Ps 25:1–3a, 4)
At the beginning of the season that focuses on our wait for the Savior, we hear the beginning of Psalm 25, through which Psalm the connections to waiting run deeply. Connections like these are all over the Propers, and they are endless. Congregations that do not experience the Propers are missing out on the majority of what the liturgy is designed to give them, and these gifts become increasingly evident over time. As a congregation is exposed to the particular texts of a particular day consistently and repeatedly year after year, the connections they illuminate click subliminally and begin to bear fruit. The Propers are the true “Easter eggs” of the liturgy. The connections are sometimes difficult to discover, but they are as rewarding as they are difficult.
The value of the Propers is in these connections which they draw within the liturgy. These connections were designed by our fathers in the Church, who appointed the readings and Propers for a purpose. Far from being bumbling neanderthals from the dark ages, they had substantial portions of Scripture committed to heart, including the entire Psalter. See this quote from the Rule of Benedict:
“[M]onks show themselves exceedingly lax in the service that they have vowed if, during the course of a week, they sing less than the entire Psalter with the usual canticles, since we read that our holy fathers briskly accomplished in a single day what we lukewarm monks hope to achieve only in an entire week.” (Rule of Benedict 18:24–25)
By comparison with the ancients, who had a command of language and memory to an astounding degree, we are the bumbling neanderthals (after all, we have to have our phones remind us what day it is). The ancients knew the Scriptures far better than we do, and we should give serious consideration to the way they read the Bible, to the way they set up the lectionary, and to the connections they drew when they did so.
These connections are illustrated well in the Propers for the Trinity season. In this season, the Introits, Alleluias, Offertories, and Communions each progress sequentially through the Psalter, with few exceptions, which increase towards the end of the season. This scheme is illustrated in the following chart, where deviations from the pattern are colored red (N.B.: the pericope references are simplified for the sake of readability). As is evident, the Communion deviates from the scheme between about Trinity 9 and Trinity 15, but continues it from then until Trinity 22; the Offertory does so only on two days; and the Introit and Alleluia maintain it with consistency for 17 and 18 solid weeks, respectively:
| Introit | Alleluia | Offertory | Communion | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Trinity 1 | Ps 13:5–6 | Ps 7:1 | Ps 5:3–4 | Ps 9:2–3 |
| Trinity 2 | Ps 18:18–19 | Ps 7:2 | Ps 6:4 | Ps 13:6 |
| Trinity 3 | Ps 25:16, 18 | Ps 18:1 | Ps 9:10–12 | Ps 17:6 |
| Trinity 4 | Ps 27:1–2 | Ps 21:1 | Ps 13:13–14 | Ps 18:2 |
| Trinity 5 | Ps 27:7–9 | Ps 31:1 | Ps 16:7–8 | Ps 27:4 |
| Trinity 6 | Ps 28:8–9 | Ps 31:1–2 | Ps 17:5–7 | Ps 27:6 |
| Trinity 7 | Ps 47:3 | Ps 47:1 | Azar 1:17 | Ps 31:2 |
| Trinity 8 | Ps 48:9–10 | Ps 78:1 | Ps 18:27, 31 | Ps 34:8 |
| Trinity 9 | Ps 54:4–5 | Ps 112:1 | Ps 19:8, 10–11 | Mt 6:33 |
| Trinity 10 | Ps 551a, 16a, 19a, 22a | Ps 88:1 | Ps 25:1–3 | Ps 51:19 |
| Trinity 11 | Ps 68:5–6, 35 | Ps 90:1 | Ps 30:1–2 | Prov 3:9–10 |
| Trinity 12 | Ps 70:1–2 | Ps 81:1 | Ex 32:11–14 | Ps 104:13–15 |
| Trinity 13 | Ps 74:20–23 | Ps 88:1 | Ps 31:14–15 | Wis 16:20 |
| Trinity 14 | Ps 84:9–10 | Ps 65:1 | Ps 34:7–8 | Jn 6:51 |
| Trinity 15 | Ps 86:1–4 | Ps 108:1 | Ps 40:1–3 | Jn 6:56 |
| Trinity 16 | Ps 86:3, 5 | Ps 115:11 | Ps 40:13–14 | Ps 71:16–18 |
| Trinity 17 | Ps 119:137, 124a | Ps 118:16 | Dan 9:17–19 | Ps 76:11–12 |
| Trinity 18 | Sir 36:16–17 | Ps 122:1, 7 | Ex 24:4–5 | Ps 96:8–9 |
| Trinity 19 | Ps 35:3; 34:17, 48:14 | Ps 98:1 | Ps 138:7 | Ps 119:4–5 |
| Trinity 20 | Dan 9:14b, 3:43b, 42b | Ps 130:1–2 | Ps 137:1 | Ps 119:49–50 |
| Trinity 21 | Esth 13:9–11 | Ps 125:1 | Job 1–2 | Ps 119:81, 84, 86 |
| Trinity 22 | Ps 130:3–4 | Ps 147:3 | Esth 14:12–13 | Lk 15:10 |
| Trinity 23 | Jer 29:11–12, 14 | Ps 115:11 | Ps 130:1–2 | Mk 11:24 |
N.B.: This chart extends only through Trinity 23 because that is where the Propers historically conclude. In the few years where one would ever need more than 23 Sundays’ worth of Propers, the Propers from Trinity 23 would be repeated until the beginning of Advent. Suffice it to say that our custom of “skipping” to the end of the Trinity season is a modern one.
This sequential progression is referenced obliquely in other literature (i.e., “and as we all know, the Propers after Pentecost progress sequentially…”), but the original research has eluded the author. Such a scheme would be difficult for the modern mind to conceive and to execute, but for the ancient mind it would have been child’s play. The fact that everything in this scheme lines up testifies to the unity of the Psalter, and the unity of the paschal mystery as encapsulated in every Psalm.
Notably, the Graduals do not participate in this sequential walk through the Psalter. This is because of the relative age of the Graduals with respect to the other Propers. The Graduals are relatively old, dating from the sixth century. They had already been assigned for hundreds of years by the time the propers were being put together for Trinitytide. And the Graduals are so closely keyed to the themes of the day that it would damage the established connections to rearrange the Graduals to progress sequentially through the Psalter.
The fact that the Graduals do not progress sequentially through the Psalter establishes that the Graduals were regarded by the Church of the Middle Ages to have a special weight within the Liturgy of the Word. Let us demonstrate this weight via a worked example, hewing to the older form of the Mass with only one reading plus the Gospel. The Epistle and Gospel are, on average, perhaps 15 verses in length, these verses taking maybe 90 seconds each to read at the appropriate (deliberate) pace.
Between these two readings are the Gradual/Alleluia/Tract, depending on the season. Again, the Gradual is never longer than a couple of Psalm verses. If we sing the Gradual to an LSB Psalm tone, it will take maybe 20 seconds. In this situation the Graduals are basically insignificant, because they’re so short: they’re merely a bit of text that connects one thing to the next. You could omit it and nobody would notice. But remember, the Graduals are not insignificant! They are historically deeply intertwined with the readings. Rather, the Graduals are rendered rhetorically insignificant by the modern practice of chanting them to a congregational psalm tone. No one who chants the Gradual this way is getting the intended deep connection out of that experience, because he is sightreading a text at the speed of speech while applying to it a melodic formula, without any rehearsals or mulligans. Such an approach does not foster a deep meditation on the text.
Now let us contrast this foregoing approach with the chant melodies for the Gradual, which have been handed down to us by the Western Church. Of all the Gregorian plainsong melodies, the Graduals are the most melismatic, ornate, elaborate, and virtuosic. Why is this? It is what we would call today a “positive feedback loop.” The Graduals were sung by professionals, not by the congregation. In fact, they had to be sung by professionals because the Gradual texts are proper to the day, not to the season. Thus, they couldn’t be made available to the congregation in a way that the congregation could sing them at any time in history before the desktop publishing revolution of the 1980s. Even if it had been possible to get the texts to the congregation, they would have been no use since the congregation was likely illiterate. And for centuries the melodies themselves weren’t written down, because musical notation was still hundreds of years in the future when these melodies were composed. So the Graduals (and all of the Propers) were sung by professionals out of necessity. Because of this, the melodies naturally became more elaborate, suiting the abilities of the professionals who were singing them.
Returning to our worked example, not only does the content of the Graduals make them significant, but the way in which they’re sung and handed down to us makes them significant. Therefore, they ought to be temporally significant, i.e. not 20 seconds long. If one chants the Gradual using the historic plainsong melodies, the length of the Gradual starts to approach that of one of the readings. At this point we have a structure that makes rhetorical sense: an Epistle, Gradual, Alleluia, and Gospel that each last about 90 seconds. The Gradual now has a rhetorical weight associated with it, parallel to that of the readings. The longer texts of the readings go by faster than the Proper chants, but they take the same amount of time. The short Gradual text, stretched out by the music to a very long time, invites a different kind of interaction. It begs the hearer to meditate deeply on the meaning of the text and its connection to the day, to really pray the text, to chew on it—to “inwardly digest” it, to quote Thomas Cranmer. Therefore, it is not ideal for the congregation to sing the Propers itself. The Propers are designed to be inwardly digested, and when one is fighting just to get the text out one is not receiving the benefit of the digestion.
More will be said about this aspect of the Propers in later articles. But first, having examined the sense of the Proper texts, we will turn in the next article to a similar examination of the historic melodies associated with the Propers: Gregorian chant, the de facto music of the Western Church.
As we continue along the editing and translation processes for The Lutheran Missal, we are also keeping an eye on the future publication of The Lutheran Breviary, which has been under discussion for some time, and is now ready for your help.
As with the process of putting together The Lutheran Missal, the breviary project will need to proceed through a number of stages before its completion. If you would like a refresher on the lengthy process for The Lutheran Missal, you can take a look at this video for more details, but the general process is as follows:
Today we are asking for volunteers interested in assisting with the second stage, data entry. All volunteers must have a Windows operating system and Microsoft Access in order to work with the database. Familiarity with Latin is extremely helpful, but not necessarily required. Training and assistance in using the database and in deciphering the peculiarities of medieval Latin orthography will be provided.
I’m sure many of you have some version of this question bouncing around in your minds: why are you beginning work on a breviary when the missal has yet to be completed? The answer is twofold. First, by having additional volunteers work on data entry, the editors can continue the editorial process largely without interruption. Second, when we began the missal project, we spent a full two years on data entry alone. As a result, if we were to postpone data entry on the breviary until the missal project reaches its completion, we would begin two or three years behind where we could have been.
If you haven’t had a chance to read the Gottesdienst post on Matins for Septuagesima, I would encourage you to take a look to get a sense of what the results of our work will look like. This is an immensely exciting undertaking, and we would be so glad to have you join us in this next project. If you are interested, please take a few moments to fill out this form.
The Common Service of 1888 was a high water mark, of sorts, for the liturgy of English-speaking Lutherans in North America. Based on a variety of Lutheran and medieval sources, it was commissioned by the General Synod, the General Council, and the United Synod in the South to provide a solid and historically grounded foundation of rites and texts, both ordinary and proper, for the use of Lutherans in the English language. The mass ordinary of the Common Service is likely most familiar to our readers in the forms found on page 15 of The Lutheran Hymnal (1941) and page 184 of Lutheran Service Book (2006), and it proved to be an immense improvement on the prior state of Lutheran liturgy in the English-speaking American environment.
In spite of its overwhelming benefits, there are a few ways in which the Common Service tradition did not quite live up to its goal of presenting a service based on the “common consent of the pure Lutheran liturgies of the Sixteenth Century.” One weakness of the Common Service project was its reliance on the American Book of Common Prayer for a number of collect translations, an example of which is recounted here. The deleterious influence of the BCP tradition can also be seen in the rather anemic conclusion of the Proper Preface in the Common Service:
Therefore with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify Thy glorious name, evermore praising Thee and saying:
rather than the traditional form
Through whom the Angels praise Thy Majesty: Dominions adore it, Powers tremble before it: The Heavens also and heavenly Virtues, together with the blessed Seraphim, in joint exultation glorify the same: With whom we beseech Thee, bid that our voices also may be admitted, with suppliant praises saying:
which was still in use in the German-speaking Missouri Synod at the time the Common Service was being produced elsewhere. (LCMS Kirchen-Agende text: Durch welchen deine Majestät loben die Engel, anbeten die Herrschaften, fürchten die Mächte, die Himmel und aller Himmel Kräfte, sammt den seligen Seraphim, mit einhelligem Jubel. Mit ihnen laß auch unsre Stimmen uns vereinen, und anbetend zu Dir sprechen…)
The following discussion, however, addresses one of the instances in which the compilers of the Common Service were not turned aside by the meandering BCP tradition, but instead hindered by the availability of Lutheran and medieval sources at their disposal. In his article The Lutheran Sources of the Common Service (The Lutheran Quarterly, Vol. 21, no. 2 [April 1891], p. 250), Edward T. Horn notes that the Introit texts that formed the basis of the Common Service are drawn from Lossius’ Psalmodia (1561), Nürnberg’s Officium Sacrum, and Johann Spangenberg’s Cantiones ecclesiasticae of 1545, as well as a pre-Reformation missal from Bamberg for comparison. Horn, in his writing, seems to understand the aforementioned Bamberg missal to be the basis of many Lutheran orders. In addition to these, the 1627 Libellus of Ansbach (hereafter Onoltzbach 1627) is not mentioned by Horn in connection with the Introits, but is cited repeatedly regarding the Daily Office.
The Fourth Sunday in Advent marks one occasion in which the paucity of sources available to the Common Service editors was demonstrably a hindrance. The Common Service tradition provides the Introit Rorate Cæli for the Fourth Sunday in Advent, as that is the text that appears in both Lossius and Nuremberg 1664 (and Onoltzbach 1627), with Spangenberg providing no Introit for the day in question. The familiar text of this Introit follows below.
Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down tthe Righteous One: let the earth open, and bring forth the Savior. V: The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth His handiwork. Gloria Patri. (Is. 45:8a; Ps. 19:1)
A broader pool of sources, however, shows this to be very much an outlier in both the medieval and post-Reformation tradition. Among our sources, the Introit Rorate cæli is assigned for the Fourth Sunday in Advent in a total of two late medieval sources, Hildesheim 1499 and Metz 1458. By way of contrast, the Introit Memento nostri is found in 54 of our pre-Reformation sources. The broader perspective can be seen in the following map from our friends at Usuarium, with the Rorate cæli text indicated by the muddy green dots (B), the text Memento Nostri indicated by the red dots (A) and, in a dataset irregularity, a singular blue dot (C). In total, the Introit for the Fourth Sunday of Advent on the eve of the Reformation was Memento nostri in approximately 79.32% of catalogued dioceses, and Rorate cæli in approximately 18.56%. A miniscule number prescribed the text Veni et ostende, indicated by the bright green dots (D).
Notably, the use of Rome prescribes the use of Rorate cæli for the Fourth Sunday in Advent, with a number of sources in southern France and the Rhône following Roman use, as is typical, and the assignation of Rorate cæli for this Sunday continuing into the 1570 Missale Romanum, thus supplanting Memento nostri throughout most of the Western Church. Let this serve, yet again, as a reminder that the Missale Romanum of any era is not a reliable source for ascertaining the broad consensus of the pre-Tridentine liturgical practice of Western Christendom.
The Introit Rorate cæli did, however, have a significant place in western liturgical use apart from the Fourth Sunday in Advent. It is universally found on Ember Wednesday in Advent, in conjunction with the reading of the account of the Annunciation; in the votive mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Advent, commonly known as the Rorate mass (drawing many of its texts from the aforementioned Ember Wednesday mass); and on the Feast of the Annunciation itself. The Rorate mass was so immensely popular, in fact, that the 1613 Cantica Sacra of the Lutheran Cathedral of Magdeburg appointed its gradual texts for every Sunday in Advent alongside the usual readings, with the proper Sunday masses relegated to the following weekdays.
While the presence of Rorate cæli for the Fourth Sunday in Advent in contemporary Roman use likely had some influence on the Common Service committee, the deciding factor was likely its presence in their two available Lutheran sources that provided an Introit for the day in question: Lossius’ Psalmodia and the Officium Sacrum of Nuremberg. As was mentioned above, the Rorate cæli text was beloved, and neither of these books includes the other occasions in Advent on which the Introit would have been sung, so it seems to have been moved to the Fourth Sunday in Advent rather than being lost altogether. In total, five of our Lutheran sources, including those three consulted by the Common Service editors, prescribe Rorate cæli for the Fourth Sunday in Advent, and all of them similarly lack the occasions in Advent on which that text would properly occur. (The other sources in question are Ludecus’ Missale of 1589 and the Lateinisches Gesangbuch from Zittau, 1729).
The Introit Memento nostri, in addition to its pre-Reformation ubiquity, also appears in a number of the most reliable Lutheran sources, including the Missale Germanicum of 1568, Jespersson’s Gradual of 1573, the 1613 Cantica Sacra of the Magdeburg Cathedral (though, as noted above, shifted to the weekdays following), and Franz Eler’s Cantica Sacra of 1588, as well as less prominent sources like the Skálholt Gradual, c. 1575. All of these sources provide the Introit Rorate cæli elsewhere, whether in Advent or on the feast of the Annunciation (or, in Eler’s case, on the feast of the Visitation), and so did not feel the need to preserve it by moving it to the Fourth Sunday in Advent. These sources are also broadly more conservative, and were loath to change the appointed texts unnecessarily.
As a result, the proposed Introit for the Fourth Sunday in Advent in the Lutheran Missal is Memento nostri:
Remember us, O LORD, with the favor that Thou bearest unto Thy people: Oh, visit us with Thy salvation; that we may see the good of Thy chosen in the gladness of Thy nation, that we may glory with Thine inheritance. V: Oh, give thanks unto the LORD; for He is good: for His mercy endureth forever. Gloria Patri. (Ps. 106:4–5, 1b)
Two years ago, we began soliciting volunteers to field test the temporal lectionary for The Lutheran Missal, followed by the sanctoral lectionary last year. This year, we are in search of volunteers to help us by field testing the lectionary and gradual texts for both the temporale and sanctorale beginning in Advent.
What is required of field testers?
We ask that field testers commit to using the provided lectionary and gradual texts for a full year, beginning in Advent of 2024, in whatever services you offer throughout the year, and periodically provide feedback.
How will this work?
After you fill out the brief form provided at the bottom of this page, you will receive access to electronic versions of all the necessary lectionary and gradual texts, as well as a noted gradual with simplified versions of the traditional tones for the Introits, Graduals, Alleluias, and Tracts. Periodic emails will be sent out to gather feedback on items of particular interest, and a form for general questions, queries, and comments will also be made available.
What distinguishes the Lectionary and Gradual for The Lutheran Missal from that of Lutheran Service Book?
Where can I sign up?
Take a few moments to submit your information here, and you will receive access to the necessary materials. Please also share with any others who may be interested in field testing!
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