If you would like Colloquium brochures to hand out to your choir, or to make available in the public areas of your parish, please drop us an email and tell us how many you need. We are very happy to send them along.
If you would like Colloquium brochures to hand out to your choir, or to make available in the public areas of your parish, please drop us an email and tell us how many you need. We are very happy to send them along.
In anticipation of the Sacred Music Colloquium this summer, our offices have received many inquiries about scholarships. There are students of music would like to attend but cannot afford it. Directors of music in parishes want to attend but their parish cannot afford to send them. There are many such cases.
Ideally, the CMAA would make it possible for any qualified person to attend and receive train in chant and experience the best of sacred music. But that is currently not possible: we simply do not have the funds to make it possible. We hope to build up a scholarship fund over time; indeed, this is essential.
Perhaps you love sacred music and understand its relationship to the liturgy. You long for liturgical prayer to be united again with chant. You understand the centrality of the Renaissance for the Catholic artistic experience. And you see how important it is for musicians to be exposed to and trained in this tradition. And yet, you don’t feel that you can make an artistic contribution yourself. This is not uncommon.
It still remains possible to send a student or director to attend this conference. A tax-deductible contribution of $560 makes it possible to for one student to gain the full experience of the colloquium: all materials, instruction, meals, and housing. This is a gift that can change someone’s life—and change the shape of liturgy in the English-speaking world.
If you would like to help, please send your contribution to our offices or write us for more information. You can also use the paypal button.
This year’s colloquium—six days of musical heaven—promises to be the biggest and best ever. Would you assist in helping a qualified student to attend?
The 1955 encyclical is here:
It is the duty of all those to whom Christ the Lord has entrusted the task of guarding and dispensing the Church’s riches to preserve this precious treasure of Gregorian chant diligently and to impart it generously to the Christian people…. And if in Catholic churches throughout the entire world Gregorian chant sounds forth without corruption or diminution, the chant itself, like the sacred Roman liturgy, will have a characteristic of universality, so that the faithful, wherever they may be, will hear music that is familiar to them and a part of their own home. In this way they may experience, with much spiritual consolation, the wonderful unity of the Church. This is one of the most important reasons why the Church so greatly desires that the Gregorian chant traditionally associated with the Latin words of the sacred liturgy be used.
Father Konrad Fuchs, the oldest living Catholic priest, has died. He survived the trenches of the Great War, defied the Nazis, and lived to say Mass on his 109th birthday. He called our Holy Father’s election a “joy for Germany” and, in his last year, expressed regret that he could no longer see well enough “to read the Bible from beginning to end ‘one last time.'” To his parishioners, he was “a down-to-earth, deeply religious clergyman, [who] cited as his great passions the liturgy, especially choral music.” Requiescat in pace.
The CMAA is pleased to announce that the Sacred Music Colloquium 2007 (June 19-24) can offer daily priest training in the sung Mass, as taught by Fr. Robert Skeris. There is a growing need for this so that the fully sung liturgy can become part of the liturgical life of Catholics, precisely as the normative form of the Roman Rite suggests it should be. See the full schedule for times.