Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge

Our Summer weekend was held at Ushaw College, near Durham, the seminary for the northern dioceses of England. We met over the weekend of 26 - 28 June beginning, as is customary, with a solemn Requiem Mass for deceased members of the Schola remembering, especially, our founder, Dr Mary Berry, who died just over 12 months ago. We had a talk given by Dr Emma Hornby, lecturer in Music at the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on western liturgical chant in the middle ages, and she gave us a fascinating talk on what we know of the chant in the period immediately before the Norman conquest. She told us, with illustrations, of the detective skills needed to come to conclusions based on mere fragments of surviving information, and she sang us some chant in the way it is thought it was sung at the time.

From the Requiem Mass in the old rite, we moved to the new, and studied the chants of Vespers and Mass for the great feast of Ss Peter and Paul, followed by singing those Offices on the Saturday evening and Sunday morning. We divided ourselves into novices and others, with separate sessions for each given by Jeremy White and Philip Duffy. Each evening we sang Compline to mark the close of the day, although this was followed by a convivial evening in the lounge bar.

The facilities at Ushaw College were magnificent. The building is spacious, the grounds extensive, the catering delicious, and St Cuthbert's chapel, where we held our services, sublime. This chapel was designed by Hansom and Dunn, and replaced an earlier chapel by Pugin which had proved to be too small. Some of the Pugin fittings survive, and the chapel has been maintained in excellent condition. We are indebted to Frs Peter Vellacott, Michael Brown and Anton Webb who, between them, celebrated Mass and officiated at Vespers and Compline, and to Canon Keith Woodhouse who celebrated the Eucharist for our Anglican members.

Tonight’s concert and subsequent recording represents the culmination of a project Dr Mary Berry, founder of the Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge, had in mind during her last year, and as such is naturally dedicated to her memory. It is characteristic of her formidable energy and commitment that she continued to generate ideas such as this right to the end. Mary had already enlisted the help of Dr David Hiley in searching out this music, and our debt of gratitude to him for his own unflagging help in editing the manuscript and being always on hand with patient advice and support is too great to repay, except with what we hope will be a worthy performance of this wonderful repertoire. (Jeremy White, Director Schola Gregoriana of Cambridge.)
 
The Templars, the greatest of the military orders of the Middle Ages, have long been the stuff of legend and fiction. Inspired by an ideal and a vision from the foundation of their Order in Jerusalem in 1120 to their wicked suppression in 1307-14, they have themselves been a potent source of inspiration in recent times, from Scott's Ivanhoe and the revival of chivalric attitudes in the nineteenth century down to the more lurid examples of the present day.
 
This evening's concert was inspired by the knowledge that the Templars were not only a military but also a religious Order. They thus united two of the three ‘orders’ of medieval society previously regarded as separate, that is, those who prayed, those who fought and those who worked. Each Templar took vows of poverty and chastity, like the members of a monastic order, and at the heart of each of their houses was a chapel. There the daily and yearly round of services, the Divine Office and Mass, were performed, sung where possible with Gregorian chant.
 
Clearly the Templars had other concerns than the celebration of the liturgy with all the splendour and ceremony of a great cathedral or monastery. They did not develop any characteristic liturgical customs or sing any special chants. But from the very few surviving liturgical manuscripts which can be associated with the Templars, it may be seen that they at least maintained the old Gregorian chant tradition.
 
By great good fortune, two manuscripts have been preserved which contain the chant sung in the Temple in Jerusalem before the city fell in 1244. One of them is a notated Breviary with all the chants, prayers and lessons of the Divine Office. Most of the pieces in our concert have been transcribed from this manuscript, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. It includes rubrics for the services to be sung “in domo Templi”, and prayers for the memorials of three bishops of Jerusalem. It also contains a full Office for St Augustine, and was clearly made for the Augustinian canons who performed the liturgy in the Temple. Since it also contains the Office of St Antony of Padua, canonized in 1232, the Breviary must have been made in the short time after Emperor Frederick II had negotiated a settlement with the Muslims and before the city was finally lost. It is not a very splendid manuscript, rather a utilitarian record of the liturgy, albeit a very comprehensive one, with 990 pages mostly written in double columns.
 
The other manuscript is a Gradual, now preserved in the Biblioteca Angelica in Rome (except for a few leaves in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge). It contains the chants for Mass; the Alleluia and Sequence at the end of our concert were transcribed from it. It dates from the twelfth century, probably from the years before the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1187. Once again St Augustine’s Day is singled out for special celebration.
 
Such resources in the form of medieval chant manuscripts having been identified, it remained to decide what to perform. The choice of the liturgy for the Dedication of a Church was almost irresistible. The church of the Templars in Jerusalem was none other than the Dome of the Rock, previously the Mosque of Omar, believed in the Middle Ages to be Solomon’s Temple itself. The texts of the Dedication liturgy abound in references to Solomon’s Temple, and above and beyond that to the Heavenly Jerusalem, as revealed to St John and as a symbol of the Christian Church. Hence the choice of illustration for the programme cover, taken from a set illustrating the Book of Revelation, where an angel shows John the Holy City.
 
The order of chants in our programme reflects that of the medieval liturgy. It was obviously not possible to perform the whole of Vespers, with its five psalms and the canticle Magnificat, each framed by an antiphon, Matins with its three Nocturns, each containing three psalms and antiphons, three lessons and three responsories, or Lauds, with a form similar to that of Vespers. Nevertheless, our grouping of chants in sets corresponding to those of the traditional services, and the inclusion of prayers, versicles and readings conveys something of the essential character of the ancient use, its majestic rhythm and the ample opportunity it affords for meditation on the place of the Church in divine and human history.
 
The programme begins with two non-liturgical items, settings of Latin poems lamenting the captivity of Jerusalem and exhorting us to take up the struggle to free the Holy City. Crucifigat omnes may have been written at the time of the Third Crusade (1189-93); it is recorded in manuscripts from 13th-century Paris, those with the great organa of Leoninus and Perotinus. Jerusalem mirabilis is earlier, perhaps from the time of the First Crusade (1096-99), and is found in South French manuscripts of the twelfth century.
 
After these two Latin songs have set the scene, so to speak, the first antiphon from the liturgy for St Augustine is sung. It fits the occasion especially well, with its references to the Jerusalem as the mother church and Augustine as a steward of the church, just as the Templars were stewards of the Temple in Jerusalem. Thereafter the chants and other items from the Dedication liturgy proceed solemnly on their way. As polyphonic music begins the programme, so too is it heard at the end, with Guillaume Dufay's setting of the Dedication Hymn Urbs beata Jerusalem. And it is our hope that our musical offering will not be unworthy of the vision expressed in the words of that hymn, the vision of a city “Plena modulis in laude et canore jubilo - Full of melody and jubilant in her songs of praise”.
David Hiley

Dr Mary Berry's funeral:

For an account of the Requiem Mass and subsequent burial at the church of St Birinus, Dorchester on Thames

Photograph gallery of the Requiem Mass in Dorchester Abbey