www.byzcath.org Forums News & Events Church News In Defense of Cantors, Prostopinije and the like

I don't know enough about the chant, or changes therein, to make an educated comment on this topic. However, I would like to point out that one of Frank's objections - that "we've been doing it this way for so long, why change now?" is the same objection I keep running into among my fellow R.C.'s regarding the changes in the Mass following Vatican II.

Granted that those changes were not handled very diplomatically - one of the many things our Pope has apologized for. But the primary objection seems to be against any change whatsoever, just on the principal that no change *should* be made.

There certainly is a good argument to be made against "change for the sake of change" - something we saw way too often following Vatican II - and against unauthorized changes - i.e., one priest deciding to open the Mass with a hearty "Good morning, everyone!" before/instead of the Sign of the Cross.

I think most reasonable people would agree that changes should only be made where necessary, and where authorized by the proper authority. But to say that no changes should ever be made simply because "we've always done it this way" does not seem reasonable to me. When we're dealing with sacred things like the Liturgy and the Mass, we should always be striving for perfection, which means sooner or later we may have to make a change!

Theist Gal,

Don't you know the cardinal sin in any church?

It's not heresy or apostasy,

It's "We never did it THAT way before!"
(even if we really did.)





Sharon

Joe has brought up a very good point, namely that every cantor does things differently. Really it is a somewhat enigmatic situation since to coordinate all of the cantors getting together on a regular basis would be logistically very difficult.

Even if a local group of cantors got together, the equivalent of the local clergy deaneries, and worked on settings, tossed around ideas, picked each others brains, etc. that would be helpful.

Just to throw something else out, as the success of the OCA and Antiochians show, incorporating multiple music traditions can and does work. While I agree that the corpus of prostopinje is beautiful and needs to be the basic musical identity of Carpatho-Russian/Ruthenian parishes, there is no reason why other musical traditions can't be incorporated. Especially here in the Midwest/west we have a real mixed bag of parishoners from Ukrainians "off the boat" to Protestant converts.

The Antiochians have an interesting mixture of Byzantine, Bulgarian, Kyivan, and Carpatho-Russian melodies for their Sunday Oktoechos at the local parish and it is wonderful (Tone 1 Kyivan, Tone 4 prostopinje, Tone 2 Bulgarian, etc.).

For Jerusalem Matins this year we even did one of the stasis in the Greek/Byzantine chant with everyone who could hold the eison. We got a lot of positive comments on that, also. While it is good to keep the prostopinje tradition alive there is no need to be "protopinje Nazis" or "samoyilka Nazis" or whatever if another musical tradition may be better suited to a particular text in terms of congregational "singability".