Views from the Choir Loft

Summer Chant Courses—Dunwoodie

Fr. David Friel · April 1, 2018

WO sacred music courses will be offered this summer at St. Joseph’s Seminary (Dunwoodie) in Yonkers. These offerings are being presented through the St. Cecilia Academy for Pastoral Musicians, an initiative of the Archdiocese of New York (both the liturgy office and the seminary) that was featured on these pages a couple of years ago.

The instructor for these sessions will be Jennifer Donelson, DMA (bio). Dr. Donelson is director of sacred music at Dunwoodie, president of the Society for Catholic Liturgy, and managing editor of the CMAA’s Sacred Music journal.

The two course offering this summer will be:

Principles of Sacred Music — 7 weeks online (June 4-July 22); 2 days on campus (July 23-24)

Principles of Sacred Music — 4 day on campus (July 25-28)

Participants will have the option either to take these courses for credit or to audit them. For the on campus portions, very reasonable room & board is being offered at the seminary.

For more information on these summer courses, see the official flyer.

Opinions by blog authors do not necessarily represent the views of Corpus Christi Watershed.

About Fr. David Friel

Ordained in 2011, Father Friel is a priest of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia and serves as Director of Liturgy at Saint Charles Borromeo Seminary. —(Read full biography).

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—Jeff Ostrowski

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—Corpus Christi Watershed

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Recently I have been enjoying looking through the inaugural (1927) edition of a 20th-century liturgical magazine called Orate Fratres. The July 1927 issue included an excellent article by a Chicago laywoman named Ellen Gates Starr entitled “The Delights of the Breviary: From the Point of View of a Lay Woman.” As we in the 21st century have recently undergone a (blessed!) re-translation of the missal into English, and as we await with joyful hope (please God, before Jesus comes back!) a similar re-translation of the breviary, the opening of her article reminded me of that old saying, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Nearly a hundred years ago, she penned words that could just as easily have been written today: “It is indeed a privilege to be allowed any participation, however slight, in the liturgical movement in the Church – the movement to bring back the classics of devotion, the Missal and the Breviary, into general use by the laity. The wonder is that they should ever have fallen into disuse. Nothing can take the place of these great universal prayers of the Church, the prayers of the Mass and the divine Office. One has only to know them to find them indispensable. And alas, how few of the laity know them!” I know that I have been tremendously nourished by regular praying of the breviary as of late, and my wish is that you and I, dear reader, may continue to nourish our interior lives with the official prayer of the Church, which present to us (in the Mass) and extend (in the Office) the fullness of Christ’s greatest gift to us – the gift of Himself – in the Most Holy Eucharist.

—Daniel Tucker