Pausing at the Asterisk
Compline
Shipmate Posts: 19
I typically pray the office using sources based on the 1928 (American) BCP. My question is how traditional the "brief pause at the asterisk" is for the reciting the Psalms. I know the 1979 BCP specifically instructs this, but I haven't found any vintage rubrics directing it.
Comments
At my theological college we paused for a count of three on the diamond. And read the psalms in a monastic murmur.
You do need to take a breath before singing the second half of the verse, so the origins are quite practical.
When chanting the psalms, it marks the shift from the first half of the chant to the second. That doesn't, or shouldn't, involve much of a pause.
The practice of inserting a longish pause there when saying psalms rather than singing them is IMHO a nasty and irritating modern innovation which seems to have spread in the last 20-25 years and is to be thoroughly deprecated. If people must insist on having that sort of a pause at all, it would usually makes better sense to put it between the verses rather than in the middle of them.
If it comes from a prayer book published in 1979, it looks as though that might be source of it, and why, with a typical time lag, it suddenly started to spread about 20 years later. Which province's book is that as we haven't got one from 1979?
I don’t think the practice can be pinned on TEC’s 1979 BCP. The St. Dunstan Psalter, published in New York in 1917, references the practice in terms of the asterisk replacing the “familiar colon,” and speaks of the “restoration of the rhetorical punctuation.” It also says “The central pause in each Psalm verse should be long enough to afford a leisurely and plentiful breath supply; and should be rhythmical related to the preceding cadence. When there is no rhetorical pause here, breath need not necessarily be taken.”
I tend to agree that the pause when speaking the psalms is irritating. Very often it interrupts a thought or idea, so it seems to hinder rather than help contemplation of the Psalmist's meaning.
The 1979 book I referenced is the current one used by the Episcopal Church in the USA.
Totally bizarre, an affectation. I never knew it when chanting psalms in Latin and only came across it when I joined an Anglican choir.
Living tradition often obviates the need for rubrics. When a practice is so commonplace that it comes as second nature, there is no need to include an instruction to do it. This might explain the absence of rubrics in older books.
This is particularly evident in rites with much ceremonial. You can study the rubrics and memorise them off by heart but it's only when you see the rite performed by a regular worshipping community that you see the fullness of the liturgical action.
At our mission, we observe the pause, partly because it would simply never occur to us not to, but also because when you're chanting you often need that time to draw breath. There is then slight overlap when the other side comes in with the next verse.
It's not a matter of being wimpy. It's a matter of continuing monastic practices.
Really? I have never come across it in RC monasteries.
Not even when they are using plain chant? If so, they are not doing it correctly.
I've just spent a week with an Orthodox community in France where Gregorian plainchant is the bedrock of their services. Their mid-verse pause isn't huge but it certainly exists, and there is no pause between the end of one verse and the beginning of the next, with the exception of just before the Gloria Patri at the end of the psalm.
So if it's an affectation it is one that isn't limited to anglophone Anglican choirs, and seems to have made its way to francophone Orthodox religious communities. However, as this community's music is led by a nun who regularly visits Solesmes for instruction, and as Anglicanism is all but unknown in rural France, I doubt it can be so easily dismissed as Anglican affectation.
I expect the length of the pause in the middle of the verse will be determined in large part by the acoustic of the building.
There's an interesting comment here about this custom.
It isn't. Orthodox who chant the psalms antiphonally to the 8 Gregorian tones divide the verses in just the same way as everyone else does. I don't want to speak for Mousethief but I didn't read him as saying that it is an Orthodox custom to divide the two choirs at the mid-point of the verse, but rather that, when he has come across the asterisk in liturgical texts, that is what he personally understood it to mean.
(Please forgive the crossed post.)
Yes, when chanting psalms antiphonally using proper Gregorian psalm tones in Latin.
I think they probably know what they are doing.
Back in the day when I sang that stuff in a very similar setting we used to pause in the middle of a line just long enough to take a breath (or nod your head) with a similar pause before the other side took over the next line/verse. Nice smooth flow.
Unless RC monasteries are on the old rite (e.g. Clear Creek, OK) or are conservative in their customs they are still processing the aftermath of Vatican II. If you Google 'video Carthusian Vigils' you should come up with a recording of the first Nocturn of Vigils (Matins) according to the revised Carthusian Use from Grand Charteuse herself. The style of chanting their is very much the traditional one as they did not suffer major disruption thanks to the rather crass way in which the Vatican II documents on liturgy were implemented.
It isn't surprising that the Carthusians have taken a minimalist approach with the post-Vatican II reforms they managed to ignore most of the Tridentine Reforms and only took onboard that which Rome absolutely insisted that they take on board. BTW, Rome had to insist for quite a long time to get the Carthusians to the bow the knee at the elevation, and make some additions to their Calendar. Listening to the recording it seems that they have dropped the threefold "O Lord, open thou my lips..." before Ps. 3, the Lord's Prayer, the Absolution, and the blessings before the readings, and that the readings are now done in French, which is kind of the minimum required by the 1967 directives.
Last time I was at Ampleforth, the services there were well done examples of the Polyester Use so the chanting of the psalms was done to a modified form of Gregorian chant which sounded a lot like the sort of responsorial settings one gets in the Anglo-Catholic and upmarket RC parishes.
What about "Inverness Caledonian Thistle"? Mind you, it would have to be the Piskies!
The three-fold "O Lord, Open our lips" was done at Mount St. Bernard's (Trappist) when I was there. The monks there are certainly not "traddies" in the "angry internet Catholic"* sense. It seemed to be their house custom to accompany Sext (and only Sext) on the guitar.
*My own term, but anyone who has encountered them knows what I mean.
That said, two of OCSO houses have gone back to the 1962 Monastic Breviary in the last ten years, but, AFAIK, use both forms of Mass. The two houses concerned were both ailing, but now have reasonably secure futures thanks to an up-tick in vocations in both houses. The 1960s Reform was not always kind to the monastic orders, as some of them had extreme difficulty adjusting.
I tried reading this thread to stretch my comprehension, but gave up here.
There is a difference between saying psalms congregationally and singing them.
From about the third quarter of the nineteenth century, earlier in many places for the canticles, the CofE sang prose psalms congregationally using Anglican chant. In the more recent part of that era, choirs and musicians used either The Cathedral Psalter or The Parish Psalter. There were arcane differences between them to which most churchgoers were oblivious. Any pause, if there was one at all, to take in breath between the first and second half of the verse was driven by the music, not a convention. It was not replicated when saying them. Before that cathedral choirs sang prose but nobody is quite sure how they did it. Ordinary congregations normally said prose psalms and sang metrical psalms in stead of hymns.
Shoving an irritating pause into the middle of each verse to catch people out when saying psalms is a recent innovation.
Polyester Use = Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite and - in this case - its cognates.
I suppose (as ever) it depends on what sort of Anglican milieu one moves in. I would have said that 50 years ago it was rare for a Sunday service in the C of E to include said psalms. Mattins and Evensong would usually feature psalms sung to Anglican chant; psalms at the Eucharist were not common 50 years ago. Even now they have never become established in many parishes, and where they are used there are many different ways of treating them.
So I would say (but your experience may be different) that saying psalms aloud congregationally, pause or no pause, was not commonplace C of E practice. Where it was done was in small group recitation of the office, or in monastic or collegiate settings, where the pause we are discussing was most likely observed. Though varying in length from a silent Hail Mary (3 syllables) to an agonisingly long wait.
Personally I think that it allows for a more meditative approach than racing straight through. But I have been disconcerted in some places when although the pause at the asterisk is observed, the succeeding verse begins almost before the previous one is finished.
True. Benedictine houses are supposed to build their Office on the guidelines in Thesaurus Liturgiae Horarum Monasticae, promulgated around 1977. It's in Latin but can be seen here.
I am an insider (i.e. an Anglican) and do not much care for the "gabble and stop approach" to the office. I prefer to take it somewhat slower with modest pauses between verses and half-verses, which gives visitors the opportunity to join in. I also dislike the psalms being sung too quickly.
@Oblatus - I had forgotten how much the Thesaurus had car-bombed the old Benedictine Office. Mind you, it appeared when Rembert 'no friend of tradition' Weakland was the President of the Benedictine Federation, so I suppose I shall have to say "no surprises there then." One surprise I had when taking a look at psalter schemas is that the TEC-affiliated St Gregory's Abbey, Three Rivers, has one of the most traditional.
Yes, St Gregory's Abbey uses Schema A in the Thesaurus, basically the scheme from the Rule of St Benedict but with the psalms of Prime distributed elsewhere. They formerly used the (Latin) Breviarium Monasticum in its entirety; they've always sought to align with the universal Benedictine Office as much as possible.
European, especially German, Benedictine houses seem to prefer Schema B, which a survey some years ago showed was the most-used of the four schemes in the Thesaurus worldwide.
As for parish Offices, our parish does them daily, morning and evening, and I've never experienced gabble-and-stop, just normal-speed spoken recitation with a generous-but-not-ridiculous pause at midverse. Just a bit more than needed for a breath. I think visitors easily settle into the pattern once they've heard the officiant and the people do it for a couple of verses. We're not all perfectly in synch but fairly close. I personally don't find the practice tense or awkward, and I certainly hope no one is dirty-looking anyone who comes in early on the pause. It doesn't happen often, and the ones who do it are not always the visitors.
Wait, is this Ship slang, or what? Google isn't helping. I'm thoroughly confused.
Nice.
And in all honesty - I really don't like modern liturgy. A lot of it smells of the lecture theatre rather than the cloister or the parish church.
I am so old that I remember the Tridentine Rite being done really, really badly - a place where there were many priests all celebrating at separate altars racing to get finished so they could get to breakfast first and grab the best bacon. Another place where the priest used to promise 15 minute Masses on weekdays. Terrible sentimental "Mary and me" Victorian hymns with music hall tunes and utter doggerel for words. Abysmal parish choirs belting out worthless mass settings by the likes of Tozer (who he?) People arriving at the Gospel and nipping out at the priests communion so they could tick off that they had fulfilled their obligation.
The list could go on. The point is that bad liturgy is bad liturgy no matter what prayer book is used.