Morning Offices of Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, and Good Friday. Together with a Magnificat for Holy Saturday and a few selections for the Tenebræ Function. Arranged and edited by Edwin F. MacGonigle, St. Charles’ Seminary, Overbrook, Pa.
The publication of this work is another comforting evidence of the reality of the revival of a better taste amongst church musicians, and of the demand of church people for a style of music at the divine offices which, at least, shall not outrage every sentiment of religious reverence and respect which they have for the house of God.
Although giving but few selections from the vast number of sentences, anthems, etc., enjoined to be sung during the great week, the choice made proves that there is a more general knowledge of the Rubrics than has hitherto prevailed amongst church musicians, and a consequent desire to produce the offices of the church in their entirety. It will also serve a purpose—to us a very desirable one—which is to turn the attention of choir-masters and organists to the sanctioned chant melodies for the Holy-Week services, which are, in our judgment, after long experience, quite unequalled by any musical melodies that were ever written.
We fail to see any possible reason for a harmonized morceau de musique to take the place of the cantor’s chanting of the Recordare at the Tenebræ function, nor can we discover any special merit in the composition itself. The works of Sig. Capocci seem to us to be better suited for exhibition at one of our “Vesper Series” concerts at Chickering and other halls than for practical use in choro before an altar—unless, indeed, the hearing of a musical concert is to be the proper and most edifying manner of satisfying the precept of hearing Mass devoutly, or of piously assisting at Vespers and Benediction.
Can the editor give any authority for the whining Fa# in the first member of the cadence of the Benedictus, No. 1, here treated as Do#? Sig. Capocci may have so written it; but then he ought to have known better.
Those who use concerted music for their church services, and who possess capable singers, will no doubt be pleased to add this publication to their collection of “church music.”
A Visit to the Roman Catacombs. By Rev. J. Spencer Northcote, D.D., canon of Birmingham. London: Burns and Oates. 1877. (For sale by The Catholic Publication Society Co.)
This book is another proof of the untiring attention that Canon Northcote continues to devote to the object of his special studies—the Roman Catacombs, to which, as he modestly tells us, he first applied himself in 1846. The length of time that he has devoted to the subject, his diligence, scholarship, and perfect orthodoxy, make him the standard authority among English-speaking Catholics on all matters connected with those wonderful subterranean cemeteries which are inexhaustible mines of treasure to students of Christian antiquities, and points of attraction to all really learned, as well as to some ignorant and conceited, visitors to Rome. The traveller to the Tiber and the Seven Hills who does not visit the Catacombs has not seen one of the three Romes, and returns with a very inadequate knowledge of the Eternal City. A study of the Roman Catacombs is as necessary to enable one to understand the manners and customs of the early Christians, and to appreciate the various stages of the doctrines and practices of the church from apostolic times to the period that followed the triumph of religion under Constantine, and its splendid development of ritual and of ceremonial during the middle ages, as the careful examination of the deeply-planted roots of a mighty oak is wanted to show the lover of nature how so noble a tree grows up the monarch of the forest, “and shooteth out great branches, so that the birds of the air may lodge under the shadow of it” (Mark iv. 32).
We are glad to learn from the preface of this short but interesting and instructive Visit to the Roman Catacombs that a second and enlarged edition of the Roma Sotteranea of the same author, published in conjunction with Rev. W. R. Brownlow in 1869, and which will contain the substance of De Rossi’s recently-issued third volume, is in preparation. We shall heartily welcome it. The present little book contains a great amount of information in a convenient, attractive, and well-written form.