Today being the solemn feast of Our Lady's Assumption-- she is 'the sacred and living Ark of the living God', as St John Damascene teaches in the 4th lesson at Matins-- I will point out that the Roman Martyrology, at Prime yesterday, simply announced the feast. The Old English Martyrology, as Dr Parker has noted, is rather more expansive; her version:
On the fifteenth day of the month is the feast which is St Mary's feast. On this day she departed from the world to Christ, and now she shines in the heavenly host among the crowd of holy virgins, as the sun shines upon this middle-earth. Angels rejoice there, and archangels exult, and all the saints are glad with St Mary. St Mary was sixty-four years old when she went to Christ. St Mary is daughter-in-law of God the Father and the mother of God’s son, and mother-in-law of the holy souls and the noble queen of the citizens of heaven; she stands upon the right side of the great Father and High King.
The 4th lesson concludes:
Hódie Eden novi Adam paradísum súscipit animátum, in quo solúta est condemnátio, in quo plantátum est lignum vitæ, in quo opérta fuit nostra núditas.
Today the Eden of the new Adam received the living paradise, wherein condemnation was annulled, wherein the Tree of Life was planted, wherein our nakedness was covered.
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Took it into my head, as I was out walking earlier, the skies being perfectly clear, to see how late in the morning I could see Venus, stella matutina, from which Our Lady, Stella matutina, takes her title. When I returned to the house, it was 0655. I might have remained outside, on the back porch, perhaps, to the end but there were clouds moving to the north across the horizon and they would've soon blocked my view.
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The neumes are the notes on the pages of chant, what we call 'notes'. Neumz is a project that will see the Gregorian chant repertory digitally recorded and made available online; of course what they mean by 'the entire repertory' is all the chants sung over the three year cycle of the lessons (in the Novus Ordo) by the nuns at the Benedictine Abbey of Our Lady at Jouques in France. Their YouTube channel is here, the website is here.
The idea is that, once everything is finished (they're ending their first year of recording), you can open their app, select e.g. Vespers of the feast of Saint Clara, and hear the chants of that hour. It is all a bit creaky (or was-- I think that I last experimented with the listening and calendar parts of the site in early July) for the present but I believe they are aiming to have a working app downloadable e.g. to mobile telephones sometime this Fall.
They are open also to recording the Office in the Traditional Rite, so we can look forward for that, too, although they would need to find a different monastic partner (the sister of one of the Neumz people is a nun at Jouques).
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I joined this concert from Tallinn some forty minutes in, so am not quite sure which of Arvo Pärt's works I'm hearing: certainly, not any movement of Haydn's Symphony no 45 'Farewell'. Missed Spiegel im Spiegel; am not above smiling at seeing that in Estonian that wonderful, glorious meditation is entitled Peegel peeglis. He is a devout servant of the Mother of God.
It was Trisagion, and the program finished with his Ukuaru valss (1973/2010).
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In an hour or so, Nelson Goerner will perform Beethoven's Sonata no 26 in E flat major 'Les Adieux' op 81a and his Eroica Variations op 35, Chopin's Ballade in A flat major op 47, and Liszt's Spanish Rhapsody S 254 in Warsaw, with a video livestream at Polskie Radio Dwójka. The recital opens the 16th International Chopin Festival, this year called 'Chopin and His Europe'. I remember reading once that there is almost always a Chopin festival ongoing in Poland somewhere; Jan Lisiecki, Ivo Pogorelić, Nikolai Lugansky, Gabriela Montero, Ingolf Wunder, Matthias Goerne, Christophe Prégardien-- those are some of the artist names I recognize.
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At Holy Mass this morning, the Schola at Saint-Eugène sang the sequence Induant justitiam; Cardinal Noailles formally included it in the proprium of the Paris Missal in 1706. The venerable Adam of Saint-Victor has left us three prosae: one for the day of the Octave, Gratulemur in hac die, one for the Sunday within the Octave, Ave Virgo singularis, mater nostri, and one for the Saturday within the Octave, Ave Virgo singularis, porta vitae. Perhaps the Victorine calendar had only two free days in addition to the Octave itself.
I'm not quite sure what they would've done when, as this year, the dies Octava is a Saturday. I myself am going to say Mater nostri on Wednesday and Porta vitae on Thursday (since those two days are celebrated as Days within the Octave in the 1910 Calendar) ending with Gratulemur on its proper day.
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