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Born out of a lifetime of teaching, Scotty Gray’s Hermeneutics of Hymnody is a wide-reaching introduction to hymnology. Instead of focusing on a single aspect of hymns, such as tune or historical background, Gray’s monograph steadfastly... more
Born out of a lifetime of teaching, Scotty Gray’s Hermeneutics of Hymnody is a wide-reaching introduction to hymnology. Instead of focusing on a single aspect of hymns, such as tune or historical background, Gray’s monograph steadfastly maintains a wide scope, even while treating an encyclopedic range of topics in turn. The book is organized into seven chapters, each treating one general approach to hymn study: “The Bible,” “Theology,” “Liturgy,” “Poetry,” “Music,” “History, Biography, and Socioculture,” and “Practice.” These core chapters are framed by an introduction and conclusion that argue for “a comprehensive and integrated hermeneutics of hymnody” (p. 12).
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This paper seeks to highlight the richness of the Church’s worship in the East and West from the fifth to the ninth century, as well as the unwarranted antagonism that sometimes characterized its factions, through an investigation of the... more
This paper seeks to highlight the richness of the Church’s worship in the East and West from the fifth to the ninth century, as well as the unwarranted antagonism that sometimes characterized its factions, through an investigation of the Trisagion or “Thrice-Holy” hymn. Controversy surrounded the Trisagion in the East after the Council of Chalcedon (451) as the rift between those that accepted and rejected the validity of the council steadily widened. While both sides agreed that the hymn was an earthly manifestation of heavenly worship and thus a touchstone of orthodoxy, the accepted meaning of the hymn diverged and ossified on either side: Chalcedonians only addressed the hymn to the Trinity, while non-Chalcedonians only addressed the hymn to Christ. The fierce polemic between these factions, based in the cities of Constantinople and Antioch, respectively, was absent in Egypt, Hispania, and Gaul, where tropings and varied liturgical contexts allowed the spinning out of images of a judging, saving, and, often, crucified Christ in the Trisagion. Vestiges of these images of Christ in Western liturgies suggest that disagreement on the subject of the Trisagion may have been briefly rekindled in the West in the suppression of the Gallican liturgies and their refashioning and reincorporation in the developing Carolingian liturgy. The introduction of the Trisagion into the Carolingian Good Friday Adoration of the Cross ceremony in the late ninth century, with diverse elements accrued from the chant’s history in East and West, may thus be viewed as a small-scale ecumenical synthesis with respect to Christian tradition.

This article is made available here through the kind permission of The Institute of Mediaeval Music.
Download the dissertation at: http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1396645278 The Roman Catholic Good Friday liturgy includes a series of chants known today as the Improperia (“Reproaches”) beginning with the following text:... more
Download the dissertation at: http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1396645278

The Roman Catholic Good Friday liturgy includes a series of chants known today as the Improperia (“Reproaches”) beginning with the following text: Popule meus, quid feci tibi? aut in quo contristavi te? responde mihi. Quia eduxi te de terra Egypti, parasti crucem Salvatori tuo (“My people, what have I done to you, or in what have I grieved you? Answer me. Because I led you out of the land of Egypt, you prepared a cross for your Savior”). The earliest witness to the chants is a Carolingian liturgical book from around 880, but it is agreed among scholars that their history extends back farther than this.

Employing comparative analysis of Biblical exegesis, chant texts, and chant melodies, this study suggests that the initial chant verse, Micah 6:3–4a plus a Christianizing addendum (“My people... you prepared...”), originated in northwestern Italy between the end of the 4th century and the end of the 7th century and carried associations of the Last Judgment, the Passion, and Christian works, penitence, and forgiveness. Although previous scholarship has sometimes pointed to the Reproaches as a key text of Christian anti-Jewish history, it is clear that the initial three verses, the Popule meus verses, originally held allegorical rather than literal meanings.

The fact that there are several preserved Popule meus chants across various liturgical repertoires and, moreover, several sets of Popule meus verses in a smaller subset of these repertoires—in northern Italy, southern France, and the Spanish March—bespeaks the pre-Carolingian origins of the Popule meus verses and raises the question of why the verses appear in the Carolingian liturgy when they do. This study proposes that the Popule meus verses were incorporated into the Carolingian liturgy at the Abbey of Saint-Denis under the abbacy of Charles the Bald (867–77). In the Adoration of the Cross ceremony adopted from Rome, paired with the Greek Trisagion, and carrying Gallican melody and meaning, the Carolingian Popule meus verses would have been an ecumenical declaration, as they spread, of the expediency of the crucified Christ and a penitent people, even in the face of impending political disintegration.
Research Interests:
This paper seeks to highlight the richness of the Church’s worship in the East and West from the 5th to the 9th century, as well as the unwarranted antagonism that sometimes characterized its factions, through an investigation of the... more
This paper seeks to highlight the richness of the Church’s worship in the East and West from the 5th to the 9th century, as well as the unwarranted antagonism that sometimes characterized its factions, through an investigation of the Trisagion or “Thrice-Holy” hymn.  Controversy surrounded the Trisagion in the East after the Council of Chalcedon (451) as the rift between those that accepted and rejected the validity of the council steadily widened.  While both sides agreed that the hymn was an earthly manifestation of heavenly worship and thus a touchstone of orthodoxy, the accepted meaning of the hymn diverged and ossified on either side: Chalcedonians only addressed the hymn to the Trinity, while non-Chalcedonians only addressed the hymn to Christ.  The fierce polemic between these factions, based in the cities of Constantinople and Antioch, respectively, was absent in Egypt, Hispania, and Gaul, where tropings and varied liturgical contexts allowed the spinning out of images of a judging, saving, and often, crucified Christ in the Trisagion.  Vestiges of these images of Christ in Western liturgies suggest that antagonism on the subject of the Trisagion may have been briefly rekindled in the West in the suppression, refashioning, and reincorporation of the Gallican liturgies in the emerging Carolingian Roman-Frankish synthesis, one result of which was the curious but richly significant incorporation of the Constantinopolitan Trisagion into the Good Friday Adoration of the Cross ceremony in the late 9th century.
To what extent are the Good Friday “Reproaches” anti-Jewish? This is the question from which this paper proceeds, constructing a historical narrative of the formulation, transmission, and meaning of this Western European liturgical chant... more
To what extent are the Good Friday “Reproaches” anti-Jewish?  This is the question from which this paper proceeds, constructing a historical narrative of the formulation, transmission, and meaning of this Western European liturgical chant over more than a millennium.  The Scriptural pericope on which the chant is based, beginning with the address Popule meus (“My people”) in the Latin, comes from the prophecy of Micah, and was theorized as early as the 4th century by Christians as a judgment from the mouth of Christ in relation to His Passion.  The ambiguous address “My people” and the possible literal and allegorical readings of the text allowed for richly varied constructions of identity and alterity—of selfhood and otherness—throughout the chant’s history.  Beginning with a survey of patristic interpretation of this pericope and then a presentation of the earliest Popule meus chants, I show how, at the time of their first appearance in the late Carolingian era, and then their expansion around the year 1000, the Reproaches were a synthesis of venerable traditions of text, music, and theological and social meaning from throughout the Christian world.  The continuing story of the chant, seen through the examination of liturgical commentary and paraliturgical use, shows a general increasing propensity toward anti-Judaism, while the investigation of polyphonic settings allows for specific contexts to be brought into relief.  Two of these settings are bound up in the bifurcation of sacred musical style in the Catholic Church: Palestrina’s setting in falsobordone and Aquilino Coppini’s madrigale spirituale contrafactum on Monteverdi’s Cruda Amarilli.  I close my investigation with the examination of two 17th-century settings for solo voice, one by Alessandro Della Ciaia explicitly directed toward the Jews of Christ’s Passion, and one by Johann Gletle explicitly directed to the individual Christian believer.  Overall, my findings reveal that, while the Good Friday Reproaches were connected at times with anti-Jewish rhetoric and action, throughout their history, from the Early Middle Ages through the Counter-Reformation, they were primarily associated with Christian ideas of failure, repentance, and renewal.
This paper seeks to highlight the cultural influence of the Eastern rites on the Western rites through an investigation of the Trisagion chant in the Early Middle Ages. While the meaning of the chant in Constantinople and Antioch began... more
This paper seeks to highlight the cultural influence of the Eastern rites on the Western rites through an investigation of the Trisagion chant in the Early Middle Ages.  While the meaning of the chant in Constantinople and Antioch began to ossify as Trinitarian and Christological, respectively, following the Council of Chalcedon (451), commentary was nonetheless unified early on in framing the Trisagion as a standard of orthodoxy, a safeguard against heresy, and an earthly manifestation of heavenly worship.  Outside of these two urban centers, in Egypt, Persia, Gaul, and Hispania, a more fluid conception of the chant persisted, spinning out visions of a judging, saving, and, often, crucified Christ.  The fluidity of meaning here is apparent in the varied uses and tropings of the Trisagion in the Gallican and Old Hispanic liturgies, and it provides a rich context for the decision of the late-Carolingian liturgists to add the Trisagion to the Adoration of the Cross ceremony in the mid-9th century.  Comparative analysis of the Good Friday chants in the Carolingian and Aquitainian repertoires, finally, with particular attention to the Popule meus verses, brings into relief the accumulated meaning of the bilingual Good Friday Trisagion chant in the Carolingian Empire with respect to the Eastern Christian Empire it strove to emulate and equal.
When asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, the child Gustav Mahler gave the reply, “A martyr.” Indeed it seemed as if throughout his life, Mahler was constantly faced with the rejection of his messages and his person and yet... more
When asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, the child Gustav Mahler gave the reply, “A martyr.” Indeed it seemed as if throughout his life, Mahler was constantly faced with the rejection of his messages and his person and yet continued to aspire to gain higher realms and lead others there as well. Psycho-biographical work by Stuart Feder has shown that Mahler’s sermonizing tendency was largely motivated by his need to overcome a series of major psychological crises, while Mahler’s Schopenhauerian artistic and philosophical circle of friends certainly contributed to the content of his messages in its attempts to surmount crumbling post-Christian forms in pursuit of a higher arts-based redemption.

All of these strands come together in the story of the Scherzo of the Second Symphony. To compose the Scherzo, Mahler expanded his earlier song setting of the Wunderhorn poem “Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt,” itself inherited from the Counter-Reformation Viennese court preacher Abraham a Sancta Clara (1644–1709), who wrote the poem about the impenitent fish congregation for one of his sermons on unrepentance entitled Judas der Erzschelm (“Judas the Archknave”). The tropes of deafness, unrepentance, and exile are carried into the Scherzo, reinforced by Mahler’s programmatic description of the Symphony, in which the protagonist views a bustling society dance through a window without being able to hear the music; indeed, the movement culminates in “the fearful scream of a soul thus martyred”—this is the existential question which the well-known Resurrection Finale seeks to answer. Like the fish congregation, the Viennese audience could not understand this movement, offering hesitant applause after a deathly silence, as Natalie Bauer-Lechner recalled. This paper thus provides an interpretation of the Scherzo of Mahler’s Second Symphony in terms of the multiple layerings of sermonizing in the composer’s life and compositional material, thus exploring the inborn human need to define identity and belief through communication with others.
Ensembles of 400,000 two-electron trajectories in three space dimensions are used with Newtonian equations of motion to track atomic double ionization under very strong laser fields. We report a variable time lag between e-e collision and... more
Ensembles of 400,000 two-electron trajectories in three space dimensions are used with Newtonian equations of motion to track atomic double ionization under very strong laser fields. We report a variable time lag between e-e collision and double ionization, and find that the time lag plays a key role in the emergence directions of the electrons. These are precursors to production of electron momentum distributions showing substantial new agreement with experimental data.