Prof. Christopher Berry and Dr. Jennifer Donelson-Nowicka will be joined by Toronto organist Dr. Aaron James and a 16-voice choir from around the country, featuring some CISM students, as they render the sacred music for Mass and vespers at the upcoming Fons et Culmen Sacred Liturgy Summit.
Join us this summer, July 1–4, 2025 at St. Patrick’s Seminar in Menlo Park! Summer 2025 CISM classes will start the Monday following the Summit.
Check out this article by Christina Gray from this fall’s Catholic San Francisco.
The intermittent harmonies of Gregorian chant echo down the halls of St. Patrick’s Seminary & University on a hot July day. It comes not from within the campus chapel, but from a small classroom in the seminary’s west wing. Here, two dozen adults from as far away as Paraguay, Slovenia and Mozambique, and as close by as Menlo Park, stand shoulder-to-shoulder in front of Jennifer Donelson-Nowicka, music sheets in hand.
Another handful could be seen on monitors at the front and back of the classroom Zooming in from different time zones across the globe.
They are parish music directors, liturgists, priests and nuns but mostly lay Catholics here for a weeklong course in “Introduction to Gregorian Chant.” The course is one of more than a dozen graduate-level liturgical music courses offered in summer sessions by the Catholic Institute of Sacred Music at St. Patrick’s Seminary & University in Menlo Park.
Check out the recent interview with CISM’s founding director Dr. Donelson-Nowicka on The Catholic Current with Fr. Robert McTeigue, SJ.
Subscribers to the Church Music Association of America’s journal Sacred Music have been reading work by our students this year.
The Spring 2024 issue featured a fantastic article about Polish-American composer Eugeniusz Walkiewicz by Jeffrey Quick, along with one of Quick’s fantastic editions, this time Walkiewicz’s Missa in honorem S. Josephi Sponsi Beatae Mariae Virginis, a lovely Ordinary for organ and congregation or unison choir.
In the Fall 2024 issue the reader finds a helpful survey of several alternatim masses, which alternate polyphony and chant, by José Ballón Vasquez, along with his edition of Palestrina’s Kyrie from his 1592 Missa Dominicalis, based on the Orbis Factor chants of Mass XI.
The forthcoming issue, Winter 2024, showcases Anton Bruckner’s Tota pulchra es in an article by Colleen Maher Bond.
Recent issues have also contained a fantastic series on the Psalms of Sunday Vespers by faculty member and chaplain of the CISM, Fr. Joshua Neu.
Congratulations, students and faculty, for your wonderful work!
Our second annual Advent & Christmas concert, part of our Public Lecture & Concert Series, and sung by the Schola Cantorum of St. Patrick’s Seminary will be lovely. Along with this new concert tradition is another tradition: all the RSVPs are gone within just over a week! To those friends of the Catholic Institute of Sacred Music and St. Patrick’s Seminary who wanted to come but didn’t get a ticket, we’re sorry! We hope you’ll be able to join us next year!
On October 18–19, 2024, we hosted an online conference for music educators on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Jubilate Deo and Voluntati Obsequens. Twelve speakers from around the world shared their stories of successes in handing on the Catholic faith and sacred music in programs for youth. The talks are a testament to the success to be found in accepting the invitation of Paul VI to hand on at least a minimum repertoire of Gregorian chant. When the Church’s sacred music forms the core of a music curriculum, students are able to set down deep roots in their Catholic faith and to find their own voices in the symphony of praise in the cosmic liturgy.
Take a listen to what Archbishop Cordileone had to say about the role of sacred music in Catholic education!