Music for the Mass

Many of you will have already heard that ICEL has published the chants for the new missal on their website for all to download. This is really good stuff. They have included two chants for the Creed, and a chant (a very ancient and simple one) for the Gloria. The latter is especially significant. Our present missal has chants for everything BUT the Gloria and the Creed. That is, we have standard chants for the Kyrie, the Sanctus and the Agnus Dei in the missal already. But without a chant for the Gloria, there has not been a full standard chant mass setting easily accessible for all Catholic parishes. And so they went looking for other settings that included a Gloria, non-standard settings. NOW there will at last be a common universal standardised chant setting available to all English speaking parishes throughout the world.

Another bit of news: the stuff you download from the ICEL website is just the chant melody. Great for unaccompanied chant. But most parishes will require organ accompaniment at least. AND it's on its way! The draft accompaniment is already being prepared and hopefully will be available soon.

The next step is to make sure that our parishes use these settings so that they become widely known. It seems to me that the easiest thing to do is to introduce the new texts WITH the new chant settings. It is always easier to memorise a text when you sing it anyway.

Just imagine being able to go anywhere in the English speaking world and join in singing the liturgy! Just imagine being able to break into song at any mass, Sunday or weekday, with or without musical accompaniment!