dunstan wrote: ...My PP likes there to be incidental music from the end of the bidding prayers to the Orate Fratres - and it is certainly good exercise in semi-improvisation: taking a piece of music and expanding or contacting it to suit. But while incidental music during the collection seems fine, to have the offertory prayers made silently by the celebrant seems all wrong.
This question has just come up where I am ATM. Some of those prayers have "omitted if singing/music is in progress" in various missals. What's the "correct" point at (or by) which music should have stopped? For bonus points, what if anything is 'binding' and what 'recommended' on this?
I suspect one of the reasons that liturgists sometimes make themselves unpopular is a tendency to take a spectrum of 'must', 'should', 'may', 'should not', 'must not' and turn it into REQUIRED and PROHIBITED..