New Mass setting for School

[Amaris]

I need to put forward some new musical settings of the Mass for our 11-18 girls school to sing as a community.

They have been using the same Inwood setting for years (before my arrival) and it's time to ring the changes.

What can people suggest that is interesting, singable and will appeal to our musical yet still thoroughly teenage girls?

I look forward to a flood of replies!

Amaris

[Nick Baty]

Give us more clues about what you're looking for.
Voices and piano?
Optional choir parts?
(Even have one here with optional claves and maracas).

[Amaris]

Sorry, yes, voices and piano. Optional choir parts for a special occasion. No other instrumentation probably.

[Amaris]

Six hundred unison voices in fact.

[Nick Baty]

And (sorry for wittering on) how often do these occasions happen?
If you have one school Mass a term you might only need one setting for the whole year.
If you have one a week you'll need several.

[Amaris]

There two masses a term plus Saints Days for each house. So about 3 or 4 a term on average. Only one new setting required really.

[oopsorganist]

I've got a mass setting by Peter Rose which is a bit lilting Scottish, nice but not the best form of Holy Holy.. I could email it to you if you pm me. It has a little simple descant in a few places. It's the mass of Cille Choirille
Nick might be better at finding you summat though.

[festivaltrumpet]

With an eye to preparing the students for the future, it may be wise to teach them de Angelis or Orbis Factor. It seems unlikely that the venacular will be much used in twenty or thirty years time.

[Nick Baty]

When you say Masses, do you mean the full thing: Gloria, Alleluia, Holy, Acclamation, Doxology/Amen, Fraction Song? In which case I would say that I honestly couldn’t recommend a single setting. If, however, you mean acclamations plus Gloria and Fractio then the world is your turnip.

It's nearly 20 years since I taught in a secondary school – and I'm not that old, honest – but In the school situation, you have the joy of a captive audience and, I presume, plenty of time for them to assimilate material. As in the parish, you are limited by what your priest can and can’t learn so some of the suggestions below might be limited by the abilities of the celebrant.

Bernadette Farrell’s Eucharistic Acclamations: Very flexible. They work with just a piano or guitar or organ. For bigger occasions I’ve added loud brass chords and a vocal descant devised from the flute part.

Paul Inwood specialises in big Holys, settings with a great chorus of repeated Hosannas: Coventry Music has optional four-part choir which you could easily adapt to two-three parts for equal voices. I quite like the Holy from Plymouth Mass although am I the only one who can hear the Village People’s Go West in the Hosannas? Gathering Mass Holy has a simple two-part choir harmony. Again, use with keyboard accompaniment or a single guitar.

If I was ever let loose in a school again, I would love to revive some of Christopher Walker earlier settings which were sung at the family Mass at Clifton Cathedral in the 80s: Dawn Mass, Premananda Folk Mass, Mannafest Eucharistic Acclamations etc

Glorias are problematic. If you want something through-composed I’d be stuck to recommend anything more than Walker’s Gloria Festiva. If you can draw a few of your 600 voices into a small schola then there are countless Glorias with refrain: Peter Jones’s Coventry Gloria, Walker’s St Augustine Gloria etc. The new Lourdes Gloria 2008 has a superb refrain but splits the rest of the text rather strangely.

From my own memory of school Masses – and it’s 20 years since I looked after the music for one so I’m probably out of date – I remember that Communion was a time for unrest as the few who were practising Catholics wriggled out of their rows and the rest took a breather. So a good time to use music to help create a silence a Fraction Song which develops into a Communion Song? Something like Inwood’s Millennium Mass, perhaps. How communions chants work in schools I no longer know – there are threads here about them not working well in the parishes.

For Fraction Songs themselves, there are far too many too mention here: have a delve through Music for the Mass and Laudate.

But what’s going on in the local parishes? Two what extent could your school Masses reflect or influence music in the pupils’ own churches. I’d be delighted if one of our youngsters tried to get me to use something they were singing in school – usual suspects excluded, of course.

[Nick Baty]

It seems unlikely that the venacular will be much used in twenty or thirty years time.

Why so?

[Southern Comfort]

Anyone who uses just one setting for years, whether it's by Inwood or anyone else, deserves everything they get. Thank goodness that Amaris is going to broaden the experience for them. The next-door parish in my diocese is still singing the same Mass music it has been singing since the 1970s - and wonders why people aren't enthused.

Nick Baty's long post seems to be a pretty good summary of some of the good things that are out there.

[Nick Baty]

The next-door parish in my diocese is still singing the same Mass music it has been singing since the 1970s

But unless there's someone enthusiastic enough to find out what else is available.....
Or, perhaps, a diocesan liturgy commission which gets out and about rather sitting on their non-proverbials. (I was going to write *beep* but didn't wish to be offensive so soon after Evening Prayer I.)

(This is fun! I just tried the bleeped word with the American equivalent (which means something quite different over here) and wasn't bleeped!)

[musicus]

With an eye to preparing the students for the future, it may be wise to teach them de Angelis or Orbis Factor. It seems unlikely that the venacular will be much used in twenty or thirty years time.

In your dreams.

[festivaltrumpet]

It seems unlikely that the venacular will be much used in twenty or thirty years time.

Why so?

That is the time frame in which current seminarians will become senior clerics. Beyond this, I have little hope of the ordinary form surviving in the venacular, if at all. We have a responsibility to prepare the next generation for the inevitable, even if this preparation accelerates the inevitable.

[contrabordun]

Does rather depend upon whether the inevitable is really inevitable though, doesn't it? I mean, it'd be a shame to make the evitable certain by mistakenly supposing it to be inevitable.

That said, I haven't met many seminarians lately. Are they really that bad?