Society of Saint Gregory

The only pieces in the new ICEL collection that are not strictly minister/people are: the settings of the 'Lord have mercy'/'Kyrie' (for use with the first and second Penitential Rites, the third being minister/people) and the 'Lamb of God'/'Agnus Dei', which is 'as a rule, sung by the choir or cant...

Has anyone tried the Caeciliae software? It employs some of the more obscure features of OpenType fonts to build up neums as ligatures, but it only works on text processing software that is equipped to do this. Microsoft Word isn't, Adobe InDesign is. Some of the existing fonts and software miss out...

Just to wish everyone a successful day tomorrow.

Its interesting that we are still, fundamentally, dealing with the mentality of 'low mass with hymns'. 'Sing the Mass' was published in 1975 and here we are, 34 years later, dealing with congregations that have not, in the main, had the catechesis/formation to move on from there. That is no real su...

Many thanks to all contributors.

I did chuckle at the 'BACK TO THE SACRED HEART' hyperlink on docmattc's script - and try clicking it for an even more romantic picture of Same. Not my style - I'll say no more.

...'O Sacred Heart! what shall I render thee / For all the gifts thou hast bestowed on me' ? Required by Sister Pauline Clarke to play at the Golden Jubilees of two nuns - this Saturday and she has only just been given the programme! The first line goes E_ E E | G__ C | C B, B, D | F__ . It's not to...

There's an excellent free chant notation package available from http://gregoire.tele.free.fr

I started this hare running (nothing personal, Hare!) to see what would happen. Time to declare my hand! “As sacred melody united to words, [music] forms a necessary and integral part of the solemn liturgy… Sacred music increases in holiness to the degree that it is intimately linked with [the] litu...

As reported on another thread, I had a chat with the Executive Secretary-elect of ICEL last week. This made me curious about what I might find on the ICEL website, so I tried http://www.icelweb.org/news.htm , which led me to http://www.icelweb.org/ICELMusicIntroduction.pdf . We should all be interes...

I think the service was similar to the way Communion was given to the sick. It began with the recitation of the Confiteor as was then the practice before Communion during Mass. Yes, that's correct. In fact, the rite of Communion for the Sick was imported into the Pius V Missal as an afterthought af...

One of the main problems in English of setting the vernacular to chant is the mismatch of stresses that seems to do violence to both. Is there less of a problem in Hungarian, I wonder. Alan The whole point of using antiphons is that, with some exceptions, they are built on simple flexible melodic f...

I have to take my hat off to Dr Dobszay's scholarship in musicology and liturgical history, to his meticulously prepared and delivered lecture (actually three lectures, punctuated by tea), and to his commitment over decades to make liturgical music - mostly but not exclusively Gregorian chant - avai...

The very prayable Rimskey Korsakoff (? spelling) Our Father is superb, but lacks a doxology, to sing the prayer then to have a spoken embolus and doxology is such a wind-down. Quite so: GIRM (art 81) says 'The invitation, the Prayer itself, the embolism, and the doxology by which the people conclud...

See Paschale Solemnitas , the instruction of the Congregation for Divine Worship and Discipline of the Sacraments dated 16 January 1988, para 99: The paschal candle has its proper place either by the ambo or by the altar and should be lit at least in all the more solemn liturgical celebrations of th...

At the risk of trying to steer a via media and calling 'a plague on both your houses', may I make the following observation about the choice of the 'Holy, holy' at the installation Mass. No doubt there were some who lamented that the choir did not sing the 'Sanctus' from the Palestrina Mass used for...