The Recovering Choir Director

The downside is that all existing English settings of the Gloria become useless. The upside is that all existing English settings that are in use in real-life parishes become useless.

Back to the downside: the publishers who have long pushed the less-than-sober settings will be the ones with the resources to scatter new ones all over American parishes. Back to the upside: it’s an opportunity to draw attention to better approaches.

With the exception of the Sursum Corda / Habemus ad Dominum (which to my ear grates as well), I like what they’ve done so far.

I believe that we musicians in the Church have a responsibility to introduce excellent, uplifting, and appropriate liturgical music to our parishes — and what better time to accomplish this than now, when there will be a need for new music? Here is our chance to write Mass settings that we can play without cringing (grin) — music that will be conducive to “fitting worship.”

For those of you considering offering your compositional services in the service of any new translations of the ordinary:

Please be sure to scan the Sanctus correctly. It would be nice for a change to encounter a setting that scans: “Holy, Holy, Holy / Lord God et cet” rather than “Holy, Holy, Holy Lord / God et cet.”

and in the Our Father: “thy will be done on earth / as it is in heaven” rather than “thy will be done / on earth as it is in heaven” (the classic Snow vernacular chant mercifully gets this quite right).

Admittedly nitpicky, but if people are going to try to get it right, these kinds of things need to be remembered, as much as translation.

In practice it will have no effect on most Masses in the US. We’ll keep singing the Mass of Creation forever, and I doubt many bishops will enforce the use of the new translation (at least in music) anyway.

Any chance they will change “of power and might” to something with a bit more poetry and majesty?

I’d like to see that, Marie.
Hmmm. The phrase “Holy, Holy, Holy | Lord God Sabaoth” or the phrase “Holy, Holy, Holy | Lord God of hosts” can be reasonably substituted in both the “massive cremation” (g) and the Mass of Angels & Saints by lengthening the 3rd instance of the word ‘holy.’

If, as Mike and Sam point out, we will retain the mass settings of today, perhaps this is at least one change for accuracy’s sake?

Sure, Marie. I stole it from someone else — don’t remember who at this point. (g)

And you can take Haugen’s “We Are Many Parts” and meld the refrain with the Beatles’ “Birthday” song, too. Really! It fits — all too well, I’m afraid. (If anyone wants the MIDI I made to prove it, email me and I’ll send it out. It’s scary.)