This was the title of easily the most useful presentation that I attended at the recent APMN conference. It was run by Fiona Dyball and Damian Whelan and it was basically advice for parish music liturgy teams on what works. They demonstrated the music with no time wasted.
The only issue is that it should have been a whole day not one hour, so I gather the idea was to take it home and unpack it like a zip file. I contacted Fiona and she was happy for me to go through it on my blog, probably for that reason. She also sent some additional ideas for reconciliation, which was very kind. I will add a few of my own suggestions, for which Fiona and Damian are not responsible.
They gave a handout with lots of useful links – I would add AOV’s music selections and that sixmaddens thing:
…and also one outlining the music choices with even more links:
Using that as a guide I am going to go through things much more slowly.
They list hymnals and music sources: AOV 1, 2, and NG; CWB I and II and digital downloads. For digital downloads they add Michael Herry’s archive (Marist Music) to Willow/GIA/OCP, but I would also suggest Hope Publishing as always being worth a look. For most parishes CWB1 is an unlikely resource these days, but many still use Gather Australia – in a lot of ways still better than CWB II. After our recent conversation here about American churches often having to be either OCP or GIA, it is nice to note the varied sources.
They note that CWB II is the official collection of liturgical music for Australian Catholic worship. I would suggest that official doesn’t mean best. The drawbacks of CWB II are well known and I don’t detect that it has been received in the parishes, which have in many cases clung to whatever hymn book they have used for the last fifty years or have given up on hymnals altogether, using multiple sources, especially downloads, and projection. CWB II is an extraordinary work of scholarship and cathedral music but also an offence to all guitar players. It is a collection with a lot traditional resources and these can be accessed in the public domain (eg see Liturgy Share) and a second hand copy of Together in Song will give you the missing chords. I still bought a copy of CWB II and do find it useful, but I believe it is a failure as a parish hymn book.
They suggest Mass Shalom as an inter-generational setting, available for purchase here. I haven’t played it in years and recall I found it difficult on guitar but it is certainly singable and was sensitively refurbished by Paul Mason. I would recommend that or Taylor’s Mass of St Francis or Mason’s Mass of Glory and Praise. My unscientific impression is that it is those three that have penetrated into the suburban parishes of Australia.
They recommend the Celtic Alleluia, which we use every week. With a bit of help from correspondents here, we have abandoned the verses provided and sing the acclamation as listed for each week. It is a small job to make them fit – the short ones need repetition and the longer ones ingenuity. If you don’t have it in AOV or elsewhere you can buy it here.
They leave the psalms for individual sacraments, but Amanda McKenna’s simple singable responses are still great for participation, if your parish is never likely to have a cantor singing the verses. All that depends on what psalm text we will be singing in the future too. Paul Mason gave a talk at the conference about what a bin fire the English language psalms have become and if he has no idea what’s going to happen then heaven help the rest of us.
I’ll take each sacrament and go through their selections with some commentary and suggestions of my own along the way. Once I have finished you will be astonished what some people can do in less than an hour.