I still love the Mass of San Francesco. I grew up with it. I know every note still.

You should never EVER use recorded music in church. Sing acapella or don’t sing. But don’t use a recording. EVER!

Not being a musician, I can’t really say how it would work on guitar. My gut feeling is that it wouldn’t, because it’s not really rhythmic.

I should have pointed out that our church is in the city, but is not a cathedral and feels more like a suburban church. We typically have 50 at the Vigil Mass, 150 at the 9:30 Mass and 100 at the 11:00 Mass, so we’re relatively small. I should have also mentioned that the piano is augmented by a violin.

I look after the music at the Vigil Mass and we use recordings. You’re right about commercial recordings being performance pieces and difficult to sing with, but I find that demonstration recordings are good. For example, GIA’s “Singing Our Faith” for school children has easily singable versions of many adult hymns (various combinations of piano, guitar, flute, two adult voices and a children’s choir). OCP’s Journeysongs also has quite a few specially recorded pieces using simple choir and organ arrangements. YouTube can be helpful, but as you would be aware, many recordings made at Mass are of a very poor quality because they are rarely made directly from the sound system, and there’s lots of the usual congregation noises!

That’s why I was so disappointed about you having to clean up this site – having only recently found it, I thought it was going to be very helpful to me with accompaniment downloads!!!! Nevertheless, I shall still be coming back here regularly because liturgical music is a passion for me (despite not being a musician!) and I like knowing what other people are doing. I feel quite happy with both chant (I almost always use the St. Noel Chabanel Responsorial Psalm) and syncopated stuff (I chose Rory Cooney’s “We Will Serve the Lord” for this evening’s recessional).

I’m impressed. I’ve been waiting for someone to call me out on my opinions.

How do you reckon it would go with just a guitar?

I’d rather a backing was made than a recording, because you can edit a backing to the tempo, key, and length you want and the recordings tend to be performance pieces that discourage participation, but as always I’m delighted to be proven wrong!

Thanks for your comments, Tim. I hadn’t thought of the effect of heat on pipe organs, perhaps a note to Rome is in order.

I’m glad to hear the revised shalom goes well, we start it in December and I always found it tricky enough to lead on guitar in its original form.

St Peters Rochedale is doing Paul Taylor’s mass and as that is the next parish along from us at Daisy Hill, I’m hoping to hear it done by a live assembly. Perhaps professional musicians don’t get a simple mass setting. I was lucky enough to meet Paul at the APMN meeting and he came across just as you describe him.

I hope the APMN portal works this time to get us all communicating.

I suspect Paul Taylor’s ‘Mass of St Francis’ will become the Leo Watt ‘Mass of San Francesco’ of the new translation… but it is at least an easy place to start. I have known Paul for many years, and I esteem him as a humble, talented and realistic musician who understands that we don’t all live in a cathedral with its resources on tap!

We used the revised Shalom Mass recently for 1st Communion, which worked well – the choir intoned the Gloria’s refrain & sang the verses, to which the marginally churched crowd of rels & friends responded well.

Again, in a small rural parish with 4 mass centres, we are lucky to have a couple of organists in 2 of the centres; but others only have a guitarist (fairly basic), or melody instruments (violin, clarinet, flute)… While ‘Sacrosanctum Concilium’ might accord pride of place to the pipe organ, they just don’t survive the heat in most of our parishes – and certainly the expertise to even play one to its potential is not present. Many of our people think ‘Yamaha’ if they hear ‘organ’… we DO need to think in a wider musical base (without throwing out the beauty of our tradition where we can still manage it!)

I met Paul Taylor at the APMN meeting in June and he was a lovely modest man who at least understands that music shouldn’t be so challenging as to require extreme talent. On the other hand a lot of people think he went too far and it is too bland. I still prefer Paul Mason’s Mass of Glory and Praise and after 2 months of the revised Mass of Creation, we are doing it for the first time tomorrow. In December will be doing the new version of Mass Shalom and I’m apprehensive about that, but I suppose we’ll cope. I wish people were blogging about their experiences with the new pieces, or at least putting something on the AOV facebook site. It will probably be years before we know what really resonates with our assemblies. I’ll be looking at some more masses soon but I was pleasantly surprised by the Rivers masses.