We used two motets by Garau and two movements from his Missa Brevis this morning.

I use Bartlett every week (Lumen Christi Simple gradual), which I adore. La Rocca makes appearances at Christmas and Holy Week. Lauridsen, Durufle and Messiaen are in our repertory. Other contemporaries include Jean Berger. and Gerald Near.

If I had my choice, I would play 20th century French organ works all the time. But my community can only stand so much. I also like Sowerby and Gerald Near and program them when I can. Dan Gawthrop is another I like.

My recital program for the fall includes:
Langlais Trois Poemes Evangeliques ( all three of the pieces)
Durufle Prelude and Fugue on the name of Alain
Tournemire Office 51. l'Orgue Mystique.

Not quite "Contemporary" but reasonable. One can play on recitals what they bloody well want to. :)

I have also performed Koerbers pieces numerous times,

Francis, is that guy still alive? ;-) Yea, his stuff is a bear!

I use at least one of Aristotle's Choral GS propers every week, alongside Richard Rice's Simple Choral Gradual. Bartlett SEPs get airplay, too. I also make JMO's Ps. 23 my funeral standard.

Richard Rice, how could I forget? We sing your simplified Graduals and Alleluias from time to time. And of course the psalms you've pointed in Communio. And- how can I forget again!?!- the parish book of chant remains an enormous contribution.

Kevin Allen's "Motecta Trium Vocum", almost every week.

I have Nicholas Wilton's Missa Brevis waiting in the wings for a future mass, as well as many of his other works. Also, the director of the schola at Holy Rosary, Indianapolis, a Mr. Charles Wyeth, is composing a hymn for our upcoming solemn mass in celebration of St. John Bosco.

I'm sympathetic to the "gotta be free" argument, from the MD viewpoint. From the composer viewpoint, it's a harder sell. I've got a bunch of free stuff out there, but it's largely material which is a little more difficult, in Latin, and which no publisher would touch with a 10-foot pole. So I'm not going to make mechanical royalties on it, BMI doesn't pay for liturgical use (and rightly so), and my only hope for monetizing the work is for somebody to program it in a concert. Thus, putting it out there on cpdl makes business sense. But for music that's easy to use or has a bigger potential constituency, there's a market value for physical copies. Self-publishing is a way to capture that, but it doesn't have the reach or cachet of traditional print publishing, Right now, I have some English offertory motets under consideration at a Famous Publisher (not an Alphabet Soup one); more info if that pans out. The next project will probably be Latin Eucharistic motets for unison (optional 2nd part) and organ.... because that's about where my new schola is, and one can only do so much St. Gregory, Traditional Roman Hymnal, etc.

Jared, you've captured the thrust of my interest precisely. As a choral geek, the establishment and maintenance of a choir in my parish/cathedral career has never been rehabilative, thank God. However, the opportunities to go "Lauridsen" or even Lotti divisi have been few and far between while remaining an all amateur ensemble. So, combined with the fact that few pastors will tolerate a regular diet of renaissance Mass Ordinary settings or otherwise forms, finding the Mass that encourages and edifies the role of the choir while simultaneously open to congregational participation viably is a task that no other generation of Catholic composers (going back to Peloquin period) has had to satisfy.
The fact that most of the CMAA list I've mentioned neither elevates nor condescends their harmonic vocabulary and still manages to keep their innovations within the discipline of 4 parts is a true gift. And many of these folks do so with seamless ingenuity.
To answer my own question, we use each of the mentioned composer weekly, including their "choral only" pieces. I couldn't be more grateful for their sacrifices. And as Noel, Peter, Adamm and others know, we do purchase their collections in quantity, exclusively with our own finances, not the parish's. That seems just.

Works by these contemporary composers are in our repertoire:
Pawel Bebenek, Charles Giffen, Luigi Molfino, Fr. Marco Frisina, O. Jaeggi, Kevin Allen, Fabio Fresi, Sir John Tavener, Andrew Carter and Richard Burchard.

I occasionally program a piece by Adam Wood. But most of his stuff isn't that good...

I love John Rutter. He's like the David Haas of music.

contemporary and 20th century composers tend to use a harmonic language that is much more difficult for an amateur choir to learn, retain, and (perhaps most importantly) tune well, than "common practice" music.

That's absolutely true (though I don't find that amateur choirs tune common practice music well either). OTOH, newer music often has less independence of parts. In what I'm doing right now, I'm trying to maximize redundancy of ideas in the voice part, keep it diatonic, and put all the interesting detail in the organ (using clear ideas as the interest in the voice line).

We're working on the Faure Ave verum right now. I don't think it will fly, but I want to give them the chance to try. Whenever the parts combine, so do the harmonic complications.

Adam Wood. Didn't he write that Missa Solemnis Olly Olly Oxen Free? I think I have heard that.

Rather than subscribing to absolute truth...

(grin)
The absolute truth is that common-practice music is what most people are used to. But if you're in a group that does almost all 16th-c music, then that's what you're used to and good at. I'm still not sure that applies to 20th/21st c. music, just because there's so little in the way of a common practice. But 19th? "Ooh, common-tone diminished 7th, yeah I know this."

We use the SEP every week for our choir's Mass. Maybe we can sing a motet by Kevin Allen; the men's schola here at Franciscan likes to sing his pieces. As much as I welcome new compositions, we only have time for 1 motet a week, and for college students with no income who aren't all sacred music students, CPDL + Youtube is the best way to learn our parts.

I used Bartlett (SEP, and venturing into LC), and/or Yanke (FEP), and/or Fr. Weber, and/or Fr Kelly, every day for three years, until the 'low Mass only' thing.

I have used Giffen, Ostrowski, Oost-Zinner, Esguerra, Rice, Willcocks, Rutter, Cleobury, and Ledger (who wasn't dead until two years ago), Proulx and Tavener (who also weren't dead until they died).

After the summer hiatus, we will finally begin working on Noel Jones' "Ave Verum" (SB). Also Heath Morber's "Ad te levavi"

Composers I would like to program some day: La Rocca, Allen, Kwasniewski, Part, Maxwell Davies, and Garau.

I have used texts by Wood and Pluth.

Regarding the secondary issue in this thread regarding choral composition, I have an observation. (But let me add that I have used music composed or arranged by several of our colleagues mentioned here, and find it to be good quality and well-crafted. Kevin Allen's work is top-drawer, sufficiently challenging and yet readily mastered by an "amateur" choir being led by someone who knows what they're doing . . . and please note I didn't say "trained", I said "who knows what they're doing." But I digress . . . )

I've just begun doing some long-term substitute organist work at a local (and very typical) affluent suburban parish with two ensembles: a "folk" ensemble of about 10 voices and a more conventional mixed choir (that I've not met yet). There is a certain degree of cross-over of repertoire, although the mixed choir does have more ambitious music in their repertoire.

Much of the music is from the usual suspects: Schutte, Haas, Matingly, and some stuff I've never heard of by composers I don't know (but suspect if I cracked open a Hope, Alfred, Lorenz or Beckenhorst catalogue would find them easily). What I found amazing in so much of the choral writing was that it was mostly homophonic and the voice-leading, especially for the altos, was athletic at best and very clumsy at worst, with rather unpredictable, awkward and difficult-to-hear leaps up and down. Because these composers typically write from the standpoint of chordal harmony with melody (a la monody with a melody and supporting chords) and then fill in choral parts to create the illusion of true choral music, the result is voice parts that really make no sense because they weren't conceived from a choral compositional practice approach. Even the hymn-style music of many of these composers is clunky and awkward to play, because their understanding of smooth harmonic progressions and voice-leading is informed by guitar style. (I'm assuming, perhaps inaccurately, that this kind of music, readily available from the major publishing houses, is what is being referred to as "common practice music.")

It seems to me that even the most basic of choral music rooted in the Western traditions, whether by time-honored composers or our contemporaries should in the long run be not only easier to sing, but more gratifying to perform.

I set as an example Elgar's "Ave Verum Corpus". I've used this as a teaching tool to introduce music truly designed to be sung in parts to several different choirs, and even those who are more bent on modern settings of "Amazing Grace" or "Just a Closer Walk With Thee" take to this piece and so begins for them a new journey of discovery. I wouldn't even dream of putting a Lauridsen, Paulus, Tavener, Part , or even a Howells piece in front of a choir like this, because the harmonies are complex and require a very clean tuning across the ensemble.

But, simply because a choir isn't up to the task of polyphony or complex harmony doesn't mean we have to settle for modern stuff that's poorly crafted or not composed with the choir in mind. Nor should we assume that because the prevailing culture is one that has dumbed down and over-simplified the average understanding of music and harmony that amateur choirs are incapable, with commitment and dedication to the work, of achieving a deep mastery of choral singing at a high level.

bumping this old but interesting thread.

contemporary composers in the plans: Kevin Allen, Nicholas Lemme.

We used the Tantum Ergo of Benedict Preece a few times this year. It went over so well, that a parishioner sought it out, found Preece's own YouTube channel, and left a comment explaining where he had heard his piece and how much he had loved it. This had the very unexpected effect of eliciting a very kind E-mail from the composer himself to me, congratulating us on our performance!

I always appreciate recommending the music of class-acts, as Mr. Preece assuredly is. Here it is on Holy Thursday