I'm working on a little musicological project (to be revealed in good time) involving 19th c. American Catholic church music. One thing that I've noticed is the number of Mass publications that also contain English words. These aren't translations of the Mass, as you might expect, but totally different sacred words, generally written to fit the music. The 'why" of this isn't hard to figure out; Catholics were a minority market, and it was hoped that Protestants would buy and use this music, since the Latin was unsuitable for them (and, contrariwise, the English was illicit in the Catholic liturgical context). But I can't imagine that this was very successful. The problem is: how to find out what the market penetration actually was? Most Protestant churches with a continuous history would have thrown out their 19th c. music long ago. Their worship records were probably even more ephemeral. Newspapers would report the Christmas and Easter repertoire of the major churches (the Cleveland Plain Dealer did this in the 1870s), but that's Creaster, which is always different from normal liturgical practice. It's a lot of minor information to gather and compile. And the works would probably appear under their English names; for example, in a Protestant program I would expect to see "Lord of worlds, incline Thine ear." instead of "Kyrie from First Mass in G, op. 100" by Albert H. Rosewig, so one would need to be up on the English words used in each edition.

So, is this a soluble problem? Does anyone have any ideas for a research process?