Thoughts on sacred music without accompaniment?
  • hansome23
    Posts: 2
    I soon have to leave the parishes that I am serving as an organist, and they are struggling to find someone to replace me.

    Our pastor is anticipating the possibility of not having an organist and singing everything unaccompanied. Perhaps some of you have experienced something similar. I'm having a meeting to discuss this on Thursday, and I would like to know more about what faithful sacred music looks like when it is completely a capella.

    Here are some of my questions:
    What are the benefits of an unaccompanied liturgy?
    What are the difficulties that might come up?
    What are some ways to differentiate between liturgical seasons and degrees of solemnity?
    Overall, how might this look different from having an organist to accompany?

    I appreciate any feedback :)
  • Jeffrey Quick
    Posts: 2,048
    It's hard to answer this without knowing how things are now.
    If you have a solid choir, it's totally doable. If you don't, somebody will be found to accompany the congregation/cantors, and if that person is a pianist, or worse, a guitarist, music will follow that lead.

    An unaccompanied liturgy will probably have more silence.
    Assuming that you're primarily doing chant, then the preferred Ordinary setting will delineate liturgical seasons. If there's no organ, then you can't take it away during Lent and Advent.
  • CGM
    Posts: 683
    I worked for several years as the choir director in an entirely a cappella Mass environment, and I really liked it. But we had several factors that made it work:
    — we had a pretty good volunteer choir of 10-12 singers who came consistently every week
    — we had a space with a remarkably gorgeous acoustic, so the choir sounded really good
    — there was a wraparound balcony, so we sang from near the front of the church while still being at least a little "out of sight"; the sound of the choir was direct, inasmuch as we were singing into the congregation's ears (as compared to singing from behind them)
    — the space was large enough to hold maybe 250 or 300 people, big for a chapel but mezzo-medium for a church; our dozen-person choir filled it quite well (and again, with that resonant acoustic as our "fifth Beatle")

    If you're singing in a dry room, or a huge room, or without a lot of dedicated, skilled, and reasonably loud(ish) singers, then an unaccompanied setup could be problematic.

    DM me if you want to talk about specific rep.
  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 1,962
    Assuming that you're primarily doing chant, then the preferred Ordinary setting will delineate liturgical seasons. If there's no organ, then you can't take it away during Lent and Advent.


    This is the big one for me. We accompany the ordinary except after the Gloria of Holy Thursday and when we sing Mass XVIII. So, for example, last week, I really enjoyed the silent entrance (no hymn) and the silence before the preface (even after a short motet) and during the ablutions, and then after Mass.

    Our acoustic is not good, and there's nothing which we can do about it for now. A capella singing outside of the Triduum, if we have a full congregation, would be largely unsustainable, and even the most basic of hymns would be problematic. We can make it work with some strong singers and a handful (a couple dozen versus hundreds) for short chants during the week.

    I also believe that the organ is a proper voice, not merely an embellishment or ornamentation, and while you can only do what you can do (i.e. if you don't have an organist, it is what it is), I think that becoming too ideologically attached to not having organ is a real risk in some communities — and then you risk moving away from chant and polyphony, supplemented by traditional (SATB) hymns and other suitable material, to other things…

    There's a lot to say about accompanied or unaccompanied chant; I tend to prefer the former, but obviously beautiful examples abound of the latter as well. The monks of Le Barroux really make it work in their chapel, which is super-resonant, and they're several dozen strong.

    I will say, the experience that I had of the organ breaking when I was in St Louis, at St Francis de Sales Oratory, convinced me of the organ as a proper voice… and while the music was of a remarkably high quality, that certainly isn't the church for purely a capella music year round, not if you sing from the loft as they normally do there.
  • Chaswjd
    Posts: 256
    One of the benefits of an unaccompanied liturgy is that the congregation really has a chance to hear itself singing.

    There are a number of chant or chant-like mass settings which can be used in an unaccompanied environment. Examples could be Proulx's Missa Simplex, the ICEL chants, the setting from Jubilate Deo (which congregations should know anyways) or some of the settings from CC Watershed. Similarly, you could consider resources like the Simple English Propers or the Graduale Simplex for the propers of the mass. The Simplex offers the possibility of repeating the same propers for a number of weeks, so your choir (and congregation) might learn them fairly easily. The Graduale Simplex also includes seasonal responsorial psalms which are fairly simple and could easily be done unaccompanied.

    One last point, if our Orthodox brothers and sisters can make it work (as they have for centuries) we certainly can.
    Thanked by 3a_f_hawkins Jani Liam
  • Carol
    Posts: 849
    A small church in the hamlet next to mine sang the 4 hymn sandwich week after week and the people really joined in! The lector would announce the hymn and begin singing. The congregation would jump right in. These men could barely carry a tune but it was expected that the congregation would sing and so they did. There were some decent singers among the congregation which helped a lot! The little church closed during covid and has not opened back up since then. Too bad...
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