We are coming up on two years of singing High Masses in the Extraordinary Form, and I thought I would write down some of our experiences. I know that many of you are managing music programs and scholas that are far past this, but I decided to offer this as an encouragement to some of the readers of this forum who may be in less ideal situations, in the hope that they might persevere.

Under the inspiration of Arlene and Jeffrey ("How to Start Your own Garage Schola"), we started practicing about 3 years ago on our own for some future, unknown assignment. After a while, we began to sing once a month at a Novus Ordo Mass which appreciated having us sing a chanted Ordinary from the Liber Cantualis. We were also singing some propers from "By Flowing Waters". It was hardly an ideal situation (after Communion they mentioned the birthdays of the week and we all sang "Happy Birthday", but we persevered.

Then, our prayers were answered by a miracle: a priest wanted to move to the Diocese to be near his aging parents, and he wanted to sing the EF. Our recently installed bishop is not a traditionalist, but a pastor in the true sense of the word, and was happy to allow him to do so. And guess what? There was no one else in the diocese who could sing chant, so almost by default we became the schola for this new community. We started off with a Missa Cantata, and for several months had a Low Mass every Sunday, and a High Mass once a month. Partly this was due to not having enough servers trained for the EF, and partly it was because it took us a whole month to learn the propers for the next Mass.

After about 6 months, though, we had enough servers for a weekly High Mass, and our priest said he didn't care if we did Rossini propers every week, if we would sing every week. So we started singing weekly with the Rossini settings most of the time, and Gregorian propers still about once a month. At the Colloquium last year I was talking to Fr. Keyes about our situation, and he said, "Why don't you just sing the Communion antiphon every week, and after a year add something else, and so on?" At first I was a little resistant to the idea, because there's so much great music out there in the OTHER propers, but eventually I realized that this is a VERY long term project anyway, so that's what we're doing now: the Gregorian Communion antiphon every week, with the Rossini settings for everything else. In July we'll start adding the Introit every week. There have been some real benefits to this: having to sing something every week at Mass concentrates the mind wonderfully, and our sight singing and neume-reading abilities have improved dramatically. We've also gotten to the point where I'm starting to feel as if we are singing we real musical expression, and not just relief that we mostly hit the right notes and didn't mispronounce "quascumque".

We do have problems. One of them is that some members of the congregation are disappointed that we don't sing Mass VIII and Credo III all the time. I was telling them that I don't want anyone to think that our "treasure of inestimable value" consisted of only those settings. But now, with the advent of the standards and liturgical calendar requirements for guest choirs in St. Peter's, I have started paraphrasing John "Blackjack" Pershing: "The standards for the schola will be those of St. Peter's Basilica". That way I can just refer them to Rome. ;-) Another problem is that we don't have enough voices to consistently sing anything in 4 parts. I tell them we have enough to do learning chant, and we do sing some 3 voice pieces (we're learning the Byrd Mass for 3 voices right now).

Sometimes we get depressed that we don't sound better, can't do as much polyphony, etc., and I remind them of where we were two years ago, and of the constant praise we receive from parishioners and guests. Plus, we're doing it to worship God. We know that we have a long way to go, but what we have, with all its faults, is much, much, much better than nothing, which is what we had before.

I guess my point is that, if there's anyone out there wondering what you can do, here's something: start chanting with two or three people. You never know what might be happening in the next year or two. Miracles do happen.