ECHO Mass Parts
  • FatherJDD
    Posts: 3
    In the 80s, I remember that "Echo" parts of the Mass came into our parish... where a cantor sung "Our Father" and the congregation then sang "Our Father" and then the cantor sang "who art in heaven" and the congregation did the same.... through out the whole song. Sometime later, they were "out" and we did not do them any more.

    Was there a liturgical ruling on that matter? If so, do you have the documentation?

    THANKS!!
  • Priestboi
    Posts: 155
    The Kyriale and Liber Usualis is full of that sort of thing...;-p
  • Jeffrey TuckerJeffrey Tucker
    Posts: 3,624
    Well, but there is no real precedent for doing this with the Our Father. It strikes me as goofy. I don't know if there are rubrics governing this.
  • David AndrewDavid Andrew
    Posts: 1,204
    I don't know of any rubrics governing this either, but it begs the question:

    Why, if the name of the game in liturgical renewal was to remove "unnecessary repetition" from the Mass (paring down the Kyrie from triple repetitions to dual for example, or eliminating the multiple signs of the Cross made by the priest at the consecration), do we still suffer through refrain-based Glorias, monotonous and sometimes meaningless repetitions of responsorial psalm refrains, Alleluias before the gospel that go on and on (and sometimes get repeated afterward, a clear violation of rubrics), triple "great" Amens at the conclusion of the Doxology, and meaningless (or worse, theologically questionable) invocations in the Lamb of God?

    (That's a rhetorical question, by the way, for those who were wondering.)
  • eft94530eft94530
    Posts: 1,577
    The echo Lord's Prayer rippled through my then-home parish (Santa Maria CA) in 1972-1975;
    after the high school aged cantor-and-guitar dude graduated it disappeared.
    Two weeks ago I attended a funeral (Albany CA);
    there it was, but not as I remembered it (a al the telephone game perhaps?).

    I will skim read my copy of
    Thirty-Five Years of the BCL Newsletter 1965-2000.
  • incantuincantu
    Posts: 989
    FatherJDD, the musical term for what you describe is "call and response." This is different from the repetitions of the Kyrie, Agnus, or Litany of the Saints in that the repetitions are part of the form. If call and response music was in vogue in a particular parish or region in a particular time (perhaps for didactic purposes) before disappearing, I'm sure it has more to do with Zeitgeist than with liturgical legislation. Norms governing composition had been in place for quite some time before then:
    The liturgical text must be sung as it is in the books, without alteration or inversion of the words, without undue repetition, without breaking syllables, and always in a manner intelligible to the faithful who listen (TLS, 9).
Add a Comment