During the last year I tracked Adam's work on getting his choir to sing this piece. I found it interesting since while working on the Catholic Choirbook, I'd become intimately familiar with other settings of Adoramus by different composers. Adam mentioned the problems had had with this piece and it made me recall the problems I had had with it in the past.

Why is it hard to sing? Awhile back I mentioned the Snow Our Father as being chant and Dr. Mahrt pointed out that it is not as chant rises and then falls. It came to me that this is precisely the problem with the Dubois. Melodically it is upside down. Singers often go flat on falling phrases, so this work immediately can cause pitch problems as singers then have to rise to the high pitch again. The middle section is made up of rather mechanical leaps, also not easy to sing.

So why include it in the Choirbooks? And, as long as we are considering this, why the Panis Angelicus as well?

Sometimes to get people to open a book and keep it in hand, you've got to give them something familiar. These two pieces are part of the legacy of the St. Gregory Hymn and Choirbook. I threw in an organ accompaniment arrangement for the Panis solely because it too is hard to sing and maintain at pitch. Putting in a few familiar things hopefully will get some people to say, "Hey, we used to sing that!" and take time to look over the great music inside.

For me, now that Adam's choir knows the words in Latin for the Adoramus, I'm waiting to see what they do with, say, the Gasparini? The idea for including multiple versions of the Ave Verum, the Adoramus Te and the Ave Maria in The Anthology is to breakdown the natural aversion to learning something new...once they can sing one if these it is easy to move on to another with the same text.