I need the advice of someone with a more highly-developed musicality than my own. Our choir is doing Pietro Yon's "Messa dei Pastori" (Mass of the Shepherds) for Christmas Midnight Mass. Our pastor has requested Domenico Bartolucci's "Et Incanatus Est" as part of the Credo. First question: Where do I find the music score for this? Can be heard at the approx. 1:40 portion of the following: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1qfHQtWAg4
Second question: If I do, indeed, get that score, do I stick to singing Credo III? The pastor had asked if we could insert Barolucci's portion into the Mass of the Shepherd's "Credo." That's where I need the advice of someone more sophisticated than myself. Would that be corny, unforgivable, or permissible?
Or, in desperation, you could do the attached file - created a few years ago after JMO arranged the Agnus Dei to this music...which was wonderful. This was created exactly for inserting....there is an English version around...never actually got to do it....
"Tell Fr. that the GIRM says that you can only insert these into chant masses..."
In regards to the second, I think singing the Et Incanatus Est from a polyphonic mass with the rest in chant has a very nice effect, as in the video above.
But in my opinion, it would seem odd to insert the Et Incanatus Est from one mass into another polyphonic Mass.
The melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic flows of a given piece of music should not, under any circumstances, be "air-dropped" into the middle of ANOTHER piece's flow(s). With all due respect to your pastor's position and vocation, he is way out of his depth here. I'm quite certain that he doesn't recommend bloodletting as a surgical technique; how in heaven's name does he think he can recommend musical aberrations such as this?
I can always count on the folks in this forum to provide good feedback. I don't know a whole lot, but I was troubled by the prospect of "air-dropping" (as dad29 aptly described it above) the Bartolucci portion into it, especially after having played the previous portion in 6/4 time. Thank you.
I had to do something similar for a priest's celebration of the 50th anniversary of his ordination. He wanted parts from the mass that was sung at his ordination. I eventually found a copy from a rare book dealer in New York. Of course, it was old-form mass, essentially the EF before it became the EF.
What I did was create an organ interlude around the insertion, creating the correct tempo and characteristics for the insertion, then another organ interlude to transition back into the "original" mass we were using. Somehow it worked, proving the Holy Spirit can still do the impossible.
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