Do what works for you and your choir. Otherwise, your congregation may never hear that nice piece of music. Ignore what the too-tight-panties crowd says. They bitch about anything and everything.

You should feel utterly free to ignore your early music friend's horror.

As a practical matter, the only real consideration other than general suitability for the ranges of the singers you have on hand and the actual acoustics of the space (that is, how it favors or disfavors certain parts of the human voice register) is if you have veteran singers who learned the piece in a given key and have it hard-wired and find it difficult to adapt (a concern more commonly found with pronunciation of languages).

The D minor tenor line is nice for choirs that have baritones pressed into service as tenors, but the effect of transposing Eb -> F# shouldn't be too heavy a lift since it's well prepared and has a drop of a fourth right after it. That said, are you going to provide the singers with a transposed score, or just tell them it's transposed (or not bother to tell them)? There are practical issues with *that* aspect of this choice - for singers who actually know their passaggio points (which singers you might not have any of, but which issue you as director ought to be mindful of), it can be helpful to have a correct score to keep them aware of areas where they might want to be "mindful" of best practices for shifting registers....

http://www0.cpdl.org/wiki/images/b/b8/Palestrina_Caro_mea.pdf

Yes, that's the other problem, but I consider it a tiny part of a Music Director's mission to screw around with choristers who have perfect pitch. Maybe it's because my music theory TA in college transposed sight singing exercises a tritone to handicap the students with PP...

I once transposed Palestrina's Jesu Rex Admirabilis down a 5th (yes, a 5th!) to sing it with an all male schola. Lowest note in the bass was F and highest in the tenor was F. Barbaric? Perhaps. But I didn't want to sing it falsetto :)

"That's so delightfully diabolical!"

My oldest college friend, whom I met on the first day of class in first year in this class waaaaay back when, has PP and explained how this practice of our TA made her nauseated. I had taken music theory for all of my senior year in high school, but this class further ramped things up for me (it got species-style counterpoint in my bones), but I being a hornist did not have keyboard skills (let alone my own keyboard)* to become as fluent as I would have wished. Nevertheless, to this day I can nearly always smell a composition/arrangement that has has been imagined from the keyboard rather than the voice (and an organ's voice is *not* a human voice, albeit a wonderful thing of its own).

* Though by the end of the year we had to be able to play the first movement of Beethoven's first piano sonata in practicum. My professor noticed that I was much more agile/fluid in my left hand rather than my right, though I wrote right-handed. I made him guess my normal instrument, which he didn't guess correctly, but he understood once I told him.

The D minor score is notated at the original pitches in the source (1575, Motettorum liber tertius, 5, 6, 8vv, Venice) in chiavi naturali, i.e. the natural SATB clefs of Palestrina's era, as remarked by the editor of the CPDL score. Hence, a transposition upwards (visualizing chiavette) by a third (perhaps major, rather than minor, since "c" would become "e"), is not out of the question.

Personally, if I needed to transpose this work up a bit, I would opt for transposing up a whole tone, to E minor, on the principle that one sharp is a heckuva lot easier to negotiate than four flats or three sharps.

E minor would probably be fine, but as a soprano I prefer singing F over and over to E over and over...rings better in the space too. Maybe I'll do a version in E minor and see which one works better.

Charles,

Some of us post in our own names. It can't remind you of Barry White.

I didn't know when I made it that most people here use their real names

That's because we are fearless. ;-)

Sara,

Welcome aboard.

Many people don't use their real names. Charles' point is that your moniker has given him an earworm, not the goodness or Spadaro-ness of using a moniker. I use my own name because I want to be responsible for everything I post.

Some years back, a man interviewing me for a school post said that he had seen my parodies and that, while they weren't an automatic disqualification for the job, they raised some eyebrows and voices of concern.

...and now I can't get that conductor out of my head.

Another conductor who is hard to forget (and I don't mean Tom Jones, who feels the need to conduct): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S87jWwzvwd8

I got the earworm reference, don't worry.

CDubya, I think I recognize that conductor---Helmut Rilling, IIRC!

from: the melo, aka "Left Coast Charlie"

please look into conducting insurance if this is your primary source of income.

You've got nothing to worry about: I'm a professional.

I would pay money to watch someone conduct a whole service with a green onion.

Shoulda been with me and Leo Nestor back in undergrad years, where he would conduct from the console with crossed leg and cigarette dangling precipitously.....

https://youtu.be/pdcccPlz_Xo

JosquinGetEnough = Just Can't Get Enough.

Last time I heard the name "Josquin De Prez", I thought I had overheard some Democrat's advice for what to do to Donald Trump . . .