Nicely set. What program did you use?

Thomas,

I appreciate the effort to get some more chant into the hands of PIPs.

On the other hand, you've taken a beautiful, melismatic Mass and reduced it to Missa Jubilate Deo of Pope Paul VI. More people, in spite of your intent, will come to think that chant is all somber and dour.

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Thomas-Mary, I could not agree with you more. Thank you for all your laudable efforts.

There is an all too frequent situation which occurs in Ordinary form Masses wherein the priest will not allow anything except something short, precise, and easy to learn and repeat from memory. At most parishes, one would never be allowed to hear the full Cum Jubilo Mass. Forget doing the whole thing. That is a fact. A heavily edited shortened version might possibly be allowed in some parishes.

Remember, most Roman rite priests follow the unwritten rule that all Masses must be kept to an hour or less. They often won't even chant during Mass themselves, because it might drag the Mass out to over an hour, and that is absolutely forbidden, so they suppose.

There must be a massive reeducation program of emphasis on the sung Mass for seminarians everywhere. Until that happens, simple English chant adaptations of Gregorian Ordinaries are most fitting.

Thomas,

If you have the support of the pastor (winsome personality or not) and capable musicians who love the traditional musical forms (i.e., not merely have skill and academic interest) you can, in fact, make the transition.

Imagine the gall involved in going the other way. President Obama (to dwell on modern American politics) simply decided to step over the line in the sand when it came to blessing homoerotic sodomitical unions. Or, take the ACA. Or.... the Missal of Paul VI. The challenge is to believe that you have, with God's grace, the strength to help someone get well, and this medicine (chant) is what is needed.

Thank you for publishing this.

In my diocese, 99% of the priests would not let Cum Jubilo into their parishes even if it were performed by children.

There have been artists in the organ and choral worlds, and musicians in various fields, who thought that they were, by simplifying music, schmaltzing it up, editing out passages that were thought to be beyond the presumed idiocy of their audiences to apprehend, teaching their audiences by the 'stepping stone method' to love great music. They were, in reality, doing nothing of the kind. They were teaching them to appreciate the travesty of music that was presented to them, that they actually heard. One cannot love and appreciate something unless one hears that something. Perhaps a simplified version of something is all that the performer him- or herself is capable of appreciating. Perhaps it is he, him- or herself, who considers the real thing an embarrassment. People who are taught by the 'stepping stone method' tend, by and large, to fall in love with the stepping stones and budge not from them. Seeing these stepping stones in print, yet, is equivalent to seeing them graven in stone. They could acquire no greater legitimacy in a society which tends to worship almost anything that it sees in print.

Is there any genre of music other than 'classical' music that would be treated with such maladroit tinkering to make it palatable? There isn't. We should not do this to any music, let alone chant and 'classical' sacred music! Adapting chant to English with care and artistry is in an wholly different moral category than purging it of its very soul, stripping it bare of its glory. (In truth, this has already been done - five hundred years ago - by none other than Palestrina and his colleagues, who gave us the infamous Medicean edition of chant. It is worthy of note that their work has received from history the opprobrium which it right justly deserves.)

It would be better by far to compose one's own original chant in the appropriate or desired degree of difficulty than to savage someone else's masterpiece. This would be honest and admirable. This, or choose simpler chant.

One doesn't pluck the feathers from the bird, thinking thereby to make the bird more desirable.

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A particularly botched example of setting English to the traditional chant of the church is the Holy, holy ICEL have put in the Missal. Merbecke/Marbeck set a much better course, even if the puritans stalled progress for many decades.
IMHO the Kyrie and Sanctus Thomas_Mary offers are successful, the melismata occur on appropriate syllables, the Gloria and Agnus Dei not such luck. This is bound to be a problem with a translated text, quite apart from the fundamental difference in stress/length patterns in different languages.

The Latin sequences and metrical hymns, which are highly monosyllabic chants with few melismas, CAN be set to vernacular texts as long as the meter of a particular translation matches that of the Latin text. Thank you, Richard, for that corrective to my screed above. As for Englishing highly melismatic chants, I'll stick with what I wrote previously.