My choir is performing the Durufle Requiem later this Summer and I am trying to find ways to incorporate parts of the requiem into our weekly Sunday Masses for practice purposes and also just because it is beautiful music! Being newer to programing music for Masses, I don't want to do anything liturgically inaccurate in regards to singing the introit with the requiem text for a "normal" Sunday mass.
Does anyone see problems with this? Could anyone give me some ideas of how I could program each of the movements of the Durufle for different Sundays? Either for preludes, offetories, communion meditations, etc?
I was just typing out a response nearly identical to the one above. Using requiem propers on a Sunday would be highly unusual. The ordinaries are usable, but really only so long as your congregation and clergy are patient, and if the music doesn't clash stylistically with the rest of the Mass. It would, for instance, be quiet awkward to pair the Durufle Sanctus with the Agnus Dei from the Mass of Creation or somesuch.
Even as motets, the proper texts are unsuited for use on a green Sunday, and using a setting of the ordinary as a motet/anthem would also be quite odd. The music is beautiful, certainly, so I understand you wanting to share it with your congregation during the Mass, but the appropriateness of the texts themselves should be one of the first things you consider.
Using bits and pieces at a Mass of Rememberance would be far more appropriate; that sounds like a reasonable idea.
The Agnus Dei would have the wrong text for a Sunday Mass. The Requiem Agnus Dei is: Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona eis requiem. Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, dona eis requiem sempiternam.
Rather than: Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: miserere nobis. Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi: dona nobis pacem.
The Pie Jesu is the part of Requiem settings (Faure/Durufle) that gets done as a solo anthem in November, the Month of All Souls; the In Paradisum as a choral anthem in that temporal context as well. They would be passing strange at Sunday Mass at any other time of year unless there is a local mass death incident.
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