To be honest my pastor has this problem with the servers even the youth. That’s the breaks basically.

Yeah. and it could be all of it to the point where the other person’s improvements might not change their mind.

I’m also very bad about feeling like I have to anticipate people being hurt and relationship problems, but my advice is to let it play out. Inquire, certainly, with this singer if she switches definitively but you might not need to bring it up, and who knows: people can be more gracious than we think.

I spent years in what might be called mixed-repertoire scholas that had different qualities, typically driven by the pastoral leadership. Mercifully, none of them were limited to what I called "Missalette Beige" (though today it might be "Missalette Greige"). Still, I certainly spent the first few years of one schola in the mid-90s chafing under a great fear that Latin texts would be too much for the congregation to bear (which I fear I managed to demonstrate was false by an ... experiment ... where leadership relented for once and we sang the chant Pange Lingua at the end of the Evening Mass of The Lord's Supper and the congregation took it up enthusiastically, to the shock of leadership, which eased up as a happy result - it helped that we had a beautiful mid-19th century acoustic for a cappella singing).

There are too many places where leadership's taste dial is stuck on roughly 1992, minus D Haas and plus composers who were rushed into missalettes to fill the void left in the wake of his disappearance therefrom. The introduction of the revised Missal 15 years ago helped dislodge some (but not all) of the baleful stasis on contemporary settings of the Ordinary, and restrictions during the first year or so of the Pandemic did help somewhat to disrupt the great power of inertia in this regard.

Liam, may I ask - how much preparation and rehearsal did the congregation need to sing Pange Lingua?

Probe

None.

This was about 30 years ago. It was an oratory (read: intentional community), not a territorial parish, so the community demographics skewed in a way that enough people in the pews had had familiarity with PL in their youth and the general disposition of congregants was to sing. And participation spread with repetition during the procession to the lower church. We repeated this in subsequent years without incident.

Given that congregants in procession often don't bother singing, I had argued beforehand that, if we've accepted that reality in the past, what real harm could come of the proposed experiment....

It's counterintuitive, but metrical hymns can get really off and scattershot over a long thin procession line (dampening the continuance of singing by the congregation), but while chant will drag, it doesn't feel as scattershot: start vigorously....

I’m one of those individuals that will work my schedule around a specific Mass time. I love early Sunday morning Masses, and because of that, I’ve had to turn my music director (and her predecessor) down on invites to join the choir simply because they sing at the late Sunday morning Mass. I’ll help out on occasional one-off events, but I like my Sundays to revolve around the early Mass.

Point is, maybe the time of day for the TLM in your parish suits certain individuals’ needs better, or maybe there’s something else going on. It sounds as if you have a good relationship with your members, so I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Maybe they ended up attending a TLM one weekend and really liked it!