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!

sing with the TLM on a Requiem on All Souls' Day and promote it as an opportunity to sing it in its intended context and not just a concert

I’m going to stop you right here. Most of the most popular and commonly sung Requiems were not written to be sung in a liturgical setting, nor are they liturgically appropriate (ie: too long, highly operatic). Furthermore, not all the texts are accurate and approved for liturgical use (artistic liberties have been taken). They were written to be sung as religious concerts and that is where the majority of them belong.

yeah also frankly I’ve got strong opinions, or preferences, or whatever, but this just comes off as needlessly difficult. We’re doing the Victoria Missa pro defunctis. There is a long list here of Renaissance settings (in fact a couple of posts + CPDL browsing is how I find new repertoire ideas). If I could get our act together, I would like to hire the local baroque musicians and do the Campra.

The Campra is the best orchestral setting imho.

For our Masses in October and November (well, I hope October, but it might just be the latter) we’re doing the Victoria à 4, but I have saved a thread from here on the various polyphonic Masses that folks have done.

We do a fair bit of crosspollination as-is. I agree that a parish like this is a special opportunity.

For All Souls we do Victoria's Requiem a 4. This year a small polyphonic choir from the community will join us, actually, which I'm pleased with. They're not Catholic, but their goal is to understand their repertoire better by singing it in a liturgical setting. My goal is for them all to convert. I'll invite choir members from the NO too, but the challenge is that they aren't typically big practisers.

The rubrics are a bigger issue; the Church has gotten (needlessly) restrictive over the past century or so. If you accept De Musica Sacra et Sacra Liturgia as the last word for the Missal of Pius V, you really can't do an accompanied Requiem, even just with organ.

I'm going to disagree quite vehemently with Jeffrey Quick on this one, and assert that De musica sacra is not only correct, but self-evidently so. As a matter of tradition, the Roman liturgy emphasizes the sombre and penitential nature of certain days and seasons by removing certain adornments, and in particular by withdrawing the use of instruments to adorn the singing of the liturgical texts. As such, I'd argue that the use of instruments at the Mass of the Dead feels profoundly "wrong", especially in the context of the usus antiquior where even the Alleluia and Gloria Patri are suppressed.

If you want to do the big symphonic Requiems, do them in the context of a para-liturgical service with readings and orations. (This also has the virtue of putting grand, opulent settings like Mozart's and non-settings like Faure's back on the table.)

I'm going to disagree quite vehemently with Jeffrey Quick on this one

mkay, I'll let you do that, lol.
Let me expand on my issues, and you'll find there's actually very little disagreement.
1.) DMS constitutes rubric creep. If read literally, it eliminates all use of the organ, and thus use of anything requiring one (Having an independent part, or even to play basso continuo.). It obsoletes the entire corpus of Requiem settings written for the liturgy, and ban on what the Church has done, on what "previous generations have considered holy" If your group can't sing well unaccompanied, no polyphony for you!
2.) DMS is inconsistently applied. If you're the Pope, or a dead member of the CMAA, you get Mozart (Durufle, Faure etc.). This is not that out of line with tradition, since most of this music was written for the nobility. but then, the restraint was fiscal, rather than rubrical. The problem with inconsistent law is that it weakens the rule of law, because people no longer think it important. I could live with a ban on non-organ instruments, with the permission of organ made explicit. (It's not sufficiently implicit in the "Organ in Lent to support the choir" loophole.)
3. Re the idea of banning polyphony at funerals, my chief issue with that is that mentioned in #1: we did it for centuries (since Dufay), so why are we getting all prissy now? Was the Church WRONG about music? BUT: aside from that, I could make a case for chant-only Requiems on the basis of sumptuary laws. We are all dust. Benedict XVI is dust, William Mahrt is dust, I'm dust-in-training; what's special about any given clump-of-dust? Is it fitting that somebody get a fancier funeral because more people with resources loved him?

"Big symphonic Requiems" in the liturgy are actually not an issue with me, given how rare they are. But what about Casciolini, Clemens, Dufay (if we ever find it), or Fr. X's setting for 2 equal voices and organ or harmonium?

Has the Missa pro defunctis really become such a dead letter in the Church, that the only composed Requiems anyone knows are those done in concert halls?

Yes. How many times have I done a "real" Requiem at a funeral. None...And I have been singing since 1968.

The fact that Ildebrando Pizzetti's setting remains neglected in all of this is depressing.

Geez, never thought I'd create such a firestorm by offering a mere suggestion of how to unite the two choirs.