Mass Program for OF Chant Mass
  • CPT Tom
    Posts: 11
    Howdy all,
    One of the minor pieces of business I have found that needed to get resolved with our new schola was a mass program. Silly, right? But for sure we wanted one that was nice but good for a Schola on a budget, like mine (Budget 0$ singing for the glory of God - Priceless!). Here is one that I just finished that after going under fire from the guys in the schola I think came out pretty well and should fit of limited budget.

    It's based on a one that Janet Gorbitz sent me. (THANKS JANET!). Armed with this as a basis and suggestions from my schola-buddies I think we've come up with a nifty mass program that I would like to give to the "chant underground" as what we call in my business a "reusable asset."

    We just took Janet's single sheet design and went a bit further. The new design is meant to be printed on either 8 x 17 or 8 x 14 paper. Our program is going to be on 8 x 14 paper. The main section, made up of the first two pages, is meant to be reusable, has the ordinary of the mass, and congregation responses. I plan to print this on card stock so it can be used for multiple masses. If we can I hope it to get stock the same color as the seasonal liturgical color. These we will use for the entire season and then print new ones for the next one.

    The last two pages are meant to be printed on ordinary white paper, back to back and cut in thirds. This is where the propers and other (such as tracts) that are for just that mass will go. This results is three sheets that can be used for three different programs, and maximize the use of the paper to keep the cost down.

    Use it as you will, dice and slice it in the service of our Lord! All I ask is that you let me know if it was useful or not, and if you have any suggestions for improvement!

    *I've made corrections to text and grammar as best as I can now.*
  • Dan F.Dan F.
    Posts: 205
    Nifty, Tom. I know this in no slight matter of business. I think it's an important piece to keep the congregation informed as to where they should sing, etc. Just knowing that they SHOULD sing certain parts goes a long way.

    I like how efficient you were with the layout. One thing to check: If you plan to reuse the first two sheets then you should remove the "23 Sunday of Ordinary Time."
  • Heath
    Posts: 933
    Whoops. Page 2, "The gace of our Lord Jesus Christ."
  • Leland
    Posts: 32
    One thing that irritates me so that I find it difficult to maintain an attitude appropriate to worship is the (in my judgment) senseless and silly mixing of "thous" and "yous". We did it at Fremont Baptist this morning, singing A Shield About Me, and your first page (left column) seems to do it, too, in the passage "We Proclaim thy death, O Lord and we confess thy resurrection until you come again." There are also several minor typos and oddities of capitalization and punctuation, both in Latin and in English. For example, in the sentence I just quoted, in addition to changing both occurrences of "thy" to "your" (since there is no other part of the document where the archaic pronouns are used), you should also change "Proclaim" to "proclaim", and insert a comma after "Lord", and a period at the end of the sentence. The program is rife with little errors of this sort, so if you are going to use it over and over I would strongly counsel (if I were in your parish) that you have me, or someone else who knows their spelling and punctuation accidentals and has an eye for detail, go over it closely before graving the pixels in stone. I am not sure whether the capital L in "ALleluia" and O in DOminus should likewise be corrected; maybe this is considered normal in the texts under chant notation—I'm not very familiar with the genre—but I would note that "Sanctus" looks right to me (i.e., it's not written "SAnctus"), whereas the "DOminus" threw me for a moment, since I read it as "D   Ominus" and it looked (like) "ominous". Had the O been an o I don't think I would have misread it that way.

    Some of the English glosses look a bit more deviant from the Latin than they ought to be (though maybe this is the result of following Jerome on the one hand and the NAB on the other or something). For example, "Oravi Deum meum ego Daniel, dicens" doesn't mean "I, Daniel, prayed to the Lord, my God, and confessed" but rather "I, Daniel, prayed to my God, saying". This sort of textual deviation reminds me of a booklet I have entitled "The Ordinary of the Mass in 8 languages", where in some languages the creed begins "I believe" and in others "We believe". The difference, while not huge, is substantive.

    Leland
  • CPT Tom
    Posts: 11
    Leland,

    We're a young (formed in March 2008) and we still have much to learn. I specifically wanted to share the format of the document, because it is a departure from others I've seen out there, and I thought that may be useful to others. Less attention was paid to the textual formatting of the translations which were taken from different sources. The English was for the congregation to understand the text, but not read from. So there was less attention paid to it. Some of the errors were from cutting and pasting from other documents...funny things happen going from PDFs to Word.

    If you had any idea what the diocese I'm in is like you'd understand that what you get irritated about is frankly very small in comparison to the bigger picture. I thank you for your comments, and will take what you have said and do a scrub of the document and reissue.
  • CPT Tom
    Posts: 11
    Dan F.

    oops...forgot to put a new section in for the changing page so the header doesn't apply for the new document for it ...will take care of it in the next go round.
  • Leland
    Posts: 32
    CPT Tom, I apologize for latching onto a small potato there. The overall appearance of the program is very attractive and looks to me like (with the emendations others have noted above) it would be very useful and conservative of time, effort and paper. Printed on 8½x11 the type is too small for my aging eyes, but I think on 8½x14 it would be okay, and on 7x17, if it fit, still better.

    Leland
  • CPT Tom
    Posts: 11
    Thanks Leland for the post...I did appreciate your original points...its just getting the parish to settle on what we have has been challenging enough, and some of the smaller details got over looked. Take care and God Bless!

    --Tom
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