Sunday 19 January 2014

Tremendous Tool for Scholas

I really thought that I had blogged about this before, but cannot find the post. So either I did, but failed to tag it, or include any obviously searchable words in the body of it, or I imagined the whole thing.

Anyway, back in July, the excellent Bara Brith blog pointed me at this. It is a site where you can enter any Sunday of the year, and get chant for the Proper of the Mass for that Sunday.  Not only that, but you can choose between the full chant (as in the Graduale or Liber) or a simplified psalmtone version.

And not only that, but you can do that for each part of the Mass, and combine the lot into one .pdf.

Thus if you have a very new Schola, you might choose to sing the first few Masses purely using the psalmtones. As you progress, you might then introduce the proper (and more difficult) chant for some parts, and retain psalmtones for others.  Finally, when competence and confidence allow, you might graduate to singing the whole of the Mass to the proper chant.

This is hugely convenient, as anyone who has heretofore wrestled with the Liber and then tried to set the tough bits to psalmtones will testify - and is a much better solution (I think) than the Chants abrégés, which is the other resource sometimes used: I always find these unconvincing and unsatisfying.

No comments: