Can someone refer me to an online resource where I can find the most common Catholic polyphony compositions sung in latin masses?
Recordings and sheet music would be great.
I am teaching myself chant and polyphony.
Thanks.
I’m not really sure that a person can “teach himself polyphony,” in the same way that you can’t really get a violin and say “I’ll teach myself symphonies.” Nor, of course, would it be acceptable to learn one’s part and then go and sing along with the choir, any more than it would be to take your violin to the concert hall and join in from your seat.
If you want to sing polyphony, join a choir that sings polyphonic music. If you are not yet good enough to join the choir, then the problem is not ignorance of the repertoire because you haven’t studied it abstractly at home, but rather that you need to learn to be a good singer: take voice lessons, learn to sight-read music, work on your range, timbre, breath support, etc., etc.
All that having been said, the most comprehensive resource out there would have to be the
Choral Public Domain Library. For instance, we can go to the page on
Palestrina, and click on the sub-page for the well-known (or is it hackneyed?)
Missa Papae Marcelli, where we’ll find PDFs of all the movements, with MIDIs to sing along to. Then there’s Matthew Curtis’s site
ChoralTracks, which is (1) for-profit and (2) not especially easy to navigate, but contains a lot of useful things intended for choir members learning, mostly, polyphony. So, for example, we can hover over the T at the top and click the link for
Thomas Tallis’s page, then on the link for the motet
O Nata Lux, then play Track 3, “Alto Predominant.” If we’ve already found
a PDF from CPDL of the sheet music, then that’s a pretty good way to learn the alto part.
