Men's schola

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clem456

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Let’s say a parish wanted to start a men’s schola-type ensemble…

The voices are typical untrained men’s voices, so our modern hymns are not going to work. The range is not there (not yet anyway). and the men involved don’t want to do that anyway.
The vision is to have simple easily singable antiphons rather than hymns. I suppose that would be called chant? (I have no expertise in this area so pardon me if the language is inaccurate.)
Has to be in English, or at least a mix of English and Latin,.

Are there resources available for this? You-tube videos would help so we could show the music director what we are talking about. The music director is more than capable of playing and directing anything, but time and education will be the issue.
How about songbooks?
What do the religious do in this area?
 
There are two parts to consider, the “ordinary” and the “propers”. There are simple settings of the ordinary that would be a great place to start for a newbie schola.

For the propers, the main repertoire for the propers is the Graduale Romanum. Quite frankly apart from a few entrance antiphons and communion antiphons, it would be out of the reach of beginners.

However there’s also the Graduale Simplex; the chants are simpler, using antiphons somewhat taken from or similar to those of the Divine Office, with psalm verses on the simple tones; one would have to master the rudiments of Gregorian modality, but at least the books has pointed the psalms making it easier to get it right, all the accentuation rules are taken care of with the pointing (“pointing” means indicating through italics and bold the melodic changes; italics for preparation syllables, bold characters for accented syllables).

There’s also a project called “Simple English Propers” that has the propers, in English, set to simple Gregorian plainchant melodies. You can download the full book online:

Simple English Propers

It would require some training though. I’ve never used the Simple English Propers largely because most parishes I sing at are French-speaking, so we use mostly Latin, and some French (typically we use French for the responsorial psalm, instead of the Gradual which is OK for the more experienced members of the schola, but a bit difficult for our newer members).
 
Thanks for the info.
Wow.
We will start to talk about this and see where it leads us.
 
More: PDF version of the current Graduale Romanum:

Graduale Romanum 1974

And here is a PDF of the Graduale Simplex:

Graduale Simplex

From these you should be able to print out a Mass or two to practice with your schola. Just about every chant in the Graduale Romanum can be found on YouTube. Some recordings are better than others, but it should be easy to find the ones pleasing to the ear or at least clear in their interpretation.

Note that these are for the Ordinary Form Mass. For the EF Mass you’d need to use the 1961 Graduale Romanum; there’s no corresponding Graduale Simplex for the EF, as the Simplex was a Vatican II development to make simpler chants available for minor churches or less experienced choirs.
 
Do your men have any background in reading music? Learning to read chant can be pretty challenging for most people, especially if they’re not used to the sound. Since there aren’t any melodies of the sort that modern music has trained us to expect, and it isn’t metrical, learning to feel the natural flow of the chanting can be difficult.

That’s not to discourage you - just to let you know what sort of difficulties you might run into. It took me about two years to really start “getting” chant, and I’m still not great at it. But it’s also a really rewarding practice, and I hope that your schola will get the most out of it if you do choose to start.
 
You might also want to visit the website of musicasacra.com/, the forum is a fun place to learn (but can be intense!). Here’s a whole page of English and Latin chant resources:
musicasacra.com/resource-lists/.
Good luck - - sounds like you will be doing great things for the Church and your parish!
 
The thing for me to do is learn this myself, so when I go approach our liturgy guy I am not dropping a huge task in his lap, who is already underpaid and overworked.
I could learn it, offer to help teach it in my living room and maybe bring it to a smaller weekday mass where half the parish won’t write complaint letters.
thanks everyone.
 
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