Music for the New Missal

Singing the Missal Tones

• The music for all of the new missal chants can be found at (includes ready-made booklets for your congregation and graphics files for pasting into service sheets) 
  http://www.liturgyoffice.org.uk/Missal/Music/Chants/index.shtml
• If you prefer traditional chant notation for missal tones 
  http://musicasacra.com/pdf/missal_chants_solemn.pdf
• The Music Makers have prepared a CD with sung versions of all the chants
  http://www.themusicmakers.org/welcomepages.htm
• Videos of all the new chants 
  http://www.chantcafe.com/2010/09/tutorial-videos-on-new-missal-chants.html
• Sound files of all the new chants 
  http://www.npm.org/Chants/index.html

Roman Missal: Order of Mass – A Guide for Composers

• This document is essential reading for all parish musicians, not just composers. It brings together the core texts of the liturgy intended for musical setting as a reference and recommends best practice.  
  http://www.liturgyoffice.org.uk/Missal/Music/OM-Composers-Guide.pdf

Accompanying the Missal Tones

• This organ accompaniment is available free of charge to download from the Diocese of Leeds. The accompaniments to the missal tones are offered on the website for the help and support of musicians introducing the new chants. There are an increasing number of accompaniment versions available and this version is offered as a simple and modest contribution to that need. We would kindly ask that if you wish to make use of it you consider making a charitable donation by cheque payable to “Leeds Cathedral Choir School”. Donations should be sent to the Music Department, Leeds Cathedral, Great George Street, Leeds LS2 8BE. Further information about the choir school project is available here.

For more in depth information on the new translation, see http://www.missal.org.uk/

Advice and Materials 

The items under this menu seek to offer some guidance and free practical examples of liturgical music for parishes. The advice regarding the choice of repertoire is necessarily limited by the parameters of a website. The download area will be expanded over time as existing material is typeset. Much contemporary music is in full copyright and therefore must be purchased by parishes, and a licence obtained for the reproduction of the words and music on any service sheets. This includes most settings of the responsorial psalms, hymns and vernacular Masses.

A good resource for free choral music suitable for the Catholic liturgy appears in some useful amateur editions on the Wikipedia site, Choral Public Domain Library.

The Gregorian Missal contains a complete range of music in chant notation suitable for Sunday celebrations. A small selection of the simplest Mass settings has been reformatted to download.

Hymn books are a more problematic area. It is worth considering if the large investment in a new hymn book is the best investment for a parish or whether the purchase of a licence to reproduce the words on a missalette is better. This is especially relevant, given that congregational hymn singing is not given primacy in the relevant liturgical documents of the Catholic church. The priority for liturgical music is to sing the mass rather than sing at mass. Unfortunately, there is little consensus on the best current hymnbook, and several recent attempts have been disappointing in the accuracy of the typesetting of music and words, indexing and manageable volume size.