Gearing up for a great year!

This past week I’ve been preparing for our new chant year – practices begin on August 22nd, and our first Mass is September 19th.  As before, I was able to have a 1-on-1 discussion with almost every member of our schola, and got some great feedback and ideas about what challenges we should take on as a group.

But I’m definitely stretching in some new directions.  Based on some wonderful experiences of singing falsobordone psalms at the Colloquium in June, I decided to give it a shot.  The problem is that we need to start off simple, with three part STB harmonies adjusted to the capabilities of this group.

Which means I’d have to compose something.  Not exactly my strong suit – to this point I’ve merely done Alleluia verses and the occasional Responsorial Psalm.

So I started off with Tu Mandasti, the appointed Communio for the 25th Sunday of Ordinary Time.  First task was to simplify the antiphon a bit, because we still struggle with long melismatic passages.  Now to tackle the verses.

Understand that my musical background consists of about 10 years of piano when I was a kid (my mother was a piano teacher), playing French Horn through High School, and singing for about the last 12 years or so.  This means that my ability to put together harmonies is a lot more based on what sounds good to me than of any kind of real education.  I can sing decent harmonies, mind you, but it’s a different matter to try to write it down.  It doesn’t help that my ability to play more than one note on the piano is, well, limited.  You might say pitiful.

But harder still was to do chant harmonies.  I’m a relative newbie to this chant business, and we’ve done everything unison and a capella.  I haven’t had to worry about harmony, and am in great awe of people at the Colloquium who can just devise it on the fly.

What I’ve ended up with is the simplest possible melody, mode V, with straightforward harmony.  I haven’t yet made the practice recordings, so there’s going to be some chance that I’ll have to rework it.  And of course recording a 3-part harmony will be a challenge with just my own baritone voice, but I think I worked out a reasonable compromise when we did a 2-part Adoramus Te Christe a couple of years ago.

Wish me luck.  This is new territory for us.