Better late than never, right? Here are some thoughts on the situation described in this post.
First – there were great comments and great advice. An unhappy pastor is never easy to deal with. It strikes me that he hasn’t made a move yet, and may not be inclined to make wholesale changes or may just be waiting for the best time. While you still have the time – here’s what I would recommend.
Recruiting
The fastest way to add men to the group is to try to recruit husband/wife teams. We have always had at least two or three in my thirty person choir and they help a great deal. This would help recruit men and make the membership base of the choir more stable.
How do you recruit husband/wife teams? You have to ask for them. Try to get two minutes during your standard announcement time to make a pitch. Thank people for singing, and ask to see a show of hands of people who have sung in choirs in the past, from elementary school and on up. You’ll be surprised how many hands you see. Some of those people, if reminded that they had a good time in the past, would be inclined to get the choir a try. Mention husband and wife teams specifically. Mention that you are trying to recruit another X number of people, including Y men. Mention that a bigger choir can do a better job and help fulfill the mission of parish music programs – give glory to God and support congregational singing.
When recruiting, you need to make sure you get the name, phone and e-mail of the people who express interest. Don’t just give them the info and hope they come to rehearsal. Get their info and tell them you’ll call or e-mail them with a little reminder.
Hymnal
Not Gather. Not Gather Comprehensive (a larger block of cheese.) Ritual Song is an excellent hymnal with the exception of the psalm texts. It has something for everyone and leans to the traditional. It’s big and red, not flimsy and brown. There’s no confusion when you ask people to grab the red hymnal and turn to #559. The OCP hymnals have improved over the last several years but still have loads of cheese, fewer options for acclamations and psalms and look and feel cheap.
If you can’t replace Gather, then you need to do your best. There are some good selections, but you need to look hard, and some of the music may be repetitive from week to week. Even Ritual Song doesn’t have a great selection of Lenten hymns… I imagine Gather is worse.
Sound System
Try to resist changes to the sound system that would make the organ and choir super loud. On congregational pieces, the organ should be loud enough that it makes self-critical people hear more organ than their own voice. Choir mics are like bad lighting – they amplify any flaws and may make people run for the exits if the end up amplifying the wrong people. (When I first arrived at my parish the first thing I did was remove the choir mics. I told the choir I’d teach them to sing so that they didn’t need mics. It’s worked out fine.)
Someone mentioned Thomas Day in the comments boxes. He had a good point about sound systems, which was if you flood the congregation with vocal sound they don’t think you need any more assistance. He called the classically trained singer blasted thru the mic “Mr. Caruso” – it’s all about the cantor, not about the congregation. Sound systems, like anything else, can be abused – sounds like the pastor has some misconceptions about them.
Tempo and Organ
The tempo of hymns and songs can cause major problems for a congregation. Hymns that are too slow make everyone feel out of breath. Songs that are too fast can be much harder to sing. Hopefully your organist breathes with the choir so he understands how much time is needed between verses and where there are breaks in the music. I can always tell if an organist sings or not: Singing organists always make it easier for the congregation to sing. Organists who don’t help the congregation breath end up causing major problems.
Organ registrations also need to be reviewed. If the pastor thinks the organ is too soft, the problem might not be volume but registrations. The organ shouldn’t sound light and sweet all the time. Big hymns demand big registrations, and varying registrations with each verse can build momentum through the piece.
That’s all for now. If you give me more detail, I may be able to provide more advice.
God bless, and thanks again for all the great comments in the original post.
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Thanks to everyone for all of the great advice! I am still “digesting” all of the suggestions, and conspiring with some of my fellow choir members to avert the possible catastrophe.
One of the things we hope to do is to have a “chant workshop” put on by a Certain Schola In Alabama. ;) That’s being proposed at the parish council meeting tonight, I think.
No new hymnals, nor music of any sort, shall be purchased, as our parish is already running at a deficit, collections-wise. So it’s either keep using Collegeville, or change to Gather (the two hymnals we currently have). But we can probably print up inserts of some sort. This is all in the nascent stages.
A related, but separate question, that’s been discussed before, I know – how do you keep your frustrations and anger about the state of the liturgy from encroaching upon your thoughts during the Mass?
AND…if, let’s say, your husband, who is a perfectly wonderful person in all respects, through no fault of his own, actually PREFERS the folkies – what then? How does one say, “My children will not grow up to believe that folkiness is acceptable at Mass,” without making your husband feel slammed upon for preferring G&P?
No, really. (By the way – I’m not a dude, as is now obvious, I hope). My husband thinks G&P is the heritage of Catholic music. He gamely attends Mass with me, sometimes, but we usually go to separate Masses (since we have small children who need both parents in the pew if they’re going to behave properly, we often leave them at home with alternating parents).
Urgh. Maybe I need my own blog, instead of to dominate this comments box. But then, all the nice folkies at my parish would realize I’m secretly seething with resentment at their musical ineptitude…
While there was certainly lots of good advice in the blog post, I have to respectfully disagree about the recommendation of the RitualSong hymnal. We used this in my former parish, and the “traditional” music has usually had the language feminized. Even the Christmas carols have had they wording changed. The longer we used this hymnal, the more I hated it.
If, ultimately, a new hymnal can be purchased (and some creative financing, other than let the parish pay, could help with that…perhaps doing fundraising specifically for the hymnal, or even having people buy their own family hymnal, with the parish serving as the group order placer). A good hymnal should be something that people want to have at home, to sing with during their own prayer and to study the text of the hymns. That’s pretty tough with most modern Catholic hymnals, but it isn’t impossible to find a few good ones.
Attention “On Deck!”
By now, you’ve been inundated with advice that will take you years to go through.
Read this first.
What you end up doing depends on what you’re stuck with. And a guy in your position usually is stuck with something going in. Some pastors already have a long-term deal in place, and that’s that. OCP is the most popular program in the USA, for better or worse, with nearly half of all parishes subscribing.
But if gonna do any long-term reading and R&D, you really need to see Jeffery Tucker’s site, including weblog and browsing library:
http://www.cantemusdomino.net/
http://www.cantemusdomino.net/blog/
http://www.cantemusdomino.net/browsing_library/
There’s free stuff to download too.
It’s possible to do a decent job with OCP’s hymnal/service book program, as recent years have included more traditional music. And the “Heritage Mass” setting in the Ordinary in front of the book has Latin descants, if you wanna throw the folks a bone in that direction.
OCP also publishes a “Traditional Choral Praise” hymnal, with a series of hymns in three versions each; SAB, SATB, and unison with descant. The latter is the best to start out with for a fledgling choir, if you can hustle up, at most, a few ladies with high voices, while everyone else carries the tune. As to the obvious disadvantage of softcover hymnals, you can get removable hard covers for them. Give the youth group an excuse for a “pizza party” each November.
I recommend GIA’s Worship (third edition) for a good traditional hymnal — yes, even with some pronouns altered; it’s not as bad as OCP. (Don’t expect that trend to continue, by the way.) It’s well-designed, well laid out, and the notation for chant is easy to read. Yep, there’s a complete “Cantus Missae” in there. Also, excellent indexes in back.
GIA’s RitualSong is good for parishes that have both traditional and contemporary programs, and need one hardcover hymnal (just one, as opposed to fumbling for several), to serve both.
I do not recommend Adoremus as a single-source hymnal. It fails miserably as a service book, with no psalmody or graduale, and no Holy Week service music. The publishers themselves will admit, if pressed and if they’re honest, that the project is a “work in progress.” As to layout, it looks like it was designed by three different places, so it’s not as attractive as it could have been. At best, it is a good supplementary traditional hymnal.
Now, aren’t you glad you read this first? You know where to find me.
thoughts about liturgy and music
One of the wonderful things about the internet is that one has the opportunity to interact with all sorts of folks. I’m on an email list that is primarily supposed to discuss the Pope’s Theology of the Body, but often…
http://www.cantemusdomino.net/ is by an Aristotle E. Esguerra, not Jeffrey Tucker
you may wish to have a look at http://www.ceciliaschola.org too