Adam Bartlett of the Chant Cafe has composed a setting of the Gloria in English. I’m personally crazy for this. It is beautiful, bright, and very intuitive. I can easily imagine that this could become the standard setting for any parish. It is also free for you to use and copy.
Adam Bartlett Gloria from Corpus Christi Watershed on Vimeo.
A special thank you to Jeffrey Ostrowski of Watershed for the presentation.
Nice! What's interesting about this is that there's a sneaky kind of resemblance to sacro-pop here. If you put a beat behind it and rhythmicized the line, it would sound similar to a lot of other masses. This is not a bug, it's a feature; this could very easily replace something awful that's being used now.
Beautiful!
Very nice work! It is wonderful to see that Gregorian "type" music is alive, that is, contemporary, or should I say, timeless. By this I mean that after much of the Gregorian Propers as we know them had been composed by the 9th century, chants have continued to be composed in this modal form, even though polyphony became the rage. To see this "style" of music being composed today is wonderful, and perhaps suggests that this is the preferred "style" of music for worship of the Roman Catholic Church. Inculturation does not mean having to bring into worship all sorts of profane musical styles, whether of yesteryear or today just so people feel "at home" or "comfortable". It means bringing in that which is and has been sacred for the Church, and the Gregorian form is one such sacred music that never grows out of date.
I like the liberal use of the Exsultet tone here. It ties the Gloria to the Easter triumph while the text recalls Christmas as always. Nice work.
This is beautiful! I am so privileged to be studying chant with Adam and singing with his Schola Cantorum. As an "old" Catholic, I appreciate and prefer this type of music at liturgies. As for Michaels' comment – I agree that I also found a comfortable familiarity with the tone progression and shape of the phrases. I had to chant the Exsultet in the past several times because no priest or deacon at my parish wanted to attempt it. If parishes would start replacing Marty with this Gloria, along with a simple Sanctus and Agnus Dei, we could begin the long journey on the road back to proper music for Mass.
I wonder if there'd be a possibility of someone setting an organ accompaniment to it. The pastor at the church where I cantor has made it very clear that I can sing anything I want, but he wants to hear that organ he paid so much for played!
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I have to ask. In my limited experience with chant, the gloria seems like it has no "hook" or "melody" that's easy to catch onto and remember, unless done so through repetition.
Please correct me if I am wrong, I love this chant and would like to use it some day at my parish, my concern would be that people would find it inaccessible at first b/c it seems to just do it's own thing. Appreciate any comments, God bless!
Tom, I suspect that you are a bit uncomfortable with the unmetered structure, i.e. that it doesn't have a four-square beat structure.