An announcement from my colleague Heath Morber on our latest project:
I’m very excited to announce the follow-up to my first project (Bread from Heaven, available here) with the arrival of English Motets for the Church Year. I scoured two-and three-part excerpts from the Mass Ordinary settings of the Renaissance masters, and fit them with English texts from the liturgical seasons and various feast days. Each season/feast has a two and a three-part setting of a text relevant to the occasion (e.g. “Drop down dew from above” for Advent, “You are Peter” for Peter and Paul, etc.), and each motet has been transposed for various voicings. All in all, the collection has 40 motets in two voicings, and a bonus motet for weddings comes to 81 different settings!
In addition, I’ll have other transpositions and voicings (including SAB versions!) in a website that my colleague, Ben Yanke, has set up. I’ll be adding settings to that site regularly. The password for the site is in the hard copy of EMCY itself, so you’ll want to grab at least one book to take advantage of the full gamut of resources!
The book can be purchased at lulu.com, paperback (Link) or coil-bound (Link). An extensive sample of the collection can be found here. Recordings are already rolling in; a couple examples are below to get a sense of the collection.
These can be done with as few as two or three skilled singers! I hope this will be a great resource for your parish community!