Gen Bryant‘s Mass For Youth, in the sheet music I purchased, ($A9.95 at Willow) does not have a Gloria. Maybe the masses she intends this for rarely use a sung Gloria, maybe she isn’t happy with hers yet, who knows.
As a great impertinence and completely unsolicited, I wrote one for it. Of course, if Gen asks me to bin this I will.
I used the form of her second memorial acclamation – OK I am in 3/4 rather than 6/8 – using her chords and notes to start off and then added one musical phrase of my own and with repetition could fill out the Gloria. Having nicked most of the ideas I claim no copyright on this at all and I did it as an exercise, about which more later.
Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace to people of good will.
We praise you, we bless you,
we adore you, we glorify you.
We give you thanks for your great glory,
Lord God, heavenly King,
O God, almighty Father.
Lord Jesus Christ, only Begotten Son,
Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father,
You take away the sins of the world
have mercy on us;
You take away the sins of the world,
receive our prayer;
You are seated at the right hand of the Father:
have mercy on us.
For you alone are the Holy One,
You alone are the Lord,
You alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ,
With the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father.
Amen.
I occasionally write songs or hymns. I suspect a lot of parish musicians do likewise. When I was looking at Gen Bryant’s music to write the melody of the Gloria, it came very easily, having set words and the restrictions I gave myself. Years ago a lyric writer in the US sent me a couple of lyrics and I found it easier to set them than write something myself. I suspect, therefore, that I would work best as a collaborator, and it is interesting the companies like OCP lock up their songwriters together to get their committee songs.
Monica O’Brien and the Willow team are having a small song writing get together soon, and my hope for it is that we can establish a network for those who want to, to collaborate on our song writing. Except for a very few hardworking professionals, no-one is going to make any money out of this game, so I don’t think there is any great drama or risk in most of us doing this. Looking at Erwin Cabucos’s work recently reinforced my belief that our new song will come from the amateurs in the parish. I will be dead before anything useful comes from the hierarchy and we can only count on the schools for so much.
I’m going to put up some songs I have written of variable quality and age. I will post demos of me trying to sing the songs – fair warning, I have a poor voice. A lot of my songs have obvious flaws, but maybe someone else is best to fillet anything useful. I wrote hundreds of terrible songs when I was young for the two or three I still think are alright some forty something years later, so I doubt many of these songs are up to much.
Conversely, if anyone has a song fragment that they have lying around that they would like to bat around, do let me know.