Rivers: a Mass by emmanuelworship

Our parish has started the adventure of the new mass settings with a safe option, Haugen’s revised Mass of Creation. From September we are using Paul Mason’s Mass of Glory and Praise, which is completely new to us, and for December we will use the revised Mass Shalom.  All fairly safe and predictable.

We have also bought a few other masses, some of which I have already looked at on the blog, and I hope to look at some more over the coming months.

Emmanuelworship wrote Fire Mass that was used for many years in our parish and I see no sign of a revised version of that coming out, so we got the two new masses from them, Rivers and Rivers Youth, written by Patrick Keady and Roby Curtis.  I’ll have a look at Rivers, and plan to do the Youth Mass at a later date.

The first thing to note is that they have provided a swiss army knife of a mass bundle.  You can see at their site that for $80 you get both settings, a hard copy and the CDs, as well as a CD ROM with backing tracks, pdfs of the songs (piano and guitar parts), alternative arrangements, powerpoints and a liturgy planner.  Even within the masses there are extra options, for example in Rivers, you can use an Amen that is reminiscent of the Holy and Memorial Acclamations, or one that harks back to the Gloria.

You can now listen to samples on their site as well, which is most useful.

None of this matters much if the masses aren’t usable however, and the Rivers Mass certainly has merit.  You need not be concerned that it is just rowdy young persons’ music, because it is not. Rivers is actually a reflective and almost sedate contemporary mass music. I’m only going to blog the pieces that we would use, as we never sing the Kyrie and the Our Father.

Gloria

I struggled to get a good 6/8 feel to my backing and so it is rather less energetic than I would have liked.  Throughout I’ve used almost exclusively MIDI based sounds in BIAB with some Realtrack 12 string for embellishment.

This is certainly different, but in a good way.  The refrain is repeated twice at the beginning and then it is sung straight through with no return to the refrain.  It is therefore a lot shorter than your average Gloria.  I haven’t put it in my backing but they have music to sing “Glory to God in the highest” twice under the three Amens. It is 6/8 but on a couple of occasions he stretches 4 notes over the six beats, an antitriplet I suppose.  It sounds natural once you’ve heard him sing it a few times but it might cause mild panic if it sneaks up on you unnoticed. He loves to jazz up his chords, but I’m sure it will sound reasonable if less accomplished guitarists just play the root chords. All in all a joyous and interesting Gloria.

Gospel Acclamation

They repeat, “Hallelu, Hallelujah, Hallelujah” twice before and once after the verse.  Their music has the response for Ordinary time, “Speak Oh Lord…” It is styled after the Gloria and is an uplifting introduction to the gospel.

Holy

From this point on emmanuelworship go reflective and respectful (I kid you not). We are in slow 4/4 now and the only difficulty may be the dotted and double dotted notes that give it a languid feel in places and a slow triplet feel in other places.

Memorial Acclamation 2

We seem to use the “When we eat this bread…” acclamation, so that’s the one I’ve done here. This has the same feel as the Holy.

Amen 1

As already noted, you have a choice to use a 6/8 Amen that is reminiscent of the uplifting Gloria. To my mind that would interrupt the mood that has been set, and it would be better to use this Amen as this follows the Holy and Memorial Acclamation in style, although for some reason the key has been changed from D to E.

Lamb of God

We are still in E so perhaps the Amen is to step up to the Lamb of God, who knows.  This is slightly faster and has a different feel to the preceding pieces.  There is an instrumental interlude, which reminds me of the very good Lamb of God in Keady’s Fire Mass. It appears that the last note in the lead sheet I printed off the CD is wrong – it has an F where there should be an E.  I don’t know if the other sheets have the same error as I have passed the CDs and books onto other music teams for their appraisal.

I have to say that this is a mass that is certainly playable in the suburbs.  There is enough oddness to make it memorable and once the occasional rhythmic eccentricity is understood nothing to scare the weekend warriors away really.  As suggested, just ignore the clever chording if it bothers you or capo it of existence, and you could always start off with their excellent backing tracks if it really was a problem.

The Mass is easily more playable than half of the selected pieces by the Australian Bishops and there is no reason it could not be used all around the world.  I suspect that Rivers Youth is the rowdy one if you are looking for typical emmanuelworship material, but this is a pleasant surprise and broadens their appeal considerably.