Views from the Choir Loft

Free Download • Simple Choral Midnight Mass Introit

Andrew Leung · November 24, 2016

APPY THANKSGIVING and happy belated feast of St. Cecilia. My guess is that most of the Catholic church choirs in the world are named after her. I have been to parishes that have two or more “St. Cecilia Choirs”. Those choirs usually end up being called the “7am St. Cecilia Choir” or “11am St. Cecilia Choir”.

Since this is a week of feasts, I thought this would be the perfect time to share a piece by a composer from Macau. I found it while I was going through some old music at our seminary. It is a very simple choral setting of the introit of the Christmas Midnight Mass, Dominus Dixit ad Me, by Fr. Áureo Castro, who served in Macau for a long time and had contributed greatly to the local musical culture. If you are looking for something simple and can be easily learned, this would be the perfect piece. The SAB introit, which can also be arranged into a equal-voice setting, is pretty straight forward and it allows basically any “Cecilia choir” to sing it after a short practice.

* * PDF • DOMINUS DIXIT AD ME BY ÁUREO CASTRO

I hope this piece would be useful and would make the midnight Mass procession more interesting. And I hope to share more music by local composers from Macau in my future posts. I will definitely write a detail introduction of Fr. Castro in my next blog post. Stay tuned!

Opinions by blog authors do not necessarily represent the views of Corpus Christi Watershed.

About Andrew Leung

Andrew Leung currently serves the music director of Vox Antiqua, conductor of the Cecilian Singers, and music director at Our Lady of China Church.—(Read full biography).

Surprising Popularity!

One of our most popular downloads has proven to be the organ accompaniment to “The Monastery Hymnal” (131 pages). This book was compiled, arranged, and edited by Achille P. Bragers, who studied at the Lemmensinstituut (Belgium) about thirty years before that school produced the NOH. Bragers might be considered an example of Belgium “Stile Antico” whereas Flor Peeters and Jules Van Nuffel represented Belgium “Prima Pratica.” You can download the hymnal by Bragers at this link.

—Jeff Ostrowski

15 February 2021 • To Capitalize…?

In the Introit for the 6th Sunday after Pentecost, there is a question regarding whether to capitalize the word “christi.” The Vulgata does not, because Psalm 27 is not specifically referring to Our Lord, but rather to God’s “anointed one.” However, Missals tend to capitalize it, such as the official 1962 Missal and also a book from 1777 called Missel de Paris. Something tells me Monsignor Knox would not capitalize it.

—Jeff Ostrowski

15 February 2021 • “Sung vs. Spoken”

We have spoken quite a bit about “sung vs. spoken” antiphons. We have also noted that the texts of the Graduale Romanum sometimes don’t match the Missal texts (in the Extraordinary Form) because the Mass Propers are older than Saint Jerome’s Vulgate, and sometimes came from the ITALA versions of Sacred Scripture. On occasion, the Missal itself doesn’t match the Vulgate—cf. the Introit “Esto Mihi.” The Vulgate has: “Esto mihi in Deum protectórem et in domum refúgii…” but the Missal and Graduale Romanum use “Esto mihi in Deum protectórem et in locum refúgii…” The 1970s “spoken propers” use the traditional version, as you can see.

—Jeff Ostrowski