48: An introduction to musical Masses

The Mass is the central act of worship of the Catholic Church. As we’ve seen in our historical overview, even at that level of detail, it’s clear how influential the Church was in setting up the musical traditions we have: chant, polyphony, cantatas, and so on—and, of course, many hugely influential composers have been priests (most famously Vivaldi).

It's no wonder, then, that so many composers, even those who haven’t been Catholic, have written “settings of the Mass.” Having written one myself, and working on 2 more at the moment, let me briefly explain what that means.

There are certain parts of the Mass where there is no flexibility—no room for options, and nothing based on a calendar(* with some very minor, specific exceptions).

Every Mass, for example, has some sort of penitential rite, wherein the congregation ask God for forgiveness and mercy, right at the beginning of the liturgy, “so that we might worthily celebrate the sacred mysteries.”

After that, every Mass not in Advent or Lent (meaning about 300 days a year) has a Gloria—the song of the angels announcing the birth of the infant Christ.

Skipping over a lot that can change, the next fixed thing (no exceptions this time) is the Creed, which must be said Sundays and holy days, and may be said during the regular week when nothing special is going on.

Skipping further still, before the beginning of the Eucharistic Prayer (the thing that makes a liturgy a Mass, and not, say, a structured Bible study)—the central prayer of the Mass itself—the “Sanctus” is sung, evoking the words of the crowds as Jesus enters Jerusalem on the way to his death and the crowds hail him as a king (only to turn on him in less than a week) and the cries of praise of the highest angels in heaven.

Finally, the last fixed part occurs during the Fraction Rite—where the consecrated Host is split in two and a tiny piece is broken off one of the halves and placed into the chalice—as the congregation sings the “Agnus Dei”.

All the rest of the Mass can and does change on a daily basis: there are different selections from the Old and New Testaments read at each Mass based on a set calendar, and then the “sermon” is more commonly called the “homily,” which should relate to those readings; there are prayers written to ask for healing of the sick in the community, for the dead, for the police/government/etc., for the local Church, and so on; and there are dozens of possible Prefaces (the prayer immediately before the Sanctus), dozens of possible Eucharistic Prayers, and so hundreds of Preface-Prayer pairings. The structure of the Mass may be the same day to day, week to week, but what gets put into those predetermined slots changes most of the time.

Those parts which are fixed are called the “ordinary” of the Mass, and the parts that change in response to each day (the readings) are called the “proper.” “Writing a Mass setting,” then, simply means taking the proper, in order, and setting it to music. I did this once for my parish—I have yet to hear it performed by actual humans—and I have been working on doing this both in memory of Pope Francis and in honor of Pope Leo.

A Mass (Bach’s B minor Mass) has been called “the greatest artistic achievement of mankind, ever,” so in due time, we’ll be looking, over many articles, at what goes on inside its 27 movements (and roughly 2 hours of music—about double the length of a Mass on any regular Sunday, and about quadruple the length of a Mass on any regular weekday). Masses like the B minor—I highly recommend you don’t wait for the overview series to start, and you go listen to it now, if you have about 2 hours free—were, of course, more common when composers had to work for/in the Church to earn a living (like Bach), before the advent of either rich court patrons (like Beethoven’s Archduke Rudolph; though he was the Cardinal Archbishop as well, the music Beethoven wrote for him wasn’t like the music Bach wrote in and for the Church while working at Lutheran parishes all over eastern Germany) or, basically, freelancing on one’s own star power (as Mozart did quite often). But even into the Classical and Romantic eras and beyond, composers (case in point: me) have continued to write Masses, so the musical form remains incredibly relevant (and the foundational text of the liturgy is the same, and has been for centuries, if not millennia).

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