The Latin Choir

Dominus vobiscum!

This little website is intended to help actual or potential Latin choir members to use their musical talents for the greater glory of God. You won't find any fancy graphics here, or fancy anything, and you will never find any video or audio files that automatically start to play regardless of whether you want to see or hear them. What you will find, I hope, is practical assistance in making more beautiful, meaningful music for God and for your congregation.

Just getting started here, step one is . . . well, probably to explain what "Non nobis, Domine, non nobis, sed nomini tuo da gloriam" means, in case you don't already know. It means "Not to us, Lord, not to us, but to Thy Name give glory." That's what this site is all about. If you insist on self-glorification, through music or anything else, you'll have to look elsewhere.

Step two: if your choir is anything like ours (the Regina Caeli Latin Choir at Sacred Heart Parish in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA), and especially if your choir is ours, you may have found that you don't have a lot of time to learn new music during choir practice. (I mean music that's new to your choir, although it may be hundreds of years old.) Of course, if you're great at sight-reading music, you can just read some over at home and learn it, no problem. If you're not, though, you may welcome some assistance in the form of music files that you can play on your computer, MP3 player, or whatnot, so you can get some idea of how the music is supposed to sound while you read it and try to sing it.

Computer-assisted music-learning experiment

If you don't mind a bit of harmless human experimentation, let me propose an experiment. Click one or more of the links to the right under "Computer-assisted music learning." Each link will take you to a page where you'll find the following things:

  • A large, legible image of the musical score and lyrics of a Latin motet, hymn, or chant
  • An English translation of the Latin lyrics
  • A link to the score in "printer-friendly" PDF format
  • Links that will let you download or play MP3 files containing instrumental versions of the music for all parts together, and also for each individual part, of the hymn or motet (why instrumental versions? Because it's a whole lot easier to produce instrumental versions with music-composition software than to produce vocal versions with live recording)
  • A link that will let you download a MuseScore file (see below) to display the score and play the music
  • Possibly some notes on dynamics, breathing, or other important matters

Try reading the score, listening to the music, and learning the appropriate part for one or more of the compositions. If all goes well, you'll find that it's very helpful to listen to the music for your part, and to sing along or afterward while reading the score. Then, when you've learned your part, you may also find it helpful to sing your part while playing the music with all parts--especially in the polyphonic motets, where the different parts sometimes start and stop at different times. The dynamics in the instrumental music won't necessarily be the same as you would want when you actually sing this music with your choir (if you ever do), but you can work that out with the choir after you've accomplished the main tasks of learning basically how to sing your part and how to fit it in with the other parts. Here are some details about how you can get this done.

Procedures for hearing and seeing the music at once

First choice: use MuseScore

If you don't already have MuseScore (the excellent free program I use to compose, transcribe, and print music), I'd strongly recommend getting it and using it. With MuseScore, you can display the score and play the music while the program shows you which notes are being played. To play only one part at a time, use the "Display --> Mixer" menu item, and check the "Solo" box for the part you want in the little mixer window that will open up; uncheck the box again to hear all the parts at once. MuseScore files, unlike MP3s, are really tiny, so they take approximately no time to download. MuseScore is available for Windows, Mac, and (my favorite operating system) Linux. Just click one of the links in this paragraph to visit the MuseScore website and (if you wish) download the program.

Second choice: download MP3s and then play them while reading the score

If you don't have MuseScore and you don't want to try it just now, you can right-click the links for MP3s and select "Save Linked Content As" (or the equivalent on your computer) to download and save the appropriate MP3 files; then you can use any media player program to play them on your computer. If you'd rather see a white image of the score with separate pages rather than a cream-colored image with no separate pages, download or read the PDF file for the score. The advantage of downloading MP3s rather than playing them online, in my opinion, is that you don't have to wait each time for the "cache buffer" to fill up before the music will play. This may not be a problem if your Internet connection is a whole lot faster than my DSL (to say nothing of dial-up), but if it isn't, you'll probably want to avoid the wait.

Third choice: play MP3s online while reading the score

If you want to do things with as few preliminaries as possible, and either you have a super-fast Internet connection or you don't mind a bit of a wait, and if your browser will play MP3s at the click of a link . . . then open the page for the music you want twice, in two separate browser tabs or windows. This will let you play the MP3 in one tab or window (which you won't be looking at) while you read the score in the other (which you will).

What if the experiment succeeds?

If this experiment works well with music I wrote or transcribed, it should also work well with music I didn't do either of those things to. Anyone else who can transcribe existing sheet music into audible electronic formats can also contribute to computer-assisted music learning, maybe even on this site (if desired). If you don't already have the sheet music, you may wish to visit a site such as the Choral Public Domain Library. You may even be able to find free audio files for the music you're interested in (though probably not for the individual parts) through a site such as Musica Sacra, the website of the Church Music Association of America, or Classic Cat, the free classical music directory. If you produce some good-quality audio files (including individual parts) for music that's suitable to be sung at a Latin Mass, please feel free to contribute them to this site if you wish.

For this, and any other non-inflammatory communications you wish to send (like about any other things you might wish to see or hear on this site), you can use the following e-mail address. User name mcclamrock ; domain name locl.net ; put them together with a "@" in the middle and you'll get the address. (Spammers, they say, have robots that roam the Internet looking for e-mail addresses to slurp up and send spam to, but the robots may be too dumb to catch addresses that aren't in or near the standard form, so that's why this one isn't.)

In any event, may God bless your musical efforts abundantly, for His greater glory and the good of your congregation!

David McClamrock

Computer-assisted music learning
(titles with no composer listed are either by Anonymous or by me)

Gregorian chant:

Two-part motets and hymns:

Three-part motets and hymns:

Four-part motets and hymns:

This space reserved for additional content (when it exists)