Tuesday, June 18, 2019

A Resource for Polyphonic Sacred Music in the Vernacular

Are you looking for authentic polyphony for the Mass in English? Perhaps you feel you have resorted to Tallis’ If Ye Love Me once too often? If so, then you should investigate the scores available at EnglishMotets.com.

This is a project created by Heath Morber, who has adapted music by de Victoria, di Lasso, and Palestrina to English translations of motets and liturgical texts including the Ordinary of the Mass. The complexity and difficulty of the arrangements vary, so there are some suitable for beginners and some for more experienced singers. There are arrangements are for two, three and four parts.

When he started this project, Heath had in mind Catholic musicians who wanted to expose their congregations to the beauty of Renaissance polyphony, and think that the vernacular may be a safe way to introduce this music to people in the pews who may balk at the use of Latin.

He already has already made over 200 pieces available, and is adding more month by month. At the moment he is asking for a one-time payment of just $30 in exchange for access to the full and expanding library of titles, as long the site and the internet exist.

Here are two samples from the site. First, Answer My Prayer, an STB three-part arrangement of Exaudi Me Domine by Orlando di Lasso:
The second is Whoever Follows Me, a two-part (TB or SA) arrangement of Qui Sequitur Me, also by Orlando di Lasso.
For more details, go to EnglishMotets.com.

More recent articles:


The Qui pridie
Lost in Translation #140To turn unleavened bread into the Flesh of the Son of Man, the duly ordained Roman Catholic priest prays: Qui pridie quam paterétur, accépit panem in sanctas ac venerábiles manus suas, et elevátis óculis in cælum, ad te Deum Patrem suum omnipotentem, tibi gratias agens, benedixit, fregit, deditque discípulis suis, dicens: A...

Lumen Christi: Defending the Use of the Pre-1955 Roman Rite
The time has come for a serious conversation about the pre-1955 Roman Rite. Not as something eccentric, marginal, quixotic, but as the normative baseline for the sane “reset” of liturgical praxis so necessary after a century of wild experimentation.There’s no escaping the truth: the Roman rite, once the serene inheritance of countless saints, was ...

Signs of the Times
I woke up yesterday to the news posted on social media by a friend that the liturgical journal Worship, which is published by St John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, through their outfit The Liturgical Press, will cease publication after four more issues, ending in October 2026. Both the journal and the press were founded in 1926, so the f...

Implementing the Traditional (Pre-55) Roman Holy Week, Part 1 — Introduction and Palm Sunday
This essay (which will be divided into three posts) is by the same anonymous author who contributed the series on the implementation of the pre-1939 (mostly the same as pre-1955) liturgy on every single day of the liturgical year. In that series, Holy Week is mentioned in broad strokes: which days to do first, and why.Now let us consider the detail...

St Stephen of Hungary and the Tomb of Pope Sylvester II
Today is the feast of St Stephen, the first king of Hungary, crowned on either Christmas day of 1000, or New Year’s Day of 1001; before then, the ruler of the Hungarians had been known as the Grand Prince. He held the throne until his death on the feast of the Assumption in 1038, and was canonized in 1083, together with his son Emeric, and a Veneti...

2025/26 Liturgical Calendar for the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church
We are happy to share this information from the London-based Society of St John Chrysostom, about its newly published liturgical calendar. The calendar is free to access as a pdf at this link:https://ssjc.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Calendar-AM-7534.pdfYesterday, the Byzantine rite began its liturgical year with the Indiction, entering the year 7...

Online Resources: Critical Editions of the Pontificale Romanum
A friend has brought to my attention the work of the website Caeremoniale Romanum, which is based in Poland, and also has a wonderful archive of films of old liturgies on its YouTube channel. They have recently made available scans of some important works for the study of the Roman liturgy, scans of critical editions of the Pontificale from two dif...

The Society for Catholic Liturgy’s Annual Conference in Washington, DC, Sept. 24-26
The 2025 Annual Conference of the Society for Catholic Liturgy will seek to examine the contribution of Joseph Ratzinger-Benedict XVI to the Church’s understanding and celebration of the sacred liturgy. This coincides both with the 25th anniversary of Ratzinger’s work, The Spirit of the Liturgy, and the Society’s own 30th anniversary (1995-2025).Th...

The Life of St Augustine, by Benozzo Gozzoli (Part 2)
The first part of this, which was published on Thursday, the feast of St Augustine, ended with the scene of his conversion; here we pick up the story from his baptism. As in the first part, these public domain images are all taken from the Wikimedia Commons page on the choir chapel of the church of St Augustine in San Gimignano, Italy, where these ...

The Final Days of the Blessed Ildephonse Schuster
We never let August 30th pass without remembering the Blessed Cardinal Alfredo Ildefonso Schuster, who went to his eternal reward on this day in 1954, after serving as Archbishop of Milan for just over a quarter of a century. We have written about him many times on NLM, partly in connection with our interest in the Ambrosian liturgy, of which he wa...

For more articles, see the NLM archives: