Five Masses
With & Without Accompaniment
Five complete Mass Ordinaries for SATB choirs, with and without accompaniment. Sacred music that joins contrapuntal craft with a devotional purpose.
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Original cover artwork from Richard’s catalogue. Check the retailer for the current edition.
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Each Mass by Dr. St. Clair is a special world all its own. The Missa Syllabica is unaccompanied and stylistically simple pandiatonicism. The Mass for World Peace features a textual amplification of the original Latin (in English) by the composer according to his personal beliefs. The Misa Española is entirely in Spanish. The Missa Dona Nobis Pacem has some of St. Clair’s earliest music for the Mass, with sketches dating back to 1972; it is musically the most complex of all five Masses. And Missa de Angelis (Mass of the Angels) is a modern-day “paraphrase mass”, that is, music that paraphrases passages from Gregorian chant dating to the medieval period. Chant does not have regular rhythm, so the composer of the paraphrase type will “rhythmicize” or “thematicize” the passages of chant, and then apply them contrapuntally as the music progresses.
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