Setting the Mass to Music: A Creative Project Years in the Making

A few months ago, I had what was, by all accounts, a normal night. But there was, in fact, something very different about that night. A melody came into my head that night as I was going to sleep and returned as I was waking up. Disoriented as I might have been, right about to fall asleep or just having woken up, I was still able to clearly tell that that melody was a perfect candidate for a setting of the Sanctus, one of the parts of the Mass which can be sung, and which thus is one of the components of what a musician calls “a Mass.” In my case, that means writing a Kyrie, Gloria, Alleluia, Credo, Sanctus, Amen, and Agnus Dei. Each of these parts is fixed from day to day, week to week, and, if one were to use my setting or any other setting in the original Latin/Greek/Hebrew, it would be possible for this to happen anywhere in the world, and a Catholic attending a Mass anywhere would still understand it: no translation required.

Music has always been a part of my life, and since middle school, I have been trying (with varying degrees of success) not just to play well what has already been written but even to go beyond that and write original work well. It turns out that, after scribbling something in a weird notation system I came up with years ago on a notepad in my bedroom and then bringing said notepad down to my computer the following morning several months ago, I had a pretty good starting point for the Sanctus: the song of praise to God of all the angels into which all Catholics join our voices before the Eucharistic Prayer.

It did not take long at all to write the Sanctus—certainly not as long as I thought it would take—and, judging by the standards of a few months ago, it was the best thing I had ever written given the time it took to write it: a week or so, maybe 10 days max. I then recorded my notation software playing it back to me, and I posted that screen recording to Twitter. Some friends there quickly but kindly drew my attention to what were, in retrospect, glaringly obvious errors. But most of the feedback from other people, even people who were very technically minded like I am, was positive, so I kept the Tweet with the recording up. I did not release another Tweet showing that I had done this, but behind the scenes, I did consider what my followers had pointed out, and I fixed some of those mistakes.

And that’s where things stood for a few weeks. A Sanctus on my computer with nothing else to go with it. It was pretty obvious to me at the time that I was going through what I had gone through many times in the past: a period where I just did not have any ideas—at least, none good enough that I kept thinking about them long enough to write them down. But that changed a few weeks ago, and I very quickly came up with another idea, for a Kyrie. The Kyrie is short (“Kyrie, eleison” twice, then “Christe, eleison” twice, and then “Kyrie eleison” twice more), so that took only an afternoon to write much less time than the Sanctus, for two reasons. First, as I already mentioned, the Kyrie is much shorter, and writing less music, in general, takes less time than writing more music. But perhaps more importantly, the creative process had already started with the Sanctus, so I knew what I liked and what I hated, what worked and what did not work. And because I did not have to repeat that process of discovery again, the Kyrie was all done in maybe an hour.

Ideas came quickly for the Gloria and the Credo, and soon after that, the Amen and the Alleluia. At this point, I was not really working on just one movement and trying my hardest to get it done before moving on to the next one. I would write a few measures of new melody or fill in a few measures of harmony each day, wherever I had new ideas. Day-to-day, I did not have goals measuring how much I wanted to write, or which movements I wanted to get done by certain deadlines. I just let the creative process happen organically; some days were incredibly productive, and others, not so much.

As I continued working on the Gloria and the Credo—by far the longest texts, so also the longest compositions—I came into a rhythm, a style I found to be uniquely mine. Interestingly, setting a comprehensive list of what we believe to music revealed in myself a sense of compositional identity I hadn't felt before, that blossomed through this project. And as I discovered the existence of and familiarized myself with my own style, I became comfortable in it, and so too in the creative process that that style was generating. Writing a summary of everything we believe and then writing out the song of praise of the shepherds was supposed to be a daunting task, but because of this comfort, it was not, or if it was, it was much less than I expected it would be. Good creative work is a positively reinforcing feedback loop: you do good work, so you want to do more, after which your work gets better, so you produce even more, and so on. The existence of such a loop became evident quite quickly, and I relished in it. Ideas came to me at all hours of the day, and, as soon as I could, I would jot them down in my software. I did not know at the time if those ideas would make it to the final draft of the Mass I was writing, but, honestly, I did not care. I just wrote because I liked writing, and I did not want any of the ideas I had to slip away into the void never to be picked up again.

After several weeks of writing, and especially after going through hot streaks and dry spells within the project, I realized very late, in fact—on the first day I was thinking about getting a group of people together to sing the parts live—that one of the movements that was essential was missing. Somehow, perhaps because of just how organically I had let the creative process develop, I had not yet written an Agnus Dei, which accompanies the Rite of Fraction of the Host and the commingling of a tiny piece from that Host into the Chalice, after both have been consecrated. Just thinking about that absence was enough. Not even five minutes later, I had found a theme I liked, and, half an hour later—the fastest-written movement yet—the Agnus Dei was done.

Throughout that journey of discovery of a personal style, I found that that style included dropping a number of “Easter eggs” as we say in the computing world: hidden stuff that is technically from somewhere else that in context feels like it should be exactly where it is. I will briefly give a few examples. I wrote the section in the Credo referring to Christ’s resurrection and ascension right after Easter, so the hymn melody Llanfair was in my mind at the time (because either “Llanfair” or “Lyra Davidica” is most often used to set Wesley’s text of “Jesus Christ is Risen Today” to music, and “Llanfair” is easier to sing, so I chose it over “Lyra”). Immediately thereafter, I thought the most logical way to refer to the Ascension after quoting “Lyra” for the Resurrection was to turn the melodic line into an ascending scale. When the Credo refers to the fact that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son,  for no reason than that I come up with an original melody good enough and that I realized this quotation would work, I lifted the “Ode to Joy” to use in context. Several movements in the Mass quote each other; the first phrases of the Kyrie and the Gloria are deliberately identical.

That idea to connect movements by either making them wholly or partially identical was not mine but rather, in the context of liturgical music, came from one of my heroes: Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach was not a Catholic, but rather a Lutheran, and yet he wrote the greatest “Missa Tota” setting ever. I, like many composers before me, wrote a “Missa Brevis:” All the parts of the Mass are there, but each part is its own movement. There is one Kyrie, one Gloria, and so on. If I had written a Missa Tota as Bach did in his masterwork Mass in B minor, I am sure I would still be working until well after my 30th birthday—and I just turned 20 this year. This dramatic increase in length is due to the fact that Missas Totas contain all the parts, as does mine, but instead of giving each prayer a single movement, each word or phrase gets a single movement. (I will provide the translation instead of the original Latin or Greek so that this point will be more easily understood.) So in the longer form of writing a Mass, “Lord, have mercy” is two movements in the Kyrie, separate from “Christ, have mercy,” which is its own. “Glory to God in the highest” is separate from “and peace to people of God will,” which, again, is separate from “We praise you,” “We bless you,” “We adore you,” and “We glorify you.” Just in this short list of examples, I have already mentioned the existence of at least 9 movements in only the Kyrie and the beginning of the Gloria. Going through the entire Mass in this manner would yield dozens of movements and hours of music, but writing as I did yielded a complete Mass in only 7 movements and 12 or so minutes of music.   

Writing a Mass—and even having the potential that this project might be known to the world—certainly has been an interesting process. Now that the writing phase is done, the project has now moved into the “let the world know this thing exists” phase. The first step in this process, undertaken over the last 24 hours was contacting a few musician friends and Catholic Centers at universities near me, and a choir of recent graduates to ask if they would work with me. The current step is this blog post and just a general “wait-and-see-what-happens” attitude. Hopefully, after this phase will come another one in which some subset of the people and groups I contacted will like my work enough that, assuming it’s safe to do so, we can get together and actually sing and play through the Mass, either in a concert outside the celebration of the Mass but nevertheless at the parish, or, in a perfect world, singing and playing through this within the celebration of the liturgy, and even possibly recording such a performance. I have no idea if or when any of this will happen, but if anything does come of my attempts to perform/record this, I’ll be sure to update this post with where to find them.