List of Catholic musicians

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List of Catholic Church musicians is a list of people who perform or compose Catholic music, a branch of Christian music. Names should be limited to those whose Catholicism affected their music and should preferably only include those musicians whose works have been performed liturgically in a Catholic service, or who perform specifically in a Catholic religious context.

Contents

Traditional and hymnal

Composers who wrote Catholic sacred music

Note: The term classical music has been used broadly to describe many eras which do not fit the label. Initially the term specifically meant 1730–1820 (the Classical period), but for this list the period from the Baroque period to the modern era will be included in this section. This is because Renaissance and especially Medieval music tends to be dominated, in the West, by Catholic religious music.

Roman School

The Roman School is a group of composers strongly linked to the Vatican and the Council of Trent. Many of them were, or became, priests. Although much of their work is too early to be mentioned here it did survive into the early Baroque. Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina is generally seen as the most famous member. As a list of members is in the article on the subject, repetition of names in it should be normally avoided, although Palestrina is notable enough to be in both.

21st Century Classical School

There is a small but growing school of church composers, favoring a return to Catholic music that can be called "classical", writing original organ, choral, and vocal music that is often based on Gregorian chant.

Twentieth century and contemporary music

Contemporary Catholic music takes many forms, from modern hymnody to inculturated sacred works. The genre of modern Catholic music is continuing to grow.

Modern Catholic musicians tend toward two main forms of expression: liturgical and non-liturgical. In a liturgical context, music is performed in a manner intended to heighten the spiritual atmosphere of a liturgical service, such as during Sunday Mass, Eucharistic adoration or Stations of the Cross, and is mandated to follow the musical tradition and decrees of the Church, such as those found in Musicae Sacrae and Tra le Sollecitudini for the Latin rite. The non-liturgical context, though very much worshipful, usually takes the form of a concert or gathering without the presence of a liturgical service and outside of the Mass. Non-liturgical settings are mainly focused on building Christian fellowship within Catholic communities. Non-liturgical artists find the opportunity to uniquely share their faith through their personal lyrics, and directly to audiences between songs, and these gatherings, since they are not a rite of the Church, but a form of personal and popular devotion, are free from the liturgical requirements that accompany a solemn act of worship in a liturgy. Although Catholic musicians tend toward one expression over the other, many will minister within both expressions with the appropriate music styles for each.

The following popular composers and performers are of note:

Liturgical artists

Black Catholics
  • Fr Clarence Rivers - pioneering Catholic Gospel artist, and one of the first to set the Mass to gospel music.
  • Servant of God Thea Bowman - speaker, writer, and recording artist who spearheaded Black Catholic inculturation in the Deep South and elsewhere. Helped develop the first and only Black Catholic hymnal, "Lead Me, Guide Me".
  • Archbishop James P. Lyke - liturgist who also worked on the LMGM hymnal.
  • Bishop Fernand J. Cheri III, OFM - auxiliary bishop of New Orleans and noted choir director and liturgist.

Non-liturgical artists

Note: The Unity Awards began in 2001 with the intent of being a Catholic-specific equivalent to the GMA Dove Awards. [18] In certain cases the following mentions winners of this award.

Catholic hip-hop artists
  • Manchild - Catholic rapper from Georgia
  • Tau - Catholic rapper from Poland
Catholic rock artists

Liturgical music

Many composers have contributed to the distinct pop-inspired sound of contemporary Catholic liturgical music, including Marty Haugen, (a non-Catholic,) Dan Schutte, David Haas, Fr. Michael Joncas, and the St. Louis Jesuits. For more details, see Contemporary Catholic liturgical music. A majority of American Catholic Parishes now use at least some of this style of music in their liturgies. [30] A recent trend has returned to the official music of the Roman Catholic Church, Gregorian chant and to newly composed music based on or inspired by it, and to liturgical projects like the Chabanel Psalms or Adam bartlett's Simple English Propers. [31]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Renaissance music</span> Western musical period between the 15th and 17th centuries

Renaissance music is traditionally understood to cover European music of the 15th and 16th centuries, later than the Renaissance era as it is understood in other disciplines. Rather than starting from the early 14th-century ars nova, the Trecento music was treated by musicology as a coda to Medieval music and the new era dated from the rise of triadic harmony and the spread of the contenance angloise style from Britain to the Burgundian School. A convenient watershed for its end is the adoption of basso continuo at the beginning of the Baroque period.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Choir</span> Ensemble of singers

A choir is a musical ensemble of singers. Choral music, in turn, is the music written specifically for such an ensemble to perform. Choirs may perform music from the classical music repertoire, which spans from the medieval era to the present, or popular music repertoire. Most choirs are led by a conductor, who leads the performances with arm, hand, and facial gestures.

An oratorio is a large musical composition for orchestra, choir, and soloists. Like most operas, an oratorio includes the use of a choir, soloists, an instrumental ensemble, various distinguishable characters, and arias. However, opera is musical theatre, while oratorio is strictly a concert piece – though oratorios are sometimes staged as operas, and operas are sometimes presented in concert form. In an oratorio, the choir often plays a central role, and there is generally little or no interaction between the characters, and no props or elaborate costumes. A particularly important difference is in the typical subject matter of the text. Opera tends to deal with history and mythology, including age-old devices of romance, deception, and murder, whereas the plot of an oratorio often deals with sacred topics, making it appropriate for performance in the church. Catholic composers looked to the lives of saints and histories from the Bible while Protestant composers only to Biblical topics. Oratorios became extremely popular in early 17th-century Italy partly because of the success of opera and the Catholic Church's prohibition of spectacles during Lent. Oratorios became the main choice of music during that period for opera audiences.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Requiem</span> Mass celebrated for the repose of deceased peoples souls

A Requiem or Requiem Mass, also known as Mass for the dead or Mass of the dead, is a Mass of the Catholic Church offered for the repose of the soul or souls of one or more deceased persons, using a particular form of the Roman Missal. It is usually celebrated in the context of a funeral.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mass (music)</span> Form of sacred musical composition

The Mass is a form of sacred musical composition that sets the invariable portions of the Christian Eucharistic liturgy, known as the Mass.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Orlando di Lasso</span> Franco-Flemish composer (1532–1594)

Orlando di Lasso was a composer of the late Renaissance. The chief representative of the mature polyphonic style in the Franco-Flemish school, Lassus stands with Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Tomás Luis de Victoria as the leading composers of the later Renaissance. Immensely prolific, his music varies considerably in style and genres, which gave him unprecedented popularity throughout Europe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roman School</span> Group of music composers

In music history, the Roman School was a group of composers of predominantly church music, in Rome, during the 16th and 17th centuries, therefore spanning the late Renaissance and early Baroque eras. The term also refers to the music they produced. Many of the composers had a direct connection to the Vatican and the papal chapel, though they worked at several churches; stylistically they are often contrasted with the Venetian School of composers, a concurrent movement which was much more progressive. By far the most famous composer of the Roman School is Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, whose name has been associated for four hundred years with smooth, clear, polyphonic perfection. However, there were other composers working in Rome, and in a variety of styles and forms.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Giovanni Animuccia</span> Italian composer

Giovanni Animuccia was an Italian composer of the Renaissance who was involved in the heart of Rome's liturgical musical life. He was one of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina's most important predecessors and possibly his mentor. As maestro di capella of St Philip Neri's Oratory and the Capella Giulia at St Peter's, he was composing music at the very center of the Roman Catholic Church, during the turbulent reforms of the Counter-Reformation and as part of the new movements that began to flourish around the middle of the century. His music reflects these changes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Church music</span> Christian music written for performance in church

Church music is Christian music written for performance in church, or any musical setting of ecclesiastical liturgy, or music set to words expressing propositions of a sacred nature, such as a hymn.

<i>Officium Defunctorum</i> (Victoria)

Officium Defunctorum is a musical setting of the Office of the Dead composed by the Spanish Renaissance composer Tomás Luis de Victoria in 1603. The texts have also been set by other composers including Morales.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">František Tůma</span> Czech composer

František Ignác Antonín Tůma was a Czech composer of the Baroque era. He lived the greater part of his life in Vienna, first as director of music for Franz Joseph, Count Kinsky, later filling a similar office for the widow of Emperor Charles VI.

Inter pastoralis officii sollicitudines was a motu proprio issued 22 November 1903 by Pope Pius X that detailed regulations for the performance of music in the Roman Catholic Church. The title is taken from the opening phrase of the document. It begins: "Among the concernsof the pastoral office, ... a leading one is without question that of maintaining and promoting the decorum of the House of God in which the august mysteries of religion are celebrated...." The regulations pointed toward more traditional music and critiqued the turn toward modern, orchestral productions at Mass.

Contemporary Catholic liturgical music encompasses a comprehensive variety of styles of music for Catholic liturgy that grew both before and after the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. The dominant style in English-speaking Canada and the United States began as Gregorian chant and folk hymns, superseded after the 1970s by a folk-based musical genre, generally acoustic and often slow in tempo, but that has evolved into a broad contemporary range of styles reflective of certain aspects of age, culture, and language. There is a marked difference between this style and those that were both common and valued in Catholic churches before Vatican II.

<i>Quattro pezzi sacri</i> Set of choral compositions by Giuseppe Verdi

The Quattro pezzi sacri are choral works by Giuseppe Verdi. Written separately during the last decades of the composer's life and with different origins and purposes, they were nevertheless published together in 1898 by Casa Ricordi. They are often performed as a cycle, not in chronological sequence of their composition, but in the sequence used in the Ricordi publication:

Alternatim refers to a technique of liturgical musical performance, especially in relationship to the Organ Mass, but also to the Hymns, Magnificat and Salve regina traditionally incorporated into the Vespers and other liturgies of the Catholic Church. A specific part of the ordinary of the Mass would be divided into versets. Each verset would be performed antiphonally by two groups of singers, giving rise to polyphonic settings of half of the text. One of these groups may alternatively have consisted of a soloist, a group of instruments, or organ. The missing even- or odd-numbered verses were supplied by plainchant or, perhaps more commonly, by improvisations on the organ. The verso became a particularly prevalent genre in Renaissance and Baroque organ music, both Italian and Iberian, and most of the French classical organ literature consists of alternatim versets.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Catholic Marian music</span>

Catholic Marian music shares a trait with some other forms of Christian music in adding another emotional dimension to the process of veneration and in being used in various Marian ceremonies and feasts. Marian music is now an inherent element in many aspects of the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Catholic Mariology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Domenico Bartolucci</span>

Domenico Bartolucci was an Italian cardinal of the Catholic Church. He was the former director of the Sistine Chapel Choir and the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, and was recognized in the field of music both as a director and a prolific composer. Considered among the most authoritative interpreters of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Bartolucci led the Sistine Chapel Choir in performances worldwide, and also directed numerous concerts with the Choir of the Academy of Santa Cecilia, including a tour of the former Soviet Union.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Santa Cecilia Choir</span> Indian male choir

The Santa Cecilia Choir is a polyphonic male choir composed of seminarians of the Rachol Seminary of the Catholic Archdiocese of Goa and Daman in Goa, India.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Choral concerto</span>

The choral concerto, occasionally known as vocal concerto or church concerto) is a genre of sacred music which arose in the Russian Empire in the middle of the seventeenth century and remained popular into the early nineteenth century. Choral concertos are short compositions for unaccompanied voices, typically containing multiple and distinct sections, with occasional soloistic interludes. The text of the compositions was usually selected from the psalms and other biblical texts, with occasional settings from feast day sequences. Choral concertos were intended for liturgical use; they were sung at the point in the Divine Liturgy when clergy were taking Holy Communion, before the Communion of the faithful.

References

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  19. ovacao.pt "Após 10 anos de uma carreira recheada de grandes sucessos, com 6 CD's editados tendo dois deles atingido Platina, um Dupla Platina e outro Ouro, a Ovação tem o prazer de lançar um novo CD do Padre José Luis Borga, para assinalar esta importante data."
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  24. Dana Archived 2011-09-26 at the Wayback Machine
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  26. "Heart Beat Records". www.ucmva.com. Retrieved 11 September 2017.
  27. Carlos & Minh Solorzano - members of the interdenominational Christian band Come Thirsty from Tucson, AZ who are signed with the Tate Music Group. Both of them also work as Catholic School teachers for the Tucson Diocese. When not working with Come Thirsty can be heard singing the National Anthem at various sporting events while Carlos freelances as a session drummer and as a tribal drumming composer whose music has been featured on VH1, MTV & E! Entertainment Television. Unity Awards 2006 Archived 2011-07-21 at the Wayback Machine
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