As I was dealing with the English changes to the Revised Roman Missal in 2011, it occurred to me that I wasn’t finding what I was looking for in the updated repertoire of masses, so I decided to write one of my own. But then the question became – what was I to do with it once it was ready? I planned to use it with my own assembly, of course, but if it could also work for others, how would I get it to them to try out?
The traditional approach involves submission to a major publisher of Catholic liturgical music, and then waiting through the approval process, and then, if accepted, the publication process. The lead time for this is usually measured in months.
But the needs in various parishes are immediate.
A micro-publishing route, on the other hand, would mean that I could create my own music score documents and try to sell them online, but I eventually realized that, even with the best intentions, I was basing this decision on a profit motive instead of my original desire to share what I consider to be a specifically useful element of the revised liturgy – which brings us to the purpose of this site:
My Missa Nova – made available under a specific Creative Commons license that allows shared use of the score (with attribution) and derivative works (shared under the same Creative Commons license as my original), but only for Non-Commercial applications. This is the CC-BY-NC-SA license, i.e. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license.
Please refer to the menus on this site to find what you’re looking for regarding the score files. Each section of the Mass has a download link. I will post modifications there as well, if I make any changes to the score. If I get requests from composer/arrangers wanting to work with the score source files, I can post my Sibelius files as well. Finale users and others may want to try to convert the Sibelius files for their own composing software. If so, I hope they would be willing to offer the converted files for posting here, too. (I only use Sibelius myself, so this would be helpful to all of us.)
