At the last What's New? session, those who came along wanted to know about settings for the Eucharist, Gospel Acclamations, ways of singing psalms, new hymn texts and where to find new worship songs. I thought it might be useful to pass on information about what we explored.

We were attracted by settings of the Eucharist by David Ogden and Paul Inwood which made use of a Cantor, gave the congregation some good refrains and provided SATB settings if a choir was available and parts for instruments. What people seemed to want was a lively Gloria setting that enabled congregations to quickly learn a refrain while the choir or cantor take care of the bulk of the text. These recent settings also provide music for the array of acclamations before the gospel and during the eucharistic prayer.

The provision in our lectionaries of appropriate ‘gradual’ psalms that thematically link old testament reading with the Gospel reading encourages the use of psalmody at the Eucharist. We browsed through the large number of books containing responsorial psalms. These provide a refrain for congregation which is easily picked up and again, the main text is sung by cantor or choir. There is a wide range of styles available and we sang psalms using simple pointing with four-note tones and longer ‘psalm songs’.

We sampled new hymn texts that are available in a number of small scale publications. The way around having to buy hundreds of copies is to find a publication that provides the texts on a CD so that they can be easily copied into the service sheet or projected onto screens. The new Hymn Quest CD resource from The Pratt Green Trust/Hymn Society was especially useful with thousands of titles, all cross-referenced