FOLK MASS

Folk Mass: translation

   American term for a Roman Catholic mass whose music is composed in idioms related to popular and folk traditions. An early example is 20th-Century Folk Mass, composed by Geoffrey Beaumont (later Fr. Gerard Beaumont) in 1956. As at the Taizé community, this movement wished to encourage congregational singing through a more familiar and accessible musical idiom.

   After the Second Vatican Council loosened regulations on liturgical music in 1963, the number of "folk choirs" in the United States increased rapidly, as did the music for them to sing, which included some ordinary settings but many more original texts that replaced the traditional propers with congregational songs, nearly always accompanied by guitars and sometimes other instruments.

   In the 1960s, these songs adopted the solo styles of the folk revival, then current in American pop. Thereafter, folk choirs’ music approximated more and more the praise choruses of the evangelical Protestant churches.

   See also Gospel Song; Hovhaness, Alan; Misa Criolla; Spiritual.

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