Masses are tough. I suppose if I didn't care what I was really doing musically with the text of the Mass I could say it wasn't hard or if I was some lazy dork who refused to set the Credo for some dubious reason besides just not believing that what the Creed says is actually true then I could decide that maybe it's not really hard ... but it's hard.
It seems the most crucial issue is to take the text and consider its theological content and form as a starting point. The text tends to suggest its own musical form. Kyrie settings are usually some variation of binary or ternary form, usually the latter. Glorias and Credos tend to be more free-floating but this is not something I'm sure I entirely endorse. I think that if you take the literary structure of the Gloria you'll find that a persistent pattern emerges in which declamations about God alternate with descriptions of how we respond to the nature of God's glory. Since the Gloria incipit is taken from the worship of angels to Yahweh I consider it to be not merely a descritpion of how acclamation of the Lord but of the divine court's description of the Lord. I.e. we're not angels so appropriating the worship of angels as our own should not distract us from the observation that angels are the Lord's messengers. Therefore I found a way to compose a Gloria where the incipit is used in a number of forms to describe the Lord's nature and attributes and to use a different thematic gesture to describe our own response to the Lord whether through thanksgiving or supplication. And it came out in a loose rondo form of ABabA.
The Credo presents another set of problems, a HUGE set of problems. I'm not Bach or Penderecki so a large scale multi-movement setting of the Credo feels utterly beyond me. But I am often stymied by attempting to just imitate the Credo forms I've seen other composers use, not because they're musically unsatisfying but because I"m just not sure the musiccal form explicates the theological significance of the text. Text-painting is cool and all but sometimes text-painting just creates a big mush of tunes and textures that don't always make formal sense. It's seeming terribly easy to create a big musical mess where people don't remember the content of the Credo.
So for me the plan that seems most logical is to build the musical setting of the Credo around Christ and to have that be the measure. There are two aspects of Christ to consider via hypostatic union--his divine nature and his human nature; His oneness with the Father and His identification with us as sinful men and women. So how would this work itself out? So far I think the best approach is to establish a thematic and structural link between Christ's earthly ministry, death, and resurrection and the ministry and gifts and hope of the Church. This would also entail finding a thematic and structural link between the Son with the Father and Spirit. So, of course, this means that the melody and harmony associated with the persons of the Trinity should be shared. So far the only composer I've found who made a point of doing this in his Mass is Frank Martin (way to go Frank!) but I imagine other composers have done this and I trust I'm not the last, the first, or that people besides Martin haven't done this already.
Yeah, I know, I've blogged about this before but making sure you are, as a Christian and a composer, putting a lot of thought into the meaning of the text is the smallest prerequisite for bothering to write a Mass at all. I've only been working on this for seven years so I figure I've got no one's deadline and only my artistic goals to worry about.
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