The Catholic Choirbook Anthology: Large Size Paperback

Product description

Catholic Choirbook Anthology Noel Jones Ellen Doll Jones, Editor After publishing Choirbook V we reviewed the entire Choirbook Series 1-5 and decided to  create just one book that would be affordable and the most useful to all choirs in one book, and including  hymns, especially Eucharistic hymns, that would serve the choir as needed for the Offertory and Communion Meditation of the Ordinary Form Mass as well as others that would be useful.  Some of these are new hymns, others that are part of the great vernacular hymns of the Catholic Church. The Choirbooks Series is built on my own choirbook that I built for my choir, music chosen to be appropriate for the Catholic Mass, but also to teach the choir to sing better!  The Anthology are my picks from the entire series, all in one book, almost 400 pages. -Noel Jones

Review

NPM REVIEW
The Catholic Choirbook Anthology I
Noel Jones, edited by Ellen Doll Jones. Frog Music Press, 2011. 
We live in an age when vast swaths of the choral repertoire are available to us free of charge. Invaluable resources like the Choral Public Domain Library have for years been making choral music both old and new available on demand. With all of this music at our fingertips, the bar is set high for a choral anthology comprising primarily public domain music to be worth the investment. Noel Jones’s The Catholic Choirbook Anthology I is just that. 
The book contains fifty-seven motets and anthems (forty-seven with Latin text, ten with English), a full setting of the Extraordinary Form Ordinary (William Byrd’s Mass for Three Voices), fifty-three hymns designed primarily to be sung as motets, and six Gregorian hymns, the engraving of which was borrowed from the Church Must Association of America’s Parish Book of Chant. 
The anthology includes works from the fifteenth through the twenty-first centuries, the majority of which are drawn from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The familiar names of Palestrina, Victoria, Lassus, and company are well represented, but Jones has taken care to include many works by lesser-known composers as well (Grancini, Friderici, Fogliano, and D’Evry, to name a few). Perhaps what is most attractive about the anthology is its variety. I found many old “chestnuts” alongside works and composers with whom I was completely unfamiliar. Your choir is guaranteed to find a significant amount of new works to complement their beloved favorites.
The variety continues when it comes to voicing. Most of the works are SATB, but a significant number of three-voice motets (in various combinations) as well as five-, six, and eight-voice works are included. The unison motets, chant hymns, and SATB hymns can be sung by a soloist or any combination of voices at your disposal. No matter what the size and ability of your choir, there will be plenty in this collection that you can throw together in fifteen minutes’ rehearsal time as well as plenty to challenge you for years to come. In the editor’s own words: “The series is more than just a collection of choir music. Rather, it is based upon the need for music – of varyiung difficulties, for varied sizes of groups, and of value as teaching material to improve the abilities of the singers.”
Most of the Latin texts are represented by multiple settings to enable familiarization with the text. Each unaccompanied piece has a keyboard reduction for the ease of the accompanist, and the engraving anddecorative art are elegant and tasteful. The quality of the editing is fine – an admittedly brief examination of the volume didn’t uncover any wrong notes. In short, this is an anthology on a par with those of the finest publishing houses.
As we’ve now come to expect with publications from Frog Music Press, the use of modern technology is impressive. In the opening material, Jones instructs the singer to visit choraltracks.com, where many of the works in the collection may be heard (parts together or separate) as performed by Ma