I was honored to take the baton as co-director of liturgical music for the 2017 Convocation of Catholic Leaders, held July 1-4, 2017, in Orlando, Florida, where I conducted a choir of sixteen singers from all over the United States (and Poland!) and a small orchestra of fine players from the Orlando area. The USCCB was very impressed with our work in 2016 for the liturgies of World Youth Day — their impact on youth, the prayerfulness of the music, and the reverence with which they were celebrated — and so they asked the WYD musical team to recreate that ethos for their Convocation.
As in Kraków, the music we selected for the Orlando liturgies included Gregorian plainsong, Renaissance polyphony, and pieces inspired by Byzantine chant.
Here are a few representative selections:
- Welcome Bread of Life (Paweł Bębenek)
- Christus resurgens (Gregorian plainsong, mode 8)
- Quia vidisti me (Estêvão de Brito)
- O salutaris hostia (Pierre de la Rue)
EWTN did a wonderful job of filming and broadcasting these liturgies, which are archived in their entirety on YouTube. To view any of the music from these Masses, click below for annotated listings of the repertory.