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s2smodern

Working frequently with the youth makes us aware that the languages we use need to be constantly reinvented so as to keep the vitality of what they’re meant to witness. Music is one of those languages. We often hear people complaining and saying '' we're always singing the same song''  or «this is too old». With this is mind, the National Department for Liturgical Music has been promoting courses on music and has published an important number of songbooks. However, there is still much work to do.

A group of Jesuits and lay friends have thus come up with the idea of collaborating in church music ministry by organising a one-week seminar where Catholic music lovers, aged 16 to 35, could find time to pray, get some musical and liturgical training, and finally to produce new music for the liturgy.

The group is offering three different programmes: one for singers (LABsing); one for instrument players (LABplay); and one for composers (LABcreate). Every day is made up of 3 moments of a Taizé-like prayer followed by different workshops. Some workshops are meant to provide participants with a general approach to music and liturgy, with topics like Mass and Music, Listening to different examples of Liturgical Music, Understanding Contemporary Music or A Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem Reader. Others are more hands-on, with vocal and instrument classes.

Rather than confining liturgical music to a single style, we want to provide composers with criteria based on understanding the meaning of the liturgy and its dynamics. This way, we hope to encourage a diverse but informed way of doing music. Simply put, we are aiming at developing different styles that reflect the purpose of music during the liturgy. Our composers will have time to write music alone, but they will also be encouraged to work together: to share, discuss and try out their new songs.

All the new songs (partitions and recordings) will be available free of charge on: https://laboratorio-rezarcriar.com. In doing so, we are not just proposing a new repertoire, but hope that this work can be tested and criticized by others. We don’t believe we have "the" solution, hence dialogue and discussion are crucial to consider and come up with new languages. We need to ask ourselves: Does this help community and personal prayer? Reflection and practice are important tools as we discern and try to do more and better.

From 22 to 29 July, we will be 60 (45 participants, 15 staff members) to enroll for this music experiment in one of our Jesuit Schools in Portugal, the Colégio das Caldinhas.

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s2smodern