Over a period of 4 years as Director of Music at a Catholic church, during which the choir grew from 16 to 46, I developed a library of music that was picked to sound beautiful when sung at Mass but also to improve the singing ability of the singers and, as a result, the entire choir.
More than 20 of the singers heard about the music we were singing and left their parishes, transferring to join the choir.
This series is built around that library.
Because music budgets are small or even non-existant, we have picked music that you may copy and share legally, helping keep costs down. And that's also why you may download the choirbooks for free, copying and sharing legally, every note on every page.
Buying a book or books helps us out, so please purchase or donate if you can.`
Each of the 5 Catholic Choirbook volumes has a theme, book 1 is a general book while the others are more specific. Within books 2 through 5, music has been chosen to expand a choir's repertoire but also to challenge them and improve their sound.
The decision was to make the Catholic Choirbooks stay under 120 pages and be large - 8" by 10" when printed by our publisher, or 8.5" by 11" or your local paper size when you print it (set Adobe Reader to FIT TO PAGE to make this happen), large to make it easy to read in dim choir lofts. We picked under 120 pages to make them light and easy to hold.
Once we got up to 5 books, it became obvious that buying ALL the Catholic Choirbook may not be possible for many churches.
So we developed the The Anthology I.
The Anthology I has 64 hand-picked Motets and Anthems plus 40+ old and new hymns and is 380 pages of music and priced, with a $5 discount available to all from this webpage, the price of two Catholic Choirbooks. This makes The Anthology I affordable These are the "best" selections from all 5 Catholic Choirbooks as far as use with a parish choir as part of a choir building program.
And it is even available in optional library Hard Binding.
Then we started the Catholic Choir Training Project. Webpages that help directors teach and build their choirs, based upon The Anthology I. Since all the music for The Anthology I comes from the Choirbook series, if there is no music budget, you may still participate, using copies of the free downloads of music from the Catholic Choirbooks.
Eventually the Catholic Choirbook Training Project will also be available in printed and bound form.
Got questions? noeljones@usit.net or 423 887-7594