Pater Noster in C Major for a capella choir

This is for the operetta. Scene 4 begins with a choir singing a Pater Noster at a church.

The recording kinda sucks because I had to use woodwinds (clarinets for women, bassoons for men) instead of voices, since I don't have the appropriate software for minimally realistic voice samples.

I might get one from a friend, but meanwhile this is what there is:

mp3

Score

A really beautiful piece. Hope you can get it performed. I'd love to hear it by a real Acapella choir.

What a beautiful first theme which comes through again in the end! The only constructive thing can think of is that perhaps the middle section (development) seems to lack the melodic structure that came across at first. Ofcourse this may be intentional, but for me I'd have liked to have seen that original motif developped further.

Wow parallel octaves.

But very pretty!

It's odd to see "AMEN" at the end, but not have it be a Plagal Cadence.

Cool. Some nice harmonic turns. The melodies, viewed horizontally, are a little too arpeggiated for my preference - it sounds more like instrumental writing rather than vocal. I also agree that the perfect cadance at the end sounds a bit wrong.

This is a very beautiful piece, but from a performance standpoint, I think it has some very awkward breath spots. There are multiple places in the piece (e.g. beat 4 of measure 6 in the alto part) which seem very important to execute powerfully and precisely, but would be very difficult to do because they're at the end of a breath. It's usually best to keep the really important parts in the middle of the breath, where the voice has the most control, and this makes for a very smooth and natural melodic line for the singer. Also when I tried to sing the piece I found that the whole thing was coming continuously with very short, almost impossible breath spots, or sometimes even no good breath spot at all.