ABSTRACT
Paul Chihara’s Missa Carminum (Folk Song Mass) (1975) provides a fitting concluding case to demonstrate that the concert mass had become a vehicle that composers would use to critique, or bring to the fore, contemporary cultural practices and ideas that were being contemplated in wider society. In his mass, Chihara grapples with the intersections and mutual points of reference between spirituality and free love that those participating in the hippy and American West Coast cultures of the 1960s advocated.
