I’ve recently been to a couple of funerals – one as an invited singer, one as a family friend.
The former was my first visit to Bath crematorium and its chapel overlooking farmland south of the city. The family wanted the mourners to be given a lead in Crimond (a hymn that is only ever sung at weddings and funerals in my experience). The other was a Roman Catholic Requiem Mass in a small and full church. The music was a mixture of plainchant Ordinary and Propers and the sort of hymns popular in evangelical churches in the 1980s or so – rather surprisingly, given the advanced age of the lady whose Requiem it was.
The Requiem Mass had a singer from the church to lead the congregation (and teach them plainchant by moving her hand up and down). In both cases I had to set my dynamic level correctly – loud enough so that those nearby who were less confident could latch on to it, but not so loud as to predominate.
Does the RC Requiem Mass still include the Dies Irae? (We continue to use it, but then the Episcopal church tends to be rather more flexible about such things).
This was actually the first Catholic Requiem I’d ever been to. I imagine the Dies Irae is still ‘on the statute book’ but in practice not used except maybe at All Souls if the Mass is being done to a musical setting that includes it (and ever since Fauré they’ve tended not to). These days the emphasis is very much on the deceased being in God’s care rather than trying to terrify people with the thought of Judgement Day.