Religion: Syncopation at St. Luke's

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St. Luke's Church in Cambridge, England this week offered its congregation an experiment in popular church music: it got a clergyman-composer to present a new sung Mass in syncopated, calypso rhythm.

St. Luke's "folk Mass" is a serious attempt at a modern version of plain chant. Its composer, the Rev. Geoffrey Phillips Beaumont, 49, is the chaplain of Trinity College, Cambridge and an energetic amateur tunesmith who writes most of the music for Trinity's annual revues. He wrote the sung Mass after clergymen friends had complained to him about their congregations' distaste for traditional liturgical music.

As performed this week, with a two-piano accompaniment, the folk Mass turned out to be a framework of bouncy modern rhythms, themes on which priest and congregation improvised when making their responses. Said Composer Beaumont, defending his innovation: "I know that many people will not like it, because they don't like light music. I ask them to offer up the Mass on behalf of the thousands that do, but don't come to church because they don't like current conventional church music."