Programme notes:

Messa in onore delta Madonna di Loreto (Mass in Honor of the Madonna of Loreto) was composed in December 1964 for a composition contest sponsored by the city of Loreto in northern Italy. What was sought was a mass for the church in Loreto. The specified parts were choir and organ. The percussion part was not added till later. The text comprises the Kyrie, Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei of the Ordinary of the Roman Catholic mass. Loreto - population approximately 9000-lies on Italy's east coast, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) south of Ancona. The city has been a goal for pilgrims since A.D.1295, when, according to legend, angels brought the House of the Nativity there from Nazareth. The Church erected the Chiesa della Casa Santa on the site in the late 15th century. This mass, too, is written as a so-called reaction score, where the conductor indicates the tempos but the performers often individually layer their parts over one another, becoming united again through extended end-notes. And here, too, Naumann denies dependence on the actual content of the text. Text composition in a conventional, "translation" sense is foreign to him: "The music, after all, can do thousands of things. If it must be bound to a particular content, I perceive it as a stage work. This text, I suppose, provides mainly the warp, the shape, the sonoric duration of the work. Naturally, it provides the word content, too, but on an utterly different level". The music has a noticeably "Gregorian" character in its rhythmic plasticity. Analyzing the work, Lars Edlund found that "...one is readily reminded of a liturgical reading surrounded by the movements of sound and resonance that can be experienced in large cathedrals..." This mass was premiered in The Engelbrekt Church in Stockholm on 13 November 1966. Conductor: Dan-Olof Steniund. Text: Rolf Haglund. From Phono Suecia nr 34 (1987)