Every music director has lived the same Saturday night.
Your cantor calls at eight o’clock with a fever. Your organist’s car will not start and the shop is closed until Monday. Sunday is fourteen hours away, and you are standing in your kitchen scrolling through your phone, texting six people who may or may not answer, hoping one of them is free and knows the propers.
Some of us have lived that night dozens of times. We laugh about it at conferences. We trade the stories the way nurses trade stories about the emergency room. But I want to say something about that night that we do not usually say out loud, because I have come to believe it is the most important fact about sacred music in this country.
That night is not a scheduling problem. It is a justice problem.
The ceiling nobody sees
Here is what I mean.
When your cantor cancels, whether your parish sings well the next morning depends on exactly one thing: who you happen to know. Not your training. Not your taste. Not your ear, your library, or your years of study. Not the faith of your people or the beauty of your building. Just your contacts.
If you direct music at a large, well-funded parish in a city, you have contacts. You know three sopranos who read chant. You know two organists who can transpose on sight and a trumpeter who will do the Easter Vigil at a fair rate. You built that list over fifteen years, and it is the most valuable thing you own professionally.
If you direct music at a small parish, a mission parish, a rural parish, a Spanish-language parish where the music budget is whatever remains after the roof and the boiler, you have almost none of that. You may be the only trained musician for thirty miles. You may not be trained at all; you may be the person who volunteered because nobody else would. You have a hymnal, a keyboard that needs tuning, and a congregation that would sing anything you taught them if only somebody could teach it.
So here is the ceiling. Two parishes with equal faith, equal desire, and equally beautiful liturgies. One sings Victoria on Good Friday. The other sings the same four hymns it has sung since 1987. The difference between them is not holiness or talent or effort. The difference is a phone list.
I have never been able to make peace with that. I do not think any of us should.
The other half of the problem
Now turn the thing around, because the injustice runs in both directions.
There are trained musicians in every diocese in this country who would gladly serve the Church and have no idea where the work is. Organists who studied for years and now play weddings for strangers because no parish ever called. Singers who can sight-read a Palestrina line and spend their Sundays in the pew, unaware that a parish twenty minutes away has been desperate for them since Advent. Young people finishing degrees in sacred music with real skill and no map at all.
They are not hiding. Nobody has told them where to go.
So we have parishes starving for musicians and musicians starving for parishes, separated by nothing but the absence of a place to find each other. The whole ecosystem runs on email chains, Facebook groups, the diocesan grapevine, and the mercy of whoever happens to know somebody. It is not a system. It is a habit we mistook for a system because it is all we have ever had.
What I built
Cantori is the network that should have existed already.
For directors, it replaces the phone list with something better than a phone list. You search a real roster by voice type, by chant proficiency, by liturgical rite, by how far someone is willing to drive. You find a cantor who has actually sung the Extraordinary Form, or an organist who has actually accompanied a Misa in Spanish, because those are different skills and the search should know that. You hire for a single funeral or for the whole liturgical year. Contracts are digital. Payroll runs through Stripe. The 1099s generate themselves, which means the week in January that you used to lose to a spreadsheet is now a week you spend on the score.
I want to be plain about why the administrative side matters, because it sounds unspiritual and it is not. Every hour a director spends chasing a substitute, reconciling a payment, or rebuilding a schedule after one cancellation is an hour not spent on the music. Multiply that across a year and you have lost a season’s worth of rehearsal to paperwork. The paperwork is not a distraction from the vocation. The paperwork is what is eating the vocation.
For musicians, Cantori is a place to be found. You build a real profile: your voice type, your chant experience, the repertoire you actually know, the rites you have actually served. Directors find you. You get called for Masses, weddings, funerals, and concert work. And you get paid on time, through the platform, instead of chasing a check across three parishes for two months and feeling like a beggar for asking.
For volunteer choirs and scholas, and this is the part I care about most, Cantori gives the same tools without the price of admission. Schedules. Shared sheet music. Attendance. Availability polls that end the group text from purgatory. The volunteer parish schola is the backbone of congregational song in most of the country. It is how the vast majority of Catholics actually hear music at Mass. And until now, nobody had built a single serious tool for it, because there was no money in it. That is precisely why it needed building.
Then there is Aria, our liturgy-aware assistant. Aria helps you plan repertoire for a given celebration, look up Latin diction, and build an outline for a Mass or a service. She is built to consult real sources rather than invent things, which matters more than it might sound. A tool that confidently recommends a motet that does not exist is worse than no tool at all, because it wastes the time of the exact person who has none to spare.
Universal in every sense
One more thing, and for the readers of this blog it may be the most important.
Cantori is not a Traditional Latin Mass tool, even though that is where I serve. It is not a tool for one kind of parish with one kind of budget singing one kind of music.
The platform serves the Ordinary Form and the Extraordinary Form. Anglican Use and the Ordinariate. Episcopal, Lutheran, and Byzantine. It is built to understand the distinctions that matter to each rite rather than flatten them into a generic «church music» category that serves nobody well.
That includes the Spanish-speaking parish, and I do not mean as an afterthought. A director planning a Misa with a coro and a guitar is doing exactly the same work as a director planning a Solemn High Mass with a schola and an organ: choosing music that fits the day, finding people who can sing it, teaching them, paying them, and getting everyone into the church on time. Same craft. Different materials. Both deserve tools that take them seriously.
I speak Spanish. I have watched what happens when a Spanish-language congregation is treated as a secondary program rather than a parish, given the leftover time slot, the leftover budget, and the leftover instruments. Those congregations are often the ones that sing the loudest and want it the most. They are exactly who this is for.
Why I did it
I built Cantori because I have been the director on that Saturday night. Because I run the Marian Institute for Sacred Music, whose whole purpose is serving the parishes this problem hits hardest, and I got tired of teaching people to build programs while the tools they needed did not exist. Because the treasury of the Church’s music is not an heirloom for the parishes that can afford a staff. It belongs to every congregation that wants to sing.
The platform is in beta now at cantori.app (click here). If you are a director at a struggling parish, a musician nobody has called, or a volunteer holding a schola together with a group text and a prayer, I would rather hear from you than from almost anyone.
Come build it with us. The Church’s musicians deserve a network. It is long past time somebody made one.
Guillermo Pasarin is Sacred Music Director and Schola Conductor at Mater Ecclesiae Chapel in Berlin, New Jersey, where he directs the full liturgical year for a Traditional Latin Mass community. His programming spans the breadth of the Church’s treasury: Gregorian chant propers, Renaissance polyphony, and the orchestral Mass settings of Mozart, Haydn, and Palestrina, alongside simpler ordinaries and contemporary sacred works suited to the liturgical moment.
He holds a B.A. in Music Theory and Composition from Westminster Choir College, where he studied composition and counterpoint under Dr. Joel Phillips and served as Chant Master of the Williamson Voices and the Kantorei Early Music Ensemble. For over a decade he has worked as a sacred musician, and for the past five years within the Diocese of Camden, preparing and conducting music for Confirmations, priestly ordinations, Chrism Masses, Solemn High Masses, Requiems, and Triduum services across parishes throughout the region.
Guillermo composes and arranges for schola, choir, organ, and instrumental ensembles. He is Founder and Director of the Marian Institute for Sacred Music, a formation initiative built to deliver workshops, retreats, and hands-on consulting to parishes across South Jersey, specifically those without the budget, staff, or expertise to build a music program alone. He also founded a young organist development program, mentoring emerging church musicians through private lessons and liturgical apprenticeship, and maintains an active private studio in voice, piano, organ, and theory.
He is the creator of Cantori (cantori.app), a platform that connects sacred music directors with the singers, organists, and instrumentalists they need, while handling the administrative work (rosters, scheduling, payment) that keeps directors from doing what they were actually trained to do.
At St. Mary School in Vineland, New Jersey, he teaches K–8 music, directs student choirs for school Masses and theatrical productions, and serves as school-wide Technology Administrator.
Guillermo is fluent in English and Spanish, with reading proficiency in Latin, Italian, and Portuguese. His work, in the chapel, the classroom, and the Institute, is animated by a single conviction: that the Church’s musical treasury belongs to every congregation, and that any parish willing to sing can be taught to sing it well.