Music for Mass blog

Read Kate’s latest for The Tablet – Lenten Music: deafness, hearing and listening

One of the recurring ways to identify Jesus as the Messiah is the healings he causes to happen as he is going about in Galilee during the brief period of his public life, and we are hearing about some of these in our Lent readings.

They made him both popular with the people and unpopular with the authorities. As the Gospel writers keep pointing out, these cures are what the prophets promised centuries before: “Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing” (Isaiah 35:5) – and if you’re an English singer, that’s the form you remember it in, because Handel set it to music in Messiah, and he used the King James Version. It’s only a piece of recitative, in an oratorio packed with beautiful arias, but it always makes the hair rise on the back of my neck, because it’s so exciting, and the final “So there!” cadence sounds even more of a challenge than usual

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Read Kate’s latest for The Tablet – Light in the darkness: hymns for Ordinary Time.

We are roughly in the middle of the first section of Ordinary Time in the Church’s year at the moment, the first of the two sequences of Sundays that can be expanded or contracted to make sure that the big dates fall at the right time.

The readings in them can be sequential from Sunday to Sunday; the Gospel usually is, but the First and Second readings can dodge around a bit, and the Responsorial Psalm is a reaction to the First Reading, so that too can come from anywhere (including the odd canticle). This first batch of Ordinary Time, after Christmas, before Lent, is much shorter than the second one (after Pentecost, before Advent), and this year it has only five Sundays, with an early Easter; but because the First Sunday of Ordinary Time is always overtaken by the Baptism of the Lord, the count starts at two. And it’s Year A, so the Gospels are mostly Matthew.

Choosing hymns for these Sundays is an interesting job.

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