I’ve written about Lent Gospel Acclamations before, those little tags we use during Lent to replace the Alleluias before the Gospel. I feel prophetic, because the main message of my first blog about them was about how they always manage to creep round and bite you when you aren’t looking, and here we go again.
with Lent Gospel Acclamations, nowhere is safe
I have spent a lot of time on them over the last several years, trying to make sure we have all the versions and that the words are correct. They cause an astonishing amount of trouble for something so short and repetitive, and this is why I had to deal with the topic more than once. Here’s the back catalogue : a general introduction and attempt at explanation here and the update for when I realised there was more stuff that I hadn’t covered there.
…but this year it’s going to be different
This year (since Advent 2024) we have the New Lectionary, and all the previous work no longer fits the changed words. So far this only affects England and Wales, so all the other versions are still valid. The UK ones simply no longer correspond with what people have in their new Missals and Mass books, and this is no good if we’re priding ourselves on being word-perfect with the Lectionary. The changes are often quite minor, and they are often not an improvement, but they regularly alter the rhythm and stresses of the words of the Gospel verses. The big consolation, however, is that these are not part of the US copyright on the psalms, so we are allowed to share our music for them with anyone else who wants to be able to sing them (as we are encouraged to do by the rubric, but you’d never guess it from the chosen texts themselves).
Volmar the Vebmeister and I trying to subdue a Lent Gospel Acclamation
One feature of the New Lectionary is that it no longer seems to have alternative verses for the Lent Gospel Acclamations/Alleluia verses. I suspect this is a question of space, because the new translation is much longer and wordier than the old version, but it does mean that I have just had enough time to do a full set of the Lent Gospel Acclamations for Year C as Lent begins.
Shape and structure
The Lent Gospel Acclamations are made up of two parts, the top-and- tail (the bit that would be Alleluia on a non-Lent Sunday), and the Gospel verse. This has not changed. However, where we had four possible options before, for the top-and-tail, we now have eight. I haven’t yet had time to set all of them, so I’ve simply done the ones that turn up week-by-week in the Missal for this Lent, Year C. I have been careful to keep them all in the same key, though, and they are modular, so if you want your choir or congregation to stick with just one, it’s perfectly easy to keep to the same top-and-tail and just drop in the different verses each week. If you need an easily printed pdf of a changed version, just email me (singenofbingen@gmail.com) and I can send it to you, thanks to my brilliant music software (thank you, Musescore) and the equally brilliant son who found it for me (thank you, sweetie).
Lent Gospel Acclamations refusing to come quietly
We’re still trying to work out how to be able to post the new versions of the psalms which we are all having to cope with, but here at least is the list of the Lent Gospel Acclamations for the next few weeks. We will add as we get more done, but hope that at least these will help. Have a happy Lent and keep singing.
With Lent come the Lent Gospel Acclamations, the replacement for the usual Gospel Acclamation. For the rest of the year the Gospel Acclamation has only one word (Alleluia, but I admit that it is repeated) and lots of tunes; the Lent Gospel Acclamation has several different forms of words, each of which has only one tune (in my settings anyway, although the verses are obviously all different, because they are different words; – but see below).
How many different Acclamations?
Each country-group has its own set of possible Lent Gospel Acclamations, so we have lots of them to deal with, and this is why it can sound confusing. But most of you only need to worry about one country’s-worth of them. I wrote about them exhaustively and extensively last year, and I still agree with everything I said then, but there was a bit of unfinished business.
Two new kids on the block
Last year I discovered that there were two more that I hadn’t set, only too late to set them; but luckily this year, I noticed in time. So here are two new Acclamations for the US and Canada this year. As I explained in my previous blog on Lent Gospel Acclamations, they are tricksy things,
Volmar and I struggling to get to grips with the Lent Gospel Acclamation
so I wasn’t surprised to find I’d nearly missed them again. The musical undergrowth is lush at this time of year, and they find it easy to lurk undetected. In my defence, I should add that these two new ones were over a page turn, are not actually used in any of the week-by-week Mass settings, are only for the US and Canada, and are additions to a stable of six variants already. I’m not sure whether any congregation actually sings all the different LGAs. However, just in case there is anyone out there who would like to, I wanted to give you the full set. So I have set the last two. And there are versions in the keys of both F and G, just in case.
you always need the full set…just in case
When they might be useful
The words are: Marvel(l)ous and great are your works, O Lord! (LGA 7) and Salvation, glory, and power to the Lord Jesus Christ! (LGA 8). They are very much in the same vein as the other Lent Gospel Acclamations, and as I said, they don’t get offered as standard top-and-tail in any of the Lent Sundays. But the Lent Acclamations are modular (like the Alleluias, mostly), so you can slot them in or out depending on whether they fit the sense better, or resonate with one of the readings, or your congregation just likes them (if only we regularly got that sort of feedback…..). Bear in mind that LGA 8 is the only Acclamation that starts on an unstressed syllable, so this will affect coming in in the first place as well as picking it up again after the Gospel verse. The congregation might appreciate a wave from you even more than usual. Think of it like a Response that starts with ‘The’.
People having a great time singing Lent Gospel Acclamations
For special occasions
I’ve used them with a couple of standard Sundays (3rd and 4th Sundays for example) just to show how they work, but the words feel a bit more triumphant than some of the other Acclamations, so I thought they might come in useful for the feasts which (can) occur in Lent, like St Joseph on March 19th and the Annunciation (those are sound-links to the CAN versions), which gets moved if it falls in Holy Week, but not if it’s earlier in Lent. So you will also find them there. I think it’s quite a good idea to have something different for the feasts, so long as you have enough people to sing it back to you on what will be a weekday Mass. And they are really easy to pick up and sing, so even if you don’t use them very often, they can come in as an occasional variant, to keep everyone interested. Acclamations shouldn’t be entirely routine, that’s why they have an exclamation mark after them.
Lent Gospel Acclamations and following a thread
It is interesting to compare what you might call the narrative arc of the Lent Gospel Acclamations for any given year in the three cycles. For the first two weeks of Lent, they are the same across Years A, B and C. The first one is Jesus’ answer to the devil in the desert, when he is offered bread while he is fasting : No one lives on bread alone but on the word of God. This is a shoo-in for the First Sunday of Lent, helping us to focus our minds on the season. The Second Sunday of Lent has as its Gospel the event of the Transfiguration in the various accounts (Year A Matthew, Year B Mark, Year C Luke, John does not retell the story), and the Gospel verse is taken from that: From the shining cloud the Father’s voice is heard : This is my son, listen to him.
Transfiguration with helpful sign language captions
Many threads in a pattern
From the third week of Lent it gets more complicated. This is partly because it is possible to use the Year A readings regardless of the canonical year, as the Scrutinies for those preparing for Baptism at the Vigil are celebrated in the next three Sundays. Year A has the encounter of Jesus with the woman at the well, with all the discussion about living water, so it is easy to see why this might be regarded as especially relevant, and the Gospel Acclamation here is the woman’s acceptance : Lord, you are truly the Saviour of the world. From this Third Sunday, however, the LGAs have different narrative arcs, so I want to look at them separately year by year.
a different sort of narrative ark, more like a space ship
Week by week, year by year
In Year A, the week after the living water, we have ‘I am the light of the world’ and then ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ in Week 5, so the tone is always positive, in contrast to some of the other readings. In Year B, there is more emphasis on sacrifice, with both the third and fourth week using John 3.16 (God so loved the world) as the Acclamation with an optional variant in the UK Lectionary of ‘I am the resurrection’. It’s quite unusual to repeat a Gospel Acclamation from week to week, though it does happen occasionally; and it means the bishops really want us to think about this one. I’ve done a couple of versions so that (the next time we are singing Year B ) you can vary it or keep it identical if you wish so as not to be a distraction.
another gorgeous ark, signifying distraction
This year (Year C)
Year C, our current year [2019], has an elegant trajectory, which is why I started thinking about this in the first place. All the Gospels are from Luke, except for Fifth Sunday, and his account is known as ‘the Gospel of Mercy’. What is the tone of the Acclamation verses for Lent in Year C, Luke’s year? After the first two Sundays, which are the same across all three years, we have ‘Repent, says the Lord, the kingdom of heaven is at hand’ and the parable of the fig tree for Third Sunday. The following week, we have the story of the prodigal son, and the Acclamation verse is taken from the Gospel : ‘I will arise and go to my father’. In the fifth week we have John’s story of the woman taken in adultery (only found in John’s Gospel), and the Acclamation is a beautiful, incredibly appropriate verse from Joel :’Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart, for I am gracious and merciful’ (there’s a UK possible alternative ‘Seek good and not evil’, but I would choose the Joel verse myself). Each week we have a different angle on repentance leading to loving forgiveness and reconciliation.
Lovely dynamic prodigal son’s return
Every word counts
So even in this tiny element of the Mass, the words of the Lent Gospel Acclamation develop the themes and messages of the readings week by week. The Acclamations introduce the Gospel and sometimes literally come out of it, but they are certainly meant to make us go more deeply into it. The top-and-tail words that we all sing are to wake us up, punctuate the movement of the liturgy and make us pay attention to the Gospel itself; but it’s also worth noting exactly what the verse says. I try not to make the music move too fast nor go too high in the Gospel verses, because it’s essential that the cantor gets the words across at their first (and only) hearing . Try and make them clear. And if you’re part of the main congregation, think of the old way we used to be taught how to cross the road. The slogan then was : Stop – look – listen. Now at Mass, we could rephrase it as : Stand – sing – listen. The words are worth it.
