Category: Church music

The mixed joys of not joining in

Read Kate’s latest for The Tablet :  The mixed joys of not joining in

The choir summer holiday is coming to an end, and I am really pleased.

Not because I like having to spend time and energy on organising and delivering the music, not because I am looking forward to seeing the choir members back again, not because I am looking forward to making music together and creating something beautiful to the glory of God, though all of these things are true, but because I have been feeling increasingly uncomfortable at Mass on Sunday mornings.

We all know priests are in short supply currently, and this is especially true in the summer months, when they are as entitled to holidays as anyone else. This year our parish reduced its number of Sundays Masses for the summer, and instructed the choirs to take a holiday until September. I actually rather like a spoken Mass for a change, it gives me a different angle of focus. Then one of the church music groups decided that since they were mostly still around, they could do ad hoc music at the one remaining Mass. I’m sure that their motivation was just to improve the service for the Lord and for everyone else, but it’s a style of music with which I am very uncomfortable.  I do happen to know all these hymns, they were new and regarded as exciting when I was a student nearly fifty years ago, but I don’t think they have all worn well; or more accurately, some people love them and find them prayerful and helpful, but not all of us do.

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Corpus Christi Sequence

Corpus Christi this week, and yet another Sequence to handle. So far we’ve treated each recent one differently. At Easter we used Lent to teach the congregation the Victimae paschali (plainchant, in Latin) so we could all sing it together for Easter Sunday. For Pentecost we sang the beloved familiar hymn translation that was printed in the missal (the Holy Spirit Lord of light version).
Corpus Christi has the Lauda Sion Sequence, written by Thomas Aquinas and source of much music over the years, from Cesar Franck’s Panis angelicus to the motet O esca viatorum and lots of loosely attached hymns (O Godhead hid, Godhead here in hiding) and so on.
For unfathomable reasons, our missal books offer the Robert Southwell translation. They admit to altering it, but it is still difficult to read and almost impossible to sing, as they haven’t even pointed out that any past participle ending -ed needs to be read as a separate syllable or it won’t scan or rhyme. We’re not using that one. Instead, I’ve gone for the more familiar translation just of the last four verses (the missal suggests using an abbreviated version), which starts Behold the bread of angels sent. That is easy to find on line. It comes out as five verses to sing. This both rhymes and scans and is comprehensible for both choir and congregation. It is irregular, though, which makes the tune a bit tricky, so we have repeated two lines of text, one in v.3 : O feed us still, still keep us thine, and then the last line of the whole thing : With saints whose dwelling is with thee. If we do this, we can sing it to Conditor alme siderum (Dear maker of the starry skies), which is in the hymn book, known to the choir, and has a beautiful haunting quality which fits the words well.
Apart from that we are singing good relevant hymns that aren’t too difficult for me to play and for the choir to sing without me standing in front of them, as this week is the first under the new dispensation without my organist who has had to retire. We’re starting with See us Lord, about thine altar (tune Drakes Broughton), which is very on theme. Then the Offertory hymn is Lord, accept the gifts we offer (Tantum ergo). There were lots of hymns to choose from for Communion, but I’ve gone for Be still, for the presence of the Lord, because I’m worried that the more traditional ones like Sweet Sacrament divine will slow down too much if I’m not conducting, and it’s much harder to steer with a keyboard than it is with an organ!
We’ll finish with Alleluia, sing to Jesus (Hyfrydol), a great rousing finisher with a verse about the Bread of Angels which all ties in with the earlier references. I’m hoping by then everyone will be singing so enthusiastically that no one will notice my mistakes.
The new Alleluia version and the old Psalm music are on the website, www.musicformass.co.uk If you need our Sequence version or music for the new psalm words, send me an email at singenofbingen@gmail.com and I will send you a pdf. Then it will be back to Ordinary Time for a bit, which will at least simplify things!
Kate Keefe
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