Possibly My Favorite Piece of Holy Season Music (Video)

"Our God, heaven cannot hold him, 

nor earth sustain;

heaven and earth shall flee away

when he comes to reign."

This tops my list of favorite music for the season. Anyone surprised?

Text: Christina G. Rossetti

Music: Gustav Holst

Performed by: Chanticleer

Alleluia! No Joke.

Getting in the Mood for Advent with Not Your Usual Advent Hymn

Hunkering down for this season 

of watching and waiting . . .

Avinu Malkenu: Our Father, Our King...

Recited* on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and 
during the Ten Days of Repentance in between . . .

 

Our Father, our King, hear our voice.
Our Father, our King, we have sinned before you.
Our Father, our King, have compassion upon us and upon our children.

Our Father, our King, bring an end to pestilence, war, and famine around us.
Our Father, our King, bring an end to all trouble and oppression around us.
Our Father, our King, Our Father, our King, inscribe us in the book of (good) life.
Our Father, our King, renew upon us a good year.

Hear our voice.
Hear our voice.
Hear our voice.

*I grew up hearing and chanting this version, but neither our Rabbi nor our Cantor looked or sounded at all like this. Dang!

Ripped-Off from Paul Brian Campbell's Headlines

Seconds Of Beauty - 1st round compilation from The Beauty Of A Second on Vimeo.

60 seconds of beauty submitted by users to the first round of 

The Beauty Of A Second short film contest.

H/T to Paul Brian Campbell, SJ blogging at People for Others. 

3rd Sunday in Advent (2011): Gaudete!

Gaudete!

Couldn't choose, so posting both. Can't have too much gaudete, right? Right!

November 1: All Saints

Ora pro nobis . . . please . . . 

Wedding: Bridezilla

Oh, dear God in heaven, three months until our wedding and I'm turning into Bridezilla -- in my own special way.

Am I getting nuts about the flowers, dress, shoes, or food? No, I am not. I'm becoming a crazy person over . . . the liturgy. Last night's   mini-meltdown was over service music. I truly have absolutely no reason to be surprised by this.

After all, I can play five instruments (badly) and read music (well). My participation in music ministry has included singing in the choir (relatively well). One season with the Westminster (Choir College) Community chorus.

I was raised by classical music snobs who also managed to download Gilbert & Sullivan operettas plus decades of musical theater into my developing skull mush. I was schlepped to Leonard Bernstein's and Thomas Schippers' Young People's Concerts during the late 1950s and early 1960s. With cred like this, who wouldn't be a wreck over the music program for her wedding?

Good news: none of this is being inflicted upon some poor music director. Instead, it's just me and Dan, he with the Episcopal church's 1982 Hymnal on his lap; me with a 2009 edition of Breaking Bread on mine. And conversations that include me asking, with an edge of hysteria in my speaking voice, "What do you mean Episcopalians don't usually have cantors?"

Ah, pre-wedded bliss: an evening sorting through hymns, anthems, and psalm settings. Not like our wedding will include karaoke, but I really want stuff I already know.

This Magnificent Hymn Has Already Made the Cut

Let All Things Now Living

St. Luke's Bottle Band from St. Luke's Lutheran Church in Park Ridge, Illinois is astonishingly awesome. God bless 'em for joyfully making joyful noise since 1979. 

I'm trying to conjure up what an equivalent musical expression might look like at Catholic parish but nothing comes to mind. Is that a good thing or a sad thing?

Countdown to Lent!

I plan to binge on the alleluia

for the next four days.

Care to join me?

Yom Kippur 5771

Kol Nidrei (Moroccan Version)*

Every vow and bond

every oath
every promise
every obligation or every renunciation
between ourselves and God
which we have vowed
which we have sworn
which we have promised
and taken upon ourselves
from the preceding Day of Atonement
unto this Day of Atonement
may it come upon us in peace
All such oaths
all such vows
all such promises
or renunciations
are as if they were not
they shall not be binding
nor shall they have any power

* H/T to chavarim at OneShul for introducing me to this gorgeous rendition of Kol Nidrei

Litany of the Saints

Please join me
in savoring eight minutes and nine seconds away from the ecumenical fray...

Mooning Around Over Corpus Christi

To support your appreciation of Corpus Christi, I encourage you to visit A Concord Pastor who has been posting his typically gorgeous posts about this feast since Friday. Fr. Austin Fleming has accompanied his commentary with audio clips of classics such as Mozart's Ave verum corpus.

But before you hie over there, please keep reading here for background about this thirteenth century feast. I quote, immodestly, from my book, The Catholic Home: Celebrations and Traditions, wherein I explain what was up with a sixteen year old Augustinian nun named Juliana:

For years, she'd had a recurring vision of a full moon, its glowing surface spoiled by a little black spot. What was that mysterious blemish? Eventually, Jesus appeared to explain: The moon represented the Church calendar, the black mark the absence of a joyful feast to honor the Eucharist, and he was choosing Juliana to promote what would become known as the Feast of Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ. By the thirteenth century, this feast had become one of great pomp and circumstance.... (p. 98-99)

No, she did not also come up with Tantum ergo Sacramentum, O Salutaris Hostia, and Panis Angelicus. Those hymns were composed by St. Thomas Aquinas at the request of Pope Urban IV, who put Corpus Christi on the liturgical calendar.

Find a Messiah Sing-Along! Make a Joyful Noise!

It's beginning to sound a lot like Christmas.

No, not around here. Here, I'm still listening to Advent music, which basically means putting O Come, O Come Emmanuel on continuous play. And not at the mall, which I avoid -- can't risk hearing I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.

What sounds like Christmas and welcomed by me during Advent is Handel's oratorio, The Messiah. If I had enough energy and throat lozenges, I could spend almost all next week and weekend participating in The Messiah Sing-Along events.

I'd tote my very own copy of the score. (Note: Makes a great gift, that's how I got mine.) I'd be warmed up from singing along with my current favorite recording. I'd certainly know enough to stand with one ear in the alto section and another with the sopranos for easy access to both. I, for one, do not attempt high octave runs any more.

I'd go even if I couldn't read music or sing tolerably well. I stand by what I wrote in The Catholic Home years ago: "Lip sync if you must, but don't pass up the opportunity to be embraced by what is perhaps the most glorious musical tribute to Jesus the Christ ever written."

What Wondrous Love is This*

What wondrous love is this, O my soul, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this, O my soul!
What wondrous love is this
That caused the Lord of bliss
To bear the dreadful curse for my soul, for my soul,
To bear the dreadful curse for my soul!

*Appalachian Folk Hymn

My Lofty Experience of Singing

Singing this year's Christmas Vigil with a choir turned out to be the healing experience I'd hoped for and clearly needed. How lovely to be so generously invited by a choir director and so warmly welcomed by the regulars. How glorious to sing next to a soprano whose voice transformed the descants into brilliant shooting stars of sound. And on pitch, too!

I was grateful to be standing where I was for another reason. I'd been placed directly across from the Crucifix above the altar -- a presence hovering over Real Presence, and face-to-face with me. Thanks, I needed that.

It doesn't matter whether I'm singing as a parishioner or a choir member, my perspective on the liturgy changes literally and figuratively whenever there's a choir loft in use. In both instances, I'm more focused on what I'm doing, which is praying, whether my voice is floating up or down. This is why I've become such a big fan of choir lofts. Too bad they've been ditched by church building committees.

A liturgist I know says this relatively recent development in church architecture is as much about economics and acoustics as it is about inviting the pew people to participate. Makes sense, I guess. But now having experienced singing from a loft several times, I've become positively retro on the matter. I'm certainly much better able to appreciate Thomas Day's book, Why Catholics Can't Sing: The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste, first published in 1990 and still brutally hilarious. Note to self: come up with music selections for my Mass of Christian Burial now.

ADVENTure Continues (4th Week)

It's the fourth Sunday in Advent and I'm busy sucking on lemon mint herbal throat lozenges. My throat doesn't hurt, I just like the taste of church music. It's the closest I ever get to synesthesia.

I'm getting ready for Christmas and excited about singing with a choir again. I haven't sung the Christmas Vigil Mass at midnight in years. My reasons?

Quite frankly, I was growing tired of spending Christmas Day wiped out with oratorio-induced adrenal fatigue. While I loved the rush that resulted from hours of singing, I did not love the subsequent crash. Or, for that matter, the time tripping. It's one thing to stay up all night at home, wandering around in flannel jammies and eating pretzels. It's quite another to begin peeling off pantyhose, swabbing off make-up, and chowing down a full meal at 2:30 AM. Plus, I couldn't help but notice that prayer was slowly being eclipsed by performance.

The lemon mint herbal throat lozenges that had once tasted like hymns, anthems and psalms, started tasting bitter. And so, I opted out and focused on making a joyful noise unto the Lord in my acoustically superior shower stall.

Whenever I think that healing happens in the strangest ways, I remind myself that nothing is impossible -- or strange -- for God. In June, I participated in a Gregorian chant and polyphony workshop. Last month, I went to lots of funerals and sang everything, including whatever the Cantor was offering up.

At one funeral, the healing mercy of God appeared to my right in the form of a former choir mate, one whose voice is like molten gold with threads of silver and flashes of sapphire. By the Alleluia, we were one voice interwoven and lifted in prayer. Shortly thereafter, I realized that singing with others was, for me, an essential spiritual practice. As for singing Christmas Vigil, this seems like the perfect time to celebrate birth as well as resurrection. Gloria in excelsis deo, et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis!