Music for Sunday 5 September

This week the Anglican Parish of Jika Jika is joining together at St George's, Reservoir.  Sunday will be the first outing of the parish youth choir to this end of the parish, so it will be interesting to see how they respond to singing in a more resonant room, and with a more colourful organ.

We will be promoting the next group of light blue level choristers, a very gratifying sign of progress in the choir.  A Sudanese bishop is visiting the parish on 19 September, so that's when the new head choristers will be installed.  Who would have thought these things would be happening even six months ago?  Still, it's a token of the realities of parish life that someone will find reason to grumble.

The psalm setting for this week is here.

The mass setting will be Philip Mathias's Christ Church Mass (Together in Song, 757).

Hymns for the week are as follows:

Introit: All creatures of our God and King [100]
Gradual: O Jesus, I have promised [595]
Offertory: New every morning is the love [tune: Melcombe, 213ii]
Communion: Praise to the Holiest in the height [141]

The choir will be singing an anthem at communion:

Jesu, joy of man's desiring [from BWV 147] -- J.S. Bach

Because this is a joint parish service, there will be an all-in-one service booklet including the pew sheet and the service in its entirety.  This saves having to shift hymnbooks and service books around the various centres to cover the numbers attending.  One of the quirks I enjoy about being a parish musician is that you get to meet people from all walks of life -- in this case, some quite useful.  It happens that a funeral director joined the choir earlier in the year, and he's kindly arranged to have one-off service books printed in his office under the company's community service program.  To cover the copyright dilemmas thrown up by productions like this, when we print a booklet the hymns are taken from a public domain source.

This raises a slightly related question, one that has often vexed me.  I've never understood the bowdlerisation of many hymns, particularly the excision of the thy form pronouns.  In many hymns the verse often scans badly when thy is transformed to you -- it strikes me as bad aesthetics parading as socially-conscious poetics -- and the effect on the sung word is to make it decidedly pedestrian in a case of language which should be aiming for the transcendent.  We live in a culture that values historical objects, and where canonic ideas still exert a hold on the ways in which we organise and imagine the stuff of our shared artistic experiences.  Some art and poetry needs to be harder work than common conversation in order to be worthwhile, and that includes dealing with archaic language forms.  Why must the language of Charles Wesley's hymns be brought up-to-date when it is precisely his location in history that makes his theology interesting and worthwhile for us moderns?

Anyway, here's the organ music for the week:

Prelude:  Cantilene (Op. 148, 2) -- Josef Rheinberger
Postlude: Praeludium [BuxWV 139] -- Dietrich Buxtehude