Music for Sunday 9 May 2010

The Easter season is now beginning to get a bit long in the tooth -- I saw a Catholic priest with traditionalist sympathies complaining in his blog recently about how the Easter season has suffered from new liturgical perspectives.  Feasting is meant to go on for the full fifty days, apparently. I suppose there's only so much seasonally-sanctioned gluttony one person can take.

This Sunday used to be known as Rogation Sunday.  In the last parish I worked for, this was the week for beating the bounds -- or at least making a lot of noise while walking around the block.  It was the closest that staid bunch of suburban Anglo-Catholics get to making a public scene, and when they do it, it can be a very fine thing indeed.  What a pity so few Australian parishes see the point in it.

Another token of the season passing is that the choir has started work on Factus est repente, the communion chant for Pentecost.  I'm using the edition from the American Gradual again, although it's a bit worrying that once things move on into the green part of the year that there's a large part of the cycle still missing from that collection.

Still, this week is where we're at.

Links to the readings can be found here.

We're using Anglican Chant for the psalm.  The setting is a nice D major chant from the Cathedral Psalter by Sir John Stainer, but using the Liturgical Psalter (1977) for the text.  It's much more sympathetic as a singing translation than the inclusive language version of 1995.  Purists might say that the differences are negligible, but there's enough trickiness about it to warrant using the earlier version.

The setting is Philip Mathias's Christ Church Mass.

Hymns for the week are as follows.

Introit: Sing, all creation [61]
Gradual: Christ is made the sure foundation [432]
Offertory: O thou who camest from above [572 ii]
Communion: We plough the fields, and scatter [130]

I mentioned Rogationtide -- the last hymn is a tip of the hat to that.

Organ music at All Saints, well, here's the best guess at what it'll be at this stage:

Prelude: Fantasia Chromatica -- Otto Olsson
Postlude: Fugue [BWV 540] -- J.S. Bach