Music for Sunday 13 February

Well, week one of the second year of the parish youth choir went well enough.  Everyone has come back refreshed and ready for another year of work.  The adults who worked through the summer made a good sound as well.  It's been good to have the opportunity to do some intensive work with the older singers over the summer, and the results do show.

Readings for the week are linked here, and the psalm setting we're using will be found here.  The Chabanel Project also include practice tracks of some of their settings, and you can hear the one for this week here.  Naturally, a performance by Australian Anglicans will be somewhat different from the efforts of earnest American Catholics...

The mass setting will be Philip Mathias (Together in Song, 757), the last time this setting will be used in full until Easter.  Hymns are as follows:

Introit: Christ is the world's true light [238, tune 106]
Sequence: God has spoken by his prophets [158]
Offertory: Christ is the world's light, he and none other [246]
Communion: Take my light, and let it be consecrated, Lord, to thee [599 ii]

There are a few things in the wind for choral developments at All Saints.  I'm hoping the youth choir will get to the stage of being able to sight read effectively (if slowly) by around the end of the Easter season.  To aid this, we're going to work on expanding our repertoire of anthems, and start adding service music.  Over the first three rehearsals for the year we're working on revisiting the material we worked on last year, and starting to push the boat out by working more instensively on solfa and stave reading.  After that, the aim is to produce a communion anthem every two to three weeks.

As they used to say in the days of the wireless: stay tuned.