And angels too

Happy Michaelmas.

To my northern hemisphere friends, best wishes for the start of term...

Harp and organ

Two windows from St Stephen's, Richmond.

Music for Sunday 2 October

Readings for the week can be found here, and the psalm will be sung to Anglican chant.

Music at St George's and All Saints will be (mostly) the same.  The Kyrie will be taken from John Merbecke's setting, with a Gloria from Taize.  The rest of the service will be Philip Matthias's Christ Church Mass (Together in Song, 757).

Hymns are as follows:

Introit: Christ is the world's light [246]
Sequence: I danced in the morning when the world was begun [242]
Offertory: The God who set the stars in space [The link may take a minute or two to load]
Communion: In God alone my soul (Taize)

Music for Sunday 25 September 2011

This week the parish is keeping St Michael and All Angels.  Readings can be found here, following the Roman options, and I posted the response to the psalm setting here.

The first part of the setting will be the Kyrie from John Merbecke's The Prayer Booke Noted, along with a Gloria from Taize.  The remainder of the setting will be Philip Mathias's Christ Church Mass [Together in Song, 757].  Hymns as follows:

Introit: Christ, the fair glory of the holy angels [tune: Christe Sanctorum -- TIS 246]
Sequence: Now to the Lord a noble song [113, tune: Melcombe -- TIS 213 ii]
Offertory: Crown him with many crowns [228]
Communion: Come let us join our cheerful songs [204]

There will be a communion anthem at St George's, and again at All Saints:
Angels ever bright and fair -- Georg Frederick Handel

Something for a coming feast

St Michael and All Angels is coming up, and I haven't been able to find a suitable setting of the psalm for that day anywhere.

Here's a little gift for those in the same boat.  I composed this setting of the antiphon a couple of years ago, and it doesn't make me shift with embarrassment after all that time.

The images below are provided for anyone to use, so long as the composer is properly acknowledged.

Full music

Melody for pew sheet

As I didn't compose a tone for the verses (so much to do, so little time!), and because I don't want to get tied up with potential copyright difficulties, you'll have to source a tone in D major and point your own text.  I'd suggest using a tone from the St Meinrad Archabbey, and taking the text for Psalm 138.1-5(-6) from the Psalter of your choice.

Music for Sunday 18 September 2011

This week the parish is keeping St Matthew.  Readings can be found here, and the psalm will be sung to Anglican chant.

The setting will be Philip Mathias's Christ Church Mass (Together in Song, 757), along with the Kyrie from John Merbecke's setting and a Gloria from Taize.  Hymns are as follows:

Introit: Your hand, O God, has guided [456]
Sequence: Master, speak, thy servant heareth [597]
Offertory: Dear Father, Lord of humankind [598]
Communion: Bless the Lord, my soul [706]

Something I discovered on the way to the northern suburbs

Yesterday marked a bit of a threshold.  After six weeks of getting fed up with the capricious vagaries of real estate agents (ahem, property managers), then going through the turmoil of packing everything up and endless trips between dwellings to clear out the last bits, it's finally done.  The old apartment has been handed back to the landlord, after a frantic week of cleaning.

I lived along the Punt Road corridor in South Yarra for the last eleven years.  Having now become a northern suburbs local, there are a few things I've discovered.

The air is clearer.

There is less grime.  The fridge was a complete mess when it arrived at the new place: not so much whitegoods as greygoods.

It gets dark at night.  And quiet.  I've finally stopped having weird dreams after a week of dark, silent nights.

I have half of a functioning desk, after a fashion.  Working at it is a feat of gymnastic skill.

Sitting on a chair with castors takes considerable art in a house without carpet.  It's a bit like random dodgem cars.  As the boxes get cleared away there's less of a bumper zone behind the chair; I fully expect to have mastered breaking by the time the wall is the only thing left to hit.

Re-sorting my books is going to take a while.  My library falls into three broad categories, and the picture above shows the musicology section.  I did a lot of pre-sorting when I packed the books up, and now I'm organising things more firmly.  With any luck, I'll know where just about everything is when it's done.

Getting to and fro now requires planning.  Normally I'm very organised about leaving the house at a reasonable time to make it to the destination early, but the last week has been a complete shambles in that direction.

It still takes twenty minutes to get to the nearest freeway -- exactly the same time as it did in South Yarra, but covering roughly twice the distance.

Camping out of boxes is exhausting.  At the age of 12 it's an adventure, but twenty years later it gets very boring very quickly.

Mastering a new kitchen is a tedious process.  Once I've got the five essential base recipes working again I'll be able to go a little more experimental.  On the upside, there's a dishwasher (yay!).

Not having upstairs neighbours is....quiet.  It's surprising how you get used to hearing people walking around on the floor above.

Finding a decent local coffee shop will be a major project.  There is definitely a market opening for an interesting cafe to the north of Preston.

Tomorrow I have a morning free, and the sky promises to be clear.  Perhaps I'll get the bike out and start figuring out how to get to work.

Music for Sunday 11 September 2011

This has been an unusually difficult week for which to choose hymns, given that the tenth anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York fall on the day.  Providentially, the priest at Jika Jika has decided to keep the Exaltation of the Holy Cross this week, which provides a few themes to move along.  There are a number of other initiatives around for the anniversary, including a page of resources on Text Week and Awareness Sunday publishes a variety of materials for liturgical use.

Readings for this week can be found here, following the Roman options, and the psalm will be sung to this setting.

The service setting will be Philip Matthias's Christ Church Mass, with a Taize setting replacing the Gloria at All Saints.

Hymns are as follows:

Introit: Lift high the Cross [351]
Sequence: In the cross of Christ I glory [349]
Offertory: God, we've known such grief and anger [tune: Cross of Jesus, 136]
Communion: And now, O Father, mindful of the love [519]

A song for Julia Gillard

Why the current government allowed itself to be shanghied by the opposition's humanly and intellectually incoherent stance on refugees arriving by boat is a question that defies all explanation.  The finding from the High Court last week simply underlines the arid worldview that has led the Prime Minister to defy even her own party's policy platform, which clearly favors onshore administration of asylum claims.

So far, the best moment in the rather breathless slather of press coverage was Tony Abbott offering to help the government legislate the Opposition's policy into place.  If you ever needed proof that the Liberals are being led by a complete stranger to the world of reality (as commonly accepted), there you have it.  Attempting to enact party policy in a permanent way when out of government is quite bold, even if the government has ended up capitulating to it anyway.

It's all a bit baffling, like the plot of an opera buffa or a court maske.  Which leads me to a musical free association that occurred to me while walking down the street today.

Nobody knows precisely why Dido fades out in Purcell's magnificent opera, although she does it with undeniable style.  In the modern setting, she'd probably find another boy to get infatuated with and carry on carrying on while carping about the iniquities of the male race.  Or, maybe, as a head of government (Queen of Carthage, after all!) she'd work on social policy and get hefty on border protection while wafting rhetorical nothings about people who set their alarm clocks in order to be up and ready for work three hours before they go to bed.

Anyhow, here's the result of my free association game from this afternoon.

Remember Ansett?

I only flew with Ansett once, in 1987, on a family holiday to Tasmania.

It is now ten years since the airline folded.

My, how time flies.

The Move: First Chunk

Moving house is a process that takes rather a long time.  In the space of a month, we've received notice about vacating, and through the process of finding somewhere to live, we've been living in a house that's gradually filled up with boxes.  We signed a lease on the new place last week, gave notice to the old property manager the same day and got started on scheduling the piano mover, general removalist, and figuring out a strategy to get the whole thing done quickly and without running up against avoidable hitches.

Today we took the first step of relocating.  All the books are off the shelves, and I discovered that we have around a ton of books (literally: upwards of 100 boxes, each one weighing around 10kg).  Two large van loads of boxes has given the old place a feeling of spaciousness it hasn't had since around the time we moved in.  The new place is now slowly filling up with boxes.  I've just packed half the kitchen in anticipation of taking it across in the morning.

Tomorrow will be a lighter day, partly because of work in the morning and a general feeling that enough has been achieved already.  Rather than the three big loads (two in a hired van, one in the car) we carried today, it might be two at most.  A good deal of the day might well be spent packing up little bits and pieces.  In any event, that will be the end of the first chunk.

We will be fully resident in the new house sometime during next week, depending on how we go with the removalists, connecting up utilities, and all the other small-but-vital things that go into winding down one house and fully engaging the new one.

New views

It is said that the average house search lasts around six weeks.  I'm glad to say it's taken rather less than that for me in the end.

Having gone through the hassle of losing half the weekend to house hunting over the last month, it will be a relief to spend the next weekend starting to move various bits and pieces to my new abode.  I will be looking at the city from another angle; indeed, from the northern suburbs it looks a little bit like the place Dorothy traveled to in that movie.  The new location is certainly a welcome change of scene from where I've lived for the last fifteen years or so.