Music for Sunday 4 March 2012

Readings for the week can be found here, and the psalm will be sung to the setting in Respond & Acclaim.

The service setting will be as follows:

Kyrie: Troped, with Kyrie Firmator Sancte as a response.
Trisagion: Plainsong
Sanctus, acclamations, Agnus Dei: Parish Eucharist -- Michael Dudman

Hymns as follows:

Introit: Lent Prose [verse 2]
Sequence: Have faith in God, my heart [619]
Offertory: How good, Lord, to be here [234]
Communion: Behold the Lamb of God [705]

The spill

He says she can't win an election.

She says he ran an untidy cabinet.

Someone else reckons she made him dump the policy that put the knife in his back.

Others reckon it would be better to wipe out the party rather than change leaders.

Most of the citizenry reckon something dastardly happened in June 2010.

The media is happy, because people are suddenly paying attention to what they say -- even if it is to run it down at the same time.

Meanwhile, the world turns and life carries on.  The only thing we can be certain of is that the sideshow will keep going too.

Music for Sunday 26 February

Readings for the week can be found here, and the psalm will be sung to the setting from Respond & Acclaim.  This is proving a very useful source of psalm settings -- my cantors are thriving with it, and the congregation seems to enjoy the settings.  Yes, it's a bit monotonous in style, but there are far worse collections out there.

The service setting will be drawn from various sources.  For the confession we're doing a troped Kyrie through Lent, and building our repertoire of items for this by introducing the Kyrie Firmator Sancte.  In place of the Gloria we will be singing the Trisagion to a simple tone.  And for the rest it's Michael Dudman's Parish Eucharist (Together in Song, 756).

Hymns are as follows:

Introit: Lent Prose (verse 1)
Sequence: Forty days and forty nights [591]
Offertory: Now is the healing time decreed [tune 245]
Communion: Among us and before us, Lord [259

Music for Ash Wednesday

Lent is nearly upon us, and it seems to come around sooner than one expects each year.

Readings for Ash Wednesday can be found here, and the psalm will be sung using the setting in Respond & Acclaim.  There's a troped Kyrie and a new Trisagion that'll be following us through the coming season, as well as parts of Michael Dudman's Parish Eucharist (Together in Song, 756).  Hymns are as follows:

Introit: Lent Prose (verse 1)
Offertory: Now is the healing time decreed [tune: Fulda, 245]
Communion: Be thou my guardian and my guide [tune: Abridge, 35]

This is a good one

Music for Sunday 19 February 2012

Readings for the week can be found here, and the psalm will be sung to the setting in Respond & Acclaim.

The setting will be Philip Mathias's Christ Church Mass (Together in Song, 757).  Hymns are as follows:

Introit: Almighty God, lift up our eyes [615]
Sequence: O Christ, the healer, we have come [638]
Offertory: Hallelujah! sing to Jesus [517]
Communion: Let all mortal flesh keep silence [497]

And so it begins again

You know the year is truly under way when the school term picks up from the summer break.  I've often had to explain to people that January in Australia is the equivalent of August in Europe: everything stops, and people go on holiday (and vice versa, depending on the hemisphere in which you find yourself).  In Melbourne, the summer slowdown really begins after Cup Day in early-November, and things remain quiet until Australia Day.

I'm one of those people who don't really know how to have the sort of holidays that involve lolling around on the beach and completely disconnecting from everything.  I find that if I try to stop I get bored very quickly and start fidgeting.  It's been a novelty to work in situations where I'm expected to take annual leave, so I had two weeks out at the end of January.  I made a couple of decisions to help make the time off beneficial.  Having some routines of quiet time gave rhythm to the day, not opening Publisher (temptation to do work), only using the computer to check email, google reader, and the news headlines, doing a bit of reading off my established tracks (of which more anon), watching the ABC iView repeats of the revived Dr Who series, getting back into swimming, not to mention quite a few long-deferred tasks around the house, meant that there was some consistency to the active parts of the day, while making sure there was an adequate balance of inactivity.

I haven't really had sustained time off like this since before moving to the current digs, so it was good to have the time to explore the local area a little more.  There are some surprising cafes within walking distance; gentrification is making its way to this part of the world, if slowly.

Still, coming back to the regular routine feels more like having a rest than being on holiday.

Last year I spent two nights a week conducting for the Australian Youth Choir.  It's work that I find stimulating, as it is a different level of discipline in how one plans and operates in the rehearsal room.  Having spent much of my time conducting adult choirs in the past, having to teach primary school-aged singers puts a different slant on how to present and teach repertoire.

This year I've cut back to one night per week.  Given that I now have a full load of daytime work, there needed to be some adjustment as one of the nights I was working last year involved a long commute to the outer south-eastern suburbs.  After moving out of South Yarra the drive became even longer.  So now I'm only conducting in one centre, which is enough to keep my skills up while making room for other things I have to do during the week.

One of the blunt pieces of advice I was given when I started at the Australian Youth Choir was that the attrition rate is high.  When I started in 2010, my centre was one of the largest in the state, with an unusually large group of first year choristers.  In 2011 about half of that group returned, and of those, only three or four haven't carried on in 2012.  Now I have an unusually large group of third year choristers -- 20 -- including quite a few surprise returnees.  At the first rehearsal last week I had a good number of parents say how much their children had been looking forward to coming back.


The repertoire is more interesting than last year.  There's smatterings of folk song arrangements, a bit of Simon & Garfunkel, and more to come (so we're told).  Only two concerts this year, which is OK, provided we're allowed to use the curriculum without the same limitations as last year.  To be fair about that, 2011 was the first year of having a chorister portal on the AYC website where parents could download worksheets, newsletters, diary notes, and various other bits and pieces.  Hopefully things will run more smoothly on that front this year.  Concert venues are still in the process of confirmation, but the word is that the AYC end-of-year concert will be one of the first events in the reopened Hamer Hall.

Music for Sunday 12 February

Readings for this week can be found here (follow the Catholic options), and the psalm will be sung to the setting in Respond & Acclaim.

There are a couple of minor differences to the usual pattern, as the Sudanese congregation is combining with the regular crew at All Saints this week.  The setting will be Philip Mathias's Christ Church Mass (Together in Song, 757), with the Gloria sung to a setting from Taize.

Hymns are as follows:

Introit: From all who dwell below the skies [72]
Sequence: Take my life, and let it be [599 ii]
Offertory (St George's only): Among us and before us, Lord, you stand [259]
Communion:  He became poor that we may be rich [721]

Offertory music will be provided by the Sudanese community at All Saints.

Another twenty years on moment

With thanks to Louisa.

A little while ago I wrote here about Holy Trinity, Benalla.  While that was a decisive experience, it was a passing one, as my family moved to Melbourne a few months later.

Where Benalla provided a really strong stimulus to regular involvement in the life of the parish, backed up with quite a remarkable standard of worship, it was St Peter's, Eastern Hill, that really formed my outlook as an Anglican.  It was here that I encountered some of the continuing strands of my life for the first time -- rich worship, high musical standards, an expectation that parish activities should be life-enhancing.

I was a regular parishioner at St Peter's for about ten years, and have turned up there on and off in the intervening decade.  I was part of the servers guild for a while, doing duty on Sundays and Tuesday evenings, and later as assistant organist.  When I first arrived, my regular seat was in the place no self-respecting Anglican would willingly occupy -- front row on the right hand side.

I went through my teens in the parish, and there were quite a few people who encouraged (or suffered) me -- among the dead, I think here of Ted and Mary, a wonderfully devout and quirky couple who had no end of interest in what I was reading, thinking, or observing.  Then there was the head server who inducted me into the mysteries of carrying a banner without knocking into the front of the gallery, which way a figure-eight procession should turn on a festival (as distinct from a penitential procession, which goes the opposite way), how to handle books, cruets and lavabo dishes, the correct manner in which to genuflect -- all the stuff that goes into being an effective liturgical factotum.  His phrase to cover all degrees of impertinence or disorganized thinking was "now don't go jumping the gun like that," delivered in a truly mouthwatering Yorkshire accent.  Everything I learned about serving in the sanctuary became high-level insider knowledge when I migrated to the organ gallery.

It takes all types to make a church.  I met most of them -- ranging from the desperately solemn to the seriously funny, down to the simply crazy.  Perhaps the most inscrutable of these to me was the Anglo-Papalists, a strange band who found it difficult to avoid constantly crossing Gisbourne Street, which does duty for both the Tiber and the Thames in Melbourne.  Some would take alternate weeks serving at St Peter's and not serving at St Patrick's.  One or two made the jump and converted, only to return later on before disappearing again.  I often wondered why this was so, until I saw what went on over the way.  Poor St Patrick's Cathedral comes across like an outpost of Sydney Anglicanism compared to the spike shop over the road.

St Peter's has figured in my research, as well.  My masters thesis looked at A.E.H. Nickson, which meant I had a deeper engagement with the historical forces acting on the parish ethos.  It was an element of connecting with St Peter's in a new way, since I'd left the place a few years beforehand to become assistant organist at Christ Church, South Yarra.  Part of that initial leave-taking was going 'cold turkey,' picking up on the different ethos at CCSY.  St Peter's was the place to which I turned when things were difficult at Christ Church, Brunswick, and it became a temporary staging post before I came to my present work in the Anglican Parish of Jika Jika.

Hitting 20,000

During the last twenty four hours some lucky soul became the 20,000th viewer of these pages.

It's not that long ago since there were 10,000 views...

Music for Sunday 5 February 2012

Readings for the week can be found here, and the psalm will be sung to the setting in Respond & Acclaim.

The service setting will be Philip Matthias's Christ Church Mass (Together in Song, 757).  Hymns are as follows:

Introit: God of mercy, God of grace [452]
Sequence: O God of love, whose heart is ever yearning [614]
Offertory: Where cross the crowded ways of life [608]
Communion: Here, gracious Lord, we see you face to face [516]