Liturgy and Music: November 2003 Archives

A little news from the moderate-trad front: it's finally happened: a celebration of Mass according to the 1962 Missal in St. Peter's, in connection with a meeting of Una Voce.

The Book of Divine Worship arrived the other day; it's a large and attractively designed volume for the Anglican-use liturgy, including propers for Sundays and Holy Days, formulas for the Daily Office, the Holy Eucharist, the rites of Holy Baptism, Holy Matrimony, and Burial of the Dead; and two versions of the Psalter. It's distributed by "Our Lady's Dowry" in San Antonio.

Thanksgiving Day has an unusual position in the religious life of America: with its lore linked to the settlement in Massachusetts, it is basically a celebration of the country's founding and Protestant heritage. And it's nearly universally observed: the one high holy day of American Protestant communities. Even anti-liturgical fundamentalists who don't believe in holy days can be expected to have a morning service on the fourth Thursday in November. Americanism vincit omnia.

The hymns of Thanksgiving Day just beg to be sung by a confident congregation. Here are two:

(Note: Some of the pages at the following links have embedded music files.)

We gather together
Come, ye thankful people, come

And now, your suggestions?

Well, we survived our concert Saturday night, but it did provide a new "war story".

A few years ago, when I belonged to a 100-voice choir in Boston, the conductor told the group that we should know the piece we were singing well enough, and have a good enough sense of its rhythm, that if she were to fall off the stage, we should just keep going.

She'd even seem to test us sometimes during dress rehearsals by walking to the far end of the hall to check the sound while we continued the piece; and the group was often enough able to do so without a noticeable loss in the piece's execution.

I'm out in the suburbs now, in a different group with a different choral conductor, but finally it's happened for real. On Saturday, we were standing in the Episcopal parish's sanctuary -- and, by the way, have you noticed? they apparently still have altar rails, even in contemporary churches -- doing the last of four variations on Nun komm der Heiden Heiland, when all of a sudden our maestra tumbled off the two wooden boxes that comprised the podium. (The top one had suffered a partial structural failure.) She made a staggering one-foot landing as her music stand went over, and she bravely continued. Alas, the shock disrupted us too much, and she had to restart the movement.

The recording engineer said after the performance, "That one's going onto my blooper reel."

For those of you discouraged by the lack of orthodox content in so many homilies, here is a sign of hope: at a suburban parish today, the young priest celebrating Mass, ordained in 2000, dared to use this explicit terminology:

As we come in a little while to receive our Blessed Lord, let us remember to thank Him for the deposit of faith He has given us through His Church.

Now if we can just bottle that and put it into the water supply at the seminary...

Here's detailed info from the Catholic Encyclopedia.