4th Sunday of Easter (B), 2009

Entrance	All people that on earth do dwell
Gloria	Mass of the Celtic Saints (Lawton)
Psalm	The stone which the builders rejected (Farrell)
Gospel Acclamation	Eastertide Gospel Acclamation (Farrell)
Preparation of the Gifts	The Lord is my Shepherd (Rutter)
Sanctus, Acclamation, Amen	Mass of the Celtic Saints (Lawton)
Agnus Dei	from Beneath the Tree of Life (Haugen)
Communion	Now we remain (Haas)
Postcommunion	Surrexit Pastor Bonus (Michael Haller, 1840–1915)
Recessional	Hail redeemer, King divine

Plenty of sheep-related material for Good Shepherd Sunday, including rousing hymns at the beginning and the end (We are his folk, he doth us feed, and for his sheep he doth us take on the one hand, Shepherd-King o'er mountain steep, homeward bring the wandering sheep on the other). There was also John Rutter's The Lord is my Shepherd, and Surrexit Pastor Bonus by Haller, with its text from today's Communion antiphon.

Haller was a leading German member of the Cecilian movement, which aimed in the late nineteenth century to restore church music to its supposedly pristine repertoire of plainchant and Renaissance polyphony. The compositions which resulted were mainly backward looking, and are now largely forgotten, but Haller's piece is a charming combination of Renaissance counterpoint and Romantic expression. The mischievous might point out a certain similarity with the nuns' chorus (Morning Hymn and Alleluia) at the beginning of The Sound of Music, but I certainly wouldn't. And besides, the latter is set in an Austrian abbey in 1938, so what else would they have been singing except the music of the Cecilians?

Bernadette Farrell's Gospel acclamation has a refrain with simple singable dignity, but the verses to my mind don't have the staying power to serve well for all the Sundays in Easter time. So we're singing the lectionary verses to a four-part chanted tone, sandwiched by the refrain. Seems to work.