27th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B, 2009)

Entrance	O Perfect Love
Kyrie	Mass of the Creator Spirit (Ed Nowak)
Gloria	Mass of the Creator Spirit
Psalm	Ps 127 (Monaghan)
Gospel Acclamation	Alleluia Mode 2 (Plainchant)
Preparation of the Gifts	You are the Lord of all (Daniel Bath)
Sanctus, Acclamation, Amen	Eucharistic Acclamations (Bernadette Farrell)
Agnus Dei	Mass of the Creator Spirit
Communion	Bread of Life (Bernadette Farrell)
Postcommunion	Quaerite primum regnum Dei (G.B. Martini 1706-1784)
Recessional	Love divine, all loves excelling

Today’s readings had the theme of marriage, and our opening and closing hymns reflected this. For O Perfect Love we had Sir Richard Terry’s magnificent tune Highwood, which must be the best hymn tune that (almost) no-one ever sings.

Daniel Bath’s superb setting of today’s entrance antiphon, beginning O Lord, you have given everything its place in the world to my mind worked well at the Preparation of the Gifts, where it didn’t need to be well-known and instantly singable, in the way an entrance song might if it is truly to serve the purpose of fostering the unity of those who have been gathered, as GIRM tells us.

Ed Nowak’s Mass of the Creator Spirit is that extraordinarily rare bird, a musical setting that gives the singing assembly its proper role, while offering something genuinely musically challenging and rewarding for an ambitious choir. The Gloria, in particular, fits the bill, and the fiery organ part holds out interesting challenges too. I wish there were more pieces like it.

Martini was Mozart’s teacher, and by all accounts his setting of the Latin text Seek ye first the kingdom of God was proposed by way of a corrective to a more wayward and inspired setting by his teenage pupil. We’ve done Mozart’s version in the past, and we’ll come back to it soon. It’s much the better of the two.