30th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B, 2012)

Sunday, 28 October 2012

 

Entrance	Praise my soul, the King of heaven
Kyrie	Dinah Reindorf
Gloria	Mass of the Most Sacred Heart (Jacob Bancks)
Psalm	What marvels the Lord worked for us (mcb)
Gospel Acclamation	Here in our Midst (Peter Jones)
Preparation of the Gifts	Cum appropinquaret Iesus (Juan Ginés Pérez, 1548-1600)
Sanctus, Acclamation, Amen	German Mass (Schubert/Proulx)
Agnus Dei	Holy Family Mass (John Schiavone)
Communion	Now in this banquet (Marty Haugen)
Postcommunion	Exsultate Justi (Lodovico Viadana, c.1560-1627)
Recessional	Thou whose almighty word

 

Today’s Gospel reading from Mark tells of the healing of blind Bartimaeus, and our entrance, Communion and recessional songs sang of the same themes, as did our motet at the preparation of the gifts, which took its text from Luke’s version of the same story. Elsewhere, the first reading and the entrance and Communion antiphons told us to shout for joy, so we did, in Viadana’s exuberant setting of Psalm 32(33).

29th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B, 2012)

Sunday, 21 October 2012

 

Entrance	Lord, enthroned in heavenly splendour
Kyrie	Kyrie for 3 voices, adapted from Byrd (mcb)
Gloria	Missa Ubi Caritas (Bob Hurd)
Psalm	May your love be upon us (Daniel Bath)
Gospel Acclamation	Here in our Midst (Peter Jones)
Preparation of the Gifts	The Servant King (Graham Kendrick)
Sanctus, Acclamation, Amen	Missa Ubi Caritas
Agnus Dei	Missa Ubi Caritas
Communion	Father, if this cup (Stephen Dean)
Postcommunion	Crucifixus from the B Minor Mass (J.S. Bach)
Recessional	Christ triumphant, ever reigning

 

Today’s readings speak of Jesus the suffering servant. The Crucifixus from Bach’s Mass in B Minor paints a vivid picture of our Lord’s suffering, both in the pulsing accompaniment and in the melodic strangeness of the contrapuntal entries on the word crucifixus. There’s especial drama, which we tried to bring out, in the arresting homophony on repetitions of the word passus (he suffered). Despite being the briefest miniature from an otherwise epic work, it portrays the suffering of the Passion with stark and beautiful clarity.

28th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Sunday, 14 October 2012

 

Entrance	All my hope on God is founded
Kyrie	Mass of the Creator Spirit (Ed Nowak)
Gloria	Psallite
Psalm	Ps 89 (Stephen Dean/James Walsh)
Gospel Acclamation	Alleluia Mode 2 (Plainchant)
Preparation of the Gifts	Wisdom, come softly (Diane Murden & Martin Barry)
Sanctus, Acclamation, Amen	Mass of Creation (Marty Haugen)
Agnus Dei	Mass of the Creator Spirit
Communion	Centre of my life (Paul Inwood)
Postcommunion	He hath filled the hungry (from Magnificat, Op 69 no 3, Mendelssohn)
Recessional	Forth in the peace of Christ

 

Bekki Gocher and Karen Massey directed the music today. Wisdom, come softly set the text of the first reading, and the excerpt from Mendelssohn’s Magnificat, Op 69, reflected both the Communion antiphon, and our Lord’s strictures in the Gospel reading from Mark concerning rich men, camels, needles and the like.

27th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B, 2012)

Sunday, 7 October 2012

 

Entrance	O perfect love
Kyrie	Mass of the Creator Spirit (Ed Nowak)
Gloria	Psallite
Psalm	Ps 127 (Eugene Monaghan)
Gospel Acclamation	Alleluia Mode 2 (Plainchant)
Preparation of the Gifts	You are the Lord of all (Daniel Bath)
Sanctus, Acclamation, Amen	Mass of Creation (Marty Haugen)
Agnus Dei	Mass of the Creator Spirit
Communion	How good is the Lord (mcb)
Postcommunion	Oculi Omnium (Charles Wood, 1866-1926)
Recessional	Love divine

 

Similar musical fare to the same day three years ago, but with both Charles Wood’s serene anthem, and my simple Communion processional song (both drawn from Ps 144(145)) reflecting the text of the Communion antiphon:

The Lord is good to those who hope in him,
to the soul that seeks him.

26th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B, 2012)

Sunday, 30 September 2012

 

Entrance	Bring to the Lord a glad new song (Perry/Parry)
Kyrie	(Dinah Reindorf)
Gloria	Psallite Mass
Psalm	Ps 18 (McCarthy/Bévenot)
Gospel Acclamation	Alleluia Mode 2 (Plainchant)
Preparation of the Gifts	Where your treasure is (Marty Haugen)
Sanctus, Acclamation, Amen	Mass of Creation (Marty Haugen)
Agnus Dei	from No Greater Love (Michael Joncas)
Communion	Teach me, O God (Christopher Walker)
Postcommunion	Laudate Nomen Domini (Christopher Tye)
Recessional	O Jesus, I have promised

 

Today’s Entrance Antiphon, from the Prayer of Azariah in the book of Daniel, includes the words

But give glory to your name
and deal with us according to the bounty of your mercy.

We took up the theme of praise of the Lord’s name in our postcommunion piece adapted from Tye’s Actes of the Apostles of 1553. The tortuous journey from Tye’s own doggerel to mongrel Latin text (by way of O come, ye servants of the Lord) is chronicled in this interesting piece.

For us it was actually a last-minute substitution: we had rehearsed my adaptation of Rachmaninov’s Khvalite Imya Gospodne from the Vespers. (The ‘adaptation’ consisted in shrinking it down to seven parts and translating the text from Ps 134(135) into Latin; we sang it once for a wedding, for a bride who’d evidently seen My Best Friend’s Wedding.) Finding ourselves unexpectedly understaffed for seven parts, I reached into the cupboard and found Tye’s piece, opening with the same words, which we already knew from having sung it many times in Advent to the words Rorate Caeli.

The second reading from St James sounded a gory warning for the rich. We turned to the rather more irenic setting of our Lord’s words from the Gospels, paraphrased by Marty Haugen:

Where your treasure is, there your heart shall be.
All that you possess will never set you free.
Seek the things that last; come and learn from me:
where your treasure is your heart shall be.

25th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B, 2012)

Sunday, 23 September 2012

 

Entrance	Be thou my vision
Kyrie	(Dinah Reindorf)
Gloria	Psallite
Psalm	Ps 53 (Laurence Bévenot)
Gospel Acclamation	St Agatha Alleluia (mcb)
Preparation of the Gifts	Make me a channel of your peace
Sanctus, Acclamation, Amen	Mass of Creation (Marty Haugen)
Agnus Dei	from No Greater Love (Michael Joncas)
Communion	In the Lord (Taizé) (alternative words by Paul Inwood)
Postcommunion	Cantique de Jean Racine (Gabriel Fauré, 1845–1924)
Recessional	O God our help in ages past

 

Today’s second reading, from St James, speaks of peace:

Peacemakers, when they work for peace, sow the seeds which will bear fruit in holiness.

We sang Sebastian Temple’s much loved setting of the text often known as the Prayer of St Francis, but which actually seems to have been first published in 1912 in France. As a child in school I remember singing it with the section beginning O master, grant that I may never seek… used as a refrain separating the verses. In recent hymn books that section is usually labelled verse 3, with the first two verses sung in succession before it. I like it better with the recurring refrain, and I’m pleased that the version we sang today – William Llewellyn’s arrangement from the RSCM collection Sing with all my soul takes the same view.

We haven’t sung the Angus Dei from Michael Joncas’s collection No Greater Love for two or three years. Its verses, drawn from 1 Corinthians 10, John 6 and the Didache, are (I imagine) out of line with the prescriptions regarding sticking to the text, which accompanied the introduction of the new translation of the Missal last year. So we confined ourselves to three repetitions of the strong and memorable refrain, with just a bar in between on the organ to catch one’s breath. I thought it worked well.

24th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B, 2012)

Sunday, 16 September 2012

 

Entrance	Praise to the holiest
Kyrie	Kyrie Litany for Lent from Missa Ubi Caritas (Bob Hurd) [UC 46]
Gloria	Missa Ubi Caritas
Psalm	Ps 114 (Stephen Dean)
Gospel Acclamation	St Agatha Alleluia (mcb)
Preparation of the Gifts	The servant King (Graham Kendrick)
Sanctus, Acclamation, Amen	Missa Ubi Caritas
Agnus Dei	Missa Ubi Caritas
Communion	Our blessing cup (Michael Joncas) & verses from Ps 115(116) (Stephen Dean)
Postcommunion	Lord Jesu Christ, my life and light, BWV 118 (J.S. Bach)
Recessional	My song is love unknown

 

Michael Joncas’s setting of the Communion antiphon text has a tuneful refrain, but the wide tessitura of the verses makes them rather more soloistic than to my mind would be ideal for a Communion song. I expect that means that this particular setting is better suited to use as the responsorial psalm for Holy Thursday; in any event, we got round the problem by singing chant verses from Ps 115(116) to a tone by Stephen Dean. This also meant that the song could be prolonged to cover more of the Communion procession than Joncas’s two verses, so in all it felt like a successful adaptation of the original.