Entrance: All The Ends of the Earth (Dufford) AOV 1/76)
Psalm 22 (O’Brien)
I will praise you, Lord in the assembly of your people.
Gifts: Seed, Scattered and Sown (Feiten) GA 195
Communion: Table Song (Haas)
Bread Broken, Wine Shared (Horner) AOV 2/155
Thanksgiving: A New Commandment (Unknown)
Recessional: They’ll Know We Are Christians (Scholtes) AOV 1/130
This is a gentle song for communion from Graham Kendrick.
The lyrics are at his site, as is the sheet music. Sometimes people worry whether a Eucharist song is theologically accurate, as if a song is meant to encompass every aspect of a sacramental act. Dogma will always be a worse explanation of mystery than art in any case.
My backing is at 85bpm and I didn’t have the inventive introduction to use that Kendrick has at his his site when I made the backing.
A catchy upbeat song from Ed Bolduc with much to recommend to it.
The text is in the sample at WLP where you can listen to an excerpt and purchase the sheet music.
These ladies start sedately but get stuck into it after a little while:
I ran across this while looking for something else I believe. This is a song written by Marty Haugen for Lutheran services.
The refrain is singable but each verse has a different tune – but Lutherans sing better than Catholics so I’m sure it’s fine.
The text was difficult to find but there is a powerpoint of it on the web if you Google it, that I can’t find a way to link to.
The sheet music is available from GIA in a very inexpensive collection.
This one starts at 1.00
Cute:
This song is by George Misulia and is another from “Voices As One” that is timely coming up to Pentecost.
There is a lot of repetition, which is fine, as you can see in the text here. The only sheet music I can find is for subscribers to WLP.
My backing aspires to be uplifting:
This version has a sixties groovy vibe:
This is very uptempo:
This version starts slowly and speeds up:
This is very MIDI:
Last one:
I’m still blogging “Voices As One” but I’m interspersing that with songs from liturgies from commenters and random songs I’ve run across recently.
This lovely song is by Stuart Townend. It’s 5/4 time, but BIAB needs to be 4/4 2/4 4/4 to cope. It’s sounds like a traditional tune I can’t place – any suggestions?
The text is at Townend’s site where the sheet music can be purchased and a chord sheet downloaded for free.
Lots of You-tube versions suggest this song is well known – I like the Mennonite version at the bottom the best.
Here is more music from Joe Mattingly in Voices As One, just in time for Pentecost.
This one is not as choir orientated as some but does have a call and response in the verses between cantor and assembly. The cantor part gets a bit high so it might be worth leaving it to a cantor even if that cuts the assembly to only three phrases in the verse.
The text is in the sample at WLP where the sheet music can be purchased.
Last Wednesday was the second session of the Archbishop’s series called “Living Biblically in a Secular World.”
(Audio of the second session.)
After last time objecting to Bible stories being labelled as myth he moves from discussing the myth of the Exodus to discussing even the even more mythic stories of the Fall and of Cain and Abel. As myths they are stories from which we learn truth by imaginative participation or by ritual.
Coleridge’s interpretation involves the Serpent tempting Eve to become like God by framing God as oppressive and a liar. Because only God can know everything, only God knows good and evil and humans should not aspire to this. By reaching too far for Godhead humanity becomes fallen and experiences shame and fear. There was an excellent question at the end of the presentation suggesting that an informed conscience was after all a knowledge of good and evil, and I’m not sure there was a good answer. As far as putting ourselves into the story, his major point was to note the consequences of the fall – blaming, failure to take responsibility and exile from our true home in the Garden. The hint is that living biblically in a secular age may be finding a way back to our natural home – the Garden, or he put it, to stop wandering like Cain after murdering his brother and start journeying instead.
There are other ways to see the wisdom of this story. As the only animal conscious of its impending death, the knowledge of good and evil is that very consciousness and from that there is no going back I’m afraid. In fact, to go back to the Garden is to abrogate both responsibility and reality and I think Christianity can do better.
A different set of overawed and over deferential young people ran the show last week and introduced things with two more songs I didn’t know.
“Come, Holy Spirit” by Mark Foreman is a lovely chant that has a descant part answering the main melody. I can find nothing on the net about Mark Foreman other than he wrote this song.
The text is here (the descant text is italicised). The sheet music can be purchased from sheetmusicplus.
The second song was “As the Deer”, which is a pretty terrible use of Psalm 42 by Marty Nystrom. The text is here and whatever the virtues of the music the triteness of the verses is pretty dreadful. Rhyming “silver” and “giver”; “brother” and “other”; and using cliched phrases like “apple of my eye” to rhyme with “satisfy” are not good song writing. “You alone are the real joy giver” is worse than clumsy. At least the young people at the Cathedral dispensed with the archaic language – “panteth” and “longeth” in the first verse that made the second and third’s use of language look even more peculiar.
The sheet music can be purchased for download at musicnotes. The song seems very popular, so what do I know. I note that the music is attributed to Marty Nystrom and a J. S. Bach, whereas Mr Nystrom is responsible for any of the words not taken directly from Psalm 42 himself.
There are some nice versions on You-tube – especially the instrumentals. Here are a few of them:
I’m switching between blogging “Voice As One” and songs I have come across looking at other parishes liturgies that have been kindly shared with me.
Back in VAO I’m up to “Journey for Home” but I blogged that last year looking for new songs for Lent.
The next song is another with music by Paul A Tate, this time setting William H Draper’s translation of words by St Francis of Assisi.
The song is call and response between cantor and assembly and this time I think it really has to be that way. To add some spice there is a descant that floats above both the other parts in the refrain.
The six verses cover a lot of territory so if you have a cantor this is a bit of a Swiss army knife song for liturgy.
I’m about half way through VAO Vol 1 and the difference between OCP/spiritandsong and WLP seems to be that WLP has more choir songs, more liturgically useful songs and less straight P&W.
The text is in the sample at WLP where you can purchase the sheet music for download. You can hear a snippet where WLP is selling the CD.
I couldn’t fit the descant in but the cantor and assembly parts are panned hard right and left to follow them more easily.
Entrance: Lift Up Your Hearts (O’Connor) Gather Australia 416
(AOV 1/156 as Behold the Glory of God)
Psalm 118 (O’Brien)
The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.
Gifts: Shepherd Me O God (Haugen) AOV 1/33
Communion: Table Song (Haas)
Without Seeing You (Haas) AOV 2/158
Thanksgiving: Like a Shepherd (Boniwell) AOV 1/26
Recessional: City of God (Schutte) AOV 1/57
