Church Music

This song is being sung for mass on Sunday with a joint music group. The music has been chosen by someone whose memory for Catholic music goes back much further than mine – I was brought up Presbyterian – and these are their selections:

Entrance: All the earth proclaim the Lord AOV 1-184

Offertory: Take our bread GB 239

Communion: Take and eat AOV 2-162

Thanksgiving: Strong and constant AOV 1-110

Recessional: Song of Joy GB 289

GB means “The Green Book”, otherwise known as Praise to God: Parish Hymn Book, which I don’t have, but I do have Joe Wise‘s “Take Our Bread” in my copy of The New Living Parish Hymn Book.

There is a commentary on the song with lyrics here. While it is a GIA copyright I can’t see it for sale there, not even in handbells, but you can buy the sheet music at Hymnary.

This is another hymn for the Presentation of the Lord, this time from an unknown author in C19, based on Matthew 1:23, and found in Gather 3rd edition.

It is set to SWABIA by Johann Speiss. If you can’t find the PD music, OCP sell it, while GIA have their handbell arrangement, which is apparently what they do when they have lost interest.

1 Praise we the Lord this day,
This day so long foretold,
Whose promise shone with cheering ray
On waiting saints of old.

2 The prophet gave the sign
For faithful folk to read:
A virgin, born of David’s line,
Shall bear the promised seed.

3 Ask not how this should be,
But worship and adore
Like her whom God’s own majesty
Came down to shadow o’er.

4 She meekly bowed her head
To hear the gracious word:
Hail, Mary, pure and lowly maid,
The favored of the Lord.

5 How blest shall be her name
In all the Church on earth!
Through her that wondrous myst’ry came,
The incarnate Savior’s birth.

6 Praise Christ, the Virgin’s Son,
Whom earth and heav’n adore,
With Father, Spirit, Three in One
Both now and evermore.

This is Ruth Duck’s take on the Nunc dimittis (Luke 2:29-35), with further inspiration, apparently, from the “Narnia Chronicles”. Here it is set to to DICKSON by Norah Duncan IV.

It is listed for the “Presentation of the Lord”, but could conceivably be a recessional for a harassed priest.

You can get the text and an idea of the sheet music from the preview at Hymnary, but it isn’t available at GIA as a single sheet, although they do have an alternative setting, CONDITOR ALME SIDERUM, on sale for the chant aficionados.

In the absence of any clues on the internet as to how this should go, the music suggested a gentle cha cha cha.

More Liam Lawton goodness from Gather 3rd Edition, this time based on John 15:5-14 and so suitable for Easter 5B and 6B where those readings come up. There are harmony lines in the refrain and a descant in the third verse if you have the resources to make use of them. They do make the guitar version I have a bit messy though.

The sheet music can be purchased at GIA and the text is here.

One of the songwriters that I am finding amongst the works in Gather 3rd edition not already covered elsewhere in my blog is Liam Lawton. Obviously huge in Ireland, he hasn’t been a feature in parishes I have played at in Australia – not sure why.

This song is in the “Eternal Life / Heaven” section and Lawton wisely keeps to John 14 and so it is useful in times of distress.

The sheet music is at GIA, and the text here.

This song is on the theme of the second coming, but is very much a proclamation of social justice and would work in Advent. It is from Gather 3rd edition and the text is by Rory Cooney, based on passages from Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Joel. The tune is MORNING TRUMPET by B.F. White. It was originally for the Millennium but with another jubilee coming it might be a song ready for reuse. The “weary world is trudging toward the year of jubilee” suggests he had been reading Yeats.

The sheet music can be purchased at GIA, where the text is in their preview.

The Second Coming
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

This song is in the “Second Coming” section of Gather 3rd ed., with text by W. Russell Bowie from Revelation 21 and set to MORNING SONG.

GIA sells it as a concertato but notes that the brass quartet is optional. What a relief.

1 O Holy City, seen of John,
Where Christ, the Lamb, does reign,
Within those four-square walls shall come
No night, nor need, nor pain,
And where the tears are wiped from eyes
That shall not weep again.

2 O shame to us who rest content
While lust and greed for gain
In street and shop and tenement
Wring gold from human pain,
And bitter lips in blind despair
Cry, “Christ has died in vain.”

3 Give us, O God, the strength to build
The City that has stood
Too long a dream, whose laws are love,
Whose ways, the common good,
And where the shining sun becomes
God’s grace for human good.

4 Already in the mind of God
That City rises fair:
Lo, how its splendor challenges
The souls that greatly dare:
Yea, bids us seize the whole of life
And build its glory there.

Continuing my look at songs from Gather 3rd edition that I haven’t already got around to here, I have come to the section called “Second Coming”, in which I find this gospel styled song by Kate Cuddy called “On That Day”. GIA say it is for anointing and funerals and maybe it is, but it isn’t solemn.

The sheet music is at GIA, where the text is in their preview.

I have really enjoyed all the Michael Mahler songs I am coming across in Gather 3rd Edition.

This is a song “with a gentle groove” for morning prayer or suitable liturgies (eg Easter). Mahler was obviously a prodigy and has gone on to an illustrious career writing for the stage.

He has two bios: young Michael church music and mature Michael secular music and never the twain etc.

The sheet music is available at GIA and the text is on page five of this booklet.

This was fun on BIAB.

It reminded me of Al Jarreau’s morning song:

Mahler has a fine side gig with Beatles covers:

My amazing brother, Dr Michael Madden PhD, has written a booklet about music in Church which can be purchased at Amazon.

I won’t review it per se, as I am not qualified to comment too much. The issues revolve around what sort of music is suitable in Presbyterian churches, a church I left a long time ago. Basically his thesis is that unaccompanied psalms, which were the original musical expression of Calvinist churches, should continue to be the standard for that church and all the other music currently used in Presbyterian churches should be removed from church services but can be used elsewhere.

What I thought was interesting is that I gather his views are very much a minority in his church now and, coming from a completely different direction, I feel much the same about the Catholic church. All I can say is that more than one Madden is interested in church music but we always seem to be rowing against whichever stream we find ourselves in. I can only think our Irish heritage has something to do with that.

Some of his arguments sound very much like those of chant only Catholics, which is passing strange. What is more strange is that we had a fairly identical early formation in the church and wound up with very diverse religious ideas. Michael remains a faithful and conservative Presbyterian and I am a hopelessly liberal, vaguely postmodern Catholic. He is certain in his beliefs and I am certain that no-one should be certain about belief.

He did prompt me to have a look what other books I had on the subject of church music more broadly.

For a rather different Presbyterian viewpoint, I have John L. Bell’s The Singing Thing and The Singing Thing too, as well as his DVD, “Singing the Unsung”. Brian Wren’s Book Praying Twice is a very thoughtful read. From a Catholic perspective, Kathleen Harmon’s, The Ministry of Music and Jan Michael Joncas’s From Sacred Song to Ritual Music are very helpful.

My position is that each assembly has a culture and language, including a musical language, in which they can express their praise of God and that it will vary from time to time and place to place within any tradition. It will doubtless be influenced by what has come before, but I don’t see how the Holy Spirit is limited by situational human constraints. As usual, I am never certain about what God is – likely a verb rather than a noun for a start – but I am sure what God isn’t, and limited is one of the things God isn’t. All our discussion is, however, limited by our human thoughts and language, which are also inevitably culturally determined.

Buy Michael’s book anyway and make him famous.