Mount Calvary: Music: Advent II: 8 December 2019

December 5, 2019 in hymns, Mount Calvary Church, Music No Comments

John the Baptist
Anton Raphael Mengs 1728-1779.

“Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.”

Mount Calvary Church

A Roman Catholic Parish

The Personal Ordinariate of S. Peter

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

December 8, 2019

Advent II

Rev. Albert Scharbach, Pastor

Dr. Allen Buskirk, Choirmaster

Midori Ataka, Organist

8:00 A.M. Said Mass

10:00 A.M. Sung Mass

Brunch to follow in the undercroft

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Organ Prelude

Gott, Durch Deine Güte / Gottes Sohn ist Kommen, J. S. Bach

Organ Postlude

Fantasia, Johann Krieger (1651-1735)

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Common

Anglican Folk Mass, Shaw

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Anthems

Domine, praestolamur, William Byrd (1540-1623)

Domine, praestolamur adventum tuum, ut cito venias, et dissolvas jugum captivitatem nostrae.

O Lord, we await thy coming, that thou come quickly and dissolve the bonds of our captivity.

“Domine praestolamur” is a setting of the text for the matins responsory during Advent in the Sarum rite. This anthem was published in 1589 in a collection of five-part Latin motets by William Byrd. The music is in the aeolian mode, which sounds to modern ears like the key of A minor, as befits the solemn text depicting our waiting in captivity for the advent of the Lord and for his deliverance. As is common in the high renaissance style, the piece begins with the same motif sung by each voice at its entrance (a point of imitation). This piece is remarkable because it employs a double imitative technique: in the first phrase “Domine praestolamus adventum tuum” the two first words are matched with one musical motif whereas the second two words are matched with an independent musical motif: two imitative entries for a single phrase of text. Near the end of the anthem, listen for the phrase “captivitatis nostrae” that circles around the same notes, depicting captivity, and how the following phrase “et dissolvas jugum,” dissolving the yoke, is set to a rising melody with a strong sense of forward motion, depicting our liberation.

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Like as the hart, Herbert Howells (1892-1983)

Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks, so longeth my soul after thee, O God. My soul is athirst for God, yea, even for the living God. When shall I come to appear before the presence of God? My tears have been my meat day and night, while they daily say unto me, “Where is now thy God?”

“Like as the hart” is a mysteriously foreboding setting of the first three verses of Psalm 42 by Herbert Howells (1892-1983). The music was written in a single day in January 1941 while Howells was snowed in at Cheltenham while London was under nearly constant aerial assault. It was published in a series of four anthems “in time of war.” Marked “with quiet intensity,” the piece opens with a lyrical melody in the men’s voices, colored with a pointed chromaticism. The whole chorus enters with the plea “When shall I come to appear before God?” that slowly dies away into a quiet E minor. In the middle section, the pace picks up with a soprano solo answered dramatically by the chorus, “Where is now my God?” After the sopranos and tenors pass this melody back and forth, the first melody returns, now answered in counterpoint by the sopranos. Listen for the plaintive notes in the organ that haunt the final chord sung by the choir. This anthem highlights the longing for the coming of the presence of God characteristic of the Advent season.

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Hymns

On Jordan’s Bank is a translation of a Latin hymn by Charles Coffin (1676—1749 Paris), who was a French teacher, writer, Jansenist, and Rector of the University of Paris. The translator, John Chandler (1806—1876) was an Anglican clergyman who translated hymns of the early church and hymns from the Paris Breviary of 1736, in which this hymn appeared. The text sums up the message of John the Baptist, encapsulating each of the important themes of the Forerunner of Christ: announcement of grace, expectancy for the coming Messiah, and renewal in preparation for the coming of the King. The first stanza calls God’s people to give attention to the coming Christ. The second calls people to receive God’s presence and God’s cleansing from sin. The third is a profession of faith in Christ. The fourth is a prayer for God’s continued grace in our lives and in our world—a response to God’s redeeming Word. The fifth is a doxology of praise.

Prepare the way, O Zion (Modern lyrics) is by the Swedish bishop Frans Michael Franzén (1772-1847). It was translated by Augustus Nelson (1863–1949). This joyful song celebrates Christ who comes to destroy sin and death, not by violence, but by his birth as a child and his self-giving on the cross.

Hark, a thrilling voice is sounding is a translation by Edward Caswell (1814–1878) of the Latin hymn, Vox clara ecce intonat. It is based on Romans 13: 11-1. We hear that “Christ is near”; in response, we “cast away the works of darkness.” Advent is not a passive season but demands something from us. We sing of “The Lamb, so long expected, comes with pardon down from heaven. Let us haste, with tears of sorrow, one and all, to be forgiven.” Advent, like Lent, is a season of repentance, and repentance involves action. Just as Christ came 2,000 years ago, we know he can come again even tomorrow as the next stanza reminds us, “So when next He comes in glory and the world is wrapped in fear, He will shield us with His mercy and with words of love draw near.” By confession and repentance, we prepare to meet the Lord.

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Mount Calvary Church: Music: 1 December 2019: Advent I

November 26, 2019 in hymns, Mount Calvary Church, Music No Comments

They shall beat their swords into plowshares.

Mount Calvary Church

A Roman Catholic Parish

The Personal Ordinariate of S. Peter

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

December 1, 2019

Advent I

Rev. Albert Scharbach, Pastor

Dr. Allen Buskirk, Choirmaster

Midori Ataka, Organist

8:00 A.M. Said Mass

10:00 A.M. Sung Mass

Brunch to follow in the undercroft

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Common

Anglican Folk Mass, Shaw

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Anthems

Rorate coeli, William Byrd (1540-1623)

Rorate caeli desuper, et nubes pluant justum: aperiatur terra, et germinet salvatorem. Benedixisti, Domine, terram tuam: avertisti captivitatem Jacob. Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto. Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum, amen.

Drop down ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness: Let the earth open and bring forth a Saviour. Lord, thou hast blessed thy land: Thou hast turned away the captivity of Jacob. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, amen.

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Laetentur coeli, William Byrd (1540-1623)

Laetentur coeli, et exultet terra. Jubilate montes laudem, quia Dominus noster veniet, et pauperum suorum miserebitur. Orietur in diebus tuis justitia et abundantia pacis.

Let the heavens be glad and let the earth rejoice. Let the mountains be joyful with praise, because our Lord will come, and will show mercy to his poor. In your days, justice and abundance of peace shall arise.

Laetentur coeli, the communion anthem, is an early work by Byrd, published in 1589 in a compilation of sacred Latin motets by Byrd and Tallis. The text is from a processional respond for Sundays in Advent from the Sarum rite. The music is set for five voices on a text from Isaiah 49:13 with a contrasting three-part texture for second half from Psalm 71:7. Listen for the shouts of exultation as the earth rejoices “et exultet terra” and for the gentle kindness of the Lord’s mercy on the poor “et pauperum suorum miserebitur;” this text is then repeated after the psalm verse to close the piece.

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Hymns

#3 Wake, awake, for night is flying(WACHET AUF) is by Philipp Nicolai (1556-1608), translated by Catherine Winkworth (1827-1878). It is partly based on Matthew 25: 1-13, the parable of the wise and foolish virgins. Nicolai was a pastor in Westphalia during a terrible pestilence, which claimed some thirteen hundred lives in his parish alone. Nicolai turned from the constant tragedies and frequent funerals (at times he buried thirty people in one day) to meditate on “the noble, sublime doctrine of eternal life obtained through the blood of Christ.” We look forward to the glorious coming of Jesus when He will deliver us from death and bring us into the kingdom of His Father. Christ’s light shining in the darkness of death to deliver us is a profound theme of Advent.

People, look east (BESANCON CAROL) is by Eleanor Farjeon (1881-1965). The delight of the poem is in its idea that ‘Love the Guest’ (stanza 1) is coming, and must be made welcome: his name is kept back until the last stanza, when He is at last named as ‘the Lord.’ Before that the phrase ‘People, look East,’ found in the penultimate line of every stanza, is a reminder of the rising of the sun, and the coming of light; and just as Christmas comes in the middle of winter, so the singer is reminded of seeds lying dormant in the cold earth, seeds of the rose of summer (stanza 2), and of birds building their nests so that new birth can come (stanza 3). Stanza 4 is a reminder of the light that comes from the stars, the light that shines in the darkness (from John 1: 1-14). Throughout the poem the images of life are contrasted with winter cold and darkness, until in the final stanza the Christ who is Lord is revealed in all His wonder and glory

#7 Hark the glad sound, the Saviour comes (BRISTOL) is by Philip Doddridge (1702-1751). The text on which it is based concerns the preaching of Christ in the synagogue. The hymn follows the scriptural account closely. It shows Doddridge’s art very clearly, especially his ability to balance the first half of a stanza against the second.

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Mount Calvary Music: November 24: Christ the King

November 20, 2019 in hymns, Mount Calvary Church, Music No Comments

Mount Calvary Church

A Roman Catholic Parish

The Personal Ordinariate of S. Peter

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

November 24, 2019

The Feast of Christ the King

Rev. Albert Scharbach, Pastor

Dr. Allen Buskirk, Choirmaster

Midori Ataka, Organist

8:00 A.M. Said Mass

10:00 A.M. Sung Mass

Brunch to follow in the undercroft

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Prelude

We Gather Together, arranged by Franklin Ritter

Postlude

Sing Praise to God Who Reigns Above, arranged by Hal H Hopson

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Common

Missa S. Maria Magdalena, Willan

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Anthems

Lift up your heads, O ye gates, George Fredrick Handel (1685-1759)

Born in Halle, Germany in 1685, Handel mastered counterpoint and harmony in the Baroque North German style. After a five year sojourn in Rome, he moved to London permanently in 1710, where he wrote and produced Italian opera. His music was wildly successful in England, but in the 1730s the cost of production of operas and changes in musical taste led him to focus his efforts on oratorios (which were cheaper because they are not staged). His oratorio Messiah was composed in three to four weeks in the fall of 1741 and was premiered at Easter in 1742 in Dublin. Handel gave his portion of the proceeds to a hospital and debtor’s prison in Dublin.

This chorus appears in Part II of the oratorio which describes the passion of Christ and his resurrection. These verses from Psalm 24 (using the text of the Book of Common Prayer) refer to Christ’s ascension into heaven. Handel divides the choir into a high group that announces his coming and a lower group of voices that questions “who is this king of glory?” This psalms announces that Christ is the King of Glory and the Lord of Hosts (meaning armies), a fitting depiction for today’s feast.

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Worthy is the Lamb, George Fredrick Handel (1685-1759)

The final chorus in Handel’s Messiah at the end of Part III is “Worthy is the Lamb,” taken from the same text (Revelation 5:12-13) that is the basis of today’s Introit. The piece opens with a full-throated acclamation “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain” to receive our praise. In the second section, the men state the fugue theme “Blessing and honour, glory and power be unto him” which is developed with elaborate and increasingly complex counterpoint. At the end of this fugue, another begins on a new subject in the bass voices on “Amen.” This pair of fugues are the most compelling in all of Handel’s choral writing. Handel’s first biographer wrote in 1760 that this conclusion revealed the composer “rising still higher” than in “that vast effort of genius, the Hallelujah chorus.”

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Hymns

#352 Crown Him with Many Crowns (DIADEMATA) is by the Anglican Matthew Bridges (1800-1894), who wrote six verses of this hymn, which is based on Rev: 1: 12: “and on His head were many crowns.” But Bridges converted to Catholicism in 1848 under the influence of John Henry Newman,, and Godfrey Thring (1823-1903) thought the hymn was too Catholic, and wrote six more verses, so hymnals, depending on their leanings, use different selections of verses. In the 1940 Hymnal the first and last verses are by Bridges, the middle three by Thring. The tune DIADEMATA (Crowns) is by Sir George Job Elvey (1816-1893), private organist to Queen Victoria,and is in the simple Handelian style.

For a complete discussion of this hymn see Nov. 20, 2016 blog.

#345 The King of love my shepherd is (ST COLUMBA) was written by Sir Henry Williams Baker (1821–1877). It is notable for its skillful meter, and its well-managed rhyme scheme of single and double rhymes, which control and shape the emotion very beautifully. Baker gave an Anglican slant to Psalm 23, interpreting it as a psalm of love and care, but stressing these qualities as evidenced in the Eucharist. The spread table of verse 5 becomes the altar on which the elements are displayed, and the delight comes as the believer takes the ‘pure chalice’; the unction, or anointing (from 1 John 2: 27), while bestowing grace in a spiritual sense, also has suggestions of a rite. This verse spreads its meaning through the whole hymn, allowing the words of Psalm 23 to acquire an extra significance: so that the last verse suggests that the length of days of a person’s life can be spent, figuratively, ‘within thy house for ever’, in the service and under the influence of the church, and then later in heaven. The singer can reflect back, and conclude that the first verses suggest the ransomed soul, sought out in love and rescued from sin (Baker’s version of ‘he restoreth my soul’). The beautiful use of the shepherd metaphor in verse 3, as the shepherd carries the lamb gently on his shoulder, is an illustration of the tenderness of Baker’s work: these lines were the last words spoken by Baker on his deathbed.

To Jesus Christ our sovereign King (ICH GLAUB’ AN GOTT) is by Msgr. Martin Hellriegel (1890-1981), a German-American Roman Catholic priest who immigrated to the Archdiocese of St. Louis, Missouri, from Heppenheim, Germany and became one of the pioneers of the Catholic Liturgical Movement. The hymn was written in 1941 as a direct response to the pretensions of the Third Reich and to remind people who actually reigns eternally. The tune was published in the Mainz Gesangbuch (1870).

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Mount Calvary Music: November 17, 2019: The Sun of Justice

November 12, 2019 in hymns, Mount Calvary Church, Music 3 Comments

Christ as the Sun of Justice, Southwark Cathedral

Mount Calvary Church

A Roman Catholic Parish

The Personal Ordinariate of S. Peter

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

Trinity XXII

Rev. Albert Scharbach, Pastor

Dr. Allen Buskirk, Choirmaster

Midori Ataka, Organist

Sunday, November 17, 2019

8:00 A.M. Said Mass

10:00 A.M. Sung Mass

Brunch to follow in the undercroft

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Prelude

Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow, arr. Johann Pachelbel

Postlude

Helmsley, arranged by Charles Callahan

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Anthems

Vigilate, William Byrd (1540-1623)

Vigilate, nescitis enim quando dominus domus veniat, sero, an media nocte, an gallicantu, an mane. Vigilate ergo, ne cum venerit repente, inveniat vos dormientes. Quod autem dico vobis, omnibus dico: vigilate.

Watch ye therefore (for you know not when the lord of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cock crowing, or in the morning): Watch therefore, lest coming on a sudden, he find you sleeping. And what I say to you, I say to all: Watch.

Vigilate is an early work by William Byrd (1540-1623) published in his Cantiones Sacrae of 1589. It takes its text from Mark 13 where Christ exhorts his disciples to watch and prepare for the coming of the Lord. This work is unusual for its text painting characteristic of the secular, Italian madrigal style. Listen, for example, for “an galli cantu” (at the cock-crow), where the voices imitate the rooster’s crow with leaps and rapid runs. The phrase “inveniat vos dormientes” is set in a long, slow double canon reminiscent of sleepy disciples. And at “repente” (suddenly), a frantic burst of fast rhythms jumps out of the texture.

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Audivi vocem de caelo, Thomas Tallis (1510-1585)

Audivi vocem de caelo venientem: venite omnes virgines sapientissime; oleum recondite in vasis vestris dum sponsus advenerit. Media nocte clamor factus est: ecce sponsus venit.

I heard a voice coming from heaven: come all wisest virgins; fill your vessels with oil, for the bridegroom is coming. In the middle of the night there was a cry: behold the bridegroom comes.

The motet Audivi vocem de caelo by Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) offers a completely different take on the same theme, here portrayed with language from the parable of the wise and foolish virgins awaiting the coming of the bridegroom. This motet makes use of the Sarum Rite plainchant (the ancient liturgy of the English church that was finally abandoned in 1559) and several clues point to a very early date of composition prior to Mary’s reign. English composers continued writing in the late Medieval style in the early 16^th century long after composers on the continent had abandoned it; this motet is an example of that trend, with its avoidance of imitation between voices and its uninflected modal harmonies.

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Hymns

The king shall come when morning dawns (MORNING SONG) is by the Scottish Free Church minister John Brownlie (1857–1925). He translated many Eastern hymns, and this hymn bears the impress of Eastern theology. Infused with the imagery of morning light typical of early Greek hymnody, hymn stirs hope in the hearts of all who look forward to the return of Christ. It is a confession of faith in the sure return of our Lord; his coming again will occur in a blaze of glory, which will far surpass his earthly death and resurrection. The text concludes with a paraphrase of the ancient prayer of the church-“Maranatha,” or “Lord, come quickly” (Rev. 22:20). We should not fear, but yearn for the coming of the One we love. MORNING SONG is a folk tune that has some resemblance to the traditional English tune for “Old King Cole.” The tune appeared anonymously in Part II of John Wyeth’s Repository of Sacred Music (1813).

The Lord will come and not be slow (YORK) is a cento by John Milton (1608-1674) of words from Psalms 82, 85, 86. The tune YORK is an old Scottish melody.

Lo, He comes with clouds descending is by John Cennick (1718–1755) and Charles Wesley (1707–1788). The content of the text and particularly the title are derived from Rev 1:7, which tells of the Second Coming. As the liturgical year approaches the coming of Christ at the Nativity, we keep in mind His coming that we await, when He shall come as Judge to make known the truth about the entire history of the human race and indeed of the universe. How will we respond when He shows us the truth about our lives and how they are part of His whole plan of salvation? With wailing or exultation?

The tune HELMSLEY is by Thomas Olivers (1725–1799), who heard the tune whistled in the street and derived his melody from music, a sequence is a short melody that is repeated at a different pitch level. In this case (“Alleluia! alleluia! alleluia!”), the melody is repeated once a step lower and then a step higher. Such repetition intensifies the text that is repeated.

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The Sun of Justice

The first reading today is from Malachi, indeed the very last prophetic words of the Old Testament:

1 “For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble. The day that is coming shall set them ablaze, says the LORD of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. 2 But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. 3 And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the LORD of hosts.

4“Remember the law of my servant Moses, the statutes and rules that I commanded him at Horeb for all Israel.

5“Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes. 6 And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.”

The image in this blog is a bas relief by Sir Ninian Comper in the Missionary Chapel of Southwark Cathedral. Christ stands in front of the sun with its healing rays. He holds the globe of the world, because he is the light of all nations (Isaiah); kneeling on either side of him are a figures from mission lands.

From the blog UNAM SANCTAM CATHOLICAM:

As the last prophetic book, Malachi is brimming with references to the coming Messiah who will restore all things and usher in the Kingdom of God. The coming of St. John the Baptist in the spirit and power of Elijah is prophesied (3:1; 4:5-6); Christ’s cleansing of the Temple (3:1); the institution of a new priesthood that will offer a pure sacrifice (1:11; 3:3), the universality-catholicity of God’s new covenant (1:5; 1:11), the destruction of the Levitical priesthood (2:1-3). It is a book that perfectly sets the stage for the New Covenant.

In Malachi 4:2, we see the Messiah referred to as the “Sun of Justice”, sometimes called the “Sun of Righteousness”; the Latin Vulgate translates this title as Sol Iustitiae, “Sun of Justice.” This is an appropriate allegorical name for the Messiah. The period of waiting for the Messiah was a period of long darkness; but though the night is long, eventually the sun peaks above the horizon, casting its light slowly at first, but eventually illumining the entire earth under its brilliance.

Thus the name “Sun of Justice” denotes a period of expectation through the darkness. Psalm 130:6 says, “My soul waits for the Lord more than the watchmen [wait] for the morning, more than the watchers for the morning.” The prophet Isaiah also says: “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, and thick darkness the peoples; but the LORD will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you. And nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising” (Is. 60:1-3). This is also why in the Easter Vigil liturgy, the church is shrouded in darkness for the Old Testament readings until the eruption of the “Sun of Justice” into the fallen world, allegorically signified by the Easter candle.

This should call to mind Resurrection; just as the sun symbolically “dies” at the end of the day and “rises” in the morning, so the Messiah will be put to death, descend into the earth, and then rise again in glory. Again, this is potently set forth in the rites of the Easter liturgy, where light and Resurrection are synonymous.

“Sun of Justice” also implies glory. Obviously, the sun is the most glorious body in the heavens. It “rules the day” (cf. Gen 1:16) just as Christ rules the cosmos. This glorious light denotes the power and salvation of the Messiah to the entire world. As it is written in Isaiah, “It is a small thing that thou shouldst be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and to convert the dregs of Israel. Behold, I have given thee to be the light of the nations [Lat. lumen gentium], that thou mayst be my salvation even to the farthest part of the earth” (Is. 49:6). The coming of the Messiah and His universal kingship are associated with the glory of God filling the earth, “For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Hab. 2:14).

Wherever this glory spreads also goes the justice and universal dominion of God. This is the meaning of one of the most famous passages in Isaiah – and one which no one familiar with Handel’s Messiah can ever read without humming:

Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh will see it together. For the mouth of the Lord has spoken (Is. 40:4-5)

The “glory” shall be seen by all flesh, like the rising sun that breaks upon the earth. And it will establish justice. This is the meaning of the Hebrew idiom “every valley shall be raised up; every mountain and hill made low”; in other words, there will be a great leveling. God will dispense justice that will throw down the mighty and elevate the lowly. This is all implied in the title “Sun of Justice.”

We can see how it is a very fitting title for the Messiah. It also has an important liturgical connection. We know that for most of the Church’s history, the Mass was always offered facing east, a position called ad orientem. This usually meant geographically east, but there is also a “liturgical east” which means the priest and the people facing the same direction as the Mass is offered, the position ad dominum, “facing the Lord” (as opposed to versus populum, “facing the people”).

It is beyond the scope of this article to explain the liturgical, historical, and theological reasons for worship facing east; but we can note that, symbolically, it is very fitting. The Messiah is likened to the sun, which rises in the east. This ties in to a very ancient Christian tradition that when Christ returns, He will return from the east. And this is not based solely on an allegorical connection between Jesus and the sun; Christ Himself says in the Gospel of Matthew, “For as lightning comes out of the east, and appears even into the west: so shall the coming of the Son of man be” (Matt. 24:27).

Now, Christ certainly may not be teaching that He will literally appear in the east first; but symbolically, it makes sense to associate His coming with the east. The sun, our Lord’s symbol, rises in the east. Jesus says His coming will be like lightning that comes from the east. In classical antiquity, the east signified brightness and daylight while the west signified darkness. In English etymology, the word east means towards dawn; daybreak, while the word west means “evening, night.” The same connotation exists in Greek and Latin.

Thus, it makes sense that the liturgy should be oriented towards the east, for from here – symbolically at least – the faithful may expect the return of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the ad orientem posture demonstrates the Church’s faith in Christ’s return, professed in the Creed when we say, “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead.”

May the Sun of Justice rise upon us. As we prepare to enter Advent, may we recall the words of the traditional hymn, Hark, the Herald Angels Sing,

Hail the heav’nly Prince of Peace!
Hail the Sun of Righteousness!
Light and life to all He brings,
Ris’n with healing in His wings.

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Mount Calvary Music: November 10, 2019

November 6, 2019 in hymns, Mount Calvary Church, Music No Comments

Attavante degli Attavanti, Martyrdom of the Seven Hebrew brothers, c. 1450

Mount Calvary Church

A Roman Catholic Parish

The Personal Ordinariate of S. Peter

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

Trinity XXI

Rev. Albert Scharbach, Pastor

Dr. Allen Buskirk, Choirmaster

Midori Ataka, Organist

Sunday, November 10, 2019

8:00 A.M. Said Mass

10:00 A.M. Sung Mass

Brunch to follow in the undercroft

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Prelude

Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing, setting by Joel Raney

Postlude

Kingsfold, Setting by James Biery

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Anthems

Requiem aeternam, Herbert Howells (1892-1983)

Requiem aeternam dona eis. Et lux perpetua luceat eis. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.

Rest eternal grant unto them. And may light perpetual shine upon them. Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord.

In 1935 Howells’ son Michael died at the age of nine, a tragedy which inevitably cast an immense shadow over the composer’s life. Until quite recently it was thought that the Requiem was composed in response to Michael’s death, but we now know that Howells composed it in 1932 or 1933, originally intending it for the choir of King’s College, Cambridge. For some reason the music was never sent to King’s, and its existence remained unknown until its eventual publication in 1980, only three years before the composer’s own death. After the tragic events of 1935, Howells increasingly associated the Requiem with his lost son, so much so that a few years later, when he was composing Hymnus Paradisi, a work specifically intended as Michael’s memorial and without doubt Howells’ masterpiece, he used substantial parts of the earlier Requiem, re-scoring it for soloists, large chorus and orchestra.

One of the earliest and most fundamental influences on Howells was Gloucester Cathedral, with its immense, vaulted spaces and glorious east window. Howells wrote of it as ‘a pillar of fire in my imagination.’ He consciously set out to mirror these essentially architectural elements of spaciousness and luminosity in his music, and these characteristics can clearly be heard in the Requiem. Significantly, the main climax of the work occurs at the words ‘et lux perpetua luceat eis’ – ‘let light perpetual shine upon them’ – a symbol of hope and comfort, confirmed in the closing pages by the final release of tension and the gradual transition to a simple, peaceful D major.

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The souls of the righteous, Geraint Lewis (b. 1958)

The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and the pain of death shall not touch them. To the eyes of the foolish, they seemed to perish, but they are in peace.

Geraint Lewis was born in Cardiff in 1958 and educated at St John’s College, Cambridge. On graduating he was appointed to the music staff of the University of Wales at Bangor, working with Professor William Mathias. The anthem The souls of the righteous is subtitled ‘In memoriam William Mathias’ and was composed for the Service of Thanksgiving for the life and work of Mathias at St Paul’s Cathedral on 20 November 1992. The composer explains:

This work was suggested by a request from Nina Walker for an All Souls’ anthem for 1992. I started work before Christmas 1991 and showed the part that I had completed to William Mathias during one of my many visits to see him in Anglesey. He liked what he heard and urged me to complete it. I held back however and put it to one side. A month later Mathias was diagnosed as having terminal cancer and given six months to live. I visited him every other week during this time (travelling from Monmouth to Menai Bridge) and he died on 29 July 1992. During this time we put his manuscript in order and tidied up his catalogue and I helped him with his last works.
We then planned a Service of Thanksgiving for his life and works in St Paul’s Cathedral. John Scott suggested that I write a work for the service (which otherwise consisted entirely of Mathias’s music—much of it with St Paul’s connections) and so I went back to my setting of The souls of the righteous and completed it as a tribute to my closest friend and colleague. The text is from Wisdom and is variously a collect for All Saints—eve of All Souls. Mathias was born on 1 November 1945—All Saints’ Day—and All Souls’ Day is 2 November.

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Hymns

The Son of God goes forth to war (Words at #549; Tune: KINGSFOLD). The author, Reginald Heber, was born in 1783 into a wealthy, educated family. He was a bright youth, translating a Latin classic into English verse by the time he was seven, entering Oxford at 17. After his graduation he became rector of his father’s church for 16 years. He was appointed Bishop of Calcutta in 1823 and worked tirelessly for three years until the weather and travel took its toll on his health and he died of a stroke. The first reading is about the martyred Maccabees; we too live in an age of martyrs: the Coptic martyrs beheaded by the sea, dying with the name of Jesus on their lips; the Missionaries of Charity slain in the home for the aged in Aden; the priest Jacques Hamel whose throat was slit at the altar as he said mass. They followed in His train.

After having heard the tune in Kingsfold, Sussex, England (thus its name), Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) introduced it as a hymn tune in The English Hymnal (1906).

Here is a rousing version. The hymn is sung to The Minstrel Boy but with the hymn lyrics in The Man Who Would Be King; here it is to the somewhat Victorian ALL SAINTS NEW.

#429 Day by Day (SUMNER) is a prayer by St. Richard, bishop of Chichester. The tune is by Arthur Henry Biggs (1906-1954), organist at St. John the Evangelist Episcopal Cathedral in Spokane, Washington.

One night in London, Thomas Olivers (1725—1799), a follower of John Wesley, was attracted to a service in a Jewish synagogue, where he heard a great singer, Myer Leoni, sing an ancient Hebrew text in solemn, plaintive mode. Olivers wrote a hymn to that tune: The God of Abraham Praise, which is a paraphrase of the ancient Hebrew Yigdal, or doxology. In the 12th century, Jewish scholar Moses Maimonides codified the 13 articles of the Jewish Creed. These articles of the Jewish faith were later shaped into the Yigdal around 1400 by Daniel ben Judah, a judge in Rome.

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A Catholic Mother Talks with a Jewish Mother of Martyred Sons

Social media shoves us all up in each other’s faces in unprecedented ways. Where national politics was once metered in through newspapers and the evening news, now people of all ages have access to global details of immeasurable variety. Through the internet, we can see what friends on other continents had for dinner. We have a finger incessantly on the pulse of global events, from terrorism to natural disasters to scandals in the Catholic Church we never wanted to admit happen.

To whatever extent this data dump causes constant anxiety, and constant anxiety upsets brain chemical equilibrium, I have not quite figured out how this torrent of affairs will play out. When I manage to get my nose out of my screen and step away, however, I often think of the Jewish mother of the seven sons in Second Book of Maccabees. She looked upon a different world, but I feel a camaraderie with her.

Her story goes back to about 168–166 years before the birth of Christ. Her people, the Maccabees, led a rebellion against the Seleucid Empire, a flourishing center of Hellenistic culture. The state was ruled by Antiochus IV who as king named himself Epiphanes, a Greek name for “god manifest.” Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the god-king, wanted to take Judaea from Egypt so he could unite a vast and diverse empire and create a religion for his people in the same spirit of Greek civilization espoused by Alexander the Great.

The Jewish people of the Maccabees held a worldview incompatible with Antiochus’s vision. Their beliefs were simple and based the monotheistic laws of God passed down by Moses. They rejected Hellenism. They rejected nature worship. They did not deify kings of vast empires. They worshiped the Creator of the universe.

Fearing disobedience, Antiochus sought to eradicate the Jewish religion. He forbade Jewish religious practices, such as the offering of sacrifices, the observance of the Sabbath, and circumcision, and he punished anyone who would not submit to his authority. The Maccabees mother and her seven sons were arrested for refusing to eat the flesh of swine. The Bible story begins when the king had them beaten.

“What do you intend to ask and learn from us?” the eldest son said to the king. “For we are ready to die rather than transgress the laws of our fathers.” This made the king angry. He ordered large caldrons to be heated in fire, cut out the tongue of the eldest, scalped him, chopped off his hands and feet, and had the boy fried alive, while still breathing, right in front of his mother and brothers.

The next son likewise refused to eat pork, and he too met the same fate as his brother. As he took his last breath, he said, “You accursed wretch, you dismiss us from this present life, but the King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws.” The third son even stuck out his tongue to be cut off and stretched out his hands to be butchered because he knew he would get them back again.

Before the fourth son was murdered, he spoke of resurrection too. The fifth spoke of his people and told the king that he may have power among men, but he would someday perish while the people of God would not be forsaken. The sixth son warned the king that he would not be spared punishment if he attempted to fight against God.

What did the mother do while her sons were murdered one by one? The narrator says she bore it admirably with honor and courage because of her hope in the Lord. Her “woman’s reasoning” was thus to her sons:

I do not know how you came into being in my womb. It was not I who gave you life and breath, nor I who set in order the elements within each of you. Therefore the Creator of the world, who shaped the beginning of man and devised the origin of all things, will in his mercy give life and breath back to you again . . .

With only the seventh son left, Antiochus IV Epiphanes tried to back off. He promised the mother to make the boy a rich and happy man, even a friend, if he would pledge allegiance to Antiochus. The king pleaded with the mother to counsel the son to save himself, but the mother bent to her last child and urged him in her native tongue to look at Heaven and Earth and see that God made everything out of nothing, including mankind. She told him to have no fear and join his brothers until they were all united again.

The seventh son interrupted his mother and turned to the king. “What are you waiting for?” Then he gave a magnificent speech about the almighty, all-seeing God of his Fathers and the wrath that would come upon the nation. Nevertheless, the god-manifest king, in the name of the creative, progressive, and the great spirit of Hellenism, punished the last son more cruelly than all his brothers. The mother? The scripture just says she died, but it does not matter how. There is no worse fate for a mother than to watch her children suffer such torture.

For a long time, this story made me angry. Why did she not tell her kids to eat the damn pork? Seriously? I eat bacon all the time. It is not like eating pork is a deadly sin.

The murders were not about food though. They were about power. The flesh of swine was only a symbolic scapegoat. The more I thought about that mother, the more I realized that we are alike in many ways. For one, we both have seven children, though five of mine are daughters. My children have not been brutally murdered all in one day, nothing like that, but sometimes it seems that as a Catholic mother I too face a culture of absurdities at the hands of humans who think themselves manifest gods. I look out at the world through the internet, and I get scared. When I teach the countercultural moral expectations of the Church to my kids, sometimes I think I am making about as much sense as telling them to die before eating pork.

As hard as I try to hang on to my babies, some grown, some adolescent, some still young, I worry that they will be consumed and destroyed by modern monsters like drug addiction, suicide, cutting, depression, sexual abuse, bullying, and nihilism, in other words, being fried alive in a cauldron so slowly they will not even realize they are dying. And I do not want to bear it admirably with honor and courage and whispering advice, because of hope in the Lord! I do not want to stand there and watch them perish. I want to panic. I want to fight.

I have this thing I do. I imagine that I sit down with the Maccabees mother at a table suspended above time and space in one of those blank white rooms of science fiction dreamery. We each have coffee, she in her robes and sandals and me in my black turtleneck and boots.

“How did you stay so calm?” I ask her.

“Like I said,” she replies, “the order in nature and life itself make it obvious that God is in charge.” The Maccabees mother, I always think, has an astonishingly scientific worldview.

“I get it,” I say. “You view nature the same way a chemist does. You think that if the Creator of the world can make atoms and swirl them all together to produce the sun, clouds, trees, and the children in our womb, then he knows what he is doing, and if we keep the faith everything will be okay in the end.”

She nods and says, “Atoms?”

I say, “Yes, the elements, like you said, within each of us that God sets in order. Do you want me to tell you about them?” She, of course, does.

I tell her how there is now evidence that elementary particles expanded from a singularity about 14 billion years ago and that elements form in stars. I show her a periodic table and explain that for a long time the universe was just the first two, 75% hydrogen and 25% helium. We identify elements by the number of protons they have. Protons are small positively charged particles in the nucleus (center) of the atom. Hydrogen has one proton. Helium has two because two hydrogens fuse to make helium (1+1=2). Astronomers now measure about 74 percent of ordinary matter in the universe to be hydrogen, 24 percent helium, and the remaining two percent the rest of the known elements.

She wants me to tell her where the other elements came from.

“They continue to form in stars as more nuclei fuse,” I say. “Hydrogen nuclei fuse to produce helium and release energy, making the core of the star hot and dense. This is how a star, such as our sun, spends most of its life. When the hydrogen is nearly gone, the core contracts, and helium nuclei with two protons fuse to produce beryllium, which has four protons (2+2=4). If beryllium collides with another helium nucleus, carbon forms. Carbon has six protons (4+2=6). If carbon fuses with another helium, oxygen forms with eight protons (6+2=8). Because helium has a unique stability, it hangs around long enough for these elements to form, hence there is a curiously high abundance of hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen—the elements necessary for life on Earth. Heavier elements fuse until the star cores are mostly iron. The stars collapse under the gravity until they explode. Elements heavier than iron fuse in the final moments of the stars’ lives.”

Her mind is blown, and she knows where this is going. “And all these elements come from Heaven to the center of the world to make Earth?”

“Well,” I say, “the Earth is not the center of the cosmos but rather a planet orbiting in a solar system whose sun is a star in an arm of a spiral cluster of 200 billion stars that make up a galaxy among billions of galaxies.” I say that it is amazing the whole universe seems to exist for us on this seemingly insignificant speck.

I tell her that a Greek philosopher named Democritus, who lived 200 years before the Maccabees revolution, used the word ἄτομον (atomon) to describe indivisible particles. I tell her that Democritus taught that everything is the result of natural laws, and we agree that this is a faulty conclusion because—call it a woman’s reasoning—if everything is just matter, then we still do not have the answer for who made the matter, who prescribed the order, or who made life.

I recount the discoveries in only the last two hundred years of humanity, John Dalton, J. J. Thompson, Max Plank, Robert Millikan, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Louis de Broglie, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger.

I explain that today properties of elements throughout the universe are understood as the result of electrons, the negatively charged particles, in defined orbitals around the nucleus much like musical strings vibrating together in unison in a symphony. I tell her about quantum numbers and how they describe the relationship between electrons and protons. I tell her how this knowledge allows us to master nature and develop technology, that we can now communicate around the globe with satellites and send emails, photos, and movies because we can control electrons so well.

I tell her how the very oxygen molecules her sons breathed came from photosynthesis in chloroplasts that evolved from bacteria.

I tell her how we know a great deal about how children form in the womb, how we think of the beginning of a new individual as a cellular conversation between gametes made of elements—

She interrupts me, “You mean life on Earth is interconnected at the atomic level, drawn from the entire cosmos since the beginning of time?”

At the same time we say, “Praise God!”

Then she asks me why anyone in my time worries at all—and I tell her that I guess we just forget to appreciate the order in nature that is right in front of us when we use the tools to access the information that leads us to despair. She thinks that because of modern science we have more reason today to trust in the faithfulness of God the Creator than people in her time ever did. And I agree.

Then I tell the Maccabees mother the good news, that in the fullness of time a Savior came, Christ, the king of the Jews, an embryo formed in the womb of his mother, made of elements, our Lord, the perfect human, both in His divinity and His humanity, truly God and truly man, begotten of the Father, conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, and born of the Virgin Mary . . .

She finishes, “ . . . according to the purpose of the Creator who works all things according to his will.” She knew all of this already, of course, including the part about atoms.

I tell the mother of the Maccabees that Mary also watched her Son die a senseless and brutal death at the hands of people who did not see the bigger picture, and that he did, in fact, conquer death, that he rose and ascended into heaven, and that Mary, given to us by Christ, wants her children united with her forever too because she is the Holy Mother of All the Living. I smile and say that Heaven and Earth resound the hymn for this queen, all creation echoing: Salve Regina!

Then I tell her I have to go and thank her for teaching me that if our hearts and minds are large enough to hope, we can trust that the whole of creation is forever held in the hands of its loving Creator. She reminds me that her people went on to lead a fight for justice and that I will figure out my purpose too. She tells me to have no fear and prays with me until we meet again. “As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”

Stacy A. Trasancos is the Director of Publications for Bishop Joseph Strickland’s St. Philip Institute in Tyler, TX. She has a PhD in Chemistry from Penn State University and a MA in Dogmatic Theology from Holy Apostles College & Seminary.

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Mount Calvary: Sunday November 3, 2019: Music

October 31, 2019 in hymns, Music No Comments Tags: Ordinariate anniversary, Te Deum

Mount Calvary Church

A Roman Catholic Parish

The Personal Ordinariate of S. Peter

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

The Tenth Anniversary

of the Foundation

of the Ordinariate

Votive Mass of the Holy Spirit

Rev. Albert Scharbach, Pastor

Dr. Allen Buskirk, Choirmaster

Midori Ataka, Organist

Sunday, October 27, 2019

8:00 A.M. Said Mass

10:00 A.M. Sung Mass

Brunch to follow in the undercroft

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Prelude

Fuga, Dietrich Buxtehude

Postlude

Lauda Anima, arr. John Ferguson

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Common

Missa S. Maria Magdalena, Healey Willan

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Anthems

Praise to the Holiest, arr. Daniel McDavitt

Praise to the Holiest in the height,
and in the depth be praise:
in all his words most wonderful,
most sure in all his ways.
O loving wisdom of our God!
When all was sin and shame,
a second Adam to the fight
and to the rescue came.

O wisest love! that flesh and blood,
which did in Adam fail,
should strive afresh against the foe,
should strive and should prevail;
And that a higher gift than grace
should flesh and blood refine,
God’s presence and his very self,
and essence all-divine.
O generous love! that he, who smote
in Man for man the foe,
the double agony in Man
for man should undergo;

And in the garden secretly,
and on the cross on high,
should teach his brethren,
and inspire to suffer and to die.
Praise to the Holiest in the height,
and in the depth be praise:
in all his words most wonderful,
most sure in all his ways.

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O Lord, Give Thy Holy Spirit, Thomas Tallis (1510-1585)

O Lord, give thy Holy Spirit into our hearts, and lighten our understanding,
that we may dwell in the fear of thy Name, all the days of our life,
that we may know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.

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SOLEMN TE DEUM OF THANKSGIVING
The People stand. The Priest imposes and blesses incense, and the Thurifer,
facing the altar in the midst of the chancel, swings the thurible as the Choir sings

We praise thee, O God; we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.
All the earth doth worship thee, the Father everlasting.
To thee all Angels cry aloud; the Heavens, and all the Powers therein.
To thee Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry,
Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Sabaoth;
Heaven and earth are full of the Majesty of thy glory.
The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee.
The goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee.
The noble army of Martyrs praise thee.
The holy Church throughout all the world doth acknowledge thee;
The Father of an infinite Majesty; Thine honorable, true and only Son;
Also the Holy Ghost, the Comforter.
Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ.
Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father.
When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man, thou didst not abhor the Virgin’s womb.

When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death,
thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.
Thou sittest at the right hand of God in the glory of the Father.
We believe that thou shalt come to be our Judge.
We therefore pray thee, help thy servants, whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood.
Make them to be numbered with thy Saints in glory everlasting.
O Lord, save thy people, and bless thine heritage.
Govern them and lift them up for ever.
Day by day we magnify thee; and we worship thy Name, ever world without end.
Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this day without sin.
O Lord, have mercy upon us; have mercy upon us.
O Lord, let thy mercy lighten upon us, as our trust is in thee.
O Lord, in thee have I trusted; let me never be confounded.

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Hymns

#218 Come Holy Ghost, Creator Blest (MENDON) is a translation by Edward Caswall (1814-1878) of Hrabanus Maurus’s (756-856) Veni Creator Spiritus. Caswall was an Anglican clergyman who became a Catholic and joined Newman at the Oratory.

#376 Come down , O Love divine (DOWN AMPNEY) was written by Bianco of Siena (c. 1345-c. 1412). The incipit (first line) invokes the Holy Spirit to “seek thou this soul of mine and visit it with thine own ardor glowing.” Classic images of Pentecost appear throughout the hymn, especially those that relate to fire. Stanza one mentions “ardor glowing” and “kindle . . . thy holy flame.” Stanza two continues the flame images with “freely burn,” “dust and ashes in its heat consuming.” The final stanza is a powerful statement of total commitment to love, to “create a place/wherein the Holy Spirit makes a dwelling.”

#273 Holy God we praise Thy name (TE DEUM) is a translation by the Rev. Clarence Alphonsus Walworth (1820-1900), one of the founders of the Paulists, of the German translation of the Te Deum, made by the Rev. Ignaz Franz (1719-1790), a German priest. The Latin Te Deum is a 4th c. hymn of uncertain authorship. We are singing all verses of the hymn because a plenary indulgence is granted to those who on this day visit an Ordinariate church and recite the Te Deum.

Holy God, we praise Thy name;
Lord of all, we bow before Thee!
All on earth Thy scepter claim,
All in heav’n above adore Thee.
Infinite Thy vast domain,
Everlasting is Thy reign.

Hark, the loud celestial hymn,
Angel choirs above are raising;
Cherubim and seraphim,
In unceasing chorus praising,
Fill the heav’ns with sweet accord:
Holy, holy, holy Lord.

Lo! the apostolic train
Join Thy sacred name to hallow;
Prophets swell the glad refrain,
And the white-robed martyrs follow;
And, from morn till set of sun,
Through the church the song goes on.

Holy Father, Holy Son,
Holy Spirit, three we name Thee;
Though in essence only one,
Undivided God we claim Thee,
And adoring bend the knee,
While we own the mystery.

Thou art King of glory, Christ:
Son of God, yet born of Mary;
For us sinners sacrificed,
And to death a tributary:
First to break the bars of death,
Thou has opened Heaven to faith.

From Thy high celestial home,
Judge of all, again returning,
We believe that Thou shalt come
In the dreaded doomsday morning;
When Thy voice shall shake the earth,
And the startled dead come forth.

Therefore do we pray Thee, Lord:
Help Thy servants whom, redeeming
By Thy precious blood out-poured,
Thou hast saved from Satan’s scheming.
Give to them eternal rest
In the glory of the blest.

Spare Thy people, Lord, we pray,
By a thousand snares surrounded:
Keep us without sin today,
Never let us be confounded.
Lo, I put my trust in Thee;
Never, Lord, abandon me.

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Mount Calvary: All Souls Day: November 2, 2019: 9 AM Mass

October 28, 2019 in Uncategorized No Comments

Mount Calvary Church

A Roman Catholic Parish

The Personal Ordinariate of S. Peter

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

ALL SOULS DAY

November 2, 2019

9:00 A.M. Mass

Rev. Albert Scharbach, Pastor

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Hymns

#223 Jesus son of Mary was written by Edmund Stuart Palmer (1856–1931) in Swahili as ‘Yesu Bin Mariamu’ sometime before 1901, for the Requiem of a colleague. Palmer was a doctor and Anglican cleric who preached and practiced medicine in Zanzibar and East Africa.

Here is the tune we will use ADORO DEVOTE.

#585 Jerusalem, my happy home has a complicated history. It may have been written by a 16^th century Catholic priest “F. B. P” (¿Francis Baker Porter?) imprisoned in the Tower and it may be based on The Meditations of St. Augustine. It exists in several versions; the one we use was said to be the favorite hymn of Elizabeth Ann Seton.As adults, we know we live in a vale of tears: the disappointments of life, the sickness and death of friends and family, the destruction that evil works in God’s creation. This world as it now exists is not our home, which we will find in the transfigured world of the New Creation. The disharmony of the present age will be replaced by the harmony of heaven, symbolized by music, the new song, canticum novum, that we will forever sing.

LAND OF REST is an American folk tune with roots in the ballads of northern England and Scotland. It was known throughout the Appalachians; a shape-note version of the tune was published in The Sacred Harp (1844).

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Mount Calvary Music: All Saints November 1, 2019

October 28, 2019 in Uncategorized No Comments

Mount Calvary Church

A Roman Catholic Parish

The Personal Ordinariate of S. Peter

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

ALL SAINTS

November 1, 2019

7:00 P.M. Sung Mass

Rev. Albert Scharbach, Pastor

Dr. Allen Buskirk, Choirmaster

Midori Ataka, Organist

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Common

Missa Sancti Wilhelmi, John Taverner

Not a great deal is known about the life of John Taverner. He is thought to have been born around 1490 in Lincolnshire, and is first documented in 1525 as a lay clerk at the collegiate church of Tattershall, a musical establishment of some importance. Later that year he was recommended by Bishop Longland of Lincoln for the new post of Informator (choirmaster) at Cardinal College (now Christ Church), Oxford, founded by Cardinal Wolsey and lavishly endowed with a choir of sixteen choristers and twelve ‘clerkes skilled in polyphony’. After overcoming an initial reluctance to leave the security of Tattershall, he accepted this prestigious invitation in time for the formal opening of the College in October 1526. Its glory proved to be short-lived, however, and after Wolsey’s fall from power in 1529 its fortunes and finances soon began to decline. Taverner resigned the post in 1530. For the next seven years his whereabouts are unknown. Possibly he worked as a freelance musician in London, or perhaps he returned directly to Lincolnshire. From 1537 Taverner was in Boston, maybe employed as an agent for Thomas Cromwell, who had been commissioned by Henry VIII to carry out a survey and valuation of the lesser monasteries and friaries prior to their dissolution. There is no truth in the persistent claim that Taverner was a fanatical persecutor in carrying out these duties. The significance of the often-quoted note in the 1583 edition of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments that Taverner came ‘to repent him very much that he had made songs to popish ditties in the time of his blindness’ may well have been exaggerated; Foxe, an ardent Protestant, was writing some forty years after the composer’s death, and the term ‘popish ditties’ remains open to interpretation. On the contrary, there is documentary evidence that Taverner had genuine concern for the welfare of the monks and friars. The assumption that he ceased to compose after leaving Oxford is based on speculation, since a proportion of his output has probably been lost and what has survived is not always easy to date.Taverner died in 1545 and was buried beneath the famous ‘stump’ of Boston church.

The Mass is scored for five voices, within which Taverner makes effective use of contrasting high and low groups. Simple and clear textures, and extensive use of imitation, combine to create a decidedly more ‘modern’ music than is found in his large-scale and elaborate six-voice masses. The Sanctus-Benedictus and Agnus Dei are given melismatic treatment. Taverner achieves a marvellous sense of climax through his favourite device of melodic sequence in the Osanna of the Sanctus.

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Anthems

Justorum animae, William Byrd (1540-1623)

Justorum animae in manu Dei sunt, et non tanget illos tormentum mortis. Visi sunt oculis insipientium mori, illi autem sunt in pace.

The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and the torment of death shall not touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die; but they are in peace.

The English Renaissance composer produced sacred music for use in Anglican services, although he became a Roman Catholic in later life and wrote Catholic sacred music as well. His serene and beautiful setting of “Justorum animae” comes from the biblical Book of Wisdom. The line ‘Justorum animae in manu Dei sunt’ (‘The souls of the just are in the hand of God) would have been a source of solace for devout believers.

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O quam gloriosum, William Byrd (1540-1623)

O quam gloriosum est regnum, in quo cum Christo gaudent omnes sancti, amicti stolis albis sequuntur Agnum quocunque ierit, laudantes Deum et dicentes: Benedictio et claritas et sapientia et gratiarum actio, honor, virtus et fortitudo Deo nostro in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

O how glorious is the kingdom wherein all the Saints rejoice with Christ; arrayed in white robes they follow the Lamb whithersoever he goeth, praising God and saying: Benediction and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving, honour and power and strength, to our God, for ever and ever. Amen.

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Hymns

The first two verses of the hymn are a description of the saints arrayed before God’s throne, asking the question: who are they? Verse three begins to answer the question. So verse four is an answer to the question of who are the saints? What is wonderful about verse four is that it describes people who do not simply submit to God’s will: “who in prayer full oft have striven with the God they glorified.” In other words, their prayer has often been an intense struggle with God. It’s a powerful description of one aspect of a devout Christian life. Like Jacob, we often wrestle with God about His seeming absence in our anguish; Jesus too cried “my God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”

Here is the Wakefield Cathedral Choir.

#126 For all the saints is by the Anglican bishop William Walsham How (1823—1897), who was a great friend of the poor of his diocese, and was known variously as ‘the children’s bishop’, ‘the poor man’s bishop’ and ‘the omnibus bishop’ (the last referring to his preferred means of travel about his diocese).

This hymn derives much of its power from its ability to capture the spirit of the Church Militant here on earth, using imagery from the book of Revelation. Vaughan Williams composed the tune SINE NOMINE (‘without a name’) for this hymn. It has been suggested that the name of the tune refers to the countless number of saints who are not remembered by name but who are part of the ‘glorious company’.

Here is the St. Edmundsbury Cathedral Choir.

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The Vanishing Male College Student

October 27, 2019 in Uncategorized No Comments

Scandinavia is the most egalitarian area in the world when it comes to policies, but it is also the area in which men and women segregate themselves into different occupations.

This division by gender in many professions is unusually pronounced in Iceland, known as a society that values equality, with a female prime minister, a law requiring employers to certify they pay male and female workers equally and a rule that at least 40 percent of corporate board members must be women.

The male dislike of education is of long standing, but it is increasing. An article in the Post points out:

Fifty years ago, 58 percent of U.S. college students were men. Today, 56 percent are women, Education Department estimates show. This year, for the first time, the share of college-educated women in the U.S. workforce passed the share of college-educated men.

Iceland is leading the way:

the shrinking number of men in higher education has, until recently, attracted scant attention, said Eyjolfur Gudmundsson, rector of the University of Akureyri, where 77 percent of 2,389 undergraduates are women.
“We are just now waking up and understanding that this is a problem,” Gudmundsson said. “The world is waking up to it.”
Yet some people still ask him why they should be concerned, Gudmundsson said.
“It is of concern for the exact reason that we had concern 30 years ago about women not being represented in higher education in a fair way, or in the United States about ethnic groups and people of different backgrounds” not going to college, he said he tells them.
______
Though there are slightly more men in Iceland than women, women earn more undergraduate and graduate degrees, including PhDs, according to the country’s Directorate of Equality. Fifty-nine percent of women in the Reykjavik region have completed college, compared with 45 percent of men; outside the capital, the ratio is 40 percent to 19 percent.
While men still predominate in engineering and computer science, they won’t go into nursing; 98 percent of nurses here are women, at a time when the need for nurses is rising.
There are also shortages of teachers in Iceland, another job for which few men apply; at the University of Iceland, 91 percent of teaching students are women.

Women will go into fields long associated with men, bt men will not go into fields long associated with women:

In fact, attitudes toward work have started changing — but more among women than men. At the University of Iceland, more women have begun to enter male-dominated disciplines such as electrical engineering.

“What isn’t happening is the other trend in the female-dominated departments,” Gestsdottir said. “We’re not seeing men going into women-dominated subjects at the same rate. This is a very slow process.”

Women will happily wear pants; men will rarely wear dresses (and no, a kilt is not a skirt).

In higher education in the United States there is some hostility to men, especially heterosexual men, especially white heterosexual men. So there are fewer and fewer men in college; women have to marry down educationally.

In Iceland, with is 3% unemployment rate, there are still many well-paying blue collar jobs in fishing and construction; less so in the United States.

The dominance of men at the very top of society conceals the downward mobility of men as a whole, and the males at the top of the pyramid show little empathy for males at the bottom of the pyramid, where men far outnumber women in prison and on the streets.

Several years ago, I attended a conference on fatherhood at McGill University in Montreal. A professor of sociology, a woman, gave a depressing presentation on the rising number of suicides of young men in Canada and elsewhere.

In the middle of her presentation an older man arose and interrupted her. “Stop!” he said. “Why are you discussing this? The real crisis is the glass ceiling that women assistant professors of theology face when they try to become full professors! Don’t waste your time on trivial issues! Concentrate on the real problems!”

I asked who the jerk was and was informed it was Gregory Baum. Ah yes, Gregory Baum, super-liberal theologian and peritus at the Second Vatican Council. And liberals wonder why men voted for Trump.

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Idolatry in the Vatican? Further thoughts and developments

October 24, 2019 in Vatican No Comments Tags: idolatry, Pachamama, Vatican

These are the images that have caused a controversy in Rome.

What are they? What do they mean? And how are they being used?

Some claim they are Pachamama, Mother Earth, a pagan deity. Others that they are symbols of Life and Fertility. A few claim they are the Virgin Mary of the Amazon (that seems highly improbable).

Let us consider similar images in Byzantine and Western art. Here are images of the pregnant Virgin Mary.

In venerating these images, the veneration is directed to real persons, either Christ or the totus Christus, the saints who are members of His mystical body, especially Mary, the God-Bearer.

But suppose, as seems to have happened in the Vatican, veneration was directed to images such as these:

Caritas could also be entitled Maternitas, motherhood. (My wife is especially moved by these images. She had six children, including twins, in eight years. One child is nursing, the other is saying he’s hungry, and the third is pulling on her skirt saying he has a school project due in the morning.)

Suppose someone venerated such an image. What is he venerating? Not a real person, but what? An abstraction, a symbol, a force, a dynamic, an impersonal spiritual reality?

The Romans had a temple of Fides, later Fides Publica, Public Faith, the deification of good faith and honesty. Sacrifices were made to her. Libertas, the female personification of liberty and personal freedom, had a temple on the Aventine. There was a joint temple to Honor and Virtus, personification of manliness, especially military bravery. These are all good things, but should they be worshipped? Christians destroyed all these temples.

Venerating Motherhood, Maternity, would be a charming pagan practice, and perhaps a step to Christianity. The image might well be repurposed as the Virgin Mary. But in itself, such veneration is giving divine honors to something other than God, or to a person who is an image of God and a member of the Mystical Body. Even if one believes in one Creator God, it is still giving honor to something other than the Divinity, and would seem to be forbidden by the first commandment. We can’t have God and in addition gods, even Libertas, Honor, or Maternitas.

Obviously venerating such an image is radically different from venerating Moloch. But I am not impressed by the Vatican officials who think it is fine to venerate an image of Life and Fertility. How does that differ from the worship of Astarte and Ba’al? They were both symbols of Life and Fertility. Some Jews worshipped them and also YHWH. Syncretism is an ancient and chronic problem.

Lee Penn noticed: “there is an ominous literary parallel. In Robert Hugh Benson’s 1907 apocalyptic novel “Lord of the World,” Benson describes the minimal (!) commitment that the Antichrist regime would ask of its adherents: “The act of worship was so little, too; it consisted of no more than bodily presence in in the church or cathedral on the four new festivals of Maternity, Life, Sustenance, and Paternity, celebrated on the first day of each quarter. Sunday worship was to be purely voluntary.”

Benson may have had a good insight. The new false worship would not be of the old gods, whether Thor or Venus; that would be too obvious. Good things can be idols too: Maternity, Fertility, Loyalty, Community. We have been warned that the Antichrist may lead astray even the elect. It has also become clear that we cannot rely upon the judgment of a man just because he is bishop of Rome. Francis is not a good judge; John Paul called the incestuous drug addict child abuser Maciel “an infallible guide to youth.” Catholics must, like Protestants, use private judgment, e.g. common sense, prudence, knowledge of Scripture and tradition, and spiritual discernment, about what is going on in the world and in the Church.

(BTW, I wonder what the reaction would have been if the Amazonians had brought statues of the common male symbol of Life and Fertility, venerated them, and then placed them in Roman churches.)

(Apparently there were small phallic objects in the Vatican ceremony, or at least some other ceremony involving the statues, but the news media discreetly omitted any mention of them. Ah, the old time religion of Ba’al and Astarte.)

A cardinal of my acquaintance called a curial cardinal about a financial and contractual matter, asking how something questionable was done. The curial cardinal; explained “I lied.” The non-curial cardinal replied, “The Ten Commandments apply in the Vatican too.” To which the curial cardinal replied, “You’re so naïve.”

Alas, not much has changed in the curia since Luther was so scandalized that he ended up dividing Western Christendom. Why the curia has had repeated episodes of deep corruption is a mystery. Careerism? Too much money? Lack of accountability? Narcissism? Arrogance? Or a witch’s brew of all of these? Quousque tandem?

And furthermore…

Cardinal Gerhardt Mueller, the former head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, is a friend of the liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, with whom he co-authored a book, An der Seite der Armen, On the Side of the Poor, so Mueller cannot be dismissed as a reactionary traditionalist. His take on the statues:

“The great mistake was to bring the idols into the Church,” replies the cardinal, “not to put them out, because according to the Law of God Himself – the First Commandment – idolism [idolatry] is a grave sin and not to mix them with the Christian liturgy.”

Rexcrisanto Delson is an indigenous person. His reaction to the statues and ceremonies in the Vatican gardens:

“There were idols, and even a Franciscan participated,” he continued.

“I later learned that an Amazon tribal leader confirmed it was purely pagan. Did the Catholics who participated and supported such a vile act not know it was pagan?”

Delson said that even if they didn’t know then, they should know now.

“There’s no excuse from here on out to claim they didn’t know they were violating the first commandment,” he said, and quoted Psalm 95:5 in saying that “all the gods of the Gentiles are devils.”

For those bishops who are a little rusty on their scripture, let us review some important verses:

I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

Father Martin said of homosexual behavior, every time Scripture mentions homosexuality it condemns it. But the interesting question for Martin is whether Scripture is correct in its judgment. Perhaps some of the participants in the Synod think the same about idolatry. Every time Scripture mentions idolatry, it condemns it. But the interesting question is whether the judgment of Scripture is correct. A very useful line of reasoning, with widespread application.

Yet further developments.

The Pope doesn’t think the first commandment is in force in the Vatican. The statues are images of Pachamama, a pagan goddess, they will be displayed in St. Peter’s, and they will presumably be honored in some way, but it’s not idolatry, because he’s pope, and he says so, and no one can stop him. So there:

Pope Francis is apologizing for the furtive removal of the carved fertility figures from a Rome church, and has announced they’ve been found and will be displayed in St. Peter’s Basilica for the Amazon Synod’s closing Mass.

“As bishop of this diocese, I apologize to those who have been offended by this act,” said Pope Francis in the opening remarks for Friday’s afternoon general congregation, according to French media outlet i.media, present in the aula.

The pontiff referred to the statuettes as “Pachamama” — up till now a pejorative used by by critics who claim she represents the pagan Mother Earth goddess — and announced Italian police had found them and are currently have them in safekeeping.

“The Commander of the Carabinieri wished to inform us of the retrieval before the news becomes public,” he said, adding, “the statues are being kept in the office of the Commander of the Italian Carabinieri.”

Pope Francis also announced “the display of the statues at the closing Mass of the Synod.”

The pope insisted that the figures had been displayed “without any intention of idolatry” in Santa Maria del Traspontina, lamenting that their “theft” had caused a “media uproar.”

But Amazonian Bp. José Luis Azcona of Marajó in the Amazon region disagrees, confirming that “Pachamama” is a pagan goddess and denouncing the rituals in the Vatican.

“In those rituals there is the devil, there is magic,” he said in a sermon given Oct. 16 in Brazil.

The Restoration of the Idols 2019 AD (not to be confused with the Restoration of the Icons 843 AD)

As the learned Paolo Suess explained to Vatican Media, it doesn’t matter whom or what you’re worshipping as long as you are worshipping:

Last week, Vatican Media interviewed Fr. Paulo Suess, a German priest who has served for decades among the indigenous peoples of the Amazon. Fr. Suess is in Rome as an official of the Synod of Bishops on the Amazon, and is regarded there as an expert on the region.

The priest was asked about a ceremony held in St. Peter’s Basilica Oct. 7, which seemed to use both traditional Christian symbols and unexplained symbols of indigenous Amazonian culture.

“It is definitely the case that there is a noticeable sentiment against the synod on the part of certain media here….Someone wrote that it was a pagan rite,” Fr. Suess responded.

“So what?”

“Even if that had been a pagan rite, what took place was still a worship service. A rite always has something to do with worship. Paganism cannot be dismissed as nothing. What is pagan? In our big cities we are no less pagan than in the jungle. That’s something to think about,” he said

Vatican Media deleted these comments.

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Mount Calvary Music October 27 2019

October 23, 2019 in Uncategorized No Comments

Mount Calvary Church

A Roman Catholic Parish

The Personal Ordinariate of S. Peter

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

Trinity XIX

Rev. Albert Scharbach, Pastor

Dr. Allen Buskirk, Choirmaster

Midori Ataka, Organist

Sunday, October 27, 2019

8:00 A.M. Said Mass

10:00 A.M. Sung Mass, with Baptism

Brunch to follow in the undercroft

_______________

Prelude

Andante, from Voluntary I, John Stanley

Postlude

Southwell, setting by Raymond Haan

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Common

Missa S. Maria Magdalena, Healey Willan

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Anthems

Give Almes of Thy Goods, Christopher Tye (1500-1573)

Give almes of thy goods, and turn never thy face from any poor man:
then the face of the Lord shall not be turned away from thee.

This Sunday’s offertory anthem is the most tasteful stewardship anthem in the repertoire. Rather than “please turn in your pledge card,” it requests us to “give almes of thy goods.” The beauty and effectiveness this short anthem is its simplicity and imitative voice parts. One vocal line leads as all the others follow, woven together like fine fabric. Listen for the words “and then the face” as they culminate in sublime, homophonic chordal treatment of the text “shall not be turned away from thee.” Christopher Tye (c.1505-1572) has been called an “innovator” of English cathedral music; together with Tallis, he bridged the musical and liturgical styles from Roman to Anglican in the earliest days of the English Church in the mid-16th Century. He worked closely with Edward VI, the young monarch who called Tye “our musical lecturer.” Moving away from plainsong, Edward VI had decreed that choirs sing in English and with only one note to every syllable. Tye graduated with a bachelor’s degree in music from Cambridge and sang as a lay clerk in the King’s College Cambridge choir. He then became master of the choir at Ely Cathedral, and Cambridge bestowed upon him the Doctor of Music degree. Though not documented, it is assumed he held a position in the Chapel Royal in the 1550s.

_________

Beati mundo cordi, William Byrd (1540-1623)

Domine, non sum dignus
ut intres sub tectum meum,
sed tantum dic verbum,
et sanabitur anima mea.

Lord, I am not worthy
that thou shouldest come under my roof:
but speak the word only,
and my soul shall be healed.

William Byrd’s Domine, non sum dignus is an exquisite setting of words spoken by a Roman centurion when Christ offers to come to his house to heal the man’s servant (Luke 7: 6–7). This text is familiar from our liturgy where it serves as a preparation before receiving the host. Byrd displays his usual skill in setting the text using features characteristic of the Italian madrigal, especially at the words “sed tantum dic verbum” meaning “but only say the word” where the imitation comes thick and fast, building to the final section in which healing arrives.

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Hymns

#414 (words) O for a heart to praise my God (RICHMOND) is by Charles Wesley (1707-1788). This hymn has the Wesleyan emphasis on the religion of the heart, which is transformed by the saving blood of Jesus. The hope for perfection is deeply Wesleyan. The Beatitudes likewise point the Christian to greater and greater perfection: Blessed are the pure of heart, blessed are the meek. Perfection is found in love, because we become sharers of the divine nature, and Jesus reveals the “new, best name” of God, Love. The tune RICHMOND is by the Anglican clergyman Thomas Haweis (rhymes with pause) (1734-1820), a leading figures of the 18th century evangelical revival and a key figure in the histories of the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, the Free Church of England and the London Missionary Society.It is named for the Rev. Leigh Richmond, a friend of Haweis’s.

#781 Lord Jesus, think on me (SOUTHWELL) is a translation by the Anglican clergyman Allen William Chatfield (1808-1896) of the Greek hymn, Μνώεο Χριστέ by Synesius of Cyrene (375-430). Synesius was the Bishop of Ptolomais, one of the ancient capitals of Cyrenaica that is today part of modern-day Libya.

I’ll praise my Maker while I’ve breath (OLD 113th) is Isaac Watts’ (1674-1748) paraphrase of Psalm 146, altered by John Wesley. It was one if his favorite hymns; he sang it at the end of his last sermon. Wesley’s caretaker at his deathbed wrote that, shortly before Wesley’s death, he ” broke out ..in a manner which considering his extreme weakness astonished us all, in these blessed words: ‘ I’ll praise my Maker while I’ve breath…’ ” During that night Wesley tried to repeat the hymn, but could only say ” I’ll praise — I’ll praise”. A few hours later John Wesley has passed into the Lord’s presence. In death Christians pass into endless praise of God’s goodness and mercy. OLD 113th was composed by Matthaus Greiter (1495-1550). He became priest and cantor at Strasbourg Cathedral. In 1524 he joined the new Reformed Church. In 1538 he accepted a position of music teacher at the Collegium Argentinense (later University of Strasbourg). In 1549 he returned to the Catholic religion and founded a Catholic school of singing.

Addendum

The attentive reader (and all readers of this blog are in that category) will no doubt have noticed the variation in the text of Byrd’s Domine non sum dignus.

In the Latin Missal, the phrase is sed tantum dic verbo, verbo being an ablative of means : Say only by the word, but Byrd’s text puts verbum in the accusative, making it the direct object of dic. Alas, I do not know the origin of this variation (the Vetus Latina?).

The Vulgate has sed dic verbo, et sanabitur puer meus.

As the blog Réponses Catholiques explains in answer to a question:

« Dans la liturgie en latin, avant la communion, nous disons : « Domine, non sum dignus ut intres sub tectum meum, sed tantum dic VERBO, et sanabitur anima mea. Instinctivement je dirais : « sed tantum dic VERBUM ». Pouvez-vous m’expliquer le sens de VERBO ? »

Sur ce blogue, toutes les questions sont bonnes, y compris les plus techniques. Mais comme mes connaissances ne sont pas universelles, j’ai consulté un confrère hautement qualifié.

Voici sa réponse, in extenso :

« J’ai longtemps cru que c’était une faute de latin (comme il y a dans le missel français des fautes de grammaire, cf. l’horrible et fautif “prends pitié”), jusqu’au jour où un moine que j’interrogeais à ce sujet m’a dit : Mais pas du tout ! Il s’agit bien d’un ablatif. Le verbe transitif “dicere” est normalement suivi d’un accusatif : “dic verbum” = “dis une parole”. Mais il existe un autre sens : commander, ordonner, avec l’ablatif : “dic verbo” = “ordonne au moyen d’une parole (par une parole)”. Il n’y a donc pas de faute, contrairement aux apparences.

Signé : Père O. »

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Married Priests?

October 8, 2019 in Anglicans, Catholic Church, Celibacy No Comments

In the Latin Rite, in general, only celibates are ordained priests. This practice has been blamed by many for a seeming shortage of priests, and led to headlines such as

Will ordaining married priests save the Catholic Church from decline?

But this chart about the Anglican Church in Canada suggests that other forces are at work:

Since 1961 there has been about a 90% decline in baptisms, and about a 50% increase in the number of clergy. And the Anglicans ordain women and married men.

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Mount Calvary Music: October 20, 2019

October 8, 2019 in Uncategorized No Comments

Mount Calvary Church

A Roman Catholic Parish

The Personal Ordinariate of S. Peter

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

Trinity XVIII

Rev. Albert Scharbach, Pastor

Dr. Allen Buskirk, Choirmaster

Midori Ataka, Organist

Sunday, October 20, 2019

8:00 A.M. Said Mass

10:00 A.M. Sung Mass, with Baptism

Brunch to follow in the undercroft

_______________

Prelude

Postlude

_______________

Common

Missa S. Maria Magdalena, Healey Willan

______________

Anthems

God be in my head, Henry Walford Davies (1869-1941)

God be in my head, and in my understanding; God be in mine eyes, and in my looking; God be in my mouth, and in my speaking; God be in my heart, and in my thinking; God be at mine end, and at my departing.

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Hear the voice and prayer, Thomas Tallis (1510-1585)

Hear the voice and prayer of thy servants, that they make before thee this day. That thine eyes may be open toward this house night and day, ever toward this place, of which thou hast said: “My Name shall be there.” And when thou hearest have mercy on them.

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Hymns

Christ, whose glory fills the skies was written by Charles Wesley (1707—1788). He begins the hymn with the antithesis between light and night. In stanza two, Wesley uses the first words of each line to tell the story of redemption. The first three lines begin with “Dark,” “Unaccompanied,” and “Joyless.” The plight of humanity has been set. The next two lines begin with “till” which represents hope for salvation. The repeating of “more and more” implies the idea that we can never see enough of the “Radiancy divine” which has “[pierced] the gloom of sin and grief.” Scripture references are present throughout: John 1:9,the “true light”; Isaiah 2:6 and Malachi 4:2, the “Sun of Righteousness”; Isaiah 14:12 and 2 Peter 1:19, the ”Day Star.”

When Jesus left His Father’s throne (KINGSFOLD) was written by the Moravian social reformer James Montgomery (1771-1854). Following Jesus, Montgomery had a heart for those who were regarded as insignificant by society: the poor and children. Let us rejoice that our church is blessed with so many children: “For of such is the kingdom of heaven.” KINGSFOLD is thought by some scholars to date back to the Middle Ages, KINGSFOLD is a folk tune set to a variety of texts in England and Ireland.

Joyful, joyful, we adore Thee was written ca. 1908, when Henry van Dyke (1852-1953) was a visiting preacher at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, set in the beautiful landscape of the Berkshire Hills, which is said to have inspired the hymn. Van Dyke, a Presbyterian minister, was also a professor of English literature at Princeton and a friend of President Woodrow Wilson. He also served as a naval chaplain in World War I. He composed it to be sung to the Ode to Joy in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

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Mount Calvary: Music October 13, 2019

October 8, 2019 in hymns, Mount Calvary Church, Music No Comments

St. John Henry Newman

Mount Calvary Church

A Roman Catholic Parish

The Personal Ordinariate of S. Peter

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

Sunday, October 13, 2019

Trinity XVII

Rev. Albert Scharbach, Pastor

Dr. Allen Buskirk, Choirmaster

Midori Ataka, Organist

8:00 A.M. Said Mass

10:00 A.M. Sung Mass

Brunch to follow in the undercroft

___________________

Prelude

_________

Postlude

Praise to the Holiest in the Height, by R. R. Terry

_______________

Common

Missa de S. Maria Magdalena, H. Willan

________________

Anthems

Gaudeamus omnes, William Byrd (1540-1623)

Gaudeamus omnes in Domino diem festum celebrantes sub honore Sanctorum omnium: de quorum solemnitate gaudent angeli, et collaudant Filium Dei. Exsultate iusti in Domino: rectos decet collaudatio. Gloria Patri. Gaudeamus.

Let us all rejoice in the Lord celebrating the feast in honour of all the saints, in which solemnity the angels rejoice, while the Archangels praise the Son of God. Ring out your joy to the lord, O you just; for praise is fitting for loyal hearts. Glory be. Let us all rejoice.

__________

Beati mundo corde, William Byrd (1540-1623)

Beati mundo corde quoniam ipsi Deum videbunt, beati pacifici quoniam filii Dei vocabuntur, beati qui persecutionem patiuntur propter iustitiam quoniam ipsorum est regnum caelorum.

Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God. Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

_________________

Hymns

Praise to the Holiest in the height (GERONTIUS) is an 1865 hymn by John Henry Newman (1801—1890). The hymn is a profound meditation on 1 Corinthians 15: 20-47, in which God in Christ, the second Adam, restores the world which had been lost by the sin of the first Adam. He does so by his Incarnation: his becoming human is an even higher gift than grace. In human form he undergoes the ‘double agony’ (the agony in the garden, and the suffering on the cross) which will teach and inspire, and demonstrate the power of ‘generous love’. The actions of the Incarnate God are appropriately enclosed within the ‘praise’ motif of the first and last verses.

Like the hymn Firmly I believe and truly, it forms part of The Dream of Gerontius (1865) , which describes the passage of the soul through death. It is sung by the angels as the soul approaches judgment. Jesus, who is true God and true man, undergoes for the human race the “double agony,” the one in the garden and the one on the cross. In his Discourse 16, Newman placed equal emphasis on Jesus’ Agony in the Garden and on His Crucifixion as central to understanding the work of redemption. In the garden Jesus felt the full horror and degradation of all the sins and guilt and sorrows of the world. Newman also intimates that we his brethren should learn from Him to do our share in bearing the burden of the sins of the world.

Lead, Kindly Light (LUX BENIGNA). Newman write this while sick and becalmed at sea in June 1933. Angry at the state of disunion and supineness in the Church he still loved and in which he still believed; confident that he had ‘a mission,’ ‘a work to do in England;’ passionately longing for home and the converse of friends; sick in body to prostration, and, as some around him feared, even unto death; feeling that he should not die but live, and that he must work, but knowing not what that work was to be, how it was to be done, or to what it might tend, he breathed forth the impassioned and pathetic prayer, one of the birth-pangs, it might be called, of the Oxford movement of 1833.

Firmly I believe and truly (NASHOTAH). As an Evangelical, Newman (1801—1890) rejected the doctrines of purgatory and the intercession of saints, but as part of his conversion (1845), he came to a realization of the fullness of the communion of saints: those striving on earth, those being purified by the divine fire, and those in heaven moved by love to pray for those on earth and in purgatory. The poem (Greek Geron: old man), relates the journey of a pious man’s soul from his deathbed to his judgment before God and settling into Purgatory. As the priests and assistants pray the prayers for the dying, Gerontius recites this creed and prays for mercy. Sanctus Fortis, Sanctus Deus is from the Good Friday liturgy and is alluded to in the line “him the holy, him the strong.”

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Mount Calvary Music October 6, 2019

October 5, 2019 in hymns, Mount Calvary Church, Music No Comments

We are but unworthy servants

Mount Calvary Church

A Roman Catholic Parish

The Personal Ordinariate of S. Peter

Eutaw Street and Madison Avenue

Baltimore, Maryland

Sunday, October 6, 2019

Trinity XVI

Rev. Albert Scharbach, Pastor

Dr. Allen Buskirk, Choirmaster

Midori Ataka, Organist

8:00 A.M. Said Mass

10:00 A.M. Sung Mass

Brunch to follow in the undercroft

___________________

Prelude

Allegro, from Voluntary II, John Stanley

_________
Postlude

Andante, from Voluntary II, John Stanley

___________________

Common

Missa de S. Maria Magdalena, H. Willan

________________

Anthems

O Lord, Give Thy Holy Spirit, Thomas Tallis (1510-1585)

O Lord, give thy Holy Spirit into our hearts, and lighten our understanding, that we may dwell in the fear of thy Name, all the days of our life, that we may know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.

The life of Thomas Tallis is a mirror of the musical effects of the Anglican Reformation in England. He served in the Chapel Royal for some 40 years, composing under four Monarchs with widely differing religious practices. Tallis was among the first to set English words to music for the rites of the Church of England, although most of his vocal music was written in Latin. A composer of great contrapuntal skill, his works show intense expressivity and are cast in a bewildering variety of styles. During the reign of King Edward VI (1547-1553) it was mandated that the services be sung in English, and that the choral music be brief and succinct “to each syllable a plain and distinct note”. The exquisite “O Lord, give thy Holy Spirit” is a classic example of these new English four-part miniatures: mainly homophonic, but with brief moments of imitation. Like many early Anglican anthems, it is cast in ABB form, the second section repeated twice. (Notes by Ryan Turner, Emmanuel Music, Boston)

__________

Lord, Let Me Know Mine End, Maurice Green (1696-1755)

Lord, let me know mine end, and the number of my days; that I may be certified how long I have to live. Behold, thou hast made my days as it were a span long, and mine age is even as nothing in respect of thee; and verily every man living is altogether vanity. For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain; he heapeth up riches, and cannot tell who shall gather them. And now, Lord, what is my hope? Truly my hope is even in thee. Hear my prayer, O LORD, and with thine ears consider my calling; hold not thy peace at my tears. O spare me a little, that I may recover my strength, before I go hence, and be no more seen.

The early eighteenth century was a rather low point in English church music, in which the fashion for Italian music, particularly opera, had diluted the native product. Thus the technical strength and expressive power of “Lord, let me know mine end”, a setting of verses from Psalm 39, are all the more remarkable. Maurice Greene (1696-1755) was the organist at St. Paul’s Cathedral and Master of the King’s Music in the mid-eighteenth century. In this his most famous work, the walking bass line that persists throughout the piece can be taken as an evocative depiction of life’s journey. Over it, Greene crafts a series of thoughtful imitative points with, at the center, a soprano duet of great beauty.

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Hymns

Love divine, all loves excelling is by Charles Wesley (1707—1788). The hymn is a prayer: through the incarnate Christ, we pray for the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, and ask that we would never be separated from the love of God in Christ, who works in us and through us until our time on earth is done. One of the most loved Welsh tunes, HYFRODOL was composed by Rowland Hugh Prichard (1811—1887) in 1830 when he was only nineteen.

Lord of all hopefulness was written by Joyce Torrens-Graham (1901 -1953) in 1929 at the request of her friend, Canon Percy Dearmer of Westminster Abbey. She carefully fitted the words to the lovely Irish melody SLANE, also used by Be thou my vision. She used the pen name Mrs . Miniver, and created the character who appeared in the 1943 film of that name.

Lord, whose love through humble service (IN BABILONE) Scripture References: st. 4 = Matt. 25:34-10 Albert F. Bayly wrote this text in response to a Hymn Society of America search for new hymns on social welfare. It was chosen as the theme hymn for the Second National Conference on the Churches and Social Welfare held in Cleveland, Ohio, 1961. The text begins with recognition of Christ’s ultimate sacrifice on the cross and then points to the continuing needs of the homeless, the hungry, the prisoners, and the mourners. Bayly’s words remind us of modern refugees, and famine victims, and drug addicts who are our doorstep or who are brought to our attention via the news media. The final two stanzas encourage us to move from Sunday worship to weekday service; such integrity in the Christian life is truly a liturgy of sacrifice, pleasing to God.

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