Alleluia! He is risen! I can’t give you darkness and candles being lit one by one to light the darkness, but I did find a lovely version of the Exsultet online. It’s a little more elaborate than the ones I’ve…
Tag: Lent
Music for a Quiet Lent: Saturday, April 11 – Holy Saturday
I have a very dear friend who is a theologian and she told me once that the church bells fly away on the night of Good Friday (presumably after the Easter vigil was done), only to return on Easter morning.…
Music for a Quiet Lent: Friday, April 10 – Good Friday
Good Friday is a day of tradition and ritual for me. I usually get up early after my Maundy Thursday service the night before, to sing a morning service at Wesley, then help lead the Way of the Cross around…
Music for a Quiet Lent: Thursday, April 9 – Maundy Thursday
And here we are at Maundy Thursday. The most beautiful and dramatic piece of liturgy I’ve ever seen or been a part of was a Maundy Thursday service I sang in at an Anglo-Catholic church not far from here, in…
Music for a Quiet Lent: Wednesday, April 8
This has been a big week for German church music, mostly because it turns out that even when I’m singing church music in English, the original is in German. But today, we are heading for France and to a proper…
Music for a Quiet Lent: Tuesday, April 7
Once again, I am abandoning the Lectionary, but I am, at least, progressing sequentially through the Passion story, or at least following Jesus’ journey to the Cross in a somewhat orderly fashion. Today’s piece is by Mendelssohn, and is called…
Music for a Quiet Lent: Monday, April 6
As we are approaching Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, the Lectionary is following John through the last days of Christ’s life, and so today we get Mary anointing Jesus’s feet with perfume and wiping it away with her hair. This…
Music for a Quiet Lent: Sunday, April 5 – Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday
OK, get ready for a big sing today, because one of the churches I sing at calls this Palm Sunday and the other one calls it Passion Sunday, and, reflecting my habit of racing around madly between services on the…
Music for a Quiet Lent: Saturday, April 4
I am abandoning the Lectionary once again today, to bring you something that might belong on Ash Wednesday and might belong on Holy Saturday, but that definitely deserves to fit into this calendar somewhere, because it is too lovely to…
Music for a Quiet Lent: Friday, April 3
It’s Friday again, which means more Good Friday music. The Casals O Vos Omnes is a favourite of mine – we sing it during the Good Friday Vigil at one of the Catholic churches I sing at every year (I…