Alleluia!

[cahn]

I spent 11.5 hours at the Catholic Church this week, despite not being Catholic. That's right. And yeah, I blew off both of the churches I actually belong to for Easter Sunday. I'm not in choir at the Lutheran one, and the Mormon choir did one song (this ward doesn't seem to really get into Easter, although my last one did much more), whereas Catholic choir was doing one Bach bit, a Pergolesi, a de Victoria, the Hallelujah Chorus, plus the entire Gabrielli Missa Brevis minus the Credo. So I felt like they needed me more.

Random thoughts:

-Father A. is a small guy, and generally walks quite quickly, and when he does his -- cope? vestments? robes? need to learn the lingo -- billow out behind him like he's a superhero, and I kind of want a shiny cream-colored robe like that. Though I don't want to be a priest. And even if I did, I'm the wrong gender and married-state anyway. But still!

-Being Catholic is no joke. Just the amount of standing Holy Week on those hard wooden floors... I salute you. Well, I did it too, but I was getting paid, so it doesn't count :)

-We sang at the front of the church except for Easter Sunday itself (where we were in the choir loft). On Holy Saturday they turned all the lights off for the first half of the service. This... posed a problem. (The choir loft would have had its own lighting, but ah well.) We ended up lighting our music with cell phones. It was a bit ridiculous.

-The pastor kind of weirds me out with his super-insistence that services be as short as possible, to the extent that they didn't say the Credo one Sunday to keep the time down (come on, are you guys Catholic or Protestant? :) ), but I must confess I did rather appreciate not having to do the baptisms and Litany of Saints on Saturday, which cut the service from 3 hours to 2 hours. (I think the Litany of Saints is really cool -- don't know anything like it in any other church I've ever been to -- but man, a three-hour service starting at 8pm is reeeeally long.)

-I'm really, really angry that I screwed up the trio in the Benedictus and it is still making me angry even though no one cares except for me (see Hallelujah chorus and aftermath, below). It wasn't even a bad mistake; I came in correctly, Director was beating it wrong, but then I failed to realize when the soprano soloist recorrected to be in time with Director -- it's just that I Am Better Than That Darn It.

-I think it's weird that they don't say "Christ is risen." "He is risen indeed! Alleluia!" -- I got used to the Catholic liturgy being basically identical to the Lutheran one at D's church, and they do it there. I don't know if it's Catholics or a recent Vatican thing (which I know changed some of the other wording they use) or just the ruling of this particular pastor. (I forget what they did last year -- although the fact that I don't remember freaking out about it last year makes me think that maybe they did do it last year?)

-Singing the Hallelujah Chorus just... never gets old. It's just the most awesome thing ever, especially with timpani and brass like we had it. MOST AWESOME THING EVER.

-No, not the most awesome thing. The very VERY best part was right after we sang it, when people clapped -- well, they generally do a polite one-second clap after we sing at services -- but then they kept on clapping. And kept clapping. It's been kind of hard for the choir lately -- due to the pastor's decisions lately, we've been a bit depressed and feeling like the church doesn't really appreciate us or the music we do -- and to have this validation otherwise was sort of staggering. I think all of us might have teared up a little. I sure did.

-I should mention here that at the end of the Holy Saturday service, the pastor singled out the choir and Choir Director for kudos from the congregation and specifically mentioned patience for putting up with him during the first part of his tenure. So I'm hoping that things are looking up in that direction? If only for Choir Director's sake. He's been having a really rough couple of months of it.

Comments

[allochthonous]

Aw, that made me miss Holy Week church a bit (well, maybe not all the standing). The Easter Vigil, with all its theatrics, litanies of saints and good singing, was the best. Although we never got the Hallelujah chorus, which is a shame since, as you correctly point out, it is the GREATEST.

Haha, the new mass translation. Not only do I not go to church anymore, I am not even in the same country, and I still get updated by my mother on the feuds caused by that translation. There's a whole group in her church that continues to respond to "Peace be with you" with a rebellious "And also with you" which is practically a cause for schism.

[antisoppist]

What is the response supposed to be? I ask because my childhood churchgoing was Church of England prayerbook where my automatic answer is "And with thy spirit" and there was a lot of grumpy muttering and sniffing when they changed it to "And also with you".

[allochthonous]

Heh, it's actually been changed to "And with your spirit" - didn't know the CofE had had that all along! Obviously a better translation ("et cum spiritu tuo"), but I think it's been taken as a kind of symbol of the whole new translation so puts people who Don't Like Change in a huff.

[antisoppist]

Ah! The CofE had had that since 1549 :-) I am amused by the people who Don't Like Change being in a huff at the change in both directions.

[tree_and_leaf]

Although Common Worship has "and also with you".

From what I've seen of the new Mass translations, there are bits that are good (though in a different style; I'm not surprised people find it jarring), and bits that sound like the sort of Latin translation exercise where it's more important to make it obvious you understood the Latin construction than to produce anything that sounds like English.

[antisoppist]

That sounds like a real world example of Word for Word versus Sense for Sense in translation theory.

I grew up in a parish that in 1980-ish went from prayerbook to ASB rite B when the joined parish next door (which was higher and had incense) went for rite A. Joint services tended to come unstuck when die-hards from our lot tried to fit "tresspasses" into the space when everyone else was saying "sins".

[cahn]

heeee. I must admit that I stubbornly stick to the "trespasses" when I'm at Lutheran church, even though everyone else says "sins." (They still say "trespasses" at Catholic church.) They recite it pretty slowly, though, so I can get away with it :)

[ollipop]

Data point from the Ohio Methodists: they pass the peace "and also with you", and still announce "trespasses".

How do we all feel about "The Word of the Lord"/"Thanks be to God"? At the ancestral church, we get about a 50% response rate on "Thanks be to God," and I heard someone sniff that it was too Episcopalian. Oooh, Christian folks, you crack me up.

You get paid to sing at Mass? Really? Or is it just special projects like Easter? Wow. Now I am understanding why most churches sound much better than mine.

[cahn]

Huh. I feel like every Lutheran church I've ever attended with D does "The Word of the Lord"/"Thanks be to God." But Lutherans are about as stick-in-the-mud as Protestants get (see also: liturgy being really similar between Catholic and Lutheran), and for various reasons I've mostly been to churches at the more conservative end of the Lutheran spectrum.

Yep, I do get paid for singing every week :) The timpani and the trumpets were special for Easter and I think we were able to get them because some well-heeled donor at the church was feeling generous. D's Lutheran church pays its music leader/cantor and an organist, but doesn't usually spring for anyone besides that. No, wait, I think they paid for a violin for Easter and Christmas. When I was a kid, I used to get paid to play violin at churches occasionally.

In the Mormon/LDS church, you have to go pretty high up to find any paid position, including clergy (like, you have to be responsible for tens of thousands of people at least, I think, or the conductor of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, yeah, he probably gets paid), so yeah, it's pretty shocking to me too.

[cahn]

Huh, that's very interesting.

A lot of the new translation slid right by me (and probably the rest of the Catholic congregation as well) because they had been doing it in Latin before. Looking at a side-by-side, I much prefer the new Gloria and Credo (both of which I knew in Latin before, but not so well in English).

But I agree, it's in a different, somewhat jarring style (we also had to learn this horrendous Mass musical setting which we all hate, hate, hate, which doesn't help).

[cahn]

Yes, the theatrics are awesome! My home church (Mormon/LDS) doesn't do liturgy or pomp in anything like that style, so I find it endlessly fascinating. Watching the four priests for this church, especially (they were all present for the Maundy Thursday and Holy Saturday services), with their very different personalities, is like watching theater :)

The choir didn't rebel against the new translation, but it did take almost a year before they stopped, simply out of unthinking habit, at least starting to respond "And also with you" or "it is right to give him thanks and praise." I found it rather hilarious.

[allochthonous]

For a while we had a very dramatically-minded priest who in the middle of the vigil used to pull off the dull white Lent altar cloth with a massive flourish to reveal a snazzy purple model for Easter, which was dead good. Church theatrics FTW.

[cahn]

That... would totally be worth going to three hours of service for. Although I don't think I would have been able to stop laughing.

[luzula]

What Pergolesi did you do? I love the Stabat Mater--I've done it in two different choirs, and thinking about it always makes me want to start singing in a choir again.

[cahn]

Surrexit Christus. It's a short 3-voice piece (which is great because our tenor and bass sections are pretty awful), nice and rather pretty, but nothing like the INCREDIBLE AMAZINGNESS of the Stabat Mater, which I've never sung in choir, but every time I listen to a recording I really, really want to.