My Mouth Shall Proclaim Your Praise

This is a sort of meta-post about the purpose of funerals and their structure. Tune in next time for more concrete suggestions and printable music you can use! Nothing brings out my Expert's Ire like watching the portrayal of Catholic funerals on TV - kind of like the way my husband spends all of every submarine movie muttering "it never looks like that" or "that would never happen." No one wants to talk about death anymore, and so the Catholic Church's teaching on Last Things is often left to one side until one must face it personally, leaving vast numbers of people without any knowledge of how the funeral liturgy works, or even what it is for. Add into that the grossly misrepresented "Christian Funeral" on almost every form of modern media, and you have a situation rife with highly uncomfortable encounters for the organist or cantor. There are few trickier situations to navigate than a funeral liturgy. On the one hand, the raw feelings of the ber...

 "He called a child over, placed it in their midst, and said, “Amen, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven." (Mt 18:2-3) Children are amazing. They begin knowing nothing except that they are needy, and over a remarkably short period of time, learn to eat, walk, talk, read, navigate relationships, dress themselves, memorize and repeat an astonishing quantity of information, and so on. For the most part, this is done simply by having things around for them to learn from, by being intentional in speaking to them, and by expecting them to participate to the best of their ability in every day life, correcting gently where necessary. No adult can possibly absorb as much as any average child - our crusty old brains still rely on the patterns acquired in infancy to process and integrate information. Our Mother the Church treats us as the children we are: she places us in a prepared environment  (a beautiful church), speaks to...

 I keep saying, in various posts, that the primary job of the liturgical musician is The Words (yes, even the organist ). What does that mean, and how does it work? My first organ teacher (who was a fabulous teacher) told me that my job as organist in a Catholic parish was to provide "auditory wallpaper" to provide a devout and prayerful ambiance to the liturgy. She was wrong. Such an approach trivializes the liturgy as a mood or feeling to experience. Were this to be true, then the current "anything goes" attitude towards liturgical music would be valid; personal taste and changing moods would force the liturgy to be subject to the whims of the music director, depriving it of its universal character, making it more or less valid according to how much or how little that particular musical style moved each participant. The liturgy would cease to be a Thing That Is Given, and instead would become a Look What I Made, Yay Me. (That's clearly not the way it is, ther...

I believe I've lamented before that church musicians are often hired and expected to execute their function properly without qualifications or training, or even guidance. Well, the good news is that there is an actual instruction manual out there: the General Instructions of the Roman Missal ( it's even online for free !) or GIRM. Here is laid out, in very clear terms, whose job is what, the order of the rites, the cues to begin and finish singing, and so much more. If you can afford your own copy of the whole missal, so much the better! Once you find your way around it, it is the single most useful and important book for a cantor or choir director to own. (I bought two copies - one for my use at home planning and practicing, and one to keep in the choir loft, because I am that disorganized and can never remember to tote a copy around with me from place to place.) In the GIRM, there is a lot of language talking about "fostering participation" by the people. It empha...

It's February, so you're probably thinking about Lent, and you're probably looking through your resources, wondering "Why are most of my options for Lent so bad? " If you're tempted to just sing O Sacred Head Surrounded for six weeks straight, starting with Ash Wednesday, allow me to give you a little pause on that thought. If you've done any thinking at all about the role of music in liturgy, then you know that the Church has a pattern, and she has that pattern for a reason. (If you haven't done any thinking about the role of music in liturgy, it's time to start!) The liturgical cycle begins in the darkest part of the year, with preparation, readings filled with hope for the future but without any denial of the darkness of the current situation. Then, Light - at the turning point, when the balance just begins to turn back towards Day over Night, the Word Becomes Flesh. We make our way through the manifestation of Jesus to the world, the calling of...

  Have you ever tried  to convey to someone the sense of an incredibly moving song, but you couldn't quite remember the tune, so you just recited the lyrics? Did it sound like you were saying: Kerplonk kerplonk, kerplonk kerplonk kerplonk; Plonk kerplonk kerplonk, kerplonk kerplonk. and then you had to make apologies for how rhymey-wimey it sounded, and it was much better when you heard it? Yeah, that's why we sing. Song adds an entirely new dimension to the sense of what we are saying. If text is a line, and a spoken phrase is a picture, music turns it to a sculpture. Properly matched to its subject, it deepens our understanding of what is being said far beyond the mere words. When we get to dealing with the Divine, though - well, nothing I can say on the subject hasn't been said better by someone else first. Here is Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, from his marvellous book,  The Spirit of the Liturgy  (which you should own, no matter who you are): " When man comes into ...