31 OT--Year C

31 OT--Year C


Processional: For All the Saints

Offertory: Pie Jesu (Faure)

Communion: Notas mihi (w/Viadana fauxbourdon)
Panis Angelicus (Franck--arr. Rutter)

Recessional: Ye Watchers and Ye Holy Ones


Not my finest week as a director. We've had a lot of people getting sick and other commitments are vying for my choristers' time, and therefore, we've had some attendance problems. We have six sopranos and only 3 could make it to mass so the "Pie Jesu" was fine, but not spectacular. The chant was also fine, though numbers were such that I didn't feel comfortable splitting it between men and women, so we did it completely mixed.

I thought Panis was going to be disastrous as it was not going well in pre-Mass rehearsal, for a few reasons:

1) Though I have five altos "on the books", if you will, only one made it to Wednesday rehearsal, and then two others made it to mass (and the Wednesday alto did not). Therefore, they had had very little rehearsal with the piece before Sunday.

2) I dropped it a whole step since I wasn't thrilled with the tenor and soprano tessitura (it was in A; I dropped it to G). Some people had a real hard time with the switch, since they were still looking at the A major score.

3) I grabbed my accompaniment in G major for my organist right before rehearsal, only to find that I didn't have the last page with it. When we got to that last page, he couldn't really provide any harmonic support and honestly, the choir needed it at that point.

It was a good lesson for me. I should have prepared them better on Wednesday, but I was in a hurry to get to our Christmas music.

Anyways, I was a bit frazzled as the minutes crept by because we just didn't have the time to work on it. I was stressing about it during mass, but (by the grace of God) came together beautifully at communion. Thank you, Jesus.