Holy Week and Easter Musical Musings 2024

Maundy Thursday is one of my favorite services of the year, and the choir really loves it too. Similar to Palm Sunday it starts out with music that celebrates the love of Christ for us as represented in the Eucharist, then we go to the garden and try to stay awake with Him as the altar is stripped in preparation for Friday and the great “Ah Holy Jesus” hymn HERZLIEBSTER JESU is sung. As we move over to the altar of repose, we always sing a Taize chant, Stay Here and Keep Watch with me, accompanied by some of our wonderful instrumentalists; Teddy Love, oboe, her daughter Kimberly (momentarily home from college) on violin, and Mariam Bora, recorder. We all love the way PJ Livesey sings one of the verses—I missed it so much during 2020 that he actually texted it to me in a voice memo during that terrible choirless Holy Week. PJ long ago moved away from Madison but comes back for this service every year.

There are two anthems I like to do, and I alternate different composers different years. They are Ave verum corpus and Drop, Drop Slow Tears.

This year we are singing Mozart’s Ave Verum, about as perfect as piece as you can find.

Ave verum corpus, natum de Maria Virgine,
vere passum, immolatum in cruce pro homine,
cuius latus perforatum fluxit sanguine:
esto nobis praegustatum in mortis examine.

Hail, true Body, born of the Virgin Mary,
who has truly suffered,
was sacrificed on the cross for mortals,
whose pierced side flowed with blood:
Be for us a foretaste [of Heaven]
in the final judgement.

I have several settings of Drop, Drop Slow Tears; Sam Batt Owen (with bells), Kenneth Leighton, (wonderful and hard) and Orlando Gibbons, profound in its simplicity. But this year we are learning a brand new one by Joanna Forbes L’Estrange (b. 1971), a London-based singer, song-writer and choral director. This setting was commissioned in memory of counter-tenor James Bowman (1941 – 27 March 2023), who I am realizing died exactly a year ago.

The poem is by Phineas Fletcher (1582-1650)

Drop, drop, slow tears,
And bathe those beauteous feet
Which brought from Heaven
The news and Prince of Peace.

Cease not, wet eyes,
His mercy to entreat;
To cry for vengeance
Sin doth never cease.

In your deep floods
Drown all my faults and fears;
Nor let His eye
See sin, but through my tears.

On Friday the adult choirs will sing Willan, Ravenscroft and Michael Haydn and lead us in great hymns like the Passion Chorale and Sing My Tongue (PANGE LINGUA) which is sung during the veneration of the cross.

Bert Polman of hymnary.org gives this succinct biography of the text’s author: Venantius Honorius Clematianus Fortunatus (b. Cenada, near Treviso, Italy, c. 530; d. Poitiers, France, 609) was educated at Ravenna and Milan and was converted to the Christian faith at an early age. Legend has it that while a student at Ravenna he contracted a disease of the eye and became nearly blind. But he was miraculously healed after anointing his eyes with oil from a lamp burning before the altar of St. Martin of Tours. In gratitude Fortunatus made a pilgrimage to that saint’s shrine in Tours and spent the rest of his life in Gaul (France), at first traveling and composing love songs. He developed a platonic affection for Queen Rhadegonda, joined her Abbey of St. Croix in Poitiers, and became its bishop in 599. His Hymns for all the Festivals of the Christian Year is lost, but some of his best hymns on his favorite topic, the cross of Jesus, are still respected today, in part because of their erotic mysticism.”

This was translated into English by Percy Dearmer (1867–1936) one of the compilers of the English Hymnal, lifelong socialist and liturgist is best known for The Parson’s Handbook, a liturgical manual for Anglican clergy.

I hope you will come Thursday AND Friday AND Saturday and Sunday, to experience this week like the answer to the question “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” is YES. We are there, and then we are also there to experience the Resurrection on Sunday in the present. I recommend this excellent blog from Father Kyle Babin bat Church of the Good Shepherd, Rosemont.

Saturday is always a favorite service as it involves darkness, FIRE, and Taize music with lots of instruments plus baptisms and a champagne reception for which I hope to have time to make peepshi.

Sunday morning our choirs, bells and brass are SO ready to give you the festive treatment, from the familiar (Jesus Christ is Risen Today, Rickard’s Christ Our Passover and Widor’s Toccata) to less known pieces I will now discuss.

Our anthem is a mixed meter (aka jazzy rhythm) setting of an Easter chorale (Christ ist erstanden) with English words—His Spirit Leads On. This is by Lloyd Pfautsch (1921-2003)who was Professor of Sacred Music and Di­rector of Choral Activities at the Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University from 1958 until his retirement in 1992. He also organized and conducted the Dallas Civic Chorus for 25 years. I love this piece because there is no organ part so I can stand up and conduct everybody—even the “red choir” learned it (they are SMART).

The fraction anthem will be sung a cappella by the adults and teens, and it is a setting of one of my favorite poems (Easter) from mystical poet and priest George Herbert (1593-1633): Rise Heart, Thy Lord is Risen. Here is a link to the poem.

I found the music on St. James Music Press. The composer Arlen Clarke (b. 1954) actually did a year of graduate study with Lloyd Pfautsch at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX, before he went on to receive his Masters Degree in Vocal Performance from Texas Christian University in 1983. Upon completion of six years of active duty as an officer in the US Army he was a singer and later, the composer-in-residence during the1989-90 season at Grace and Holy Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Kansas City, MO. Shortly thereafter, he was appointed to the post of Director of Choral Activities at his alma mater, Belhaven College. He currently lives in Greenville, SC and is the Director of Music at St. Mary’s Catholic Church. The coincidence that he studied with Pfautsch came to me right now as I researched this blog!

Have a blessed week and I hope to see you in church!