The choral year

This is the time of year when I'm trying to look at the big picture, get a general view of the entire liturgical year. I generally sit down with the Lectionary on one side of me and the Sacramentary on the other, moving back and forth Sunday to Sunday and season to season, trying to deliberately notice the forest without getting too hung up on the trees...

At the moment, I'm specifically thinking about the choral music the choir will sing this year, the "anthems," or pieces the choir will sing on their own, without assembly participation. These can be a hit or miss effort, largely depending on which general tack the homilist for that particular Sunday takes. Sometimes we absolutely nail it, other times we're way off base, and there's really no predicting one way or the other which way it will go. That's where we have to trust to the kindness and weird sense of humor of the Holy Spirit.

I like to begin the choir season with all the music for the year at least tentatively chosen. For one thing, it makes it much easier to pace rehearsals and general flow. It's generally a bad idea to have a month of familiar choral music followed by 5 weeks of brand-new and difficult music. My methodology is sort of scattered and imprecise, but it allows for giving all the variables their due weight. (Sort of like an Impressionist painting; lots of little dots that make very little sense at first but which eventually form a coherent and recognizable picture.)

1. Usually first I scan through the year as a whole, and jot down for each Sunday whatever major themes or concepts strike me from the combination of the readings and Sacramentary texts. For some weeks a particular piece we've sung before and really enjoy will just leap to mind ("Christus Paradox," that glorious anthem based on PICARDY, tends to pop up on Christ the King...when the Gospel is the Beatitudes, one way or another it's a given that we'll sing the Orthodox chant of the text.) and get immediately slotted for that week. That gives a good overall sense of how the year will flow.

2. Then I look at my annual summary of what we sang last year, to pull up the anthems we did for the first time but were a bit shaky, and which I want to make sure we repeat, and I see which Sundays they may work for. Sometimes it's a no-brainer; Victoria's O Magnum Mysterium is a Christmas piece however you slice it, so this year we'll do it on Christmas Eve at the Midnight Mass, and then probably again on Holy Family if the whole tenor section isn't on vacation that week or something.

3. I then go to summaries of the previous few years, to see if there's anything really lovely we learned a few years ago that has moved off the radar and been lost by the wayside. (Sometimes, of course, things that moved subliminally off the radar really should stay there--not everything is a Greatest Hit, but we have to try stuff before we know if it'll be a hit or not.) I do the same thing with those, scanning through the year to see if there's a perfect Sunday for it that jumps out at me.

4. Finally, I go to my stack of "new music" collected from choral packets, conventions, reading sessions, and such. I give it another good and fearless examination to see how much of it really seems worth our trouble (honestly, most years I get over a hundred octavos to review, and we're lucky if we can do a dozen in a year--very lucky at that), and look at the Sundays of the year to see what pieces seem perfect for what weeks or seasons.

5. At this point I usually have a pretty good overview of what's possible for the year. Some tweaking is always necessary, of course--like I said, you don't want too many brand new things stacked several weeks in a row, or 2 months of oldy moldies. (They only get moldy when there are too many of them at a stretch.) And there are always Sundays with nothing there, and other Sundays with 3 pieces, so things get moved around. So now I am looking at the specific Sundays with nothing yet chosen, and making specific efforts to find something for that week. Often those are the weeks that end up with something more general (like "We Remember You," a very pretty but general anthem based on "Adoro Te Devote") or seasonal (something basically Lenten or Advent-y on one of the Sundays of that season) instead of a very specific piece.

There are always some weeks that are a bit of a stretch, and it's never fully set in stone until we've actually rehearsed the piece and know whether it's going to work us or not, but at least now I know what needs to be ordered and how to pace the early rehearsals.

And the really nice part of doing it this way is that now, before I even begin looking at the congregational music, I have already spent some time sort of steeping in the flow of the liturgical year. I'll be tangling with trees soon enough, and this is my only chance to really check out the forest before I'm in the thick of it, so it's nice--and worth it--to take the time.

peace,
Jennifer