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Jessica French’s setting of the St. John Passion premieres at Trinity, Wall Street, this Good Friday.

“There’s so much pain in this story,” [French] says. For her, the Renaissance pleasantness of the Victoria music never conveyed that brutality. “I wanted to reflect the text accurately, to channel all the intense things that are happening to Jesus through my writing. What came out sometimes surprised me. To some small degree, we all experience the betrayal and grief and anger that Jesus did, and whether we are composing or listening, we bring those feelings — which are only accentuated by our times — to the story. The music I write can’t help but be affected by how difficult and divided the world is.”

Breakey, Charlene. “Trinity’s New Music Passion”. trinitychurchnyc.org, 10 April 2025.

Labels: Good Friday, Holy Week, Jessica French, Passion, Trinity (New York)

[The Rev. Skip] Walker may be one of the few priests to release an album, Tina’s Contemplation: A Reflection on the Genius of Tina Brooks (2022), that made it to No. 25 on the music charts. Walker is a firm believer in using improvisation in music and to enliven the church.

Havens, Christine. “‘I’ve Heard There Was a Secret Chord’”. The Living Church, 1 April 2025.

Labels: improvisation, Jazz

A Quiet Resurrection

For the first time in my tenure at St. Peter’s, St. Louis, we will offer the Great Vigil of Easter. It is, in my opinion, the single most important service in the Book of Common Prayer. If you want to know what Christianity is about, come to the Easter Vigil.

But, for the first time in my career, I was faced with the challenge of finding music for the Vigil that works well without a choir. And this has led me to focus on what is most crucial to the service.

The Episcopal Church has developed a very theatrical approach to the “Easter moment” in this liturgy. In most vigils, churches quickly turn on all the lights, shout Alleluia, and have the organ thunder for the first time since Thursday.

But the Prayer Book doesn’t say to do any of this. And, in fact, I wonder if some of these customs might violate the spirit of what the Vigil is about.

We don’t need to switch on all the electric lights in sight. Vigils have happened by candlelight for hundreds, even thousands of years. Instead, the candles being lit on the Altar should be allowed to shine with symbolic brightness. And I would advocate to let that lighting happen by itself without trying to cover it with music.

We won’t be sounding a fanfare this year, because we won’t have a robust congregation singing the hymn afterward. It’s fun to have the pipes sound once again here, but an organ — even one as large and fine as ours — shouldn’t be the focal point of this moment. It shouldn’t overshadow the singing of the Canticle that follows. This year, we’ll let the ancient Te Deum ring forth in the best way we can.

And the Easter versicle and response (“Alleluia. Christ is risen. / Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia.”) which is so commonly heard at this point in the liturgy is optional here (it is, however, a must on Easter Day!). Its inclusion at this point in the Vigil comes from the Eastern Orthodox tradition, but it’s not required by the Prayer Book.

What if this moment of the Vigil showed the resurrection, instead of told it? Let the light spread and listen to the ancient hymn of praise.

You overcame the sting of death
     and opened the kingdom of heaven to all believers.

Jesus didn’t sound a fanfare when he got out of the tomb in the middle of the night on Saturday. He didn’t snap a selfie and post it to Twitter either. He just did it. In the dark. It was a quiet resurrection.

When the women came to the tomb the next morning, they saw the stone was rolled away and then they knew something had happened. But they didn’t see or hear the resurrection take place. No one did.

And I think this is a big part of what the Vigil is about. We’re stepping into the stream of cosmic time to enter into the very night that this quiet resurrection occurred. And we can make plenty of noise with Mary Magdalene and the disciples as the good news spreads in the light of day. But here, in the night, it seems to me that the Vigil wants to bear witness to this deeply sacred quietness.

One of my very favorite pieces of prose about the Easter Vigil is about the Great Alleluia which heralds the Gospel.

“This [Great Alleluia] rises with a slow movement; it rises above the grave of Adam, and it has the blood of Christ on its wings. It is the marriage song of the Paschal night, which will grow slowly brighter as it meets the day of resurrection. But these are only words. The first alleluia of the Paschal night is a mystery, unutterable like all mysteries. As this alleluia is, so is the whole life of Christians: A gentle, quiet song of joy which meets the rise of day in the midst of the suffering of night time.”

(A. Löhr, The Mass Throughout the Year)

It feels like there’s so much I haven’t been able to do as a choirmaster in the last year. But let us take heart in what we can do, and by the grace of God will always do: let us sing a “gentle, quiet song of joy which meets the rise of day in the midst of the suffering of night time.”

Labels: Easter, The Great Vigil of Easter

I know that is probably obvious to you, but it was a point that was driven home in a hymn sung in many parishes.

Maybe you caught it? It was in the list of negatives that we sang in the opening of Hymn 259 in the Hymnal 1982: “Hail to the Lord who comes.”

Hail to the Lord who comes,
   comes to his temple gate;
not with his angel host,
   not in his kingly state;
no shouts proclaim him nigh,
   no crowds his coming wait;

John Ellerton (1826–1893), alt.

In this hymn’s first stanza, John Ellerton gives us four consecutive negative images to let us know what the Presentation is not.

It’s not like the Second Coming when Jesus will come in glory with his “angel host.”

And, notably, it’s not anything resembling the triumphal entry on Palm Sunday when the crowds lining the streets of Jerusalem acclaim Jesus with shouts of “Hosanna!”. These very roads lead toward the temple, and at least in Mark's Gospel, Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem culminates with his entry into the temple.

For Ellerton, it is important to stress that the Presentation is not that kind of arrival. This is a quiet, unheralded entry—at least on the outside. The acclamations and epiphanies about who Jesus is come from Simeon and Anna once the infant Jesus is inside the Temple.

Defining something by what it is not strikes me as an unusual maneuver in hymn writing, but not a unique one. We find other examples of this in our hymn repertoire.

Request for rhetorical vocabulary: If there is a useful rhetorical term for this, I would be eager to learn what it is!

Not here for high and holy things
   we render thanks to thee,
but for the common things of earth,
   the purple pageantry

Hymn 9, st. 1, Geoffrey Anketel Studdert-Kennedy (1883–1929)

When this old world drew on toward night,
   you came; but not in splendor bright,
not as a monarch, but the child
   of Mary, blameless mother mild.

Hymn 60: "Creator of the stars of night," st. 3, Latin, 9th cent. ver. Hymnal 1940, alt.

He sent him not in wrath and power,
   but grace and peace to bring;
in kindness, as a king might send
   his son, himself a king.

He came as Savior to his own,
   the way of love he trod;
he came to win us by good will,
   for force is not of God.

Not to oppress, but summon all
   their truest life to find,
in love God sent his Son
   to save, not to condemn mankind.

Hymn 489: "The great Creator of the worlds," st. 3, 5, 6, Epistle to Diognetus; ca. 150; tr. F. Bland Tucker (1895–1984), rev.

for not with swords loud clashing,
   nor roll of stirring drums,
but deeds of love and mercy,
   the heavenly kingdom comes.

Hymn 555: "Lead on, O King eternal," st. 2b, Ernest Warburton Shurtleff (1862–1917)

Labels: hymn, Hymn 259, Hymn 489, Hymn 555, Hymn 60, Hymn 9, John Ellerton, Presentation

Of the hundreds and hundreds of settings of the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis, one genuinely scares me. I am afraid to perform it, either as a conductor or as an organist.

And it’s not that this piece is overly technical. Indeed Herbert Howells has written more difficult settings of the Evening Canticles (the Dallas Service comes to mind).

But there is a unique difficulty in this music written for King’s College, Cambridge, in 1945. Like no other piece I can think of, the “Collegium Regale” Evening Canticles seem to demand perfection.

I recently pulled out my copy of the piece to accompany the canticles this past Sunday at Evensong. I found myself briefly second-guessing the composer at the slurring of the word “lowliness,” but quickly realized that Howells got it right (of course). It is also the first slur in the piece that somehow feels as if it was already full of them.

I can study the notes, I can sing them, I can play them, and yet, these pieces somehow remain a mystery. The kind of alchemic liquidity that Howells achieves is impressive. The culminating Gloria Patri seems to transcend time and space every time we encounter it, and blissfully, it comes up twice when these canticles are sung at Evensong.

I realize need to get over my fear which has resulted in a kind of reluctance to program these canticles. They must always remain special, but Howells has done that work for us. I relished the chance to accompany these on Sunday. They cry out to be performed, not kept under glass.

Labels: Howells, King's College (Cambridge)

The Abbey has quietly begun a regular series of live video webcasts of various services.

The series began on September 8, 2024, with a Sung (Choral) Eucharist, and continued with a service of Choral Evensong on Holy Cross Day. Each of the service they have broadcast has stayed up on their YouTube channel for about a month.

The most recent service was a Service of Lessons and Carols for Christmas.

Today, the Feast of Epiphany, the Abbey will webcast a Sung Eucharist.

The Abbey began indexing these services on their “Streamed Services” page, which is now called “Watch Services”.

This kind of endeavor is of great interest to us at Sinden.org, as we suspect it is of all students of church music. The value in these kinds of regular, live webcasts is immeasureable. They allow us to hear a wide variety of liturgical music—sung at a very high standard—fully within a specific, contemporary liturgical context. Though any electronically mediated liturgical experience is, by definition, something other than being truly present, there is value in seeing and hearing liturgy and music as it is conducted in a place like this.

It is not lost on us that as the webcasts at St. John's College, Cambridge have sadly decreased in frequency (only four services were webcast in 2023/24), they have begun at Westminster Abbey. The common denominator here, we must speculate, is Andrew Nethsingha. Webcasts sprung up when he was directing the St. John's Choir, and now they seem to have done the same toward the beginning of his tenure at the Abbey.

Labels: Andrew Nethsingha, Epiphany, St John's (Cambridge), webcasting, Westminster Abbey

But that’s not the carol I am writing about today.

In the run-up to Christmas this year (so, Advent, I guess?) I had occasion to type all of the words to the carol “O little town of Bethlehem”.

And, unusually for this blog, I’m going to eschew any mention of the various tunes for this completely, and just invite you to reflect on the words. Although now common throughout the Anglican Communion, and really all of Christendom, these words come from the pen of Episcopal priest Phillips Brooks (”Born in Boston, Died in Boston”). Brooks later became the Bishop of Massachusetts.

You might be struck by the Christmas silence of the third stanza. Or the glorious crescendo achieved in the fourth stanza. It’s all rather beautiful, and our familiarity with it sometimes prevents a true close reading.

I hope you have had a blessed Christmas!

O little town of Bethlehem,
   how still we see thee lie!
Above thy deep and dreamless sleep
   the silent stars go by;
yet in thy dark streets shineth
   the everlasting Light;
the hopes and fears of all the years
   are met in thee tonight.

For Christ is born of Mary;
   and gathered all above,
while mortals sleep, the angels keep
   their watch of wondering love.
O morning stars, together
   proclaim the holy birth!
and praises sing to God the King,
   and peace to men on earth.

How silently, how silently,
   the wondrous gift is given!
So God imparts to human hearts
   the blessings of his heaven.
No ear may hear his coming,
   but in this world of sin,
where meek souls will receive him,
   still the dear Christ enters in.

Where children pure and happy
   pray to the blessed Child,
where misery cries out to thee,
   Son of the Mother mild;
where charity stands watching
   and faith holds wide the door,
the dark night wakes, the glory breaks,
   and Christmas comes once more.

O holy Child of Bethlehem,
   descend to us, we pray;
cast out our sin and enter in,
   be born in us today.
We hear the Christmas angels
   the great glad tidings tell;
O come to us, abide with us,
   our Lord Emmanuel!

Phillips Brooks (1835-1893)

Labels: 12 Carols for Christmas, Christmas, Phillips Brooks