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This collect was quoted by Kyle Ritter in the May/June issue of the Journal of the Association of Anglican Musicians. It was composed by Ray Glover, the editor of the Hymnal 1982, and one of my predecessors at St. Paul's, Richmond.

O God, whose servant David played upon his harp, composed hymns for his people, and danced before the Ark to the glory of your holy Name: Guide and inspire the musicians everywhere who serve in your temple, that their offerings, like those of David, may be a sacrifice of time and talent worthy of your honor and glory. Al this we ask thorugh Jesus Christ, your only Son, our Lord. Amen.

Labels: church music, Collect, prayer, Ray Glover

Why, then, does the ego get in the way of its own longing for expression? On the one hand, it is inherently egotistical—presumptuous, even—to get up onstage and demand that others listen to what you have to say. But at the same time, performing requires humility: a willingness to risk being humiliated or misunderstood, and to lay yourself bare so you can try to say what you mean (and what you think the composer meant). That is what is at stake in performance: nothing more or less than the longing for self-expression, to connect with others and be heard by them.

Hodges, Natalie. Uncommon Measure: A Journey through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time. Bellevue Literary Press, 2022.

Labels: music, Natalie Hodges

We let our alleluias rise on Easter Day. But, to borrow a question I asked here a number of years ago, “Did we overdo Holy Week and Easter Day?”

The problem may not be so much that we overdo Holy Week, the Triduum, and the liturgies of Easter Day. We are right to bring our best to those services and to celebrate them in their fullness.

I have had this deep uneasiness with how we celebrate Eastertide for many years now, and it’s not going away. If anything, it’s getting worse. How are we to reconcile the hard liturgical work of Holy Week with a rich Paschaltide celebration that continues from the celebration of Easter Day itself?

The answer doesn’t seem to be obvious, but I still think it’s worth stirring up a conversation about it.

It is counterintuitive that we haven’t cracked creative celebrations of Easter. We have done well to enrich Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany with all kinds of “lessons and carols” type services.

But even King’s College, Cambridge, that significant locus of 20th-century liturgical innovation for Christmas, has come up empty for Easter. The televised “Easter from King’s” service, which was a Easter counterpart to its beloved televised Christmas service, has been been abandoned, having last aired in 2023.

And while this is disappointing, it’s not entirely surprising. The King’s model of lessons and carols seems to work well for Christmas, but it never really spoke as coherently at Easter. And it is notable that that service took as its starting point not the Resurrection, but the Passion. Perhaps this is the problem in a nutshell: we easily gravitate toward the darkness of the Passion, especially as a contrast with the light of the Resurrection. But how is it that the Church draws out of itself a rich devotional life surrounding the Easter reality?

There have to be new ways to do this in the church. Don’t there?

“We should be taking steps to celebrate Easter in creative new ways: in art, literature, children’s games, poetry, music, dance, festivals, bells, special concerts, anything that comes to mind. This is our greatest festival. Take Christmas away, and in biblical terms you lose two chapters at the front of Matthew and Luke, nothing else. Take Easter away, and you don’t have a New Testament; you don’t have a Christianity… This is our greatest day. We should put the flags out.”

N. T. Wright

Maybe the “special liturgy” model is the wrong one, and as N. T. Wright suggests, we need to be relying on other artistic modalities.

But I still wonder if there are threads of Anglican patrimony that have not been widely encountered at Easter.

Great Paschal Vespers is a short, stational monastic service that has been disseminated in the Episcopal Church through The Prayer Book Office compiled by Howard Galley in 1980. (Read it here or here.) This service may not be a natural fit in every place, but I for one am eager to see it more widely used and its form adapted in different ways.

Stations of the Resurrection (also known as the Via Lucis, or the Way of Light) is an Eastertide counterpart to Stations of the Cross. It is now included in Common Worship , the official liturgical resource in the Church of England. For parishes that offer one or more Stations of the Cross services before Easter, would it not be wise to provide this service at least once in Eastertide?

And let’s not limit ourselves to thought about “extra” devotional services either. Surely the faithful can be brought more deeply into the Easter season with the right touches in the principal liturgy as well.

I have been struck recently by how the simple placement of the paschal candle in the center of the choir can redefine the season visually. In too many places, the paschal candle is nearly invisible, even when lit. A small flame at the top of a candle that remains unlit most of the year doesn’t nearly make impression we think it does. It’s easy to move the Paschal candle to a more prominent location. So let's do it! If it's a bit “in the way,” that's even better! The asperges, a traditional part of the liturgy in this season, can be used as an opening of the Eucharistic rite to great effect.

Stations of the Resurrection, mentioned above, naturally leads us to a consideration of Ascension Day. It is a significant imbalance in our liturgical life that Ash Wednesday enjoys greater observance among the faithful than Ascension Day does. Both are mid-week liturgies. If people can come out on a Wednesday for ashes, surely they can come out on a Thursday for a principal feast of the church. Is Ascension Day not more fun than Ash Wednesday? Can it really be impossible to convince Episcopalians of this?

The answer, at the moment, perhaps is yes. And this problem deserves some reflection too. Have we developed into liturgical introverts who enjoy the darkness of death, but are too afraid to enter into the light and see what it illuminates?

The hymn “Lift your voice rejoicing, Mary” speaks to all of us with its refrain: “Let your alleluias rise.” I hear this now as a charge to the Church to give the Easter season greater richness and devotional texture. The Episcopal/Anglican Church has done this successfully for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. But if Easter truly is our greatest day and season and very reason for existence, we owe it to ourselves to find new ways to celebrate the risen Christ in Easter.

Labels: Easter, Great Paschal Vespers, King's College (Cambridge), Lessons and Carols, Stations of the Resurrection

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