Chant Practice Resumed

I am a little late in noting this, but on Tuesday night we resumed our Gregorian chant schola-in-formation, and have agreed to continue to meet on Tuesdays (excepting the third Tuesday of each month), at 7.30 pm at St Francis, Riverside, for an hour's practice. Fr Allan has proposed, and we've gladly agreed, that we will work towards singing Benediction, and eventually Compline - which one day perhaps we can do in public on the Saturday evening, ad mirandum populi.

After a few scales, we went over the simple Kyrie (from Mass XVI), plus the Sanctus and Agnus Dei we'd learnt (from Mass XVIII), then the first verses of the Veni Creator, and the start of the Ubi caritas et amor. This done, Fr bade us listen to some recordings of monks singing the Introit Da pacem (with its opening leap of a fifth) of the 18th after Pentecost, and then the famed Gradual Christus factus est from Holy Thursday. This acted to spur us on; we then practised Psalm 133 (Ecce nunc benedicite, from Sunday Compline) and revised the Corpus Christi Magnificat antiphon O quam suavis (which to an experienced ear sounds awfully like both the Sanctus from the Missa de Angelis, and the Dominican anthem O lumen Ecclesiæ).

As we had begun with a prayer, an Our Father and some invocations of the saints, we closed with the Compline Responsory In manus tuas, as our prayer. As usual, we had the meeting after the meeting - some long discussions in the parish carpark afterward. It's good to talk with likeminded folk.