Collect

Collect for the Fourth Sunday after Trinity

O God, the protector of all that trust in thee, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: increase and multiply upon us thy mercy; that, thou being our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we finally lose not the things eternal; grant this, O heavenly Father, for the sake of Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Music: William Byrd and Psalters

I'd like to wish everyone a happy Solemnity of the Annunciation. Enjoy your day of not having to fast.

I have posted two songs for today, quite different ones. I wanted to post both, but I was having a hard time coming up with a pretext to do so, since I normally only post one when I put music up here. (To those of you rational human beings who are thinking, "Uh, why isn't 'Because you feel like it' a good enough reason to post two songs?", shh.) Then I remembered that this, in addition to being one of the most important feasts of the Church's year -- indeed, in one sense, the root of every other feast, as it marks the beginning of the Incarnation -- it is also one of the feasts that Catholic and Orthodox Christians celebrate on the same date. So my excuse is a celebration of that fact.

Appropriately, the former of these songs is a piece of Latin polyphony by William Byrd, one of the finest composers of the English Renaissance and a convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism, while the latter is by the nomadic, anarchist band Psalters, whose album The Divine Liturgy of the Wretched Exiles is heavily influenced by Orthodox motifs. This one in particular incorporates the Trisagion or "Thrice-Holy," traditionally chanted at some point during the liturgy of the Scriptures (often before the Epistle is read, but it seems to vary in different places).


I couldn't get the video settings that I know how to work with to cooperate, so the second one is at this link.

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