Friday 28 October 2011

I hate cancelled services...

...so we are still going to have Evensong at St Paul's-in-the-Camp this evening.

I have no wish to compete with the cathedral, but I also don't want anyone turning up thinking there is a service and then finding out there isn't one. That has happened to me so many times, in so many contexts, that I can't bring myself to take the risk of it happening to someone else.

I do plan to attend the Evensong inside St Paul's at 5pm, but then, I really really like Evensong.

Thursday 27 October 2011

Friday Evensong at St Paul's-in-the-Camp, 6.15 for 6.30pm.

EDIT, FRIDAY AFTERNOON: It turns out St Paul's are having Evensong tonight after all, but didn't tell anyone about it until late morning. While I don't wish to compete with them, I think we should go ahead and have Evensong outside anyway.
END OF EDIT


On Friday we will have Evensong outside St Paul's. While the Cathedral has said they will be open for worship, I don't believe they are having Evensong tomorrow, so I want to go ahead with this. It's the day for St Simon and St Jude, apostles.

Meet at 6.15pm for 6.30; outside M&S seems to be a reasonable place for it, although we may need to move (especially if there are enough of us to obstruct the walkway).

You can print a copy of the liturgy from here ON THE DAY or from here today (Thursday). Alternately you can follow along online using the same links on a smartphone or using one of the various Common Worship smartphone apps.

The really simple way to do it will be to bring a Book of Common Prayer, though. I have a small number of spares. The Psalm will be Psalm 119.1-16. The Old Testament reading will be 1 Maccabees 2.42-66 and the New Testament reading will be Jude 1-4,17-25.

I did not choose these readings; I want to use the same ones that will be on the Church of England website, for ease of letting others follow along at home or elsewhere. Readers for the readings will be assigned when we meet.

We will sing the psalm and canticles from the Parish Psalter. If you have a Parish Psalter please bring it, even if you don't sing! These are harder to get hold of than the BCP and I only have a small number.

Unless a conductor volunteers in the next couple of hours, we will stick to the ferial responses. Please bring music to these if you have it; it's hard to get hold of online and I only have a small number of copies. I will cantor if there are no clergy there who are willing/able to do so.

We will use the same hymns as on Sunday and Wednesday. If you want to print the words to these yourself they are available in .pdf format here. If you want to bring a hymnal to sing harmony I prefer New English Hymnal (note that some of the words are different).

If you don't have any of these bits of pieces, you can still come! Really. You can look over my shoulder, or someone else's, or participate in a more reflective manner.

It would be helpful to have a rough idea how many people will be coming along, so if you are planning on it please do leave a comment here. Anonymous comments are fine.

If there are enough singers we might do an anthem -- same one as yesterday -- but be aware that if numbers are low this will be cut.

Summary:
6.15 for 6.30pm outside M&S, St. Paul's-in-the-Camp
Liturgy here on the day.
Bring BCP, Parish Psalter, and ferial responses if you have them.
Further updates from @artsyhonker and @FlashEvensong on Twitter.

Tuesday 25 October 2011

Wednesday: St Paul's-in-the-Camp Flashmob Evensong

On Wednesday we will have Evensong outside St Paul's -- unless the cathedral has opened for worship again, of course, in which case we may as well join them inside.

Meet at 5pm for 5.15; outside M&S seems to be a reasonable place for it, although we may need to move (especially if there are enough of us to obstruct the walkway).

You can print a copy of the liturgy from here ON THE DAY or from here today (Tuesday). Alternately you can follow along online using the same links on a smartphone or using one of the various Common Worship smartphone apps.

The really simple way to do it will be to bring a Book of Common Prayer, though. I have a small number of spares. The Psalm will be Psalm 119:145-176. The Old Testament reading will be @ Kings 9:1-16. The New Testament reading will be Acts 27:1-26. I did not choose these readings; I want to use the same ones that will be on the Church of England website, for ease of letting others follow along at home or elsewhere. Readers for the readings will be assigned when we meet.

We will sing the psalm and canticles from the Parish Psalter. If you have a Parish Psalter please bring it, even if you don't sing! These are harder to get hold of than the BCP and I only have a small number. Ditto the music for the ferial responses. I will cantor if there are no clergy there who are willing/able to do so.

We will use the same hymns as on Sunday, mostly because I have about 20 hymn sheets and I don't want to waste them. If you want to print the words to these yourself they are available in .pdf format here. If you want to bring a hymnal to sing harmony I prefer New English Hymnal (note that some of the words are different).

If you don't have any of these bits of pieces, you can still come! Really. You can look over my shoulder, or someone else's, or participate in a more reflective manner.

If you want to join the choir for the anthem please contact @FlashEvensong on Twitter, who is organising that bit. I've said that if we don't have at least two strong readers per voice part it's better not to do the anthem. There is a poll here for you to sign up.

It would be helpful to have a rough idea how many people will be coming along, so if you are planning on it please do leave a comment here (even if you aren't planning to sing the anthem). Anonymous comments are fine.

Summary:
5 for 5.15pm outside M&S, St. Paul's-in-the-Camp
Liturgy here on the day.
Bring BCP, Parish Psalter, and ferial responses if you have them.
Contact @FlashEvensong for choral anthem enquiries, poll here.

Monday 24 October 2011

Flashmob your own liturgy

Dashing this off very quickly, but here are some online resources for putting together your own flashmob services:

BCP Mattins

CW Morning Prayer

BCP Evensong

Compline (Trad language)

Compline (Modern language)

The Oremus Hymnal

Sunday 23 October 2011

St Paul's Evensong at OccupyLSX

I didn't think, when I got up this morning, that I would somehow wind up leading a BCP Evensong at St Paul's Cathedral.

The cathedral has had Occupy LSX, a protest camp, on their doorstep for the past week. Last weekend the Canon Chancellor, Revd Dr Giles Fraser, told the police to leave the protesters alone. As the week has worn on and the tents have stayed up, the cathedral has been operating on a reduced schedule, and on Friday the Dean issued a statement saying it would have to close until further notice.

I have no strong criticism of the cathedral closing to sightseers; there is a point at which keeping things ticking over stops making economic sense, and though I am uncomfortable with entry fees for cathedrals I cannot condemn them without calling into question the legitimacy of thousands of smaller, parish-based fundraising efforts. Fair game.

But a cathedral is more than architecture and establishment. Cathedrals exist to serve the local community, as well as to support parish churches in their work. Their primary task is of public worship, and it is difficult to see how Occupy LSX are a significant threat to that. The supposed health and safety reasons for closure given by the cathedral haven't, to my knowledge, been specified in a way that would allow the protesters to improve matters, and so things have come to a sort of impasse.

Practising the organ this morning I half-joked on Twitter about being tempted to turn up at St Paul's and hold Evensong myself, if they weren't letting people in for services. Then I went back to practising, it being one of those mornings where I felt like I had someone else's fingers and feet, and the choir turned up and we rehearsed, and there was a service and afterwards tea and toast. I checked my phone before heading home and there seemed to be some positive response to the idea of an outdoor Evensong, and I began to think more seriously about it.

I'm accustomed to Evensong services of varying sizes. I knew that without any real idea of who was going to turn up, I wouldn't want to plan anything too complicated.. but there definitely wasn't time to select metrical psalms, so we'd have to do simple Anglican Chant (and hope for enough people who can make sense of it for it to work) or even just said psalms and canticles. I made a few more tentative tweets, putting out feelers to see who else might be interested. I tried to contact both St Paul's, and Occupy LSX, through Twitter, and got no response -- fair enough, both are busy organisations. But people who had been involved in the protest, and various clergy and churchy types online, seemed encouraging, so I decided to go for it.

At 12.12 I tweeted "Right. Evensong at @OccupyLSX outside St Pual's, 3.45 for 4pm. Please bring Parish Psalter & BCP if you have them." From there it was a matter of choosing hymns with words in the public domain and printing them, providing links to those and to the BCP liturgy for the day through the C of E website, making sure I had the readings and the Collect for the 21st Sunday after Trinity to hand, and the sort of low-grade terror at what I was doing that you might expect, complete with wildly beating heart and trembling hands. A lot of people were generally supportive but simply unable to get there due to geography or prior commitments. But people said they would come, and I turned up and they found me. Our numbers were small but mighty, and included an atheist and a Roman Catholic, as a typical Evensong at St Paul's well might! Apparently there had been some sort of praying and singing not too long before my arrival, but the clergyman involved was busy being interviewed by someone with a camera and I had come over all shy, so we decided just to get on with it. We chose an almost-quiet spot outside M&S and did just that.

And it was good. Christ is made the sure foundation was our introit, chosen because I love it and it is a good length, and one or two people did join us as we sang. There was a bit of informal awkwardness going from one bit of the service to the next -- I nearly forgot the psalm, think of it! -- but we chanted psalms and canticles in something resembling unison, and the ferial responses were fairly straightforward. The readings were Ecclesiastes Chapters 11 and 12, and St Paul's 2nd Letter to Timothy, Chapter 2, verses 1-7. One annoying photographer insisted on trying to ask us questions during the service, which I found a bit difficult -- I tried to explain we weren't finished, I think someone else went and talked to him and then came and joined us again. Instead of sermon (the epistle said it all with "The husbandman that laboureth must be first partaker of the fruits.") or anthem we had Guide me, O thou great Jehovah and after the "Prayer for the Clergy and People" (rather apt I thought) and "A Prayer of St Chrysostom" and the Grace we sang O God, our help in ages past and went our respective ways -- some of us to the pub, to slake the thirst after righteousness (I'll get my coat), others off home or to other parts of the protest.

So, that was a pretty strange day. I wonder what tomorrow will bring?

Friday 21 October 2011

By Popular Request: Gin Sandwich recipes

A while ago on Twitter, in one of those conversations that sometimes happens when I ought to be practising or tidying or some such thing, there was discussion of gin, and taking gin on trains, and so on. In the way of such things it got rather whimsical and somehow, I'm not sure how, ideas for gin sandwiches came up.

I'm pleased to say I have now tried two of the ideas, and they worked beautifully.

The first one is easy: slice cucumbers, soak them in gin, in the refrigerator, overnight. I don't mean "sprinkle some gin on them" I mean "put them in a container and fill it up until the gin covers the cucumbers". Then use these cucumbers in sandwiches, as you would normally use cucumbers. They seem to go very well with herby cream cheese, but I see no reason they couldn't be used with other sandwich ingredients.

The second sandwich idea is to make sloe gin jelly.

To do this I used Oetker's gelatine; it comes in a yellow box and has sachets in it. Each sachet says it will set one pint of liquid.

Mix one sachet of gelatine with about 150mL of hot water. You may need to stir quite a lot to dissolve it all. Add about 300mL gin. Set in the refrigerator for several hours. I had been hoping that the jelly would set hard enough to be sliced, but even with the reduced liquid the alcohol in the gin prevented that happening, so it was a spreadable jelly instead. However, it was very tasty! This works beautifully with good-quality sliced sandwich meat, particularly smoked varieties.

I don't know how long the cucumbers will take to go mushy, but if they don't they shouldn't spoil in any hurry. The jelly ought to stay good for a fair while, too. Basically it's hard for anything with that much alcohol in it to actually go off. Whether they keep depends more on supplies of bread, creamcheese and sliced sandwich meat!

There you have it. Gin sandwiches: the perfect treat when you get back from Evensong too tired to cook properly.

Wednesday 19 October 2011

Metrical Psalms for Advent

I want to encourage the use of psalms in liturgy. To this end I have committed to compiling a small booklet of metrical psalms for use this coming Advent (Year B). As with everything else I publish I will release the work under a CC BY-SA licence so that other people can use it, free of charge, without having to bother me for permission.

I aim to have two settings of each of the psalms for the main Sunday morning service, one with a very well-known hymn tune and one perhaps a little less well-known (I might even write something myself). I will include full music, and also a "lead sheet" version with the melody line and chords. The psalms will have an optional refrain, so that they can be sung congregationally (without the refrain) or in the "responsorial" style with the choir/music group/whoever singing the verses, and the congregation joining in with the refrain. I used this method of metrical psalm singing quite successfully in my own parish, St Andrew's Leytonstone, during Lent.

There is a catch, however. Most of the public domain metrical settings of the psalms use language that, at best, is considered archaic. Some of the older settings are quite difficult to understand. While that might be all right for the choir at St Andrew's, where people have a fairly high tolerance for "old-fashioned" language, I do think it might be difficult in other contexts.

To this end I would like some modern metrical settings of the following psalms:

Advent I Psalm 80:1-8,18-20
Advent II Psalm 85:1-2,8-13
Advent III Psalm 126
Advent IV Psalm 89.1-4,19-26
(These are all from RSCM's "Sunday by Sunday", so please tell me if I've got the lectionary wrong...)

It would, of course, make sense to add these translations or paraphrases to Psalter Commons. Some of them have been shortened in order to be a sensible length for congregational worship; that's the lectionary's suggestion, not mine, so please feel free to include a bit more if the text sits better that way.

A modern metrical setting of the Magnificat (listed as an alternative to the psalm on Advent III or Advent IV) would also be useful, but this is not as crucial as there are serviceable settings already available in many hymnals (Timothy Dudley-Smith's "Tell out my soul" is perhaps the best known).

I've promised people I'll have this booklet done by mid-November, so I really, really need the text by the end of October. Do let me know if you'd like to help out.

Saturday 15 October 2011

A bit about why I use the CC licenses I do.

When I write music I release it under a Creative Commons license. I usually use a CC BY-SA license, known as Attribution-ShareAlike. This means people can use it, without first asking me, as long as they give me attribution and any derivative works they make are shared under a similar license. If I am using CC BY-SA then they are free to earn money for derivative works, but since they have to release those works under a similar license they are not going to be in a situation where they have a monopoly on the work. For example, a musician might get paid for recording one of my compositions -- this is a commercial use of the work -- but as they must allow others to use the recording they are not going to end up being the only supplier of it. The CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike ) license is more restrictive, and I rarely use it these days; I believe the drawbacks outweigh the benefits of restricting copyright in that way.

The reason for "giving my music away for free" is something I've been through a number of times, but a short summary is that it is more important to me that the music is heard and used than that I make money from it. People are not queuing up to pay me to write music and the writing I do is little enough, and sufficiently esoteric by mainstream standards (mostly choral music, mostly for use in churches), that I'm unlikely to make much money from it anyway. Like the majority of musicians throughout history, I earn more money from teaching and performing than from composing, publishing or recording. When I do write something, and someone uses it, I'm delighted. It would be great if they could chuck a fiver my way, but a lot of people are in the same boat I am, with little or no sheet music budget, so I'm not going to worry about it too much if they don't.

So, why do I use Creative Commons licenses rather than simply adding a preface to work saying that people are free to use it?

One is that the license information is easier to include on the work itself, so that in the event that it gets separated from the preface my intentions are still clear. (See Christ Has No Body Now On Earth But Ours for an example -- that work is four pages, but it wouldn't have been hard to include the license information on all of them, and anyway one page of it isn't that useful on its own.) This isn't a big deal for short pieces, but if I were to publish, say, a booklet of psalms for Advent, it's quite likely that some people would want to use -- and print -- only one or two pages from it. It makes sense to have licence information on all of them, rather than expecting people to remember where the music came from and come back to find it again.

Another reason is that the people at Creative Commons have done the research to make sure that their copyright statements are legally valid, whereas a simpler text statement may not be considered binding (particularly in areas of international jurisdiction). I've seen lots of plain text copyright statements that aren't absolutely clear whether, for example, an organist playing for a wedding which will be recorded is allowed to use the work if they are being paid. While I'm alive this isn't too bad, as people can contact me (I try to include an e-mail address on most paper copies of my work too), but after I'm dead if there is any lack of clarity people will have to wait seventy years for my work to become public domain. So there's a lot to be said for using a standardised license that others will be able to interpret and which has been formulated by people who understand the full legal implications.

I use a Creative Commons license because I want to give my work away and I want to do it with a minimum of fuss for myself and for others.