This is a special post for Good Friday mass.
I'd like to get together on Wednesday, April 1st, from 6:30-8:30 to run the programs for Good Friday and Easter Sunday. In speaking with the Office, the Church itself will be tied up, but the Parish Hall is free (and should be all set up), so we'll rehearse in there. If you haven't already, please let me know if you're able to attend.
Let's also plan to meet at 1 PM on Friday in the Church to set up and spot check songs as needed.
The music selections and mass format for Good Friday should be exactly the same as it was last year (our old program can be found here).
If you'd be interested in cantoring the Psalm, My God, My God, please let me know. The only changes I'd like to make from what we did over the weekend is add in some guitar (to help compliment the bass) and have flute and/or violin take over the harmony lines I played on sax.
We'll do 'Were You There' before, during and after the reading of the Passion, just as we did on Saturday. Cindy will give us the first few notes and we'll sing it a capella. This takes the place of the Gospel Acclamation; we'll return to the regular Gospel Acclamation from Mass of Remembrance for Easter Sunday.
For the Veneration of the Cross, the cross will be brought into the Church and stopped at three points along the isle. At each stop, we'll give Father Charlie a cue note and he'll sing 'behold, behold the wood of the cross, on which is hung our salvation'. We respond with 'o come, let us adore'. When the cross has reached the Sanctuary and the Veneration begins, we'll do the song 'Behold the Wood' in its entirety. My thought is this will largely be a guitar-based piece.
Our second Veneration song is 'Jesus, the Lord'. This is one we've always struggled with tempo-wise, especially when it comes to the instrumental interlude in the middle of the refrain. We may not even get to this one depending on how long the Veneration takes, but we should still be prepared to do it.
If you'd be interested in cantoring the Psalm, My God, My God, please let me know. The only changes I'd like to make from what we did over the weekend is add in some guitar (to help compliment the bass) and have flute and/or violin take over the harmony lines I played on sax.
We'll do 'Were You There' before, during and after the reading of the Passion, just as we did on Saturday. Cindy will give us the first few notes and we'll sing it a capella. This takes the place of the Gospel Acclamation; we'll return to the regular Gospel Acclamation from Mass of Remembrance for Easter Sunday.
For the Veneration of the Cross, the cross will be brought into the Church and stopped at three points along the isle. At each stop, we'll give Father Charlie a cue note and he'll sing 'behold, behold the wood of the cross, on which is hung our salvation'. We respond with 'o come, let us adore'. When the cross has reached the Sanctuary and the Veneration begins, we'll do the song 'Behold the Wood' in its entirety. My thought is this will largely be a guitar-based piece.
Our second Veneration song is 'Jesus, the Lord'. This is one we've always struggled with tempo-wise, especially when it comes to the instrumental interlude in the middle of the refrain. We may not even get to this one depending on how long the Veneration takes, but we should still be prepared to do it.
Our songs during the Communion Rite include 'Calvary' and 'Jesus, Remember Me' (note we will not use any of the Eucharistic mass parts). My thought on 'Calvary' is to return to an all-vocal arrangement (my notes indicate that we used heavy instrumentation last year). I'd like to start with the refrain sung on 'ooo' before repeating the refrain on melody and then going into the verses. We may also want to consider having soloists on each verse to simplify things a bit. We won't have time to do anything with the written parts, but given this is a Spiritual, there's plenty of room to improv harmonies as desired.
For 'Jesus, Remember Me', I'd like to try to use the simple choir parts if possible. The idea with this one would be to slowly build up the voice parts and perhaps play with the dynamics to keep it interesting.
Finally, Father has asked that we play something instrumental (softly and reverently) after the ministers process out in silence and the congregations begins to leave. He suggested 'Were You There', but 'Jesus, Remember Me' is also an option (especially if we don't get to it during Communion). Both of these could easily be done by starting with one melodic instrument and slowly adding/taking away instruments as we go along.
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UPDATE (4/2): a few notes on these songs from our rehearsal on Wednesday:
For 'My God, My God', we decided to 'volunteer' Jonathan to cantor this again (if you're up for it, Jonathan?) and also added two beats of rest between the end of each verse and retrain (rather than going straight in as written).
For 'Jesus, the Lord', the intro will be the last two bars of the verse. Also, guitars should be careful not to cut off the refrain interlude too soon, which will throw the melodic instruments out of sync. There are also rests at the beginning of all verses (1 1/2 beats for verse one and three beats for verses two and three) that we'll need to watch out for.
For 'Calvary', let's plan to sing the 'ooo's mentioned above as we all go up to Communion, repeat as needed and then start singing the refrain after everyone is back. This way, we won't need to worry about pulling people mid-song.
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Jim is out this week.
Here are the songs for Friday: