Tag: Music

The Tantrum Song

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I’ve just got back home from my Holy Hour. Despite being brought up a practising Catholic and being in Catholic education for the majority of my schooling, I somehow missed out on many quintessentially Catholic experiences, two of which are Adoration and Benediction.

I remember an incident a few years ago when my girlfriend and I were asked to do the music at a healing Mass. We presented our song suggestions to the planning team and they were well received, but it was also requested that, at Benediction after Mass, we play “Tantum Ergo”.

At this point in my journey I was vaguely aware of what Benediction was, but neither of us were familiar with the hymn “Tantum Ergo”. We tried to “push back” on this suggestion and recommended other songs instead, ones with which we were more familiar. However, the planning team was adamant, we had to do “Tantum Ergo”…

After spending some time looking at the music we eventually concluded that it was “actually not too bad”. However, because of the unusually strong reaction to our suggestion to play something else, that hymn was forever dubbed in our minds as “The Tantrum Song”!

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Why do we sing the liturgy?

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If you attend the liturgy in the Catholic Church you may encounter, in additions to hymns and a psalm, words of the liturgy that are sung.

Now, in some parishes there will be no singing whatsoever. In others, the priest and congregation may sing small parts of the liturgy such as:

Priest: “The Lord be with you…”
Congregation: “…and also with you”
Priest: “Lift up your hearts…”
Congregation: “…we lift them up to the Lord”

At the other end of the spectrum, my local Byzantine parish sings virtually everything. Only two things are actually spoken during that liturgy: the homily and a brief prayer before communion. Absolutely everything else is sung,  including the prayers, readings, creed etc.

This begs the question why? Most Christian churches use music and will have some songs, but why is it that some churches (those who are more “liturgical”) sing parts of the liturgy which others will simply say?

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Prayer of St. Brendan

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Now that the craziness of Independence Day has passed, it’s time to calm down and listen to something beautiful:

I was fortunate enough to be present at the Mass at Clifton Cathedral in Bristol when this video was taken. It was written by a friend of mine, Mr. Joseph Meigh, as his final composition piece before heading to university.

Byzantine Music

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If you’ve listened to my recordings of the writings of the Early Church Fathers (an area of this website I plan to soon organize properly), you will recognise the first few seconds of singing from the video below:

This video is a bit of computer trickery to make it appear as though these men are singing in Hagia Sophia (“holy wisdom”), the former cathedral of Istanbul, widely acknowledged as one of the most beautiful churches in history. After spending 500 years as a mosque after the Ottoman conquest, today it functions as a Museum.

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