Saturday, April 19, 2003 AD Music We had our final rehearsal this morning for the Handel piece we're doing tomorrow -- Messiah #33, "Lift Up Your Heads, O Ye Gates." Ah...what a pleasure to be able to sing challenging classical music for a change. And the Gospel choir is doing three selections from Robert Ray's Gospel Mass (alas, I cannot seem to track down a commercially available recording), which I'm also enjoying, except for some of the librettist's liberties. Since I'd not been to choir for a few months, I held my tongue for about three rehearsals before I piped up and pointed out a careless paraphrase in the Credo. The music director told me later that at the moment she thought, "Yay! Valerie's back!" Not that anybody's going to change anything now that Valerie's back and putting her two cents in, but at least it's nice to know that my doing so does not engender universal loathing and annoyance toward me.
Last night's Good Friday service was a joint event involving all six PCA churches in Baltimore City. With one exception (yeah, I always have to find something wrong!), the music was marvelous -- thoughtful lyrics, non-inane music, skillful playing and singing. Subjectively speaking, the best worship experience I've had in months. And oddly enough, it was an older hymn, not a contemporary song, that irked me. "And now I am happy all the day" has got to be one of the dippiest lines ever penned in hymnody. And "Alas and Did My Savior Bleed" is so good otherwise. I wish we would stick with Watts's verses and ditch Hudson's chorus. PDI/Sovereign grace has a very nice version of the hymn, by the way, on this CD (audio available, too). They did go with PDI selections for some of the other songs last night. (By the way, Wayne L, if you happen to read this, since I never did get around to responding to your inquiry about contemporary music that's not devoid of all merit, I would recommend starting by poking around in PDI's Come and Worship series. Not uniformly excellent, but light years better than your average Vineyard/Integrity's Hosanna/Maranatha offering.) Posted by Valerie (Kyriosity) at 4/19/2003 02:40:00 PM
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