Liturgy Planner - a couple of thoughts

[keitha]

While making my comment on the Advent Hymns thread I thought about looking at the Liturgy Planner, both current and past editions. Firstly, the current edition ends with the feast of Christ the King - which is entirely logical, of course. On the other hand, our magazine will arrive around the First Sunday of Advent (or, possibly, after it this year as many regular contributors will have had their time taken by Papal visit preparations), when it will be too late to aid the planning for that Sunday. Might it not be worth, in future, bringing the first Sunday of the next season into the preceding season's magazine?

Secondly, so far as I can tell, there is no archive on the website. For example, it might be worth having access to the preceding 3 years' Liturgy Planners on a rolling basis. I don't know how much demand there would be for this and whether it would involve a lot of effort/cost to satisfy what might be a limited demand.

Just a couple of thoughts.

[Boadicea]

keitha wrote:
On the other hand, our magazine will arrive around the First Sunday of Advent (or, possibly, after it this year as many regular contributors will have had their time taken by Papal visit preparations), when it will be too late to aid the planning for that Sunday.

I understand the next issue of the journal will be dropping through members' letter boxes any day now.

[keitha]

In that case, firstly, well done to all - given our recent "distractions" and, secondly, I have clearly misunderstood something I was told recently, so apologies to all.

[musicus]

I have clearly misunderstood something I was told recently, so apologies to all.

No problem, Keith. Perhaps you were thinking of the revised copy date (1 December for the issue after the one that is about to drop through your letterbox.

[organist]

I use the planner with the RSCM one and it does come too late! Music lists have to be produced 2 months in advance in order to be published in the parish magazine. I currently have the RSCM one up to the end of April so why not copy them and work far ahead?

[musicus]

Keep the detailed comments coming, please. The editorial team is very keen to hear from you, as it is currently considering how Planning the Liturgy could be improved.

[mcb]

There are good things about the planner, from a musician's point of view, in the Notes for Musicians section. It's good to have such a thoughtful list of recommendations - like having an extra participant in your planning meeting.

I'd like to see a revamp, though. The present format is more or less an uncommented list of titles of pieces of music. This can be useful for someone choosing music - after all it saves them having to think of things for themselves - but it doesn't really teach anything, explicitly at any rate, about how to plan: what principles should guide the selection of music for the liturgy each week? As an obvious example from the new edition of the planner just out: Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time. Here most of the recommendations are for settings of the Beatitudes, or pieces based on them. But the planner doesn't say so, nor does it say why (answer: because the Psalm response, the Gospel acclamation and the Communion antiphon are all from the Beatitudes in St Matthew's Gospel). The novice planner would probably benefit more from having this pointed out, than simply being served a plateful of songs about the Beatitudes and being left to work it out. (As an aside: for this Sunday, even the extended commentary on the Gospel reading seems not to help - no mention of the Beatitudes here either.)

If the compilers of the music lists were obliged to explain the choices rather than just list them, this might have the beneficial side effect of making the choices less quirky! With all those settings of the Beatitudes listed, there's no room, apparently, for Chris Walker's Save us, Lord our God, which is a bullseye for that day's entrance antiphon. Yet this piece is listed for the previous Sunday. I honestly have no idea what makes it suitable for the Third Sunday. Sometimes the planner can read like a maths exam in which the candidate has failed to show their working out!

And speaking of quirky, I find the For the Choir section routinely a bit, well, sui generis. Again picking one Sunday by way of example, take the Fourth Sunday of Advent. This is the Sunday of the year when it's surely more appropriate than any other Sunday to sing a setting of the Ave Maria (which after all is the Offertory antiphon in the Graduale). The planner only suggests Arvo Pärt's Bogoroditse Devo. This is an unusual choice, I think, and perhaps not a helpful one. Even if the harmonic language is fairly straightforward, it's still in eight parts and in a language no-one in the church is likely to understand. I don't really understand the purpose in recommending it instead of, say, Arcadelt, or the choral arrangements out there of Gounod or Schubert, or to aim higher, Victoria or Parsons or Rachmaninov (for which Latin versions exist). These would all be more useful additions to the repertoire of a good parish choir.

The remaining choral recommendations for that Sunday are, er, The 'Great O' Antiphons, The 'Great O' Antiphons and The 'Great O' Antiphons! It's obvious, isn't it, that if someone sees a recommendation for the antiphons in Latin, they might also consider singing them in English without it having to be a separate suggestion. You could use the space saved to explain why they might be a suitable choice.

Actually that looks like a regular pattern - for the Immaculate Conception the planner takes five lines to recommend five different psalm settings with the title All the ends of the earth, and four lines recommending pieces entitled Tota Pulchra Es. Perhaps there's a more efficient way to use the space, and scope for including more commentary in the mix. The result would be to make the planner a stronger teaching aid.

But this isn't meant to sound like a grumpy diatribe. The planner's already an excellent resource, and there's an opportunity now to make it even more excellent. Thanks for the hard work, editors, and keep it up.

[VML]

Thorough constructive comment MCB, and, I am sure, useful to the compilers and all who put so much into M&L. Thanks to all of you.

[presbyter]

Oh mcb - bless you! You've just done something similar to my own comments about certain aspects of the Society's work some two and three-quarter decades ago. I talked myself into a job - you may have done the same!