Things Are Different

Choir members should tool around the schedule and Calendar for important different information as needed.
-the mgmt.

ACDA 2012 Full Recordings

THERE WILL BE CD'S AS SOON AS THE REHEARSAL TRACKS ARE POSTED

In the meantime, you should listen to these until you can hum along independently with them without music.

On a Personal Note: Trying to Find the Big Picture

I would like to thank everyone who has been so kind as to keep up with this blog.  Though I will not take it offline, I am taking a hiatus from posting.  Probably a quite long one.   I will update the Choir Calendar and Mass Schedule tabs as needed for the use of the choir families.  It has been a wonderful experience blogging about the Youth Choir, and I will miss it, but I must re-work my time and talents to better suit my family's needs for a while.

Thank you again for your kind support of the St. Richard Youth Choir and this blog.

Mrs. Carleigh

Choir Season 2011-2012 starts SOON!

After a whole summer's hiatus from blogging, it's time to quit hanging around and start us looking forward to our Fall Season!

Choir Season Begins at Registration!!!!  We will hold a MANDATORY parent meeting from 2:00-2:30 PM on Sunday, August 21st for registration of ALL choir members, new and returning.  We will discuss rules, the schedule for the year, and the possibility of a Pueri Cantores Festival somewhere driveable.   Choir rehearsal will follow from 2:30-4:00 PM.


I wanted to again thank all the choir members who helped sing at the Cathedral.  I keep hearing good things from Cathedral staff about how we did.  It's always good to hear that hard work really does pay off.

See you all on Sunday, August 21st, parents AND choir members, in the choir room at 2:00 PM!  Later's....

Mrs. Carleigh

Out of the Ordinary

Corpus Christi Mass 2011, St. Peter's Cathedral, Bishop Joseph Latino, presider

I am lifting my blog hiatus briefly to share our wonderful experience singing for the Cathedral this past weekend.  We sang with the Cathedral Choir under the direction of Jimmy Scoggins, and we brought our chant skills to bear singing the Lauda Sion salvatorem, O Salutaris Hostia, and the Pange Lingra gloriosi.  It was a fantastic opportunity to put such outstanding music of the Church in its rightful place at what was certainly a beautiful Mass.

I'd like to thank Fr. Jeffrey Waldrep, Mary Woodward, Bishop Latino, Jimmy Scoggins and the Cathedral Choir for their kind welcome and support.  We appreciated the chance to join all of you for this Mass.


Below are two of the highlights from Mass, the Sequence for Corpus Christi, Lauda Sion salvatorem, and the O Salutaris Hostia.  Our chant skills are still in the formative stages, so bear with us as we continue to grow and work!

Easter 2011 at St. Richard Catholic Church, Jackson, MS

Easter morning came very very very early for us.  I got up at 5:00 AM to make goo for the choir (goo is our special concoction to heal all things that ail voices at 8:00 in the morning).  We got to the church by 6:30 AM, and started setting up for Mass.

The choir started arriving at 6:45 AM or so and put on their robes and grabbed their books, ate the last of the bananas from Saturday's rehearsal and settled in to warm up and get serious about this Easter thing.

Our organist, the ever-amazing and wonderful Christopher Ray arrived, got the organ warm, and helped us run through psalm and acclamation and anthem and ordinary before heading over to the church to start the prelude.

We downed some more goo, sang through the sequence (which is by necessity here sung after communion, which makes me a little sad), and did the yearly "how do we line up for a procession" dance (with about the same results as usual---cat herding and lots-o-confusion), and then realized we had our binders AND our Worship III hymnals to manage while walking and no time left to fix that, so things were a bit awkward as we processed, but still good.

Claire sang the psalm and it was lovely.  Below, there's a video clip from the psalm, but I did not include it in its entirety because it is marred somewhat by me TRYING to get my darling little slugs to SING the parts we had gone over so many times in rehearsal (or sing ANYTHING for that matter) on the refrain and the little tag bit in the verses and one thing I've discovered about myself is that I do not sing well when I'm trying to communicate vociferously to a choir of people who are ignoring me WHILE I'm also trying to song lead.  (This is why song leading FAILS---it's a dual role and you end up doing neither thing well.  You neither sing well NOR conduct well.  HATE HATE HATE song leading.  Let's start a petition to abolish THAT, why don't we?)


We sang our anthems, sang the ordinary, and sang the sequence.  Not too shabby for the little choir that could.  I am proud of the work we've done these past seven years.  I think back on how far we've come and I wonder...how far CAN we go?  How will we serve God next year and in the years to come?

In the meantime...here is Sunday's full choir rendition of Exsultate Justi, Regina Caeli, and that snidbit of a psalm I promised you.

Donkeys, Palms, In Monte Oliveti, and New Friends

Goodness, what a busy weekend for the choir.  We sang at the Palm Sunday Vigil Mass here at home at St. R's, and then hit the road early Sunday morning to head north to Yazoo City and sing Palm Sunday at St. Mary Catholic Church "up there".

We really enjoyed our time in Yazoo City.  The youth were especially hospitable, cooking and serving lunch for us and generally showing us a GREAT time!  It was good, too, to see Fr. Lincoln Dall again and celebrate Mass in the lovely community he now shepherds.  We'd like to especially thank Mrs. Rosemary, our accompanist, for doing such a fantastic job.

So, in order:

St. Richard's Vigil Mass included the dramatic reading of the Gospel which is a standard here, and Greg Mitchell was the percussionist.  James' mom is up there helping the lectors give this reading it's special punch. 

CLICK HERE to see an excerpt video from the reading.



James closed our Lenten Experience this year, just as he began, singing the psalm, only this time, the text was "My God, My God, Why Have You Abandoned Me?"




For our anthem at both Masses, we sang Battastini's In Monte Oliveti, which has as it's text, Jesus's words in the Garden.



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Sunday brought cooler temperatures, and we were blessed with a bright beautiful sunny blue-green world in Yazoo City.  For our Communion Meditation we sang Billings' When Jesus Wept, and I'd like to point out that the camera is in the loft and we are unamplified.  Acoustics, when designed properly, WORK.  Amplification distorts voices.  I really appreciated the space we sang in here, as it was really a pleasure to sing without microphones and have such a nice result::




And Finally.....  The after Mass luncheon with the Youth of St. Mary's.  Thanks guys for the food, the great service, and the AWESOME playing of Ninja and big blue ball...

On the Road Again, With EXCITEMENT

On Saturday, we'll sing at Mass at St. Richard's, but on SUNDAY MORNING, Palm Sunday 2011, we have the distinct privilege of singing in Yazoo City at St. Mary's Catholic Church with family and dear friends of the choir.  Fr. Lincoln Dall is the pastor now at St. Mary's and Trey, Chantele, and Kayla have LOTS of family that live "up there" in the Delta, so there is much excitement around town that we are coming.

Yesterday, I drove up there to get a feel for the place, check logistics, meet Mrs. Rosemary who I found to be a great accompanist, and really nice soul, and figure out all the how's and where's of Mass for Sunday.  I took some photos of this beautiful little church, and wanted to share them with you guys.  Something to note, that is a tin ceiling, and the steel beams are a later addition because it had serious structural problems at some point.  I think it is a beautiful church.  When they moved the altar forward, they dropped the head piece which had been sitting on the altar and put it, with the tabernacle, on the floor with it's angels.  I sense that there was a reluctance to destroy anything, and make it easy to put back should history and time make that possible.  One can only pray and hope.  At least the Tabernacle is where it belongs. 

I apologize for not taking exterior pictures.  I will do so Sunday when we are there.  Honestly, I just forgot because the interior was so beautiful and Catholic.  I'd like to lift this little church WITH its friendly and amazing community, off its foundations and drop it by helicopter near my house so I could go to church there, but Fr. Lincoln thought maybe that'd be a bit difficult.  :)  So, we'll visit instead.  Here are the pictures:

From Their Perspective: Crazy Sale 2011

I let them take their own pictures this time.  So...below you can peruse the 166 pictures that I found on my camera when I got it back from them...

They include some pricelessly beautiful candid shots of individual choir members, and a whole ream of what they are calling "creeper pictures" (I have no idea what that means to them exactly, but to me it looks like they are practicing to be amateur private detectives.  **note to self:  maybe murder dinner theatres weren't such a good idea!

So, in their original form, uncut and uncaptioned...here are the SRYC, in all their quirky glory, as seen from their very own perspective:

Crazy Bake 2011

UPDATE:   Apparently, our little friends in the choir took 166 pictures of themselves when I let them play with my camera.  I'm out of town right now, so uploading would be EXPENSIVE, but I'll put them ALL up when I get home.  For now, I'll share just one picture and add just one question for the guys...."So, you found the "sports" setting on the camera, eh?"  I am wondering whose less than brilliant idea jumping off of things during Mass was, but we'll all agree to love them anyway because they are cute:

It begins again.  The crazyness of Spring.  The seventh annual Spring Bead N' Bake is upon us, and we are hard at work making products for sale this weekend at Mass.   Again, we'll have our Chocolate/Candy coated brownie pops, the "normal" brownies, and we'll also have our wire crosses for sale. We'll be on the sidewalks this year because we don't want to clog up the bridge so much.  Please do take a moment to look at the display boards on your way into Church.  They tell the story of our trip to Rome and all the other work we do here at the SRYC.