The Quartet, Saturday's Mass, and "The Quest for Loftiness"

We'd like a loft, now please.  A safe, secure, hidden above, acoustically perfect loft to serve God at Mass from.  A place that we are not seen.  It's hard to hide back here in the choir stalls, but we tried yesterday.  We tried to keep the people's eyes on the altar and off of us by scooching (yeah, deal with it, it's my blog, I can make up words if I want to) off to the very side of the choir stall and working with the horrible sound system as best we could.

It was an important opportunity for these four young people.  Though our alto, Ramsay, was not old enough last year to try out for All-State and was therefore unable to learn the Croce with the others under the fine direction of Mr. Fenton, she nevertheless picked up her music and did her very best to learn this quite difficult little piece. I'm standing next to her as mostly moral support, and some occasional tweaking of lines.  Mostly, it's them.  They brought this beautiful work of art back to St. Richard's and sang it for God.

The Exsulate Justi is our challenge piece for this year.  The quartet has worked on it first, and we have begun rehearsals with the rest of the choir to offer it again at Mass when it comes around next as a Full Choir anthem at Offertory.  With the people's eyes on the altar, all that remains is for me to convince my boss that our quest for loft sound and hidden from view singing is the best way to go with a choir comprised of teenagers.  My hope is that it will catch on and people will again have mental and emotional space during a song to contemplate the mysteries Christ has wrought for all of us while engaging only ears and heart and mind.

So, for your contemplation, I offer you the quartet's hard work brought home:

NOTE:  the song is only a minute & a half long, and then I kind of accidentally didn't clip the rest properly, so the video continues in silence.  So, just press pause when the song is over and move along...no need to note the TEENAGERS who are TALKING behind my back DURING the rest of the offertory...



And at communion, we sang the Exsultate Justi in Domino by Viadana:

NOTE:  this video is suffering from the same affliction as the other one.  The song is only a couple of minutes, then there's silent video of the end of Mass.  *sigh*  I'm not sure what happened when I edited these.  Maybe it wasn't my fault after all.  Maybe my video software went nuts.  Regardless, I'm not re-syncing the audio.  That was hard and annoying.