St. Augustine once said singing is praying twice. By his maths (see I’m learning to speak Irish), we prayed so many times this weekend. This is because, on top of our usual musical commitments with the Vigil and Sunday morning Masses, we also hosted our first workshop of the year. With 10 hymn tunes to teach (often singing 2 different textual versions of each hymn) and 5 new psalm settings to introduce, this amounted to a pretty good deal of singing. St. Augustine may have even lost count of how many prayers that is.

As you probably gleaned from the last paragraph, our workshop focused on General Hymnody and Seasonal Psalmody. As Carolyn explained to the participants, the day was really about “getting back to the basics” in encouraging congregational singing. One of the major ideas we introduced was pairing one hymn tune with several different texts. This is a great teaching tool as it allows you to get a great deal of mileage out of one simple piece of music. The participants seemed to find this idea to be incredibly helpful, and will hopefully be able to implement it successfully in their parishes.

The workshop also focused on the seasonal psalms. These are the Psalms that the Church has approved for use during an entire liturgical season. We focused especially on the seasonal Psalms for Ordinary Time, introducing five new pieces of music for use in various liturgical settings. These also seemed to be well received.

With the first workshop behind us, we are looking forward to a more normal week. Carolyn has decreed that today is a day of vocal rest. This has been interesting as we have only been able to communicate through a series of grunts, whistles, and hand signals. This has been particularly confusing for random passers-by on the street, who are only accustomed to encountering this sort of language when passing construction sites. (NOTE FOR CONSTRUCTION WORKERS: I apologize to any construction workers who are offended by the previous statement. Said statement was only meant to make light of the fact that construction workers often grunt and whistle at random passers-by. Trust me, the last thing I want to do is offend construction workers because they are much stronger than me and I don’t want to be on their bad side.)

That’s all I’ve got for now. Check back on Friday to see how the week went and read about our excitement as Festival Season approaches.