Whew... and eating your vegetables

Whew...
(I have a choir member who actually aloud, no, LOUDLY, articulates this at the end of a "big" liturgy, ending with a "big"piece of music. Seriously, as loudly as she has just been singing a high note, she sometimes lets out with a loud high pitched, "whew!" or "hoo boy!" I have been unable to cure her of this altogether, although I am glad to say she did not do so yesterday. I digress...) I repeat, Whew.
The ordination is over.
No disaster occurred, (except that Himself did not fulfill his Sunday "obligation" for the first time since becoming a Catholic, SFAIK. He forgot to estimate in his travel time to work, the bishop's garrulousness, and the length of the rite when Saturday night he suddenly informed me that he would be there to sing more than the prelude and the entrance.)
As to prelude, we bailed on the Monteverdi Laudate Dominum Omnes Gentes, at the rehearsal an hour before, not Mass, but before Quiet, (I am trying to enforce that -- we can rehearse, and talk as we would at a normal weekday rehearsal before Mass ONLY if we are silent by half hour, so that people both in the nave and in the loft can, I dunno... pray? collect their thoughts? something quaint like that.)
It just wasn't working. I'm not sure why, the sopranos had blamed it on the absence of a strong tenor at rehearsal on Thursday, but it turned out rather to hinge on the absence of a strong soprano.
In a contrapuntal piece, especially when I have laryngitis (I continue to claim... I suspect it's really nodes,) I simply cannot make everyone's entrances for them.
I'm not sure what has happened to the section... it is growing, we actually for the first time since I arrived, have the usual configuration for church choirs, more sopranos than anything else. The voices I thought we could depend on for "leadership" (which we all know sometimes has nothing whatever to do with voice per se or musicianship, sometimes it's just the CONFIDENCE to make an entrance, or even to breath to signal to those around one that one is about to make the entrance,) just aren't providing it.
Of course, the only reason this is a problem at all goes to a much deeper problem -- the tension between their self-identification and our aims.
Because in reality, there exists no "need" whatsoever for us to sing "show-pieces."
But they have been, for a long time, not really a liturgical choir, but a concert choir that happens to sing during Catholic Masses.
And I certainly understand it, there's way to much performer in me, (Himself would say, rather, "Hambone,") not to sympathize.
But they are too attached to what they call the Easter Screamers, (anthem after anthem, laden with melodrama and high notes,) and to the contents of file cabinets stuffed full of sweet, (in some cases, insipid,) Christmas ballads.
So part of the course I'm trying to steer is to channel those tastes and impulses into music that is at least textually more in line with what the liturgy calls for.
I thought the Monteverdi could be another Nieland Magnificat for us, something we know and love, with an actual liturgical text that is pretty generally useful that satisfies the "You ain't heard nothin' yet!" predilections of us show-off types.
(The setting of "Christ is the true vine" to the Cherubini canon that I cobbled together is another such... they love it to pieces, it's only 2 voices so we can pull it out when flu or holidays have decimated our ranks and it's close enough to one of the ad libitum communion antiphons from the Gradual to be multi-purpose.)
They "like" it. Most find it catchy and fun, (except for that wicked "et veritas Domini" section.)
And I guess it will be, eventually.
It just wasn't to be yesterday.
Well, this wasn't intended to be a dissertation on why we didn't sing Monteverdi yesterday, and what my intention are and my failures turn out to be with the choir.... but there you have it.

So anyway, I'm sorry that sometimes some of them feel the psalm or the ordinary are the vegetables I'm making them eat before we get to the dessert of The Little Drummer Boy....