Universalis, your very own breviary in pixels...

Tuesday 4 November 2008

How to sing a Kyrie

From Dad29 in a combox below, to wonderful not to enjoy a wider readership:
Roger Wagner used to try to motivate his choral-seminar participants to "method-sing" the Kyrie. He'd ask them to imagine that they were suspended by a spider's thread above Hell--and the only way to avoid Hell was to sing Kyrie Eleison as though they actually meant it...

Of course, that was when there WAS Hell.
A tudge different outlook from the one expressed by someone who asked me to find a "'livelier' Lord Have Mercy" to program.....

3 comments:

Lyn F. said...

A livelier Lord, Have Mercy?

/scratches head

I'm sorry, this does not compute.

Or as they say in the Little Britain series: "The Computer Says No."

Anonymous said...

Hi, Lyn, thanks for stopping by.
I'll be honest here, since no one I know IRL is likely to read the comboxes and recognize themselves, I actually changed the wording of the request, to protect the guilty -- the actual request, when I was helping with school Masses was, "Why can't we have a nice peppy Kyrie?"

I bit my tongue at the meeting rather than say to the nice man, "Yeah, 'I'm sorry, cha-cha-cha!' makes for a REALLY sincere-sounding apology...."

(Save the Liturgy, Save the World)

Mary Jane Ballou said...

Again I see that Scelata is failing to understand that I come to Mass to be cheered up, get a little shot of "happy," and recharge my batteries.