Ask any church musician or priest what is the busiest week of the year, and hands down, I bet they all would say Holy Week, or as my late husband used to affectionately call it, Holy H*** Week! Even Father Paul Lillie called it “The Week of All Weeks” in his sermon tonight! Between my two church jobs, I’m playing seven services between Palm Sunday and Easter. Bear in mind, though, that the organ is silenced from after the Gloria in Excelsis of Maundy Thursday to the intonation of the Gloria at the Easter Vigil. That means that the organist (that’s me) has a break, while the poor choir has to sing TWO passions, one on Palm Sunday, and the other on Good Friday, and UMPTEEN psalms, plus a number of choral compositions.
It’s still a lot of music—if you consider all the hymns, psalms, liturgical pieces, and organ voluntaries that I’ll be playing—too many notes! Not to mention all the alternate hymn harmonizations that I’ve searched for!
Here are my seven services of Holy Week this year:
- Eve of Palm Sunday, St. Mark’s Episcopal, Saturday, March 28, 5:00 pm
- Palm Sunday, Nu‘uanu Congregational Church, Sunday, March 29, 9:00 am
- Palm Sunday, St. Mark’s Episcopal, March 29, 11:00 am
- Maundy Thursday, c April 2, 7:00 pm
- Easter Vigil, St. Mark’s Episcopal, Saturday, April 4, 7:00 pm
- Easter Day, Nu‘uanu Congregational Church, Sunday, April 5, 9:00 am
- Easter Day, St. Mark’s Episcopal, Sunday, April 5, 11:00 am
Hey, in the “old days,” my husband Carl and I used to do nine choral services in Holy Week, all of them different. Plus he sometimes had the complication of doing other people’s taxes when Easter fell close to April 15. And the craziest, most insane thing he used to do was in addition to preparing all the 50+ pieces of music in the week, and typing all the bulletins, was to cook a dinner for the choir and liturgical servers on the night of the Easter Vigil. That was for about 40 people!
Some of the music I’ve chosen for this week is familiar, but much of it is new to me. Here are some of the pieces I’ve had to spend time learning and practicing:
“Hosanna, loud Hosanna,” by J. Wayne Kerr (b. 1958) is what I’m playing for my prelude at St. Mark’s for the Eve of Palm Sunday and Palm Sunday. He is the minister of music at the First United Methodist Church in Hurst, Texas. It is based on the hymn tune ELLACOMBE.
The hymn tune ANDUJAR will be sung at both Palm Sunday services at St. Mark’s. I would have to say this is my favorite hymn of all time from the Episcopal Hymnal 1982. Here is a video from St. Mark’s Philadelphia of this gorgeous David Hurd tune. However I find it quite challenging to play!
“Cornet Processional” by our life-long friend David P. Dahl is what I’m playing for my prelude on Easter at St. Mark’s. It was composed for the wedding of James Holloway and Judy Carr. Jim was tragically killed by a random shooter on the Pacific Lutheran University campus in 2000. He and his wife had recently spent 17 days in Hawaii, at least a week of that as our houseguests.
“Awake, O sleeper, rise from death,” by Gerald Near (b. 1942) is the choir anthem for the Easter Vigil. Our choir director, Mike Dupre, gave me the music to start learning last Christmas, and even though I should have had it locked into my brain by now, there are always places which surprise me!
For the postlude on Easter at St. Mark’s, I’ll be playing Marcel Dupré’s “Prelude in B major, op. 7,” a piece I used to play with some regularity during my years at the Lutheran Church of Honolulu. However I haven’t played it since I retired from that position in 2012, and I’ve had to work my you-know-what off to resurrect it! And for your information, I have never learned Widor’s famous Toccata. It was a piece my husband Carl used to play, so I didn’t feel any pressure to learn to play it myself, even though I’ve taught it to several students. I’m also played my perennial favorite for the prelude on Maundy Thursday, Bach’s “O Lamm Gottes unschuldig, BWV 656.”
Not to forget my position at Nu’uanu Congregational, Russell Ishida, trumpeter and choir director, and I will be performing “La Rejouissance” by George Frideric Handel for the prelude, and the Hallelujah Chorus from “Messiah” in versions with three trumpets and organ. The other players are Thomas Kamisato and Elizabeth Kaneshiro Akamichi.
And I’ll be hosting an Easter brunch after church. My table is already set up!
Several reasons for loving this post: a reminder of busy times during Holy Week (although never as busy as yours, since I was a choirmaster, but not an organist!); our mutual friend David Dahl (my colleague at PLU for so many years—and we still see him occasionally at PLU concerts); and memories of dear friends, Jimmy Dale Holloway and Judy Carr. I hadn’t known that they’d spent a week with you in Hawaii.
Jim both stood up for me and played at Kathryn’s and my wedding in 1996 (July 6, so our 30th anniversary is this summer), and both Jim and Judy went along on our “honeymoon” because Jim was playing for a “Singing Week” where I was conducting in Veszprém, Hungary. We’d planned our wedding around the dates for that event, which was set long before we decided to marry! We couldn’t get a flight into Budapest, so flew to Prague instead. Jim and Judy joined us there a couple days later, and after a short visit in that wonderful city (first time for us) we then took the train to Budapest, where we met several other people involved in the week and took a van to Veszprém.
Each day involved intense rehearsals for Jim and me, and we were staying outside of town (all the other “ateliers”—the various choirs, each led by a different conductor and repertoire, were in town) at a seminary . . . which had recently been converted from a former residential school for Marxist and Leninist Studies! We’d have breakfast and lunch there, then go into town for dinner and evening concerts. Kathryn and Judy, meanwhile, since we were given bus passes to get into town, would take off on a different bus each day after breakfast and just go wherever that particular bus number went, having adventures exploring the area, and would join us for dinner each evening.
After the Singing Week, we all went back to Budapest, where among other things, we saw the Liszt Museum at his former apartment in Budapest, where Jim was delighted (since he was doing research for his doctorate on Liszt’s organ music) to discover that the books about his harmonium in that apartment had an incorrect stop list, and to be able to correct it in his dissertation! We spent several days together in Budapest, then separated briefly while Jim and Judy went to Liszt’s birth town in Hungary, where Jim was able to see and play the organ Liszt had learned on in his youth. We went on to Vienna, where we were joined shortly by Jim and Judy for several days before they went on to London and home, and we started an unusually long honeymoon traveling through Gemany, to Kristiansand, Norway (where Kathryn’s younger sister, her husband and two kids lived), and eventually at the end of August arrived in Stockholm.
Kathryn had to go back to Tacoma to teach (art) at the end of that time, and I stayed for 6 weeks, since it was my sabbatical year and I was updating research for my dissertation on Swedish choral music, before writing it during that sabbatical year.
It will be the 20th anniversary of Jim’s death this 17th of May, and I still can’t believe what happened. And I still think of Jim nearly every day.
May you have a wonderful Holy Week, Cathy!
Buen Suerte esta semana!
jb
Thank you for the beautiful arrangement of a favorite hymn, and especially for the reminder of Jim’s passing. I will never forget that announcement coming across the TV not long after his wonderful conference ; I was in far away Huntsville, AL. I was so shocked and stunned. Shortly after I lost my piano tuner to a similar senseless shooting, very much a reminder of Jim’s grace and talent. Wishing all a blessed Holy Week.