Music for Holy Week

Maundy Thursday:

Ubi Caritas (Duruflé)

If Ye Love Me (Tallis)

(This is the video I learned this piece from long and long ago in the days of first being part of the adult choir — it was so nice to see that it still exists. I came across the animation separately from the music the other day and — though it had been years — still remembered which parts of the music went with which images.)

In My Father’s House (Stopford)

Good Friday:

“The Agony”, by George Herbert

      Philosophers have measur’d the mountains,
Fathom’d the depths of the seas, of states, and kings,
Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n, and traced fountains:
      But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that found them; Sinne and Love.

      Who would know Sinne, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
      His skinne, his garments bloudie be.
Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein.

      Who knows not Love, let him assay,
And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
      If ever he did taste the like.
Love in that liquor sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.

Ave Verum Corpus (Byrd)

“On A Theme From Julian’s Chapter XX”, by Denise Levertov

Six hours outstretched in the sun, yes,
hot wood, the nails, blood trickling
into the eyes, yes—
but the thieves on their neighbor crosses
survived till after the soldiers
had come to fracture their legs, or longer.
Why single out the agony? What’s
a mere six hours?
Torture then, torture now,
the same, the pain’s the same,
immemorial branding iron,
electric prod.
Hasn’t a child
dazed in the hospital ward they reserve
for the most abused, known worse?
The air we’re breathing,
these very clouds, ephemeral billows
languid upon the sky’s
moody ocean, we share
with women and men who’ve held out
days and weeks on the rack—
and in the ancient dust of the world
what particles
of the long tormented,
what ashes.

But Julian’s lucid spirit leapt
to the difference:
perceived why no awe could measure
that brief day’s endless length,
why among all the tortured
One only is “King of Grief.”

The oneing, she saw, the oneing
with the Godhead opened Him utterly
to the pain of all minds, all bodies
—sands of the sea, of the desert—
from first beginning
to last day. The great wonder is
that the human cells of His flesh and bone
didn’t explode
when utmost Imagination rose
in that flood of knowledge. Unique
in agony, Infinite strength, Incarnate,
empowered Him to endure
inside of history,
through those hours when he took to Himself
the sum total of anguish and drank
even the lees of that cup:

within the mesh of the web, Himself
woven within it, yet seeing it,
seeing it whole. Every sorrow and desolation
He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.

Holy Saturday:

Sicut Cervus (Palestrina)

Easter:

The Exsultet from the Easter Vigil:

Bach’s 4th Cantata:

https://soundcloud.com/bachakademieaustralia/sets/js-bach-cantata-bwv-4-christ-lag-in-todesbanden