After a short prayer, we went back to the Kyrie. I tried to compensate for our lack of a teacher by playing a recording from the choir from Saint-Benoît-du-Lac. We learned about pitch the hard way. The monks were singing in Mode 8, we had practiced in Mode 5. We tried singing along but it was more like squeaking along.
Fr Joe arrived to say hello (Thursday is his one day off). After some chat, he left but complimented us on the recording, ‘was that you from last week?’
Aye right.
We kept trying but without guidance, we just couldn’t get the final Kyrie passage to fit the notes.
Because the Latin Mass is in Stirling this Sunday, I wanted to let everyone try the Credo and Agnus Dei. Again, my recordings (from the Benedictines of Silos this time) were in a different mode from our songbooks (mode 3 vs mode 5). But this time we were able sing with the recording. We noticed how the slidey notes worked and how the double lines meant a longer pause. I said that I kept making a pigs-ear out of the slidey notes.
We looked in the Gregorian Highway Code and found that the note is called a Porrectus.
Jack told us that porrectus is the Latin for pigs-ear.
We tried these two prayers a few times. Patrick noticed that we were all pausing to ‘take a breath’ at the same time because we didn’t know where the music was going next!
We closed with Salve Regina. I made a recording which will stay private. It shows that the Schola started the hymn in one key and ended in another one, through tiny steps after each line.
Any men who come to Mass in the Holy Spirit at 5.00pm will come as members of the congregation, rather than as a Schola Cantorum. It will be a while before we sound good enough to lead prayers.
The next meeting will be our last before Christmas.
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