Winter Chant Intensive 2011: Day 4 – Epiphany “King Cake”, Last Night in Town

And so today was the last full day of the the Winter Chant Intensive. Tomorrow participants will have a brief session in the morning, a rehearsal for the closing Mass, and then a liturgy in the Extraordinary Form in Old St. Patrick’s Church with a full sung Gregorian chant proper, Mass IX, and Te Deum in an organ alternatim setting played by B. Andrew Mills. Many of us will be heading straight for the airport at the conclusion of tomorrow afternoon’s Mass in order to get back to our parishes for the weekend. The week has gone by so quickly, I’m sure than many of us will hate to see it end.

Today was the Feast of the Epiphany in the EF calendar, and so at lunch today we got to have some authentic New Orleans “King Cake” which is a traditional way to celebrate the Epiphany, and, so I’m told, it also is a sign of the beginning of the Mardi Gras season! Here it is:

And here is a shot of some of the participants at lunch time in the beautiful St. Patrick’s rectory:

Today’s chant sessions continued to focus on the repertoire for tomorrow’s sung liturgy, and also covered topics such as a further study of the development of the manuscript tradition, and chant hymns and sequences. I had the pleasure of sneaking into the “beginner’s session” led by Scott Turkington. Since I’ve never been in one of Scott’s training sessions I was very glad to see how he handles the task. I must say that he truly has mastered the art of training amateur chanters. The group sang so well and seemed to have picked up a vast amount of information and knowledge in a very short amount of time. It will be very interesting to see how the beginning and advanced groups sing together tomorrow in both rehearsal and liturgy. I can see already that the two conductors, Turkington and Mahrt, have taken at times very different approaches to the same pieces. This should indeed make for an interesting result when the two choirs are combined!

I also had the pleasure this evening of touring the French Quarter. One of the Intensive attendees who is a resident and member of Andrew Mills’ schola cantorum gave a few of us a most fascinating tour of the quarter which is truly one of the most unique places I’ve been. We had some gumbo and a muffaletta at the Napolean House and coffee and a beignet at Café du Monde. I also have to concede that my casual comment about Bourbon Street in my opening post was a bit uninformed… let me suffice it to say that I now have a fuller understanding of the place and would encourage anyone who has much concern for the state of their soul to not spend much time there! Maybe I’m a little green–wow, wasn’t expecting that!

On a more sacral note… I absolutely love how the New Orleans cathedral is placed directly front and center in the French Quarter. This is a sign of a culture that was built around the Catholic Faith (though certain parts not too far away seemed to have wandered a bit away from the fold!). I snapped a few shots, one of the front of the cathedral from the levee near the river, and one from the back of the church where a haunting shadow of Christ is cast upon the wall from a statue in the courtyard:

And so the last evening draws to a close. I will try to secure some recordings of tomorrows liturgy and post them for all to hear.