blog/should-we-use-common-worship-for-evensong/

[utterances-bot]

Should we use Common Worship for Evensong? - Dan Soper

http://localhost:8080/blog/should-we-use-common-worship-for-evensong/

[dansoper]

[Peter says:]
This post is just messed up - can't even be bothered to comment. You made a fool out of yourself. Sorry. Why change something that is already good and universally loved? All the "issues" you see are only in your brain. Baby-boomer much?
[8.19pm, 1 June 2020]

[dansoper]

Thanks for your reply, and apology!
[8.27pm, 1 June 2020]

[dansoper]

[Andrew Kirk says:]
I found this blog quite thought provoking! Thank you. Some time ago (10 years?) our ATBs sang traditional compline and when we decided the boys choir would sing compline in Lent, we decided on contemporary language. It works.

There is such a wonderful heritage of BCP settings of the Magnificat (and Nunc) that I can’t see this happening unless a mix and match approach to language (trad or contemporary) is taken.

Magdalen College Oxford for many years had a Choral Evening Prayer on some weekdays, with some fine alternative canticle settings by John Harper and Grayston Ives. I enjoyed the flow of this service but believe they have gone back to traditional BCP Evensong now.
[9.27pm, 1 June 2020]

[dansoper]

[Robert Browning says:]
There are some interesting thoughts here that address problems with both the BCP and Common Worship. The issue with CW, I feel, is that it wasn’t designed for music from the outset. Many of its texts are unsingable.

If we’re looking for a daily office with more seasonal material, I would suggest the Sarum Rite – totally unusable in the past, but there’s a brilliant project underway to translate it all into English with plainchant notation. BCP Mattins is a combination of matins and lauds, whilst evensong combines vespers and compline, so it would be very easy to keep all our choral music. (The practice of medieval secular clergy was to combine these offices in the morning and evening – it wasn’t anything revolutionary.)
[10.42pm, 1 June 2020]