[Magdalen] Hymnals and Perspective.o

[John R Robison]

No, the text is right in the Critical edition of Life Together. 

It causes quite the cries of outrage from choir members.



Sent from my iPhone

> On Oct 16, 2015, at 4:07 PM, James Oppenheimer-Crawford <oppenheimerjw at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dieter has a rather well appointed classroom named after him at Union.  I
> should think that would be more than enough.
> 
> The main reason people sing in parts is a simple matter of range.  That
> really settles it, it seems to me.
> 
> If all the people cannot sing the melody, one wonders what the lilly pure
> martyr would have us do. perhaps he wants us to do it his way or shut up.
> How very 30s-40s German of him.
> 
> I sorta agree that some need to be "weeded out," as he puts it, but I'd
> focus on a different grouping. I have always enjoyed singing harmony, as it
> seemed to me to make the sound all the more unified.  Mom always sang the
> alto parts, although she never joined a choir until after Dad died.
> 
> I would not wish his ending on anyone -- taken naked into the wintry
> morning to be hanged, merely because they knew they were losing, and they
> wanted to kill him so he would not be able to be freed.
> 
> I wonder if the text is a hoax....
> 
> James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
> *“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved,
> except in memory. LLAP**”  -- *Leonard Nimoy
> 
>> On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 10:41 AM, Jim Guthrie <jguthrie at pipeline.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Very Interesting!
>> 
>> Thanks for passing this along.
>> 
>> Cheers,
>> Jim
>> 
>> 
>> From: John Robison
>> 
>> Some of the reason, I'm told, comes from that noted shabby thinker Dietrich
>> Bonhoeffer:
>> 
>> "The essence of all congregational singing on this earth is the purity of
>> unison singing – untouched by the unrelated motives of musical excess – the
>> clarity unclouded by the dark desire to lend musicality and autonomy of its
>> own apart from the words; it is the simplicity and unpretentiousness, the
>> humanness and warmth, of this style of singing….There are several elements
>> hostile to unison singing, which in the community ought to be very
>> rigorously weeded out. There is no place in the worship service where
>> vanity and bad taste can so assert themselves as in the singing. First,
>> there is the improvised second part that one encounters almost everywhere
>> people are supposed to sing together…There are the bass or the alto voices
>> that must call everybody’s attention to their astonishing range and
>> therefore sing every hymn an octave lower. There is the solo voice that
>> drowns out everything else, bellowing and quavering at the top of its
>> lungs, reveling in the glory of its own fine organ. There are the less
>> dangerous foes of congregational singing, the ‘unmusical’ who cannot sing,
>> of whom there are far fewer than we are led to believe. Finally there are
>> often those who will not join in the singing because they are particularly
>> moody or nursing hurt feelings; and thus they disturb the community." ~
>> Life
>> Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer Works, vol. 5, Minneapolis, Fortress Press,
>> p. 67
>> 
>> As I recall, he's got a line about it in Discipleship and Sanctorum
>> Communio.
>> 
>> On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 2:38 AM, Roger Stokes <
>> roger.stokes65 at btinternet.com
>> 
>>> wrote:
>> 
>>> On 14/10/2015 01:47, Grace Cangialosi wrote:
>>> 
>>> SE&B??
>>>> 
>>>> Probably Sung Evensong and Bebediction.
>>> 
>>> Roger
>> 
>> 
>> --
>> John Robison Asc. Episcopal Carmel St Teresa
>> 
>> Check out my online Book Shop:  http://astore.amazon.com/friarsrumi-20
>> 
>> "Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic
>> uninterestingness as an intellectual position." - John Updike
>> 
>> "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life:
>> The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that
>> often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading
>> to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with
>> the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."  ~John Rogers
>>