The Recovering Choir Director

The Lord’s Prayer is the topic of this article.

81. In the Lord’s Prayer a petition is made for daily food, which for Christians means preeminently the eucharistic bread, and also for purification from sin, so that what is holy may, in fact, be given to those who are holy. The priest says the invitation to the prayer, and all the faithful say it with him; the priest alone adds the embolism, which the people conclude with a doxology. The embolism, enlarging upon the last petition of the Lord’s Prayer itself, begs deliverance from the power of evil for the entire community of the faithful.

The invitation, the Prayer itself, the embolism, and the doxology by which the people conclude these things are sung or said aloud.

Now the Lord’s Prayer isn’t sung at our parish Masses. Odds are it probably isn’t sung at yours, either. How can this practice be resurrected at Mass? A possible answer: sing it outside of Mass. Perhaps your parish has a Rosary group or your family prays the Rosary nightly at home. Perhaps you pray Lauds and Vespers in community. These examples are opportunities to learn and memorize the melody of the Lord’s Prayer, whether or not it’s in Latin.

Another opportunity is choir practice. Available here is a PDF file (59 K) of a simple SATB harmonization of the commonly-known Sacramentary plainsong adaptation of the Lord’s Prayer. Besides being a great way to teach a choir to listen to itself and tune to each other, it’s a wonderful meditation piece, with a hint of Russian homophonic influence.