A brief pastoral update on the flock’s ability, often downplayed, to learn to sing Mass music. Technologically, these sheep are pretty sophisticated. Here’s what they’ve been up to in the last two months or so:

Statistics show that several thousand unique visitors have accessed our MacMillan Mass MP3 files, listening to the Gloria most of all. Even discounting Birmingham pilgrims, people from abroad who are merely interested and of course the usual spammers, an enormous number of the Bellahouston congregation must have already listened to the Mass.

And these are unique visitors. The statistics don’t register if they come back again and again, but the tens of thousands of hits in total, and the hundreds of sessions of half an hour or more, suggest that this is just what they have been doing. Some serious home listening and practising has been going on, which must be helping parish practices considerably.

Of course, this method of online music learning has been around for some time. But the publicising of it in connection with the papal visit has been an excellent step forward in the light of all the additional music which congregations will have to get to know when the new Mass text is introduced for real. So please, folks, don’t go away when it’s all over after 16 September!

In the meantime, those going to Bellahouston who don’t have a computer, or a friend with a computer, don’t have parish practices and don’t read music, will still be able to participate. That’s why the repeats are in. I had misunderstood, but now stand corrected.

If they are untrained but all dressed up and wearing buttonhole flowers or corsages, then they are wedding guests and known to all the company as singers, if only at the local pub karaoke. It doesn’t matter how they sing; everyone will love it. They almost always sing Panis Angelicus or one of the Ave Marias. Sometimes their dismay when they first enter the church and look around shows how different this is from their normal singing environment.

‘Where’s her microphone?’ demanded the mother of a teenage soloist. I explained that she would be singing from a gallery in a three-quarters-empty church with a splendid acoustic and an organ that could throttle right down to the quietest possible flute. Everyone would be quiet and listening to her. She would be fine. ‘We’ll see about that’ growls mother as she slams out. Ten minutes later she is back, even more furious. ‘He won’t give me the hand-held microphone. He says he needs it for the vows. Have you ever heard of such a thing?’

Others like to give Ave or Panis the Oh, hohh, hohh treatment. That’s OK by me; the lovely resonant acoustic can blur the fact that you’re playing the same group of semiquavers three times instead of twice to accommodate the passionate, held-on bits.

Sometimes the couple will ask the soloist to sing along with the hymns ‘to get the guests going’. With an untrained belter, this is fatal. The ‘big voice’ takes over, and any congregational efforts are completely drowned.

And then, at the end, when all your attention is needed for the final voluntary, so often a tricky one, the soloist will sidle up to you, all the bottles of water now taking effect. ‘It’s been lovely working with you’, she will say, ‘and can you tell me where the toilet is’?

There’s so much less hassle with a trained singer who understands your part of the action as well as his/her own, assesses and responds to the acoustic straight off, and if asked to boost the hymns, knows how to blend so as to bring out the other voices. One such lady did a marvellous job, and then stood quietly by until I had finished the exit voluntary before making her farewell. I told her how much I’d enjoyed working with her. She said very charmingly that she had enjoyed it, too. ‘As a rule, I have considerable trouble with organists’, she added.

Hmm.

But the very worst of all is when they’ve been tinkering with things and don’t tell you. Perhaps my most shattering experience of this kind was a wedding in a large church with a very old and particularly difficult electronic organ. I had played it before, and had always found it tricky to handle because of its harsh tone and confusing stop and coupler labelling. This time it seemed quiet and subdued, with very little of its usual brashness. I fiddled with the various controls, including the awful crescendo pedal, without making much difference at all. What had happened to the thing? Was it finally on its last legs?

This was getting worrying. While the guests were coming in it didn’t matter, but I’d have to get something reasonably strong for the bride’s entrance.

Suddenly a girl stuck her head round the door at the far end of the gallery and hissed ‘The bride’s ready. Start now’.   I added everything I could, opened all pedals to the fullest and began playing ‘Highland Cathedral’.

The same girl reappeared, very agitated. ‘The bride’s READY! Please start!’

‘I have started!’, I hissed back, ‘I’m doing all I can!’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you haven’t got the amplifier on’, and she reached up to the wall beside her and threw a switch which I didn’t know existed. I had everything set at maximum, and the resulting blast just about took the roof off the church.

Needless to say, I haven’t been asked back. And needless to say, that church now heads my ‘never-again’ list.

It was the minister of one of the local kirks. Could I play at a wedding? I rooted out the diary and grabbed a pencil.

Me: When is the wedding to be?

Minister: At 3.30.

Me: And the date?

Minister: 3.30 TODAY! In twenty minutes!

Me: What!!

Minister: The guests are all in the church, the bride is running to time, and the church organist hasn’t turned up. Please, please, can you help?

Me: Yes, of course I will. What’s the music?

Minister: Two hymns. I forget what they are, but they are straightforward.

Me: Yes, but what about entrance, exit and register-signing?

Minister: I don’t know. Just play anything.

By fortunate chance, I was all dressed up for a wedding, with a bag full of wedding music, so all I needed to do was put the fancy sandals on again and jump into my car.

The minister was pacing the pavement outside the church when I arrived. The bride was almost due, but was going to be asked to appear to be late, so that I could get some pre-nuptial music in. In a side room, while I replaced the fancy sandals with my organ shoes for the second time that day, the minister went through the order of service; it was at that point that I realised that I had never played at a Church of Scotland wedding before. Then I entered the church as unobtrusively as possible.

Instinct told me, as I did a quick survey of the guests before slipping on to the organ bench, that there was probably more than a 50% chance that the traditional music might be what they’d ordered, so I gave them Wagner and Mendelssohn, with Jesu, joy at the register-signing. Everyone seemed happy, though some of them may have wondered.

I spared a thought for the errant organist as I pocketed his fee, and wished I could be a fly on the wall when he next met his minister.

What has struck me about this music list is the sheer quantity of the stuff, 39 items in all, 35 of which are sung. To accommodate this massive programme, singing starts at 11.30 am, and as far as I can tell, continues, no doubt with pauses here and there for eating and other necessities, until 7.30 pm when the whole thing ends. If I’ve got it right, rehearsals of choir and congregation start in the morning and run until 4.00 pm, at which point singing for the ceremony proper will start, although Mass itself doesn’t begin until 5.15. Throat sweets and bottles of water will be a necessity, and not only for the choir.

Is this incredibly vast amount of singing always a tradition when the Pope visits a country? I’ve been trying to think back to 1982. All I can remember is that it was a very hot day, and I wanted to sit in the sun and watch Bellahouston at the same time. So I carried our portable black-and-white TV out into the garden on the end of a long cable, and put on headphones so as not to annoy the neighbours. Of course, it was impossible to watch a TV screen in the sun, as I soon found out. Possibly I chose the sun over the Pope for a lot of the time, because my main memory (having taken the telly back inside) is of priests going up and down under parasols distributing Communion. There was a lot of singing, but I can’t remember a single thing that was sung. It was only later that I came to know the Bellahouston Gloria, Sanctus and Agnus Dei, when they became popular on Sundays. As an organist, I came to know them very well indeed.

This time, though, it will be different. I’ll definitely be on the watch, and if there is sunshine on 16 September, it won’t be allowed to get in the way. The one thing I don’t want to miss is the MacMillan Mass, even if it does take an hour and a half and seventeen music items to get to it. I’m familiar with it already, of course (having done all those MP3 files on the Singing the Mass page), and I’ll be absolutely delighted if it follows the pattern of its predecessor and reaches the Sunday congregations.

This morning our PP announced that the front page of this week’s Scottish Catholic Observer is completely wrong.  (That was actually a very unfair thing to say.  The last couple of paragraphs, which dealt with the Forth in Praise website, were absolutely accurate.  They’d even got the link right!)

What our priest meant, of course, was that contrary to the Observer’s declaration that Scottish pilgrims won’t have to pay, the organisers have now sent round a letter to parishes saying that everyone going to Bellahouston is expected to make a donation of £20, for which they will get a liturgy book and a CD   (The CD at last!  Or at least, let’s hope it is the CD made in the cathedral in Edinburgh).

So now I’m going to have to put this news on the Papal Mass page of the website.  This involves HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) coding and File Transfer Protocol (also usually abbreviated, but let’s not go there today).  Katherine Cameron, our highly efficient webkeeper, kindly showed me how to do this before she went on holiday, but neither of us realised how quickly events would develop.  At one point this site was so popular that it nearly went down, and emergency action was required.  I was very pleased at the web hosting company’s response to emails shouting ‘Help!  Panic!  Webkeeper on holiday!’

It has been a steep learning curve.  But it has added to my education.

The really good news is that Katherine returns any day now.  Katherine, I hope you’ve had a lovely time, and please, please, have your website back.  I hope I haven’t messed it up too much.

Then I can retreat to the blog.  All one has to do there is type in some stuff and press a button.

Choir parts created by Fr Peter Jones of Birmingham Archdiocese are on the PAPAL MASS page.

What a wonderful voice! A rich, vibrant baritone, equally impressive in speech and in song. And dominating. This was the priest. The organist had obviously been tamed long ago. She followed him meekly, underpinning his melodies with long chords. He provided all the phrasing and articulation required, whether it be in hymns, Mass parts or psalm response. There was no cantor, perhaps understandably.

What was sad was that the congregational Mass sheet was designed to get the people singing, no doubt on the initiative of this very priest. The words for all the hymns and Mass parts were there, together with words and music for the Alleluia and for the responses to both psalm and bidding prayers (something I’d love to see here). The priest probably thought his compelling voice was simply another help for his flock. Unfortunately, he overdid it and drowned the poor lambs, though they did try.

No. 2 Lourdes

Here the drowning took a different form. It was pouring from the heavens, absolutely tipping it down. We attended a Vigil Mass in English in one of the smaller chapels. No music at all, apart from the drumming of the rain on the roof and the dripping of the umbrellas. But there was something immensely peaceful about this wet, music-less Mass. Or maybe it was just the very special Lourdes atmosphere making itself felt.

No. 3 San Asensio, La Rioja

Old Spanish churches are traditionally dark and mysterious. The architecture of this one is a mixture of sixteenth century and Baroque. Behind the altar the ancient and beautiful retablo, with its gilding and its angels, stretches upwards towards the dimness of the ceiling. On the left, the Lady Altar fades into the darkness beyond.      And on the right?    A Powerpoint screen.    Ouch.

Musically, it was interesting. When the time came for the psalm, the organist left his instrument, marched up to the lectern and sang the psalm unaccompanied, conducting the people’s response as they read it off the screen. Then he nipped smartly back to the organ to get ready for the Alleluia. How many of us could manage that, I wonder? There was a cantor as well, who led the rest of the singing, although he would have done better without his microphone. The flock were again overwhelmed though, like their French counterparts, they did their best.

No. 4 Ripon, North Yorkshire

On the final part of the drive north, we went to Evensong at Ripon Cathedral. Anglican music at its very best. Absolutely beautiful.