Sewanee Conference: Day One

The view for Morning Prayer (Antiphon for the Venite: "Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness") After Morning Prayer I headed down to Manchester, where my sister is building a house. It was great to spend some time with her and my younger niece, who turned 18 last month and is heading off to college at Western Kentucky University next month. The house is really lovely, and thanks to my sister's handling of the finances, they're coming in well under budget. It's all quite impressive. Then back up the mountain for registration. How wonderful to see so many familiar faces (masked though they were) after a three-year hiatus! I caught up with our chaplain, the inimitable Barbara Crafton, who for health reasons is handing over the officiating and presiding to me, though she will continue to do all the preaching, thanks be to God. I'm always happy to preside, though chanting the liturgy at a conference of church musicians brings a certain amount of pressure with it. This morning will be the Mozarabic chant, which I will sing in E-flat so as to make a seamless transition into Malcolm Archer's Sanctus (unless of course I sharp, in which case e-hev-ryone will know exactly what happened). Relax your shoulders. Just relax your shoulders. Speaking of Malcolm, on Wednesday, which has become our day for Eucharist for the Departed, we will sing a new anthem he wrote for the occasion, a setting of "Faire Is the Heaven." A good bit of our first rehearsal was dedicated to that piece, which is lovely and not especially easy. I thought we made impressive progress. Malcolm himself was not there, having been bumped from his flight yesterday. He was, apparently, somewhat less than chuffed about the whole thing.

The day ended with a beautifully sung Compline. On my walk back I introduced myself to a terrier who was accompanied by a man who turned out to be an English professor. He and I ended up talking about Boethius, the fact that there are only two kinds of people (those who have read Middlemarch and those who haven't), and what Diarmaid MacCulloch is writing for his new edited volume.

"Do you work at all on Anselm?" he asked innocently.