Passiontide Devotion

Yesterday evening our 'augmented' choir (all the singers we can muster from ourselves, plus the odd soul dragged in from other churches) laid on their musical offering for Passiontide, this year for reasons of convenience on Passion Sunday rather than Palm Sunday. In the past I have moaned a bit about the music, and the form, alternating between examples of what I can't help but regard as somewhat turgid and uninvolving Victorian fare. This year was very different, a selection of readings, anthems, and congregational hymns, along the same pattern as our Advent and Christmas carol services, and I liked that much more: it was less of a performance and more of a service, and though that might make it harder to market beyond the church, the takers for the previous version, if they weren't already church members, were family and friends of the singers anyway. 

Delving into old service registers as I am at the moment has shown how common this kind of musical event in the days leading up to Easter was at one time. Lots of churches seem to have put on a similar kind of devotion, performance, or whatever, on a Sunday evening at the end of Lent, and I wonder whether this reflects the paucity of official Anglican liturgical provision for the season. Until Lent, Holy Week and Easter was published as late as 1984, if you wanted to do anything beyond what was available in the Prayer Book you had to borrow from Roman sources. Of course plenty did, even if they weren't all-out Roman Rite churches, but these musical offerings may have been part of the same attempt to add something appropriate to the diet.