{"id":2892,"date":"2007-02-17T19:36:27","date_gmt":"2007-02-17T19:36:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/plainsong-in-the-bath.html"},"modified":"2007-02-17T19:36:27","modified_gmt":"2007-02-17T19:36:27","slug":"plainsong-in-the-bath","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/plainsong-in-the-bath.html","title":{"rendered":"Plainsong in the bath"},"content":{"rendered":"

Also from the Herald – revitalizing music in an English parish:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

A mass of bouncy children appeared at my feet in the main hall of St Wulstan\u2019s in Wolstanton, Staffordshire. They had run down from their choir practice in the organ loft, where they had been rehearsing the plainchant Orbis Factor Mass and a couple of Renaissance motets.<\/p>\n

Were they enjoying it, I asked? \u201cYes!\u201d they screamed.<\/p>\n

And what was their favourite piece to sing?<\/p>\n

\u201cAgnus Dei and the Sanctus from the Orbis Factor,\u201d said a couple of the nine-year-olds, quick as a flash.<\/p>\n

\u201cVictoria is my favourite,\u201d chipped in Olivia Turner (nine and a half), and she was not referring to Mrs V Beckham. She had meant the 16th-century Spanish priest-composer Tomas Luis de Victoria, the great polyphonist. She would sing his Ave Maria in the bath, she said.<\/p>\n

She was not the only one. Richard Keane (10 and a half) admitted enjoying the Orbis Factor and claimed he intoned it while walking down. Tiny Joseph Daniels (seven) had learned how to sing plainsong before he could read.<\/p>\n

To hear children this young talk about early music in this way \u2013 music that few of my peers would have even heard of \u2013 was simply astonishing.<\/p>\n

And yet I was not in London or Winchester; I wasn\u2019t visiting one of the great cathedral schools with their vast resources and venerable traditions. I was in a small Midlands town, a modest place with a middling parish. All the kids were local, Catholic boys and girls, all attendees of the Catholic school next door, St Wulstan\u2019s Primary.<\/p>\n

What had transformed the musical life of this ordinary parish was the initiative and belief of the husband-and-wife musical team, David and April West.<\/p>\n

The couple converted from the Anglican faith in 1993 and had no sooner entered their new Catholic community than they had begun to reorganise its musical foundations.<\/p>\n

They were trained musicians and were sick of hearing people say there was no decent music in the Catholic Church. \u201cIt was crazy to think people actually believed this. I mean, think of all those great Catholic composers,\u201d says David.<\/p>\n

So, instead of grumbling, they decided to do something about it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Also from the Herald – revitalizing music in an English parish: A mass of bouncy children appeared at my feet in the main hall of St Wulstan\u2019s in Wolstanton, Staffordshire. They had run down from their choir practice in the organ loft, where they had been rehearsing the plainchant Orbis Factor Mass and a couple…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nPlainsong in the bath - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/plainsong-in-the-bath.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Plainsong in the bath - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Also from the Herald – revitalizing music in an English parish: A mass of bouncy children appeared at my feet in the main hall of St Wulstan\u2019s in Wolstanton, Staffordshire. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2892\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}