11 a.m. Choral Mattins

This Sunday, we will offer a service of Choral Mattins

What is Choral Mattins?
There is an old saying – bis orat qui bene cantat; “he prays twice who sings well”. Music has that power to lift our hearts out of torpor into fervent worship. Normally our own voices are the vehicles of our own praise. That’s the tradition of congregational singing, in which untrained voices join together, usually in unison, for the singing of metrical psalms, hymns, and simple chants. The other is choral, where a choir of trained and skilled voices is the congregation, or sings on its behalf. Normally our service is a bit of both, but on this Sunday, though the congregation does join in for hymns and some prayers, the service is chiefly choral; and therefore we must use the choir as our representatives and make their singing the outward expression of our own aspirations. This requires from us a sustained effort to follow the outward singing of their voices with the inward lifting up of the heart; but, as Colin Dunlop said, when trained voices sing some of the finest pieces of sacred music ever written, “the total offering to God can be something in comparably more precious than would be the case if the musical standard were levelled down to the capacity of the least gifted singer”. Indeed, it is perhaps when our own voice is not the vehicle, and we are not focused on producing the right sounds, or exulting in our own performance, that we can most completely fulfill the apostle’s exhortation, to “be filled with the Spirit; speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord” (Ephesians 5:18, 19).