Posts Tagged ‘richard barrett’
An All-Night Vigil for St. Richard of Wessex: An Old Saint is Venerated Anew
Overview: On the evening of 6 February 2022, Dormition of the Virgin Mary Greek Orthodox Church in Somerville, Massachusetts celebrated an All-Night Vigil (full festal Vespers, Orthros, and Divine Liturgy served consecutively) for Saint Richard of Wessex (7 February, +722 A.D.). At the altar were three priests: Rev. Fr. Anthony Tandilyan, proistamenos of Dormition Rev.…
Continue reading »Byzantine Music is Choral Music
Some years ago, a singer who was primarily active in Russian Orthodox choral music pulled me aside at a church music event. “Can I be honest with you about something?” this person said to me. “I don’t understand Byzantine music. To me, it looks like it’s either a soloist or a group of mostly men;…
Continue reading »Worship in the Workshop: Providing Opportunities to Raise the Bar
The joke is at times heard that in the chapels of some of our seminaries, they “don’t worship but workshop.” The sense of this witticism is that what happens in their services is experimentation with rubrics, texts, service order, with an impulse towards “reform.” Over the course of this last summer, however, I was blessed…
Continue reading »A New Translation of the Canon of the Akathist by Fr. Seraphim Dedes
The state of affairs for English-language liturgical texts is fundamentally unstable. A core problem is that there is no existing body that has either the mission or the competence to review and approve English-language liturgical texts, so there is no settled path to a text being adopted once it is produced. In addition, differing jurisdictions…
Continue reading »Heaven and Earth: The Psalm 103 Project Comes to Life
It has been over five years since The Saint John of Damascus Society commissioned The Psalm 103 Project, a big idea that brought together the work of six great composers, Matthew Arndt, John Michael Boyer, Alexander Khalil, Kurt Sander, Richard Toensing (+2014), and Tikey Zes, to create a unique, collaborative choral work that would be a model of…
Continue reading »The Psalm 103 Project: A Status Report
It has been a little over two years since my last update on The Psalm 103 Project for Orthodox Arts Journal, so, perhaps now would be a good time to bring everybody up to speed again. The Psalm 103 Project, for those just now joining us, is a major undertaking of The Saint John of Damascus Society. It…
Continue reading »Travelogue: The International Society for Orthodox Church Music 2015
In June of 2014, I was a participant in Kurt Sander’s Pan-Orthodox Liturgical Music Symposium at Northern Kentucky University. While I was there, a gentleman whose acquaintance I had newly made, one David Lucs, on hand to give a presentation on children’s music education, was rather excitedly asking virtually everybody during a coffee break, “Are…
Continue reading »The problem of art in Anglophone Orthodoxy: a review essay
Recently, an online exchange about public outreach efforts with respect to various aspects of Orthodox music and music of Orthodox composers led the following comment by a discussant: What exactly is so “Orthodox” about any kind of pure music? […] [T]o associate any composer with the Church is an empty exercise, since music has only…
Continue reading »The 2014 Pan-Orthodox Liturgical Music Symposium: Reflections and Reviews
The 2014 Pan-Orthodox Liturgical Music Symposium took place July 12-15 at Northern Kentucky University. The following is a series of reflections upon the symposium written by some of the main organizers and participants. I highly recommend that anyone who did not attend the event should read this. It paints an inspiring picture of an American…
Continue reading »The current state of things with the Saint John of Damascus Society’s Psalm 103 project
Back in April, I posted about the Saint John of Damascus Society‘s Kickstarter campaign for the first phase of the Psalm 103 project. I’m happy to say that it was more than successful, and we’re just about to deliver on one of the first parts this phase. Before I get to that, let me tell…
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