Easter Vigil

the only awful thing that happened, from my perspective occured with the Gloria.
So I knew in advance that they would be ringing the church bell during it. Fabulous. We did John Lee's repetitive chant-like Gloria with the handbells. However, I failed to take into consideration the fact that the handbells and the church bell are actually musical instruments with PITCHES. Which, as it turned out, are NOT in tune with eachother. (Someone had told me a while ago that these particular handbells were not in tune with anything else, so they always have to be used alone. Fine with me, I never really planned on using them with the organ.) The Gloria kind of revolves around an F, G, and Bb. The church bell is a G. Of a very different tuning. So we started the Gloria with the handbells, then the church bell came in. Not only were we then fighting its tuning, but the rest of the choir was standing away from the four of us ringing the handbells, and couldn't HEAR us b/c the bell above them was so loud! So they were basically just trying to watch my lips! I wonder what would have happened if I had stopped the handbells-would the singing have migrated to match the church bell? Had I thought of this in advance, it might have actually been cool to try the Gloria with JUST the church bell-it's simple enough.

Then on Easter, at the chant Mass at St. T's, we forgot (I TOTALLY should have remembered!) that there is a sprinkling rite! And we need to sing something for that! Literally TWO minutes before we had to start the introit, someond reminded us. One of the girls kind of knew Asperges Me, so she did that. I've intended before to learn Vidi Aquam, knowing it might be useful someday, but I never actually have. grr. That whole Mass was just kind of stressful, b/c the previous Mass went so long, that we couldn't even find parking much less get in the church until 12 minutes before our Mass! But, my priest/boss came to hear us! I had mentioned it to him so that he could get ideas for us to start using at our church. He left before it was over, so I didn't get to ask him what he thought.