I am getting to the place in the Virtual Divine Office that I have done a lot of the ground work, e.g. building a template for the four week cycle so that as each new day comes, I can copy something from four weeks ago and just change one thing. Today for Morning prayer I only HAD to change the Benedictus antiphon.
EASTER WEEK 6 WEDNESDAY MORNING PRAYER
So now I can get creative, like add my collection of thousands of my photos.
The blog is subtitled "Songs of the People of God" because its aim is to add music resources to the personal and small group celebration of the Divine Office. So I really don't give things like the readings which you can find in a book, or on the internet or even choose your own.
To get a full idea of the celebration I give a link at the top to the text THE mostly spoken celebration of the Divine Office. I think it follows the official text very well but not much music,
For the Hymn to match my photographs I choose the popular Oceans. You have two links, one from a popular production. The other is to the SATB version which our parish actually used when we did this for Easter, etc.
All the photographs were from one evening shoot down at the Lake, arranged as a commentary on the antiphons of the psalms and canticles, and hence on the psalms and canticles themselves. I gave two photo commentaries on the Benedictus. The first one is my sociological big view of the antiphon and of the evenings photos. The second finally reveals what I had carefully chosen to avoid, the guy who is surfing. But then the Benedictus is about the Child and so perhaps after all the wind, waves, and lights and clouds we should finally have the future as personal.
For my computer you can put the Divine Office website sound track in one tab, and if you click on any of the five photographs of the post in another tab and each photograph will almost fill the screen but you can toggle from one photograph to the other as the recitation continues.
For the evening office since this is First Vespers of the Ascension in some places I gave a link to the old Monastic Office as it is still celebrated in Latin somewhere in Europe (I think B16 encouraged them to keep it) with the Latin/English translation
FIRST VESPERS OF THE ASCENSION IN THE OLD MONASTIC DIVINE OFFICE
Enjoy
Jack, I am not getting to what you are doing. I seem to keep toggling between the venerable Divine Office voice but now on Youtube and the monks of Le Barroux, but I don't see anything that looks like Lake Erie. What am I doing wrong?
ReplyDeleteTom,
ReplyDeleteIt is a work in progress. Betty, a cantor, and I have a shared interest in the Divine Office. When I discovered there were a lot of people, mostly not Catholic, who were doing many of the psalms we became attracted to using them as a way to get a musical virtual Divine Office online without being dependent upon some group doing it. (Though we do give links to Benedictines who do a choral Divine Office)
Not only do these videos have a great range of musical styles many of them employ slides and videos as ways of accompanying the text and music. Of course the artists use a great variety of different basic translations which they often modify.
I decided to put this all within the framework of the current four week psalter of the Roman Rite. Of course there are books and resources for people who simply want to pray the text alone.
The subtitle SONGS OF THE PEOPLE OF GOD signals our intention to use the music of many Christian groups to support an experience in song and the visual arts of the Divine Office that can be shared across the internet whether people pray alone or in small groups, e.g. house churches.
It takes four weeks in ordinary time to create the basic psalm framework of two posts a day, after that it is just copy, modify and paste the basic framework and choose some music and visual images.
During this design phase we put many links for each psalm. Eventually we will just choose one or two music links for each psalm. However I have started to created posts for each psalm that give a full list of possibilities, e.g. for Friday morning prayer Psalm 51 is a link to a list. Eventually Betty and I will develop a brief paragraph to help people choose which audio they want.
While many people are using video and slide backgrounds to their music, we find the most interesting are those which bring a new perspective to the psalm. The photographs of the windsurfer are such an example of bringing an unusual perspective to the wind and water spiritual themes of the psalms. I was able to choose photographs from the same evening to enlighten each psalm and canticle.
Why choose photographs from Lake County? The Benedictine tradition emphasizes the local community with its vow of stability. This is summarized in the phrase “We drink from our own wells”