Choral Eucharist (Quire) – 15th August 2010

• Communion Setting – Darke in F
• Motet – Ave Verum, Pearsall
• Motet – O Sacrum Convivium, Tallis

It’s always a quick turnaround between the two morning services in a cathedral, but this morning was ridiculously short – we finished the first Eucharist at 11.20, and had to start the next one at 11.30.  That gave us just enough time to fetch our music and set it out in the choir stalls, and then rush back and collect it again after hearing that the first hymn would be a processional.  Bizarrely, after all that confusion, we ended up processing into the quire in a big fog of incense and organ music, but no hymn singing.

This service didn’t go quite as smoothly as the first Eucharist, in part because we’d not had a run through of the service beforehand, and many of the singers weren’t so familiar with the old format of the service, which has a different order compared to the modern service.  By this time we’d also been well and truly blasted with incense, which I’m sure will have killed any bugs in the vicinity, and also did a very good job of leaving me coughing for the rest of the day.  All the top D’s and E’s which I’d miraculously discovered in the first Eucharist vanished in that second cloud of incense.