Francis, there was no mass, which I found both surprising and not surprising.

Not surprising in that there are tons of foreign dignitaries and non-Christians in attendance, and it was long enough already… but surprising in that one would expect a sacrifice to be offered for the deceased. Not being a mass, I found it rather odd when they chose to sing some Eucharistic texts like RVW’s O Taste and See. (Granted, you can take the text in a more general sense, but it is clearly a Eucharistic text, so it felt out of place in a non-Eucharistic service.)

My main takeaways were that a.) solemnity is something that really needs to be reintroduced more broadly in corporate worship; while the degree of solemnity in this particular case was extreme, it was also lovely and touching. b.) nobody does hymnody like the British (we knew this, but still… gorgeous.) c.) good choral singing is so necessary for corporate worship… it adds something that is truly special and that cannot be had in any other way. (And yes, we were all “actively participating” even though we were just listening!)

You can check the programs that have been posted here; it's not like looking at them makes one a collaborator with heresy.

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None of the state liturgies are liturgies with general communion (the coronation service has the feature of communion for those being crowned, but that's it, IIRC).

We should remember that the British way of doing hymnody in the Anglican church was a deliberate - and controversial - creation of the second half of the 19th century, and considerably refined in the early 20th century, with roots from a variety of sources, esp Non-Conformist but also Catholic breviary hymn translations. The services in the wake of a sovereign's demise 200 years ago would not have felt like what was offered in the last two weeks.


One significant take-away for me was: a consistent level of professional competence of all liturgical ministries, at the individual and institutional levels, and what it takes to nurture, sustain and harvest the fruits of it.

PS: If you think the British way with hymnody is the best, you need to meet...Lutherans and their ecclesial progeny. (There's a reason I've witnessed choir directors say things like "Sing this like Lutherans would" to their timid Catholic choristers.)

There was also the gusto with which the congregations present sang. That's a fruit of professional competence too, in this case, the professional competence of choir directors in schools in the UK.

There was also the gusto with which the congregations present sang. That's a fruit of professional competence too, in this case, the professional competence of choir directors in schools in the UK.

Yes, I meant that no less than the choirs. It's also cultural norms: British people are more used to singing in public gatherings than most people in the USA currently are other than members of historically Black churches.

And in the Catholic church in the USA, the reality that its institutional structures were dominated by Irish-Americans perhaps meant that the Protestant hymn singing traditions of the British Isles were not viewed as a font from which to draw deeply, but instead viewed with varying degrees of apathy to suspicion. To say something was Anglican was not to compliment it in that context, but more like "that's not who we are or want to be".

No. To my mind, the real takeaway is that we are in the initial stages of a Catholic Renaissance in the English-speaking world. Call it feminine intuition.

Matthew, excellent comment.

Priests chanting their parts is so much a staple component of RotR that the lack of clerical chant stuck out to me.

Ideally, yes, but in practice much rarer than it should be. And that's a lot of the problem. Priests resisted, congregations resisted, the Missal and Ordinary get treated as musical wallpaper instead of the *foundation* music.

To say that there is an “Anglican view” is inaccurate in that Anglicans are characterized by a plurality of views.

I heard prayers that besought eternal rest for the departed. At the burial service, prayers were read that were nearly word for word prayers that are read at NO funerals.

Alternatively, there were lots of Presbyterian prayers from the Scottish church.

Also, at the commital in St George’s, the choir sang the Russian Kontakion, which is a prayer for the dead.

That there was no prayer for the dead is not quite accurate, especially with the committal. Paradoxically, there is no real separate funeral that can be split; the traditional Catholic way of the office of the Dead with sung Mass and the procession, expected to be done all the way until the 1960s can be reduced (one nocturn only, only part of the processions to and from the church sung, or reduced to the Ego sum, Benedictus, and Subvenite beforehand and then some of the chants when arriving at the cemetery). The BCP office is really a burial office, in true Cranmerian/Edwardian form.

That said, the first two sentences especially are prayers for the dead; the first is the reappropriated Ego sum from Lauds of the Dead, the second the reworked first responsory of the first nocturn of Matins of the Dead, obviously taken from Job. The rector of Sandringham read a prayer in St George's Chapel that is essentially the Memento of the dead from the Roman Canon with some slight modifications (I haven't heard the canon in English in so long, so I had to look up which prayer uses "refreshment, light, and peace"); he also worked in "perpetual light" (interestingly, this is from a part of our apocrypha, 4 Esdras, though we hardly read it even privately). Obviously, the Kontakion for the Dead is an explicit prayer for the dead.

Since the Requiem has no blessings, I'm no fan of them at funerals, but they explicitly prayed for rest for the departed in the blessing at the funeral.

The reading at the funeral is an expanded version of the epistle from the second Mass of All Souls (the triple Masses are, in the universal church, a very late development, but I believe the Mass formularies are more ancient). The psalm was the same as the Tract on the day of burial in many usages, except that of Rome itself, where the Tract is always Absolve me. The prayer "Go forth o Christian soul" seems to be a conscious reflection of the Subvenite and the In Paradisum, and the prayer which preceded it at the burial is a conscious prayer for her soul.

Ps 121, sung at the committal, is in our Vespers of the dead.

Are the prayers perhaps somewhat indifferent or universalist? The former yes, the latter not really; you still have to be Christian… Do Anglicans seem conscious of not being Catholic but also not wanting to share their theology and ritual entirely? In my outside opinion, yes, at least at the highest levels and in certain circles, and indeed the prayer "O Merciful Father" (curiously moved to the beginning) is very Anglican (the emphasis at the end being on Christ as mediator and redeemer) but it's not like they've thrown out the Last Judgement entirely, which means they are aware, however queasily they feel about it, of the possibility of going to the Other Place and that we need help to not go there or to prepare for heaven. It's all very meta in a way. Liturgical Arts Journal had a very good Facebook post about how this wasn't possible without the evolution of the Anglican Communion since 1830 or so, and it came complete with bibliographic recommendations (alas, there weren't any for Anglican worship from ca. 1610 to 1830).

That said, I wasn't especially a fan of the music besides the Sentences (I loved them and wanted to know whose settings were used) and the Kontakion; I don't care for the new anthem at all. I recognize that the music was sung by two of the best choirs in England if not the world, but the overly-syllabic style of much of the repertoire, true to Elizabethan form (which Elizabeth…), and the dissonance do not appeal to me, and I thought that the trumpets overshadowed the descant in one of the hymns, which was sad, since I love descants. The descant of "Make Me a Channel of Your Peace" (yes, that one) is one of the best things about the funeral of Diana… I'm an outlier, I get it.

Also the Purcell. All listed in the programs.

The Purcell part of the service is placed so that it is sung as the coffin is borne through the portal of beneath the Organ Gallery into the Choir.

A takeaway for me is that all of this music has been made possible through a stupendous amount of state funding through the years. Westminster Abbey, St. George’s, Windsor, the other royal peculiars, all the Oxbridge colleges, and also the cathedrals have had gargantuan amounts of public money thrown at them to keep up pro ATBs, a choirmaster, and some boys singing daily, for centuries.

We do not have this in the USA, and other European countries with state Churches do things differently.

Choirs don’t get that good unless they perform almost every day of every year from age 7 until retirement. The only other way is to have pro choirs in which everyone has already earned degrees in music. To replicate the British model in a local setting is a tremendously costly endeavour, and to transform a culture would require an investment on the order of every penny the Crown spent on music since Henry VIII broke up the monasteries, adjusted for inflation…..

It's not true that 'all' the Oxbridge colleges 'keep up pro ATBs, a choirmaster, and some boys singing daily,' Using Cambridge as the example, not all the colleges have a choir like those at Kings and St. John's. I sang in the chapel choir at one of the smaller Cambridge colleges during my student days. The choir was SATB, drawn from among the students, and although the choir members received an annual honorarium it was not a significant amount. Although the college provided the building and organ most churches do that. In my day the choir was conducted by a student, and the organist was also a student, who received a slightly larger honorarium but nothing like a professional rate of pay for the time and effort involved. (And the organist when I first joined the choir was studying civil engineering, although his successor was a music student.) What enabled the system to work was the English choral tradition, which meant that there was a good supply of students (reading subjects other than music for their degree) who were already competent singers and could sight read.

My takeaway is that the Anglicans generally have far better music than you will find in most Catholic parishes in the USA.

@a_f_hawkins At least we have competition in providing good liturgical music. Think of how bad it could be at Westminster Cathedral, if they did not have the choir at the abbey to compare.

Sorry, sloppy generalizations….

(Percutit sibi pectus ter….)