And how much more beautiful these words are when set by Benjamin Britten.

Happy St. Cecilia's Day!

Amen amen! St. Cecilia has helped me a lot through her intercession over the years. Happy Feast Day St. Cecilia! Please pray for all of us trying to serve the Church with the music She desires.

And for Vespers: The glorious virgin always bore the Gospel of Christ in her breast; neither by day or by night did she cease from divine conversation and prayer.

Mode II: Virgo gloriosa semper Evangelium Christi gerebat in pectore suo; non diebus neque noctibus a colloquiis divinis et oratione cessabat.

I hadn't realized our patroness was an early practitioner of Colloquiis. How appropriate that the first notice of Sacred Music Colloquium XXII arrived today.

Happy Saint Cecilia Day! As you celebrate Thanksgiving Day, don't forget to give thanks for sacred music and musicians.

From Catholic.org (https://www.catholic.org/saints/saint.php?saint_id=34):

In the city of Rome there was a virgin named Cecilia, who came from an extremely rich family and was given in marriage to a youth named Valerian. She wore sackcloth next to her skin, fasted, and invoked the saints, angels, and virgins, beseeching them to guard her virginity.
During her wedding ceremony she was said to have sung in her heart to God and before the consummation of her nuptials, she told her husband she had taken a vow of virginity and had an angel protecting her. Valerian asked to see the angel as proof, and Cecilia told him he would have eyes to see once he traveled to the third milestone on the Via Appia (Appian Way) and was baptized by Pope Urban.
Following his baptism, Valerian returned to his wife and found an angel at her side. The angel then crowned Cecilia with a chaplet of rose and lily and when Valerian's brother, Tibertius, heard of the angel and his brother's baptism, he also was baptized and together the brothers dedicated their lives to burying the saints who were murdered each day by the prefect of the city, Turcius Almachius.
Both brothers were eventually arrested and brought before the prefect where they were executed after they refused to offer a sacrifice to the gods.
As her husband and brother-in-law buried the dead, St. Cecilia spent her time preaching and in her lifetime was able to convert over four hundred people, most of whom were baptized by Pope Urban.
Cecilia was later arrested and condemned to be suffocated in the baths. She was shut in for one night and one day, as fires were heaped up and stoked to a terrifying heat - but Cecilia did not even sweat.
When Almachius heard this, he sent an executioner to cut off her head in the baths.
The executioner struck her three times but was unable to decapitate her so he left her bleeding and she lived for three days. Crowds came to her and collected her blood while she preached to them or prayed. On the third day she died and was buried by Pope Urban and his deacons.
St. Cecilia is regarded as the patroness of music, because she heard heavenly music in her heart when she was married, and is represented in art with an organ or organ-pipes in her hand.
Officials exhumed her body in 1599 and found her to be incorrupt, the first of all incorrupt saints. She was draped in a silk veil and wore a gold embroidered dress. Officials only looked through the veil in an act of holy reverence and made no further examinations. They also reported a "mysterious and delightful flower-like odor which proceeded from the coffin."

Also: http://www.catholicnewsworld.com/2018/11/saint-november-22-st-cecilia-patron-of.html
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03471b.htm

Today is my birthday and my patron saint's day since I chose St. Cecilia as my confirmation name. I am thankful for my mother who instilled in me a love for God and for music, especially liturgical music. Happy Thanksgiving to you all!

Our 12.30pm Low Mass at St. Bede's, Clapham Park, London, was today upgraded to a Sung Mass, (EF)

ENT, Cantibus Organis, (Antiphon from Vespers)
All Propers sung in full from the Graduale Romanum
Mass V
Offertory motet, Terrena cessent organa, (Office Hymn for St. Caecilia)
Communion motet, Nunc ad coronas pergite, (Office Hymn for St. Caecilia)
Marian Anthem, Salve Regina Simple Tone.

Happy Feast!

A Hymn for St Cecilia

Sing for the morning’s joy, Cecilia, sing,
in words of youth and phrases of the spring.
  Walk the bright colonnades by fountains spray
  and sing as sunlight fills the waking day.
Till angels, voyaging in upper air,
  pause on a wing, and gather the clear sound
  into celestial joy, wound and unwound,
a silver chain or golden as your hair.

Sing for your loves of heaven and of earth,
in words of music, and each word a truth,
  marriage of heart and longings that aspire,
  a bond of roses and a ring of fire.
Your summertime grows short and fades away,
  terror must gather to a martyr’s death,
  but never tremble, the last indrawn breath
remembers music as an echo may.

Through the cold aftermath of centuries
Cecilia’s music dances in the skies,
  lend us a fragment of the immortal air
  where with your choiring angels we may share.
A light to light us through time-fettered night,
  water of life, a rose of paradise;
  so from the earth another song shall rise
to meet your own in heavens long delight.

    by Ursula Vaughan Williams (1911-2007)
    (the widow of Ralph Vaughan Williams)

Attached is the Chorus part for my setting of "A Hymn for St Cecilia", together with an MP3 sound file. Feel free to sing along, with others doing the same on this St Cecilia's Day! The full score and parts are also posted elsewhere in the forums, and they are published at CPDL.

Happy St. Cecilia Day! St. Cecilia, pray for us.

St. Cecilia is my patroness, and I had hoped my daughter Cecilia would be born on her feast day, but she came on Sunday, instead. Only 2 weeks late (or 3 days later than I'd hoped)...
Oh well.