Today is the feast of the Holy Name of Mary. In addition to the cathedral, there is also a parish with that name but they don’t do Friday Mass. It’s also the feast of Saint Ailbe but the parish of that name also doesn’t do Friday Mass. So the cathedral it is.
I sang in the cathedral choir for four years which was some of the best musical development I’ve ever had thanks to music director Matt Walsh who has since moved on to another position. I remember in my audition, I had a piece that I was missing the accompaniment for the first page. The keyboardist for my audition, based on just the melody, my mention of one chord that I remembered from the accompaniment and what he knew of the style of the composer (Jules Massenet) was able to improvise a perfect accompaniment while sight-reading the piece. He was the assistant organist. The main organist was even more impressive, occasionally playing as a postlude after Mass one of the Messiaen organ pieces which had him playing and adjusting stops with such mania that it seemed a certainty that he had more than four limbs at his disposal to play like that. It did have the effect of ruining me for “normal” parish choral work. The sorts of things that many parishes would spend a whole rehearsal going over would be things that we would just sight-read at Mass and when we did go over parts, rather than bang out each choral part individually on the piano, we would instead get the full harmonization played and have to hear our part inside that to sing it back.
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