Singing in Church (and in French, and in English, and in Latin)

Singing here is something of a trip. In the Anglican services each week I revisit my elementary school years, as we sing Mrs. King’s (my fourth grade teacher’s) favorite hymns, in English but with different tunes and with French, British, Indian, or Rwandan accents. (We haven’t yet sung “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder”, but I keep waiting for it.) The organist tends to trip over the notes and frequently changes tempo, while the French woman sitting next to me plows ahead fearlessly, pronouncing “th” like “z” and adding vowels where Webster never would have put them. It’s a very energetic crowd, at 10h30 (10:30 a.m.), with plenty of kids bouncing around as we sing the last, energetic hymns.

I also go to the evening mass at the Cathedral. Here everything is of course in French, and we sing almost all of the service, led by the beautiful trained voices of oldish white men. For the Psalms and hymns, a man in a suit stands on the right of the chancel and sings into a lone microphone, echoing into the frayed edges of the cathedral and guiding the gathered crowd. He sings a first line alone, and then guides us in singing it again, drawing a shorthand of the musical line in the air with his hands. Here the organist is so good to be unnoticeable, and the chilly air fills with a variety of notes and frequencies and accents. It’s so cold in fact that I can see my breath—which gives a new sense to the words “Let my prayer be set forth in your sight as incense” (Ps 141:2). I always enjoy chanting the Psalms, and the hymns we sing are easily understood but lovely, with the natural loping gait and rebounded rhyme of the French language.

On Ash Wednesday we even sang some of the liturgy in Latin—the parts that start with “Sanctus! Sanctus! Sanctus!”, “Kyrie eleison”, and “Agnus Dei”. Considering my Latin is as advanced as my French feels most days, I didn’t mind it at all. I tried to remember the rules of pronunciation we learned in fourth grade (again, at the wrinkly imperious hand of Mrs. King), but all I could remember was that you probably vocalize most of the letters (unlike French!). In the end I just pronounced it like my infant-level Italian, with a generous dose of enthusiasm.

And everything that I said about my trouble with the word “Amen”? Tripled when it comes to singing it. I just stick with my Western U.S. vowels.