My choices of hymn/song from Sing Praise for both the 2nd and 3rd of March (and adjacent in the book) are settings of the Greek text ‘Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison, Kyrie Eleison’ (Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy). John Hartley’s comment on my post of 28 February is worth reading and there’s not much more I can add, other than to say that No.184 (an anonymous setting of ‘a Ukrainian traditional chant’) was familiar to me from somewhere, while 183 (a setting by Dinah Reindorf and Geoff Weaver) was not. It’s more of an acclamation in style, whereas the Ukrainian melody is more meditative. Unlike John I don’t move in compositional circles, and Geoff Weaver is one of the few composers/writers in this book whom I have met personally.
One thought on “Kyrie Eleison”
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Many thanks for the commendation, Stephen.
On a personal level the words of “Kyrie eleison” don’t do a lot for me. Perhaps one further quote from Jasper and Bradshaw is in order (p190): it was “a response to the deacon’s list of petitions at the evening office” and “by the time of Gregory the Great, Christe eleison had been added and on ferial occasions the petitions of the litany were omitted, leaving only the Kyrie”. In other words, using it to say “Lord, hear our prayer” is a bit vacuous if there isn’t actually any prayer to go with it! I’m reminded of the salutary title of a book I read a few years ago: “Don’t just sit there – pray something!” Amen!
However, although the words of “Kyrie eleison” don’t do a lot for me, I rather liked both of these settings. The wonderful chord at the end of bar 6 of the Geoff Weaver arrangement – which has both an F-natural in the melody and an F-sharp in the harmony – is great, and worth passing a lot of pubs for! (Actually I can’t work out whether the F-sharp is really supposed to be a G-flat, for I never did grasp the rules of these things … but I suspect that since that note resolves to the F-natural in the next chord, it was supposed to have been written as a G-flat.) And the Ukrainian setting has a rather attractive brazenness about its quality. And, after all, the whole of the liturgy is rightly not organized around my own personal preferences!