Tales of choirs …

… God’s Own Music. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Gant’s book is particularly fascinating for a former suburban choirboy like myself because it explains a lot of things that at the time seemed either rather mysterious or just to be taken for granted. Psalms, for example—sung by choir and congregation—seemed to occupy an inordinate amount of the morning service, and the junior members of the choir spent much of the sermon sniggering over the psalmist’s more recondite imagery, usually in psalms we never sang but found in the prayer book, and which we somehow conjured into a vague impropriety (“my mouth is dried up like a potsherd and my tongue cleaveth to the roof of my mouth” seemed unaccountably hilarious).