All Souls’ Day and Arvo Pärt

At 7:00pm on Tuesday, November 2, Saint Philip’s will commemorate all the faithful departed at the All Souls’ Day service. This promises to be a beautiful and evocative liturgy. I hope you can attend!

This commemoration flows out of the Church’s desire to commemorate the lives of saints, which is itself a historically local phenomenon. All Souls’ Day is an added opportunity for us to remember and pray for all those family members and friends who have passed into the next life. The practice of praying for those who have departed is rooted in a deep faith and hope in the mercy of God and in the forgiveness of sins, which leads us to ask for peace and for rest for those who have died.

I’m particularly excited about this service because all of the music presented in the liturgy will be by Arvo Pärt. At the center of the musical design is a cello octet which will play Pärt’s Missa Brevis, which is based on two movements from the Berliner Messe and one from the Missa Sillabica: a Kyrie, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei. We will offer these movements in lieu of sung mass Ordinaries, though the music of each is based on the texts in Latin.

The Offertory is a particularly special work, Pärt’s Silouan’s Song for cello octet. This moving piece is based, syllable by syllable, on a Russian text by Saint Silouan of Mt. Athos, as recorded by his disciple, Saint Sophrony of Essex. If you want to hear this work, which has been arranged for various ensembles, and learn something meaningful about Arvo Pärt, I recommend viewing a short video. This piece shows Pärt’s acceptance speech when he received an honorary degree from St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Seminary in 2014, and incorporates ideas which Pärt wrote in his musical diaries:

Silouan’s Song and Thoughts from the Musical Diaries (https://vimeo.com/221011528)

Text of Silouan’s Song (https://www.arvopart.ee/en/arvo-part/work/505/)

Other works will be included in the liturgy, including Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel (‘Mirror in the Mirror’), his Vater Unser (‘Our Father’) and the Littlemore Tractus, based on the final lines from English Cardinal John Henry Newman’s sermon Wisdom and Innocence, delivered in Littlemore, England, in 1843.

Join us on Tuesday for this service of candlelight, prayers, remembrances, and music.

—Justin Appel, Director of Music