There's loads of music for Christmas and Passiontide, there's Easter music, there's requiems a plenty for All Souls, but not much springs to mind for tommorrow - Pentecost in the Western calendar, or to use the old fashioned name, Whitsun, the festival of the Coming of the Spirit.



I imagine Bach did a cantata or two.  Anyone know them?  Are they among his best?

Any other suitable musical pieces (settings of Veni Creator Spiritus definitely count)?

Messiaen's or Palestrina's Pentecostal Mass or of course William Booth's Oh God of Burning Cleansing Flame!

Is that the one from Salvation Army Hymn Book with the chorus Send the Fire! Send the Fire!?

I have persuaded my vicar to have it tomorrow to the tune of Keep the Red Flag Flying High.

Unfortunately I am teaching in the Sunday School and will probably miss it.

They did sing Send the Fire! Send the Fire to the tune of The Red Flag, but I was out rehearsing the Sunday School for doing their reading next week  ("Once more with feeling.  Darling, you were wonderful. It'll be all right on the night, etc. etc.")

I was in church for the final hymn which was Come down O love divine to RVW's lovely tune, Down Ampney.

I wore my best red jacket, to mark the day (red being the liturgical colour) and was a bit miffed that at least two people wondered if I was from Butlins'.  "I bought in Liberty's" I replied frostily.

For Veni Creator Spiritus I was hoping some Mahler lover would mention the first part of his Symphony 8 (soi disant "of a thousand") where the Latin hymn provides the words of part 1.

I once heard it described on some cheepy sleeve notes to Mahler 8 as "an old catholic hymn" as though it was "Daily daily sing to Mary" or "Hail glorious Saint Patrick, sweet saint of our isle."

It is one of the best known hymns of medieval, or late antique, Christian Latin, and in translation the only hymn in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer (in the ordination service) as Come Holy Ghost, our souls inspire.

In my childhood, everyone would have known about Whitsun, as the Monday was a bank holiday.

The Wilson government set the bank holiday as the last Monday in May.

Vatican 2, followed by the C of E and other churches, returned to the primitive understanding that Pentecost was the final day of the Easter season, so it was inappropriate to keep the following days as a religious festival.

It is an older and more important festival than Christmas, but the concept of the Spirit will never appear as attractive as the idea of babies.

I asked my Sunday School could they think of any words beginning "Pente" and one lad says "Pentagon".  I ask him what that means.  "A five sided figure."  So I explain Pente is the Greek for five,or in this case fifty.  Can they think what happened fifty days ago?  And to my relief one of them comes up with Easter.  I was impressed.

Giggle, giggle.  That gets it off to a tee.

But that's presumably pre-NEB, Anty. The King James version sonorously declaimed in vast vaulted spaces is an inspirational thing of beauty, but I'm not convinced that a reading from the New English Bible has anything like the same power to affect the listener.