Category Archives: News

Choral Evensong at Christ Church Cathedral

Indianapolis, Indiana

June 30, 2014, 5:15 p.m.

Directly across from our conference hotel, the Sheraton City Centre Indianapolis, is the Episcopal Christ Church Cathedral. The Cathedral and their staff are making our conference faculty and attendees welcome, allowing us the use of their choir room and church for rehearsals, hosting our organ breakout series and allowing us the use of their parish hall.

Their Associate Organist and Choirmaster, the award-winning Simon Thomas Jacobs, will present a recital for the Colloquium on July 2nd. As a special treat, their choir will also be performing a Choral Evensong for us on Monday evening, the opening day of the Colloquium.

From Mary Jane Ballou’s article on ChantCafe:

“The Evensong Service is the crown jewel of the Anglican musical tradition.The Book of Common Prayer combined the two canticles originally sung at Vespers and Compline, the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis, which are sung sequentially at Evensong. Other music includes sung preces (short petitions), an anthem, psalmody with antiphons, as well as an organ prelude and postlude.

Christ Church Cathedral has a well-known choral program including a choir of men and boys, a choir of girls, and a Spanish language choir. The principal choir has recorded and toured extensively, so hearing their music will be a delight.

Plenary Speaker Father Christopher Smith, STD/PhD, pastor of Prince of Peace Parish in Taylors, South Carolina, will speak to the Church Music Association of America at 11 a.m. July 1 at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Indianapolis with an address entitled “Liturgical Theology.”

A native of Greenville, South Carolina, he was received into the Catholic Church at the age of 13 at St Mary’s. After graduating from Southside High School, he went to Christendom College in Front Royal, Virginia. After a year living in Rome studying at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, he entered priestly formation at the Pontifical Roman Major Seminary, the Pope’s personal seminary, for service in the Diocese of Charleston. While there, he obtained a licentiate in dogmatic theology from the Gregorian University and also studied French at the Institut Catholique in Paris. Father Smith was ordained Deacon by Camillo Cardinal Ruini, Papal Vicar for the Diocese of Rome, on 30 October 2004 and Priest by Bishop Robert Baker of Charleston on 23 July 2005.

Mary Jane Ballou will be teaching the Foundations chant course for women at this year’s Colloquium, doing what is dearest to her heart – bringing new singers into the marvelous world of Gregorian chant.

Dr. Mary Jane Ballou is currently the director of Cantorae St. Augustine, a women’s schola that re-introduced chant and Renaissance polyphony into the Diocese of St. Augustine after a nearly forty-year hiatus. She studied piano and organ at the