This Sunday, St. Peter's celebrates our namesake and our patron, St. Peter.

In the version of the Sunday's Gospel lesson found in Matthew, Jesus replies to Peter, “You are Peter.” The Latin translation of this phrase (“Tu es Petrus”) and its play on words with rock (“petram”) has received a great deal of attention from composers writing music for the Church. Sunday, we sing a setting of these words by the Italian Renaissance composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525–1594). Palestrina used his polyphonic motet as the inspiration for a polyphonic mass setting. This kind of “parody” mass was common in the Renaissance and helped to unify the different sung portions of the liturgy.

Before the service, I will play music by Nadia Boulanger (1887–1979), who is better known today as a teacher of composition than she is as a composer of music herself. Among her many pupils are composers whose music is often heard at St. Peter's: Lennox Berkeley, Herman Berlinski, Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Adolphus Hailstork, Gerre Hancock, Daniel Pinkham, Virgil Thomson, and George Walker.

Hubert Parry’s anthem I was glad was written in 1902, the same year that Alexandre Guilmant dedicated an organ sonata to Charles Galloway, the organist of St. Peter’s (he is commemorated with a plaque in the narthex). The organ voluntary is taken from a different sonata by Guilmant.

See how this music fits into our last 150 years at stpetersepiscopal.org/timeline