Cartoon by Lisa Tkach
On Friday, Feb. 15, students and members of local parishes entered the Egan Chapel of St. Ignatius Loyola to attend the liturgical music event “Age to Age: Generations of Faith” hosted by the Center for Catholic Studies on campus and the parish of St. Anthony of Padua in Fairfield.
“Age to Age: Generations of Faith” is a liturgical music concert put together by composers and performers Dan Schutte, Steve Angrisano and Curtis Stephan. Stephan and Angrisano are contemporary liturgical composers, while Schutte is more traditional, well known for his hymn “Here I Am.”
The concert started around 8 p.m. with about 350 people in attendance.
The trio distributed a program containing the refrains — and even some of the verses — to the songs being performed. Schutte, Angrisano, and Stephan took turns performing each other’s songs and invited the audience to sing along.
This created an atmosphere similar to a mass as everyone sang a few familiar hymns together. It was also very interesting to see the difference in how these songs are performed at Fairfield Mass and how the men who wrote the songs perform them.
Throughout the concert, there was some commentary between the songs. Sometimes the three performers would explain what the song meant, sometimes how the song was written. There were some funny stories as well as some heartfelt moments. One such moment was when Angrisano told the audience that he had told Schutte to play “Here I Am” at his funeral. Then Schutte said, for the first time, that he would want Angrisano’s “Psalm 65” at his.
The conversations between the musicians on stage helped to invite the audience in and make the concert a little bit more intimate.
The concert lasted for about two hours, and at the end the musicians thanked the attendees, signing autographs and taking pictures by the door. The event was a very enriching experience, especially for those who grew up with the music of these three composers.
“I really enjoyed the concert!” said Grace Neubauer ‘13, who worked as an usher at the event. “It was so interesting to hear songs performed by the composers themselves. I was struck by how much faith each of the composers had when listening to them talk about their work. You could that writing liturgical music was more than a job for them — they felt it was their calling from God. ”
Sitting in the chapel with fellow Fairfield students, hearing it live and sharing faith was a wonderful opportunity to invite members of the community onto campus to help build community relations and to share faith.
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