Here’s a wonderful piece of fun. I stole it from Fr. Mark Harris, who, in turn, stole it from TitusOneNine. To non-Anglicans, this is Anglican chant (actually sung rather well) complete with affected pronun-ci-a-ti-ons of a kind one sometimes hears from high-class British choirs.

The joke might have been better (nah, it wouldn’t), if “The Weather Report” had been sung in the manner of American congregations from the bad old days when Morning Prayer was the standard low-church Sunday service. Imagine every cadence thumped to death as congregation and choir rendered the canticles and the psalms in a manner undeviating from established parish norms, week in and week out, so that parishioners who were inclined to sleep through the service need not be disturbed by anything untoward. The chanting here is a positive delight in comparison. Give it a listen.

It turns out that “The Weather Report” was cooked up by a group of British schoolteachers who called themselves the Master Singers for a while. It was first recorded in 1966 and produced by George Martin, the producer of the Beatles. Here are links to two accounts of the whole thing from the same blog, that don’t entirely agree; and here’s another to “The Highway Code,” an earlier similar spoof, also recorded by George Martin. Both recordings “hit the British charts” in 1966, according to my source.

Anglican chant is serious, of course. It would hardly be worth parody otherwise. A Wikipedia acount, which isn’t bad, is here. In addition, here’s the best serious Anglican chanting I could find on the web. It’s the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, chanting Psalm 50. Such chanting may be accompanied or not. The Kings College video is accompanied, of course. It is also heard as sung in a big reverberant gothic building, not up close and personal to the microphone, like “The Weather Report.”