While on a recent summer pilgrimage to St. Louis (the “Rome of the West”) with twenty-five of my students at Our Lady of Walsingham, we were able to visit at least eleven different magnificent churches for which the city is justly famous. Aside from attending Mass and admiring the exquisite sacred architecture (from an age not so long ago when the very structure of the churches were built as if to manifest the Theology of the Catholic church in stone, mosaics, and stained glass) the students were also able to exploit the acoustics of each of these churches with their voices!

Thanks to the quick thinking work of a colleague, we were able to capture one of these moments in the gorgeous “new” Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis. Here the students are singing Sicut Cervus in a setting for which Palestrina envisioned it.