Reviews of other parishes

I will make a more discursive post about how modern libertarians are fellow travelers with fascist movements in the near future.

So I was at a couple different parishes in college towns recently. Both of them are less than 20 years old and both have only had buildings since some point in the 2000s, so I think, given my current position - infancy stage of a mission in a college town that just got a priest - I would make some notes similar to my previous reviews.

Some nearby parish
I've been here several times. They have a nice building they purchased from some other group. The layout has no pews, only a small number of chairs and then benches along the sides. The choir takes up pretty much one entire side of the sanctuary along the wall. We were there for Christmas. The vesperal liturgy on the eve was somewhat sparsely attended, as is the case in many places. The choir sang some fiddly stuff that didn't work too well with sparse attendance, but they are generally good. The liturgy on the day itself was very well-attended, which I found somewhat surprising (in a good way). Doubly so because it is a college town. It looked like there were a lot of immigrants, perhaps, so perhaps they had not lost the habit of attending church on Christmas or not yet become like the American converts that never had that habit. The increased attendance made the choir work better. I really like how there are no pews, though the back of the church is much more densely packed as a result (people don't seem to migrate forward). The only things that annoy me are the sometimes-glacial pace and not having other musical selections to fall back on when the choir is more minimal, but, whatever, I'm searching for things not to like.

Some other more distant parish
We were here on a Sunday. They built their own building. It is wider than it is long in the sanctuary, which is somewhat interesting. They, too, have no pews, only a small number of chairs toward the back and seating on benches around the edges. Instead of a choir, they have a kliros for the chanters (not present for liturgy), one person at a music stand on the opposite side waving directions for the congregation, and fully congregational singing. The pace of the singing was brisk and they "clip" the ends of phrases. eg, instead of a melismatic drawn out "Lord have mercyyyyy", that last note is almost only an eighth note instead of a half. It's surprising they manage to do that with an entire congregation. They seem to have a deep bench of knowledgeable chanters in the Byzantine tradition, which is very good if doing anything Byzantine.

Notes about both:

They both used the "Georgian wedding hymn" for the cherubic hymn. Not really a fan of it being used there. They both have the sort of more "open" iconostas that has been seemingly popular among Antiochians lately and which I'm not a very big fan of. Except that the icons are quite good, so that makes up for any "sins". Namely, I like actual doors rather than having people enter or exit the side and am not terribly fond of the "see-through" thing. But this is, again, looking for things to find fault with. They still earn an "A" if they are graded.

This definitely reminded me of how much I prefer a minimal seating style to pews or rows of chairs that take up the bulk of the space. Both of those parishes have adequate seating arrangements for their attendance, but appear mostly empty and allow plenty of open space for children and families to space themselves appropriately. If trying to emulate an ideal choral situation, I think the "choir with people following" is preferable to "one person directing the entire congregation" paradigm, at least, unless there is a large number of singers among the people. But I don't really get a vote in any of this, so, whatever.