This Sunday, November 10, we reflect and pray with the aid of three women composers. The offertory anthem is a beautiful Eucharistic motet by the working-class French composer Mel Bonis (1858-1937). Bonis (pictured above) was a prolific late-Romantic composer who masked her gender with the pseudonym “Mel” rather than Mélanie.

Sunday’s organ prelude is a Petite Prière by a contemporary of Bonis’, Blanche Rozan. Little is known of her life, other than that she studied and worked in Marseilles around the turn of the 20th century. The postlude is by another French woman, Elisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (1665-1729), who was unusually recognized and celebrated in her own lifetime. Her Gigue is lightly arranged for organ from a harpsichord suite.