The Boston Camerata, an ensemble specializing in music from the baroque era and earlier, was founded in 1954. It was originally a performing adjunct to the musical instrument collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Between 1969 and 2008, the group was directed by Joel Cohen, under whose leadership the group produced a number of recordings, including many albums of rather unconventional Christmas music. The first one that I obtained in 1975 (on vinyl) was called A Medieval Christmas. That album was followed over the years by six more recordings, each focusing on music from a specific era or region. One of these later recordings (1993), An American Christmas: Carols, Hymns and…
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Recommended recording: Noëls Celtiques – Celtic Christmas Music from Brittany
One might easily assume that a disc of “Celtic Christmas music” would feature Irish or Scots or maybe Welsh folk music. But the Breton language is another Celtic tongue, closely related to Cornish and Welsh. The Breton people emigrated from Cornwall and Devon to Brittany beginning in the third century, to escape Anglo-Saxon invaders; Brittany is sometimes called Less, Lesser, or Little Britain. This unique Christmas recording captures some of the heritage of Brittany. A few songs on this album have known Welsh or Cornish ancestry, some are identified simply as “traditional,” and a few are more recent compositions. All of them are sung in Breton by the L’Ensemble Choral du Bout…
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Recommended recording: Christmas Music from English Parish Churches, 1740-1830
Irish-born Nahum Tate (1652-1715) spent most of his working life in London, where he was well-known as a poet and playwright. In 1692 he was named poet laureate, and in 1702 he was appointed the official royal historian. Today he is best known for having compiled (with poet/priest Nicholas Brady) A New Version of the Psalms, fitted to the tunes used in churches (1696). It was a collection of metrical paraphrases of the Psalms for use in worship. A Supplement to this volume was issued in 1700 which contained some new translations, as well as six hymns (as opposed to paraphrased Psalms) that were officially approved by ecclesiastical authorities for…
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Recommended recording: The Promise of Ages (Taverner Consort)
On Christmas Eve in our parish, we heard a sermon about the mystery of the Incarnation. God loves flesh; how surprising is that?? His love for us is not an abstraction, but a Person born of a woman. The text to the fourteenth-century poem A spotless rose (discussed yesterday) compares Jesus to a rose from the root of Jesse. This situates the Messiah in human history, with all its fleshly particularity and vulnerability. Meanwhile, another medieval poem that has often been set to music — There is no rose — uses the imagery of the rose to describe the Virgin Mary, her body wondrously transcending the usual configuration of space and…
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Recommended recording: Christmas Night (Cambridge Singers)
Almost every year, someone in our parish asks me to recommend some recordings of Christmas music. Since I’ve been collecting such albums since before there were commercial cassette tapes readily available (let alone CDs or MP3s), it’s not easy to come up with a short list. Over the twelve days of Christmas, I hope to have the time and discipline to offer here some suggestions about music to listen to that transcends the tendency toward sentimentalism in the sounds of Christmas that characterizes (tragically) the experience of far too many people. I’ll start with a very approachable recording that features a number of familiar carols and hymns, including many arrangements that have been…
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Recommended recording: Gregorian Chants (Advent)
Earlier this week, I recommended a recording of Advent music sung by an all-female group, the sisters of the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles. The current recording features an all-male ensemble, CantArte Regensburg. This album includes traditional Gregorian chant settings of many texts used liturgically during Advent, including texts from the propers for the Sundays in Advent (Introits, Gradual and Alleluia, Offertory, Communion) and the texts for the O antiphons, traditionally sung at Vespers during the last week of Advent. There are different ways of chanting these venerable works. Sometimes one hears recordings of monks who seem to have among their ranks sincere but somnabular brothers whose chanting may convey…
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Recommended recording: Advent at Ephesus
Not far from the ancient city of Ephesus is a small stone building traditionally known by Christians and Muslims as the “house of Mary.” Since the 19th century, the building has been maintained as a shrine to the Virgin Mother of Jesus. About 5,900 miles away — an hour’s drive north of Kansas City, Missouri — is the site of the Priory of Our Lady of Ephesus. It is the home of the small community of the Benedictines of Mary, Queen of Apostles. The sisters living, working, praying, and singing there recognize a connection between their vocation and the house of Mary As their website explains: This little home is the…
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Recommended recording: German Advent Music
What might one expect from an album with the subtitle German Advent Music? From what genealogy does this music emerge? In Music in Early Lutheranism, an introductory guide to the tradition that gave the Church some of its most enduring musical achievements, Carl Schalk writes: The first two centuries of the Lutheran Reformation — the period between Martin Luther and Johann Sebastian Bach — produced a singularly impressive body of music written specifically for the worship life of the church. Less often noted is that this music developed as a clear result of Lutheranism’s understanding of worship and the important place it gave to the art form it considered next in importance to…
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Recommended recording: Advent at St. Paul’s
In a 1952 essay called “The World’s Last Night,” C. S. Lewis critiqued one of the great modern myths, a belief he called “developmentalism.” We have been taught to think of the world as something that grows slowly toward perfection, something that “progresses” or “evolves.” Christian Apocalyptic offers us no such hope. It does not even foretell (which would be more tolerable to our habits of thought) a gradual decay. It foretells a sudden, violent end imposed from without; an extinguisher popped onto the candle, a brick flung at the gramophone, a curtain rung down on the play — “Halt!” Lewis went on to urge Christians to give more attention to…
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Recommended recording: Mendelssohn Church music
Felix Mendelssohn was born into a prominent Jewish family in 1809. His grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, was one of the most prominent Jewish intellectuals of the Enlightenment. But in 1816, Felix and his three siblings were all baptized into the Christian faith at his parents request by a Reformed Protestant minister in Berlin. As a young man, Felix would later disclose that he had become a follower of the Prussian Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher. Neither his baptism nor his numerous compositions of Christian sacred music were mere formalities. The best-known of his sacred choral works are the larger, longer, concert-sized works, especially the oratorio Elijah (1846). But there are many shorter…