The choral ensemble The Sixteen has recorded a number of albums of Christmas music. They include music from Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque composers, as well as venerable arrangements of well-known carols. In 2006, they issued A Traditional Christmas Carol Collection, followed in 2010 by A Traditional Christmas Carol Collection, Volume II. Under the wise leadership of conductor Harry Christophers, all of these recordings demonstrate discipline and taste shaped by decades of performance of less familiar and more demanding repertoire. In 2016, The Sixteen issued an album called Song of the Nativity which included seven traditional carols as arranged in the 1928 first edition of the Oxford Book of Carols (which for some of…
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James MacMillan (b. 1959)
James MacMillan is one of the pre-eminent living composers of sacred choral music. Born in Ayshire, he studied composition at Edinburgh and Durham Universities. In 1988, he moved to Glasgow where he worked for some time as music director in a parish church. In his book Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music (2007), Jeremy Begbie notes that reviews of James MacMillan’s music consistently identify quality of his works in terms of their lyricism, “raw energy,” “emotional directness,” “humanity,” and “accessible.” He quotes MacMillan’s description of his key influences: “My best teachers were [J. S.] Bach and Palestrina” because they commanded a “complexity of technique but in a…
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Echoes of glory
by Ken Myers [This article originally appeared in the July/Auigust 2016 issue of Touchstone magazine.] In a 1990 essay entitled “‘Sing Artistically for God’: Biblical Directives for Church Music,” Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger observed that “church music is faith that has become a form of culture.” But in late modernity, “the inner connection of faith to culture is in the throes of a crisis.” This crisis is the result of the fact that for centuries, at least since the Enlightenment, “faith and contemporary culture have drifted apart more and more.” Since the eighteenth century, cultural life — especially in the arts — has been pursued with a spirit of defiant emancipation from…