One of our parish’s favorite Advent hymns is “Wake, awake, for night is flying.” We sang it this past Sunday (Advent 3), and last week I shared a couple settings of the tune and text that explored its musical possibilities. Michael Praetorius (1571-1621, about whose music for Christmas I recently wrote elsewhere) composed an extended piece based on this melody. His grand setting of Wachet auf was part of a collection of music published in 1619 called Polyhymnia Caduceatrix et Panegyrica. the subtitle of which was “Festive Concert of Peace and Joy.” Polyhymnia contained 40 concerto-cantatas for voices and instruments written in the expansive Venetian style (if you have no…

Musicologist Walter Blankenburg has observed that Praetorius (1571-1621) was “the most versatile and wide-ranging German composer of his generation and one of the most prolific, especially of works based on Protestant hymns.” But Praetorius also wrote settings of pre-Reformation melodies, including the chant tune we know as Conditor alme siderum, and which we have been singing during Advent as our Sequence hymn, “Creator of the stars of night.” The hymn originally included six stanzas; here is the first stanza sung with Praetorius’s harmonization by Ensemble Nobiles, a group of singers who met while singing in the St. Thomas Boys Choir in Leipzig. This is the opening track of their Advent/Christmas/Epiphany…