This Sunday, the choir will commence our Advent observation with a choral prelude just before the processional hymn. “Come down ye heavens from above” is a setting of portions of Rorate caeli. This text its sometimes called the “Advent Prose,” and is often sung in masses during Advent. Composer Judith Weir (b. 1954) has taken the plainchant tune for this ancient song of the Church and embellished it for a cappella choir. Our processional hymn is Charles Wesley’s “Come, thou long-expected Jesus,” and our sequence hymn during Advent is “Creator of the stars of night.” Our sermon hymn, “O Word, that goest forth on high,” is sometimes attributed to Thomas Aquinas,…
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Bach’s Advent cantatas, part 1: Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland I (BWV 61)
In 1714, while he was a court musician in Weimar, Johann Sebastian Bach composed a cantata for the first Sunday in Advent. It was first sung on December 2 of that year. The text for the opening chorus was from a very early Lutheran hymn, Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, “Now come, savior of the Gentiles.” This cantata — as do all of Bach’s cantatas — takes its name from that opening line. There is sometimes a Roman numeral I at the end of the title, to distinguish it from a later cantata with the same opening text and hence the same name. (N.B.: This cantata is also known as Cantata #61, or…
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Advent service from St. John’s, Cambridge, on the BBC website
At 3:00 PM (GMT) on the first Sunday in Advent (December 2), the BBC will broadcast “A Service for Advent with Carols from the Chapel of St John’s College, Cambridge. You may listen to a recording of that broadcast here. The program for the service is as follows: Carol: Adam lay ybounden (Boris Ord) Processional Hymn: O come, O come, Emmanuel! (Veni Emmanuel) Carol: E’en so, Lord Jesus, quickly come (Manz) I The Message of Advent Sentence and Collect Antiphons: O Sapientia and O Adonai First lesson: Isaiah 11 vv.1-5 Carol: Tomorrow shall be my dancing day (James Burton) Second lesson: 1 Thessalonians 5 vv.1-11 Sacred Song: Einklang (Hugo Wolf) II…
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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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Sunday next before Advent (November 25, 2018)
This Sunday’s Holy Eucharist will be one of our a cappella services. In lieu of an organ prelude, the choir will sing a chorale by J. S. Bach, taken from Cantata BWV 38, Aus tiefer Not schrei’ ich zu Dir. This cantata is based on Martin Luther’s early (1524) paraphrase of Psalm 130, and we’re singing this chorale since that text is the focus of some attention in the last few weeks of the Church year; the Offertory and Communion propers feature a verse from Psalm 130: “Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice.” The story of the tune and text for…
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Happy St. Cecilia’s Day!
We know very little about St. Cecilia’s life, other than the fact that it ended in martyrdom, probably in the early to mid-third century. Many stories associate her with singing — in acts of prayer as a young woman and in the face of her torturers. In the middle ages, she was named the patron saint of music and of Church musicians. In works of art and literature that extol the mysterious, cosmic power of music — connecting earthly with celestial music — St. Cecilia is often referenced. John Dryden’s “An Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, 1687,” for example, is about the creative power of music, not about St. Cecilia, although she…
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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…
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Music for Trinity 25 (November 18, 2018)
Although the Pilgrims never planned it so, our national harvest festival (some of us still call it Thanksgiving) occurs near the end of the Church’s liturgical year. Families and friends typically gather together at this time in a faint, secular echo of our Eucharistic feast, which in turn anticipates the great wedding feast ushered in with the second advent of our Lord. The music in our worship this Sunday resonates with Thanksgiving and anticipates Advent. Our processional hymn, “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing,” has often been sung at Thanksgiving as a national hymn, the “We” taken to mean “America.” It is important to remember that the “We”…
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Recommended recording: Selected works by Monteverdi
On Trinity 24, our choir sang the Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei from a Mass by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) published in 1641 (see here for more about the historical significance of Monteverdi’s work). The Messa da Capella a quattro voci is a relatively late work by Monteverdi, and it demonstrates how he was able to write music that sustained the rich polyphonic textures of previous generations of composers (employing the “Stile antico”) even as he pioneered the innovative musical techniques of the early Baroque. This Mass was part of a collection called Selva morale e spirituale, “A moral and spiritual forest.” In the words of conductor Harry Christophers, “It is jam packed…
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Music for Trinity 24 (November 11, 2018)
During Communion on Sunday, we will sing a familiar hymn text to a not so familiar tune. The bulletin will feature an insert with the music to “O Food to Pilgrims given.” You may recognize the words as almost exactly the same as hymn #192 in our Hymnal, “O Food of men wayfaring.” The story of the two different tunes and the slightly different texts is told here. The music sung by the choir during the Offertory and during Communion is from a 1641 setting of the Mass by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643). This page offers more information about this work, and this article presents a introduction to the significance of…