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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Christmas Eve: Lessons and carols from Cambridge
This year marks the centenary of the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge. This service has been broadcast on the BBC since 1928 and in recent years has been available (without requiring a shortwave radio) around the world — live and delayed streaming — via the Internet. The 90-minute service will be broadcast live at 3:00 GMT on Christmas Eve, but may be heard later through the BBC website.
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Fourth Sunday in Advent (December 23, 2018)
Our opening hymn on this final Sunday in Advent, “How bright appears the Morning Star,” is another one of Philipp Nicolai’s stirring Advent hymns (we sang “Wake, awake, for night is flying” two weeks ago). It turns out that the text we sing is inspired by a poem by Nicolai, but it is actually quite a bit different (see here for an explanation). The Introit for this Sunday is from Isaiah 45 and Psalm 19: Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness: let the earth open and bring forth a Saviour. The heavens declare the glory of God: and the firmament showeth his handy-work. That text…
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Orlando de Lassus: Conditor alme siderum
The fourth and last in my series on Renaissance motets based on Conditor alme siderum features a setting by a composer who is far too under-appreciated. As I wrote recently in Touchstone: Among musically knowledgeable listeners, even those who admire the music of the high Renaissance, the work of Orlande de Lassus is woefully unfamiliar. It was not always so. During his lifetime, in the second half of the sixteenth century, Lassus was easily the most famous composer in Europe. With contemporaries that included Palestrina, Victoria, and Byrd, such fame is a remarkable tribute to his artistic accomplishments. Another contemporary, the celebrated French poet Pierre de Ronsard, hailed Lassus as…
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Francisco Guerrero: Conditor alme siderum
This is the third in a series of “lessons” about how Renaissance composers explored the musical potential of the plainchant melody in Conditor alme siderum. In English translation (“Creator of the stars of night”) this hymn has been our Sequence hymn during Advent. (The earlier pieces featured compositions by Victoria and Dufay.) Francisco Guerrero (1528-1599) shares Spanish nationality with Tomás Luis de Victoria. But while Victoria spent much of his career in Rome, Guerrero spent most of his life in Spain, and most of that time making music at the Cathedral in Seville. His setting of the 6 verses of Conditor alme siderum — like Victoria’s — alternates between plainsong (odd-numbered…
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Guillaume Dufay: Conditor alme siderum
Here is another setting of Conditor alma siderum — our Sequence hymn for the season of Advent — and the earliest setting I’ll be presenting. It’s by a prominent 15th-century composer, Guillaume Dufay (1397-1474). Dufay was one of the leading composers of his time, and a widely influential figure in shaping the direction taken in the music of the Renaissance. Ordained a deacon, then a priest, Dufay became a member of the choir at the Papal chapel in Rome. But it was an era of great turmoil in the Church, with tumultuous Councils, schisms, and an antipope. Perhaps that explains why Dufay traveled a lot, which extended his aesthetic influence across Europe. In…
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Tomás Luis de Victoria: Conditor alme siderum
During Advent, our congregation often sings the hymn, “Creator, of the stars of light,” as our Sequence Hymn. As the name of the hymn’s tune suggests, this hymn is based on the 7th-century Latin hymn Conditor alme siderum. Victoria’s setting was written for four vocal parts. It includes all six verses of the Latin original, and alternates between plainchant (in the odd-numbered verses) and polyphony (in the even-numbered verses). This alternation was a very common compositional form in the Renaissance. Here is a performance of Victoria’s motet sung by Ensemble Nobiles.
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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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Third Sunday in Advent (December 16, 2018)
Our service will open with one of the most familiar of Advent hymns, “O come, O come, Emmanuel.” This hymn conveys ancient texts in the life of the Church, but its recovery within English-Language hymnody is in large measure thanks to priest-poet-translator John Mason Neale (1818-1866). His involvement with the Oxford Movement led to efforts to restore to more common use a number of profound hymns from the Church’s first millennium. The Introit chanted (or said) on the third Sunday in Advent is from the 4th chapter of St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians: “Rejoice in the Lord alway: and again I say, Rejoice.” If our choir chanted that text in Latin,…