Sunday, November 18, 2007

Advent/Christmas choral plans at “Our Lady of Anonymity”

Proulx “Missa Emmanuel”
Advent 1: Byrd “Lord, Make Me to Know Thy Ways”
Advent 2: Victoria “Conditor alme siderum”
Advent 3: Howells “O, Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem” (from Ps. 122)
Advent lessons & carols: above 3 anthems plus all 7 O antiphons
Advent 4: Anerio “Ave maris stella”

Christmas midnight choral preludes (interspersed with the hymns):
Dawson “Mary Had a Baby”
Biery (arr.) “O Holy Night”
my own “Personent hodie”

Proulx “Gloria for Christmastime”
Chepponis “Festival Alleluia”
Christmas midnight: Hassler “Lætentur cœli” (from Ps. 96)
Epiphany: Fallan-Tidings “Out of the Orient Crystal Skies”
Baptism of the Lord: proper offertory

The Victoria will be a stretch for us. We are going to “cheat” a bit and sing the 6th verse with the same music as the 2nd. Since I’m giving verse 4 to soloists, that will let us do the piece with only one verse to learn - which, for some of my singers, will already be more than enough!

As I am looking over these plans, I am hoping I did not fall into my all-too-typical problem of overextending my singers musically. Howells will take a while to learn just because of how much music there is. Hassler - we’ll see. Anerio won’t be a problem.

What is problematic is that a lot of this is dependent on having those 1 or 2 “section leaders” there. Our rehearsal this past Thursday was pretty much a downer because we were missing most of our best readers in the tenor and bass sections. Alas, the Josquin “Tu pauperum” had to be dropped - again, not a difficult piece....I guess the Latin was a problem. (Heck, even the choir in my last parish pulled off the Josquin, though not without quite a bit of work.)

UPDATE: I’m dropping Hassler in favor of Halsey “Verbum caro” from SJMP. As I looked through the Hassler, a new awareness of “what the &^(* was I thinking?!?!” came to me; Halsey is still a cool piece and much more accessible to my group.

1 Comments:

At Tuesday, November 20, 2007 5:08:00 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

“Our Lady of Anonymity”

This little-known title of the Mother of God arose when it was discovered that there was a historic mistranslation in Matthew's Gospel:

When Herod had died, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt and said, "Rise, take the child and his mother and go somewhere, for those who sought the child's life are dead. But don't tell anyone where you are going, because Archelaus is ruling over Judea in place of his father Herod." He rose, took the child and his mother, and the went somewhere in the land of Israel.


:)

 

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