Monthly Archives: December 2010

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Advent Calendar Day 15 – Ave Maria (Josquin Des Prez)

I’d never sung or heard this piece prior to typing ‘Josquin Desprez Advent’ into YouTube and surfing around to see what came up. Yes, sometimes my choices really are as random as me thinking “Hmm, this composer is good, and I bet he wrote something appropriate, let’s see if I can find it.”. Shameful, I know.

This is an interesting one to listen to, especially when you compare it with some of the other polyphony adorning this calendar by Byrd, Gibbons or Hassler. Desprez was born over a century before that lot, and it shows. His music is sparer, starker, more medieval in its harmonics (or at least, I associate all those open fifths with medieval music – the Elizabethans don’t go in for them anywhere near as much). It feels as though a bunch of Gregorian chants got together to sing rounds. Only that implies a level of verve and cheeriness that Desprez does not seem to go for (in my extremely limited experience of his music – I believe I have sung one piece written by him). This feels much more monastic and reflective, even in faster recordings.

In my quest to find the perfect recording of this song, I learned that it was apparently considered an almost perfect composition, and that it was so popular that someone (Ludwig Daser) decided it would be even better in six parts. And then Ludwig Senfl, who clearly shared my view that this was quite an amusing thing to do to an allegedly perfect piece of music, wrote a parody of the whole thing. It is with profound regret that I report that I could not find a recording of the parody. I mean, it might not have been all that funny to a modern ear (Mozart wrote all these musical jokes that stopped being funny once the romantics, I think, got their paws all over the art of composition and broke all the rules), but enquiring minds still want to know.

I’ve put the translated lyrics below. I have to say, they are the least interesting thing about this piece of music. But even if you don’t like the lyrics, you can still let the music wash over you and be happy.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNzH4SwjCEY&w=560&h=315]

Hail Mary, full of grace,
The Lord is with thee, gentle Virgin.
Hail, thou whose Conception,
Full of solemn joy,
Fills heaven and earth
With new gladness.
Hail, thou whose Nativity
Became our great celebration,
As the light-bringing rising light
Coming before the true sun.
Hail, blessed humility,
Fertility without man,
Whose Annunciation
Was our salvation.
Hail, true virginity,
Immaculate chastity,
Whose Purification
Was our cleansing.
Hail, glorious one
In all angelic virtures,
Whose Assumption
Was our glorification.
O Mother of God,
Remember me.
Amen.

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Advent Calendar Day 14 – The Holly and the Ivy (Mediaeval Baebes)

I’m not sure this next one is strictly an Advent carol (I’ve been saying that a lot, I know); it usually gets sung as a Christmas carol, though it shares the advent tendency to focus on aspects of theology or Christ’s life other than his birth.

I first heard this carol when I was six years old and living in York. It brings back to me my first experience of conkers, that gorgeous walk home from school through late-autumn woods (that smell and look completely different to the Australian kind), complete with red squirrels and actual robin red-breasts (just as exotic to me as koalas are to our overseas visitors), and then across the stepping stones of the lake at York University. It reminds me of the fascination of cobbled streets and Roman walls and going to bookshops up long flights of stairs in The Shambles when it was already dark outside. It reminds me of ice on car windows, of colouring in stained-glass snowflakes (which was as close as I got to real snow that year), of eating blackberry jam and collecting gollywog stickers while watching Jackanory, and of being Clara in the school production of the Nutcracker – because, as the school closest to the University, lots of academics and graduate students from overseas sent their children there, so the teacher thought it would be a good way to showcase national dances and costumes. (Presumably, Australia was not cultured enough to have a costume or a dance, and that’s why I got Clara. Or perhaps it was evident even at that stage of my development that my talents lay in memorising lines, not in dancing.)

And it reminds me, of course, of holly, which is so beautiful and shiny and green – and such a good green! – with those wonderful rich red berries that seem so much brighter in the grey of a Yorkshire winter than they ever could in the gold and blue of an Australian summer (it’s true that we have redcurrants, which are almost Christmas decorations in their own right, but we don’t have the darkness for them to shine in). Also, it’s prickly, which was generally the part I encountered. But that didn’t prevent me from adoring the colour and the name of it – holly is such a lovely, sparkly green word that sounds just like what it is. At least to me.

I love this carol, too, because of all the colours in it – the red of the berries, the white of the blossoms. The green isn’t mentioned, but it’s implied, at least to me. I didn’t even notice all the religious content until years later. And the melody is beautiful, and the version we do in choir has these perfect harmonies in the verses that make me happy.

Mostly, though, I love this carol because it reminds me of York.

This is another Mediaeval Baebes recording. Why should King’s College Choir get everything their way? I don’t trust them not to sing it as though it was rocket-fuelled…

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57l6dSbVppM&w=560&h=315]

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Advent Calendar Day 13 – December 13 – O Magnum Mysterium (Poulenc)

OK, I’m up so late that it is officially tomorrow, and time for another Advent window!

This window is purely serendipitous. When I was wandering all over YouTube, trying to find someone – anyone! – who had recorded Byrd’s O Magnum Mysterium, I quite accidentally happened upon a version by Poulenc.

I’ve only sung one or two pieces by Poulenc, and that was a very long time ago, but I do like him. He really has a way with harmony – I’m sure I’ve described other composers as lush, but Poulenc takes lush to a whole new level. And I have a certain fondness for Poulenc also because twice in my life I have got myself completely lost in Paris and ended up in front of the house in which he was born (I think – though it may have been the one he lived in as an adult. Or perhaps both – I’m not sure I got lost in the same place both times). So stumbling across Poulenc purely by chance is something of a Catherine tradition.

Poulenc was a 20th century composer (a phrase that fills me with foreboding) and apparently “embraced the Dada movement’s techniques, creating melodies that would have been appropriate for Parisian music halls”. I honestly have no idea what they are talking about when they say that, but perhaps this is because I have only encountered his religious music.

(Hmm… according to the article I’m looking at, “A master of artificial simplicity, [Poulenc] pleases even sophisticated listeners by his bland triadic tonalities, spiced with quickly passing diaphonous discords.” Is it just me, or is that statement really pretentious?)

You can tell I know nothing about this piece by the way I am resorting to other people’s remarks about Poulenc to justify its inclusion. But I’m not going to justify it any further, because it’s just plain gorgeous and just a little bit spooky and entirely worth listening to even by unsophisticated listeners such as myself.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VShyqHcWjPY&w=560&h=315]

And while we’re having serendipitous Poulenc, here he is being all Christmassy with shepherds and such

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Advent Calendar Day 12 – Rejoice in the Lord Alway (Purcell)

Today’s carol is a very special one, because not only is it Purcell (and you know how I feel about Purcell), but it is sung by my church choir!

Edited December 2017: No, it’s not. I’m very sorry, but that recording seems to have disappeared from the internet.  So instead you get Chanticleer, who really do it very well, even though they don’t have our rocket-powered soprano section to come in and wake everyone up after the soloists are done.

The piece is called ‘Rejoice in the Lord Alway’, which I understand is one of the texts for Advent 3, though I may have been misled, and it’s one of those pieces where the alto soloist has all the fun. Well, she shares it with the tenor and bass soloist, but you get the picture. This is because after the Restoration of King Charles II, there was a need for church music again, but after several years of having the Puritans in charge, there was a real dearth of trained boy sopranos (Puritans not being into church music). So Purcell wrote a number of pieces of music where all the sopranos have to do is come in loudly and high and sing the melody with enthusiasm, while the other parts do most of the work (remembering, of course, that this was in the days when male altos were more common – women, naturally, did not get to sing in church choirs at all).

Which is why I always say that Purcell writes the best show-off music for altos. Well, him and Gibbons. I’d hate to have to choose between them.

My favourite thing about this piece of music is the way the sopranos come in at the chorus like a bolt of lightning or a clap of thunder – you’ve been sitting there, listening to a lot of polite strings and a delicate alto-tenor-bass trio, and then, Wham! Here come the sopranos (well, and the rest of the choir, too, but it’s the sopranos that make it for me), and you are riveted to your seat, listening to them.

Sadly, Chanticleer are way too tasteful to do this with quite the terrifying enthusiasm of a church soprano section that has been sitting patiently through three minutes of everyone else having solos except them, with nothing to do except build up a head of operatic steam that is just waiting to explode all over the unsuspecting congregation.

The other thing I really love in this piece is basically the polar opposite of unleashed sopranos, and that is the gorgeous bit in the trio about the peace of God which passes understanding.  You can find it at 5:30 or so in this recording.  I won’t claim that we do anything else better than Chanticleer, but that bit?  That bit, I think John and Les and I can sing as well as anyone.

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i_-1lp0RgZQ&w=560&h=315]

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Advent Calendar Day 11 – Adam Lay y Bounden (Boris Ord)

This next piece is a favourite of mine from way back when I used to do Christmas Carolling in shopping centres in the late 1990s. Never having heard of ‘felix culpa’ (happy fault), I was even more delighted by its completely upside-down logic than I was by the truly gorgeous tune.

Actually, even now that I have had the whole felix culpa thing explained to me, I still find this song irresistibly amusing. The gist of it is that if it hadn’t been for the sin of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (yes, wesre back in the Garden of Eden again with this piece), we wouldn’t have Mary and Jesus, therefore ‘blessed be the time the apple taken was’. Which sounds to me suspiciously like saying sin leads to good things, yay sin, let’s have more of it! (Well, maybe not the last bit.)

More mature minds than mine explain this argument rather better and convince me, at least while I am reading them, that it’s a beautiful piece of theology. “Where sin abounded, grace did more abound” sounds pretty good. But when I read down a few lines further and find things like “For God allows evils to happen in order to bring a greater good therefrom”, I start feeling rather suspicious and muttering things about ends justifying means and whether God isn’t supposed to be better than Machiavelli. (This is possibly why I’ll never make a good theologian) And are the people to whom the evils happen will the same ones who gain the greater good? I’m not at all sure of this, especially since I know I’ve heard this quoted in the context of people dying young or having horrible and irrevocable things happen to them, which always struck me as remarkably unhelpful.

The text is, not surprisingly, medieval – it dates from around 1400, and other poems on the same page of the manuscript from which it derives include ‘I sing of a maiden’ (a famous Advent song that may or may not appear in this calendar later) and ‘I have a gentil cok’, which probably doesn’t mean what my inner twelve-year old thinks it means, but which nonetheless amuses me.

Boris Ord is actually a 20th century composer, but his setting of the piece has a rather archaic feel to it that I like very much. I love the way the melody and harmonies ascend through the first three sections and then spiral back down in the ‘Deo Gratias’ at the end. It makes me happy whenever I sing it or listen to it.

This recording is beautiful, but the tempo is extremely fast. I do think this piece deserves a slower treatment, but the quality of the singing here is so good that it makes up for it. And perhaps if they sing it fast enough, nobody will notice the weird medieval logic…

Edited in 2012: The recording was taken down from YouTube, so I’ve substituted another – it goes at a saner pace, but the voices are not quite as good.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGYmwDYJCvs&w=560&h=315]

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Advent Calendar Day 10 – Dixit Maria (Hassler)

I first sang this piece in 1994 with the Flinders University Choral Society. Like many university choirs, FUCS practiced everything *interminably*, so the soprano line is in my memory for good. I sang it again last Sunday as an alto, and completely bollocksed the line up. So I’m not sure whether it is comforting or saddening that I had real trouble finding a recording of this piece in which the choir didn’t go out of tune or out of time . And I’ve never watched so many YouTube videos in a row in which it was so self-evident that nobody was watching the conductor.

(And then there are all the versions of this piece which have been set to the same melody but in blocks of harmony. Why would you do this? Why?)

Anyway, this is, very simply, a beautiful piece of music (note that I do not call it a very simple piece of music). It’s another Mary song (‘Mary said to the angel “Here I am, the servant of the lord”‘, or possibly ‘behold the handmaiden of the Lord’, if you are in a King Jamesy mood), and deserves better treatment than it got from me on Sunday. In this recording, I love in particular the hushed way the choir sings the repeat of ‘Ecce ancilla domine’.

(but the true moral of this story is that one should always watch the conductor)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hc4Nn33Tc4I&w=560&h=315]

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Advent Calendar Day 9 – See, the Word is Incarnate (Orlando Gibbons)

I think we all know by now that, left to myself and with a little more co-operation from YouTube, I could happily compose an entire playlist of Orlando Gibbons, with the occasional pause for some Purcell (and believe me, there’s plenty of that in the days ahead). Sadly, nobody seems to record much Gibbons, possibly because he requires a lot of his choirs and more of his soloists (his accompaniments never, ever help out the soloists even by accident). Worse still, when people do record Gibbons, they never use a female alto for the solo, which is something I am resisting the urge to rant about at great length.

Anyway, this next piece may not, technically be an Advent Carol. It does, in fact, start with Advent, but within twenty bars it has passed Christmas and is heading for Epiphany, after which it rampages gleefully through a collection of miracles, dwells mournfully on the cross and the wounds, and then ends with a glorious ascension (and really, this is Gibbons – glorious is, if anything, an understatement). Hello, seven-minute sung Gospel! However, since a tendency to race through large swathes of the Bible in a handful of verses is definitely feature of many Advent Carols, I’m calling this one, and ignoring the fact that traditionally these swathes are from the Old Testament.

Besides, this is Gibbons. Do I even need to make excuses for including more of him? And this is not just any Gibbons, but Gibbons at his very best. This piece is another verse anthem, with verses sung by soloists alternating with choral sections, but the verses are all sung by different combinations of voices; building from an alto solo at the start through an alto-soprano duet (which swaps altos mid-stream) and an alto-tenor-bass trio to a completely swoonworthy, spine-tingling quartet of two altos and two tenors, before the final verse, which is the alto soloist again, getting to show off her coloratura, before returning to the final choral section.

In short, it’s wonderful, wonderful writing, with Gibbons’s usual talent for making his melodies mimic inflections of speech combined with his glorious voicing and harmonisation. And did I mention that once again, the alto gets all the fun – including the fun of standing between the other alto soloist and the tenor soloist during that wonderful trio?

My sole quibble is that there are only three recordings of this on YouTube that I can find, and, while all of them are good recordings with good soloists, I am immodestly certain that I can sing that alto solo better than they do! Especially with the marvellous Ursula P on the Alto 1 solo. And *why* does nobody ever record this piece with female altos…?

Edited in December 2017 to note that I have not changed my opinion in any way.  Especially about female altos.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa9fFWMFJw0&w=560&h=315]

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Advent Calendar Day 8 – O Magnum Mysterium (Byrd, Lundgren)

So there’s this lovely piece by Byrd called O Magnum Mysterium, which is a perfectly good Advent text with, moreover, an excellent alto line, but it turns out that it’s incredibly difficult to find online, principally because everybody in the world has at some point composed a setting of this text, and apparently everyone else prefers to sing one of the other ones. And if you do find the Byrd version, it is being played on the viol or the recorder, which is not in the spirit of this advent calendar at all.

Byrd’s music is polyphonic which, for any non-musicians who are not skipping this entire sequence out of sheer frustration, means that instead of everyone singing the same rhythm in blocks of harmony, each part has its own line and melody and rhythm twining around the others. If you’ve ever sung a round, that’s a basic form of polyphony (actually, there are some rounds out there which are fiendishly complicated and not at all basic, but you get the idea). This means that you get beautiful interwoven melodies and harmonies, and that very often the listener is left with no clue what the lyrics are, because everyone is singing different words at the same time. Of course, the composer knows this, too, and this style of music, at least in the context of church music, is designed more to generally lift the spirit and promote meditative prayer than to actually convey meaning.

Anyway, I tried, I really did, to find a good recording of the Byrd. And I found one… sort of. It’s beautifully sung, if a trifle slow, the choristers show evidence of paying attention to the conductor (YouTube is teaching me that this is a rarity), and it’s accompanied by Arthur Rackham fairy illustrations. No, you didn’t misread that. Nor are you hallucinating the piano which comes meandering in after a couple of minutes and starts playing laid-back jazz behind the choir, before going into a piano solo interlude that Byrd never dreamed of.

It’s Byrd, Jim, but not as we know it.

Honestly, I was in two minds about including this. I still am, actually. It’s absolutely not what I was looking for… but for all its weirdness and my feeling that this is not proper Advent music, I feel as though it would be cheating in some way to leave it out.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsG-etzMdQQ&w=560&h=315]

Translation of the lyrics:

O great mystery,
and wonderful sacrament,
that animals should see the new-born Lord,
lying in a manger!
Blessed is the Virgin whose womb
was worthy to bear
Christ the Lord.
Alleluia!

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Advent Calendar Day 8 – For unto us a child is born (Handel)

You can’t have Advent without The Messiah, at least not in Australia. Though, actually, I’ve never managed to sing in a performance of The Messiah, which suggests I’m doing it wrong. Anyway, this was another of the quotes from the Advent Service on Sunday, and since we did this piece in Advent a few years ago, I thought, why not? After all, the lyrics are appropriate, it’s got lots of lovely baroque twiddly bits (I especially like the bit towards the end when the sopranos and altos are singing their coloratura bits in thirds – so much fun!), and it’s a nice cheery contrast to yesterday’s piece. Perfect.

And then I went looking for a performance I liked.

For most of the pieces I want to share in this calendar, the problem is finding any performance at all. Often I can’t – there’s a lovely piece of Gibbons I continually look for recordings of, but so far without success. With The Messiah, of course, the problem is reversed – there are so many performances that it’s hard to choose one, and of course it’s sung so often that you can wade through a lot of truly dreadful performances before finding a good one. I found this one on my fourth attempt, and instantly realised that I had to share it with you, because this is The Messiah like you’ve never seen it before, unless you were an intervarsity chorister with even worse traditions than the choirs I was in at uni.

For this, my friends, is The Messiah – with hand actions (putting the Hand back into Handel…)(that sounds a lot dodgier than I meant it to)! I can honestly say that I don’t understand the hand actions, and indeed spent most of the piece giggling maniacally at them. And then there’s that woman in the middle who looks like she is cooking up something at a chemistry bench. Though, actually, I have no idea what she is really doing. I’m open to suggestions, though. And there appears to be an infant crawling around on one side of the stage, which at least makes some sort of sense.

It’s truly bizarre – and yet the singing itself is extremely good. You can even hear the altos! This is quite rare, in my experience. The performance is by the Schoenberg choir, and as someone who really does not get Schoenberg I can only conclude that they feel it is their Scheonberg duty to make even Handel’s Messiah incomprehensible…

Enjoy! And if you do figure out what the woman in the middle is doing, please tell me.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKCdt1rm0lw&w=560&h=315]

Edited December 2017: So it turns out that this particular recording is part of an entire Messiah production created by Klaus Guth, who evidently thought that what the Messiah truly needed was a narrative about funerals, suicide, adultery and really dysfunctional families.  Also interpretative dance.  And a sign language interpreter – but only for the instrumental bits.  It is truly bizarre, and it *should not* work, but bizarrely, it does, at least for me, on an emotional level.  It is now required viewing for me every December.  Because, oh yes, I went straight out and bought the DVD as soon as I learned that it existed…  You can watch the entire thing here.  Go on, I dare you.  But be warned – you will never be able to sing ‘How Beautiful Are The Feet’ again without giggling.

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Advent Calendar Day 7 – The Truth Sent From Above

Today’s carol is one I have sung in a couple of different versions, most recently on Sunday evening. It’s another medieval carol that starts with the Garden of Eden and that whole sorry business with the apple (or quince, as some claim, though I find it hard to picture anyone eating a quince straight from the tree), and basically explains to the non-literate, or at least not-literate-in-latin audience of the time why Christ’s birth is actually important, beyond being an excuse for feasting and Twelfth Night and so forth.

Nobody ever sings all ten verses, and different arrangements choose different combinations. In fact, when I went looking for the verses I remembered that weren’t on this recording, I discovered that there were some even I have never heard of, which given my frighteningly thorough knowledge of the Christmas carol oeuvre suggests that they are really obscure. This recording skips my favourite verse*, and goes straight from “Woman was made with man to dwell”, to “Thus we were heirs to endless woes”, which strikes me as a little unfair. But even I wouldn’t sing ten verses of this, so some editing was clearly inevitable.

The carol is sung by the King’s Singers, an all-male group who I understand to be former members of the King’s College Choir. And they really do have beautiful voices, as well as having one voice per part, which is an effect I always love. And there’s a beautiful baritone solo in verse one, which to me is vital to this carol (much as I love this harmony, it *needs* that solo at the start). Don’t be put off by the falsetto solo in verse 2; I realise it’s a little alarming, but it’s worth it once you get to the glorious harmonies in verse three.

(Incidentally, you may have noticed that yesterday’s Advent Carol was an all-girl affair. This was partly because I love the Mediaeval Baebes and their arrangement of that song, partly because I think Mary’s songs should be sung by female voices where possible, and partly because I keep finding that the best arrangement of a given piece of music is by an all-male choir, with or without boy sopranos, so I couldn’t resist using an all-female group when found one.)

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPvC5KvqHjU&w=560&h=315]

Bonus Easter egg (Christmas bauble?) because I love the King’s Singers, especially when they are being clever and funny:

In which regrettable (but amusing) things are done to Rossini’s Barber of Seville

* And they did eat, which was a sin,
And thus their ruin did begin.
Ruined themselves, both you and me,
And all of their posterity.