Tag Archives: advent

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Advent Calendar Day 13: Joseph est bien marié

Another Joseph carol, a bit less well-known than the various iterations of the cherry tree.  This is a traditional French carol which I haven’t been able to find a provenance for, but certainly sounds like it’s from the Renaissance (not weird enough to the modern ear to be medieval, but the instrumentation and tune is definitely pre-baroque.  Also, it sounds like incidental music from any Shakespeare play you’d care to mention, which is definitely Renaissance or pseudo-renaissance…)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFbneUGHfhA&w=420&h=315] Continue reading →

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Advent Calendar Day 10: Prepare Ye The Way (Michael Wise)

See, now I am absolutely cheating by looking up lists of Advent music and seeing what I like.  But it’s not really cheating in this case, because while I haven’t actually sung this particular verse anthem before, I was looking for a different Michael Wise anthem for Advent quite recently (this was the path that led me into the pit of smutty Elizabethan Madrigals a couple of Sundays ago).  So when I saw that he had written another Advent anthem, I braved YouTube again, to see if I could avoid the smut, and found this.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4ZeM1KLMlM?rel=0] Continue reading →

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Advent Calendar Day 9: Wachet! Betet! (J.S. Bach)

A few months ago, when I was preparing for my exam, I sent the Bach alto aria I was learning to my German theologian friend, Anna, to check that my translation wasn’t too wildly wrong.  She sent back the translation with her comments, and also mentioned that in Bach, the alto soloist is usually the voice of the believing soul.  I thought that sounded gorgeous, and set out today to find some advent-suitable soulfulness to share with you.

And I found some.  But this isn’t it, because what I also found in my travels was that Bach, being the excellent church musician that he was, had actually written a cantata for the second Sunday in Advent – which is today.  I am not an excellent church musician, but I am a conscientious one, and having found beautiful music that was actually written for this precise day in the church year, I am incapable of choosing something else.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRiVFPPgjVo?rel=0]

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Advent Calendar Day 8: Lullay My Liking (Lawson)

After yesterday’s travesty, I thought you deserved something really gorgeous, and what could be more gorgeous than the King’s Singers?  I was fortunate enough to see them in concert earlier this year, as well as attending one of their masterclasses, and they really are the most perfect ensemble I’ve ever heard – their tuning is so perfect that you get harmonics, and the balance between parts is just amazing.  And they also seem to be lovely people, which is an under-rated skill…

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXH7062QOBg&w=560&h=315]

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Advent Calendar Day 7: There Is No Rose of Such Virtue

Given that I’m coming up with a post a day during Advent, I was going to put my Friday Fun on hiatus… but on reflection, that didn’t sound like much fun at all, so instead, I’m going to devote Fridays in Advent to interpretations of carols that are just plain weird.  And what could be weirder than Sting singing medieval Advent Carols?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJbVj1gOIRc&w=420&h=315] Continue reading →

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Advent Calendar Day 5: The Cherry Tree Carol

One of the more fun things about Advent Carols are the ones you get that were written by the people, for the people.  And the people sometimes had some pretty unorthodox ideas, largely, one suspects, because services were in Latin, Bibles were for the clergy, and singing was not permitted in church.  This left quite a lot of room for people to make things up with the best of intentions.  And people were pretty interested in St Joseph, because in some ways, he’s the most relatable character in the Christmas story.  I mean, Jesus is divine, Mary is a walking miracle, and then you have Joseph, just an ordinary bloke (indeed, a regular Joe), whose betrothed has just turned up pregnant and is claiming that the baby is the son of God.

You can see why he wouldn’t be too thrilled about this.  The people writing carols could see it too, and there are a whole swathe of carols about Joseph being quite grumpy about the whole business.  (Incidentally, I’m told that Joseph didn’t get many churches in his honour, especially in Italy, largely because of a feeling that he was a cuckold.  Apparently, being cuckolded by God isn’t much better than the regular kind of cuckoldry, at least if you are Italian.)  Here’s one of them.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oscp04gjgIY&w=560&h=315] Continue reading →

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Advent Calendar Day 4: Quia Ergo Femina (Hildegard von Bingen)

After all that Baroque and Renaissance music, it’s surely time for something a bit older – and it’s definitely time for some good, old-fashioned, medieval theology, and a glimpse of Mary.  (You’ll be seeing a lot of her this month.  I tend to think that Advent is all about Mary, and nobody has managed to convince me otherwise so far).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRfwaf8ZlKk&w=560&h=315]

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