While I was looking for just the right Rorate Coeli/Caeli to share with you yesterday, I fell down a very deep internet rabbit hole where it turns out that pretty much every composer and his cat has written a setting of this text.  Some of them do very little for me, but others are absolutely lovely – lovely enough, in my opinion, to justify a sequence of Rorate Coeli posts for the first few days of this Advent.

Today’s Rorate, however, is in fact the one I was looking for when I stumbled on this rabbit hole in the first place.  It’s by Francisco Guerrero, a 16th century Spanish priest and composer.  It’s a setting I’ve sung a few times in different churches, and it’s very lovely and unexpectedly simple to sing – everyone gets a melody, and they all blend together very beautifully.  I like the word painting in this one – the all those lovely, waterfall-like runs in each voice part, matching the psalmist’s rainy metaphor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWREiFdvAvY