A bonus carol for your Christmas Vigil!\u00a0 I love the lyrics to this piece of music – they are perfect for Christmas night, translating “O great mystery and wonderful sacrament, that the animals see the Lord born, lying in a manger.\u00a0 Blessed virgin whose womb was worthy to bear Lord Christ. Alleluia!”<\/p>\n
The hard part is choosing a setting, because everyone has done one.\u00a0 There’s this gorgeous one by Victoria<\/a>, or you could try Byrd, straight<\/a> or with jazz piano<\/a>, or you could have some spooky Poulenc<\/a>, or then there’s this one, by contemporary American composer Morten Lauridsen.<\/p>\n [youtube=http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=nn5ken3RJBo&w=420&h=315]<\/p>\n I love the reflectiveness of this setting and its stillness, and the way the alleluias come out of the darkness at the end.\u00a0 For all its modernity, it would be a beautiful thing to hear in an old Roman or Gothic church, with only a brazier for light, as we await the coming of midnight and the lighting of candles to celebrate the holy birth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A bonus carol for your Christmas Vigil!\u00a0 I love the lyrics to this piece of music – they are perfect for Christmas night, translating “O great mystery and wonderful sacrament, that the animals see the Lord born, lying in a manger.\u00a0 Blessed virgin whose womb was worthy to bear Lord Christ. Alleluia!” The hard part […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13,87,130,501,538,585,750],"class_list":["post-563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-advent","tag-byrd","tag-christmas","tag-morten-lauridsen","tag-o-magnum-mysterium","tag-poulenc","tag-victoria"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}