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.<\/p>\n
(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?)<\/p>\n
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’.<\/p>\n
(but the true moral of this story is that one should always watch the conductor)<\/p>\n
[youtube https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=hc4Nn33Tc4I&w=560&h=315]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[14,189,305],"class_list":["post-754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-advent-calendar","tag-dixit-maria","tag-hassler"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754","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=754"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/754\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=754"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=754"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/catesings.catespeaks.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=754"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}