I’ve been singing in choirs for sixty plus years, and I never knew Morten Lauridsen’s music until I happened to sing his wonderful O Magnum Mysterium a couple of years ago with The Bach Society of St. Louis. Here’s a fine performance I found online. I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the season here, than to post it.
Ave Maria
Here’s the beautiful Ave Maria by Franz Biebl, in the famous recording by Chanticleer. This is a low fidelity file, but it sounds pretty good.
Listen, if you will.
’tis the season
I’ve been caught up in life too much to post for a couple of weeks. Though I’ve got a raft of drafts sitting here, I don’t feel like finishing most of them right now. So I think I’ll just post music for a while. I’ve a couple of seasonal drafts involving choral music I had thought to post. They’ll appear over the next couple of days.
But here’s my first musical post of the season, a wonderful song by Henry Purcell, the thought inspired by the last sentence of my previous paragraph. This performance allows the listener to follow a score, a nice touch; and I like the female singer, too; her singing nicely recontextualizes the piece and renders it universal, in a sense.
not your ordinary waether [sic]
Here’s a wonderful piece of fun. I stole it from Fr. Mark Harris, who, in turn, stole it from TitusOneNine. To non-Anglicans, this is Anglican chant (actually sung rather well) complete with affected pronun-ci-a-ti-ons of a kind one sometimes hears from high-class British choirs.
The joke might have been better (nah, it wouldn’t), if “The Weather Report” had been sung in the manner of American congregations from the bad old days when Morning Prayer was the standard low-church Sunday service. Imagine every cadence thumped to death as congregation and choir rendered the canticles and the psalms in a manner undeviating from established parish norms, week in and week out, so that parishioners who were inclined to sleep through the service need not be disturbed by anything untoward. The chanting here is a positive delight in comparison. Give it a listen.
It turns out that “The Weather Report” was cooked up by a group of British schoolteachers who called themselves the Master Singers for a while. It was first recorded in 1966 and produced by George Martin, the producer of the Beatles. Here are links to two accounts of the whole thing from the same blog, that don’t entirely agree; and here’s another to “The Highway Code,” an earlier similar spoof, also recorded by George Martin. Both recordings “hit the British charts” in 1966, according to my source.
Anglican chant is serious, of course. It would hardly be worth parody otherwise. A Wikipedia acount, which isn’t bad, is here. In addition, here’s the best serious Anglican chanting I could find on the web. It’s the choir of King’s College, Cambridge, chanting Psalm 50. Such chanting may be accompanied or not. The Kings College video is accompanied, of course. It is also heard as sung in a big reverberant gothic building, not up close and personal to the microphone, like “The Weather Report.”