As is our custom, the choir will sing Choral Evensong for Advent on the first Sunday in December. That will be December 7 at 5:00 pm, the Second Sunday in Advent.
I have long felt that the Advent Evensong has a special quality of reverence. Instead of an entrance hymn, the choir sings the Advent Prose, “Drop down, ye heavens, from above, and let the skies pour down righteousness” (Isaiah 45:8). This sets the tone for the Office. A solo voice chants verses of prophecy in plainsong, and the choir answers with the quoted refrain in fauxbourdon: the plainsong melody in the tenor part and the other voices in harmony around it.
The principal choral music in the service will come from the English repertory of the early 17th century. The Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis will be from the Short Service of Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625). The term “short service” designates a setting of the canticles that is concise and usually in four parts. In the hands of lesser composers, the short service idiom could be dull and perfunctory, an exercise in getting through the text in the shortest possible time and with the least trouble to the composer and singers. This is certainly not the case with the Gibbons Short Service, which is an acknowledged masterpiece, surviving in no fewer than 30 extant 17th-century sources.
For the anthem, I have chosen “Surge, illuminare” (Arise, shine, O Jerusalem, for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee) by William Byrd (c1540-1623). The text is based on Isaiah 60:1. The piece comes from the second volume (1607) of Byrd’s Gradualia, a collection of motet settings of the mass propers for the entire liturgical year. This particular text is from the Gradual for the Feast of the Epiphany, but the theme of the dawning of the divine Light makes it appropriate for Advent when presented as a free-standing anthem.
Although they died within two years of each other, Byrd and Gibbons were of quite different generations. Byrd’s earliest works date from the reign of Mary I, and he remained a faithful Roman Catholic at a time when it could be dangerous to do so. Even so, he was a member of the Elizabethan Chapel Royal and highly regarded at court. In the early 1590s he retired to the village of Stondon Massey in Essex, near the estate of his patron Sir John Petre, where clandestine Catholic services were held. Byrd’s three masses and the Gradualia were among the works intended specifically for the Roman liturgy.
In contrast, Gibbons worked as a church musician exclusively within the auspices of the Anglican Church and the English liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer. He was a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal from 1605 until his death, by which time he had become that foundation’s senior organist. He was also organist of Westminster Abbey, and a keyboard musician at court. He died suddenly of a seizure probably brought on by a brain hemorrhage while with the court at Canterbury awaiting the arrival from France of Queen Henrietta Maria.
--WJG |
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