At Good Shepherd it is our custom to keep the solemnity of Corpus Christi on the Sunday following the actual day. This year it is June 14. It is also the last Sunday of the regular choir season, so the day’s liturgy is observed with festive musical elaboration.
The choral mass setting is most often taken from the Viennese tradition. This year the choir will be singing the Missa Brevis in F by Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), an early work probably dating from 1749, and not to be confused with his Missa Brevis Sancti Ioannes de Deo in B-flat, which is also in the Good Shepherd repertoire. The Missa Brevis in F is for choir with two soprano soloists. On June 14, the soloists will be our regular soprano section leader Katie Armour and Laurel McLaughlin, who will be making her last appearance as a regular member of the Good Shepherd Choir.
Laurel is graduating from the Delaware County Christian School and in September will enter Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where she has been awarded a Presidential Scholarship. Laurel’s accomplishments in recent years have been highly impressive. She is a 2008 graduate in voice from the highly selective Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Performing Arts. In her junior and senior years she won a place in the Pennsylvania Music Educators’ Association State Choir after participation at the district and regional levels. She has also won prizes is several competitions including those sponsored by the Chester County Choral Society and the Alliance of Christian Musicians. At Good Shepherd it has been a great joy to see and hear her emerge as an accomplished and poised vocal artist, and we wish her well for a future that promises to be bright. We also hope that she will return and sing with us whenever she can.
The anthem on June 14 will be my own setting of “Anima Christi”. This prayer is traditionally used as a devotion after receiving Holy Communion. A translation appears on page 106 of Saint Augustine’s Prayer Book. It is attributed to St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), the founder in 1534 of the Society of Jesus, and author of Spiritual Exercises (1548). In contrast with florid and colorful medieval devotional poetry that we find in texts like the Stabat Mater and the Dies Irae, the Latin of the Anima Christi is concentrated and direct, even stark in its concision. It is a prayer that I have found exceptionally profound and helpful in my own spiritual journey. In my musical setting I have taken the text clause by clause and attempted to match each invocation with music of appropriately expressive harmony and texture.
As in years past, our communion motet will be Mozart’s “Ave verum Corpus”. It is a late work, written on June 17, 1791, just a few months before the composer’s death in December of that year. This exquisite motet was composed for the Feast of Corpus Christi at Baden bei Wien for Anton Stoll, the choir director there.
--WJG |
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