Wednesday, September 25: Sung Morning Prayer Beyond All Praising – a setting by Colin Britt This week, we begin a new cycle of Sung Morning Prayer services. In keeping with the Marquand tradition of singing from a broad and diverse musical palette, this setting includes music from across the globe and spanning 12 centuries. Former Director of Music, Colin Britt, created this cycle in 2012 as a way to bring back several beloved hymns and songs well-known to returning students and faculty, but also to introduce a handful of new gems that further enriched the Marquand song canon. Read on for fine detail of the service: We open the service with a chant from the 9th century, “Veni creator spiritus.” Commonly attributed to the Benedictine monk Rabanus Maurus, this is one of the most well-known and popular chant melodies of the entire repertoire, and is sung regularly at numerous occasions within the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches. The text and tune have been arranged and set by many composers, including Mahler, Hindemith, Penderecki, and Duruflé. Its inviting and lyrical phrasing set a beautifully contemplative tone to our service. We re-introduce old favorites, such as Isaiah Jones’ gospel setting of “Fill My Cup,” John Bell and Graham Maule’s delightful arrangement of the Caribbean “Halle, Halle, Halle,” and the Sacred Harp tune, “Christians, We Have Met to Worship.” These exciting songs exemplify the contagious joy and energy that singing in Marquand brings to each of us. Some of our most beautiful liturgical music comes from the Russian Orthodox tradition. To name only a few, many of us are familiar with Rachmaninoff’s Vespers, and the Rimsky-Korsakov setting of the Lord’s Prayer is a frequent Marquand staple. This service introduces another Russian Lord’s Prayer setting, this one by Nikolai Kedrov, Sr. It is simpler, more contemplative than many other compositions, and the gentle way in which slight harmonic tensions are introduced and released is profoundly moving. For our psalm, we venture even further east, to the Siberian province of Tuva. We sing an adaptation of Psalm 96, set to an arrangement of a traditional Tuvan folksong, “Kongurei.” Among other traits, Tuvan music is recognized internationally for the use of throat singing, one particular variant of the musical technique known as overtone singing. This unique and eerily beautiful technique isolates specific pitches within the overtone series (which forms the building blocks of all types of audible sound, not the least of which is music). Though foreign to many Westerners, overtone singing is quite common in many East Asian and sub-Saharan cultures, and will hopefully add a transcendent luminous quality to our singing. The title for this cycle comes from the Michael Perry text set to the hymn tune Thaxted, by Gustav Holst. While not an extremely well-known hymn, the melody is quite familiar in the classical music world from the Jupiter movement of Holst’s “The Planets” (Opus 32), and several other hymn texts have been set to this tune. Humble, yet exhilarating words, paired with the gradually ascending contours of the melody bring us ever higher, epitomizing the reason we sing to God: “O God, beyond all praising, we worship you today, and sing the love amazing that songs cannot repay; for we can only wonder at every gift you send, at blessings without number and mercies without end.” For something new, for something familiar, for something beautiful, for something meditative, and, perhaps, for something transcendent, please join us for this new cycle of Sung Morning Prayer. We need your presence and your voices to make it work!
Posted on: Tue, 24 Sep 2013 15:00:00 +0000