HRISTMAS IS APPROACHING. And let me explain why you’ll want the following piece. First of all, it’s gorgeous and incorporates Christmas carols 1 in a fascinating way. Moreover, complete verses are provided for Christmas and Epiphany, making it possible to use this piece for multiple Sundays. I couldn’t help recording a simulation video; please excuse my voice on the really high soprano notes:
REHEARSAL VIDEOS for each individual voice have been created—locate #6800.
Download the ORGANIST SCORE and VOCALIST SCORE at #6800.
MAKE SURE you pray through the English translation included in the vocal score. These lines—written by the 5th-century Christian poet, Sedulius—are tremendously powerful. The full poem has twenty-three verses, and each stanza begins with a successive letter of the alphabet, which you can see. However, it never works out perfectly because the Breviary eliminates some stanzas and adds doxologies (disrupting the poem by Sedulius).
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NOTES FROM THIS ARTICLE:
1 Some will be surprised that Fr. Nicolas du Peron (a French-Canadian Roman Catholic priest) appreciated these carols, but we must remember that Canada was an English colony for many centuries. I suspect there’s much “co-mingling” of English/French. Benjamin Franklin wanted England to give Canada to the USA in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, but that didn’t occur.
