ERE IS A WONDERFUL, short, easy, fresh piece by Fr. Antonin Lhoumeau (d. 1920) which provides an SATB polyphonic refrain for the famous & ancient Marian hymn, “Ave Maris Stella.” This piece can be used until Advent!
* * PDF Download • AVE MARIS STELLA
Your choir will love this piece! And you can choose soloists for each verse. You’ll notice that the melody for the verses is slightly different than the Editio Vaticana. I thought perhaps Lhoumeau was using a French version, but as you can see, this variant was quite common during the Middle Ages. By the way, a cool thing about ancient manuscripts is their treatment of hypermetric syllables—the ones that don’t fit—and there are different ways to handle them. When they had trouble, they would write out the problem spot in the margin like this. The score above treats “monstra te esse” according to how it was sung in ancient times.
Here’s how the “Ave Maris Stella” appears in the Campion Hymnal:
You’ll notice the English translation is by Fr. Adrian Fortescue. Throughout the Campion Missal, many translations by Fortescue are used—as well as Cardinal Newman and others—because translations by Roman Catholics were given preference.
NOTES FROM THIS ARTICLE:
There is an error on the Bass rehearsal video with regard to the rhymic value of one (1) note. Sorry about that!
