APPY THANKSGIVING and happy belated feast of St. Cecilia. My guess is that most of the Catholic church choirs in the world are named after her. I have been to parishes that have two or more “St. Cecilia Choirs”. Those choirs usually end up being called the “7am St. Cecilia Choir” or “11am St. Cecilia Choir”.
Since this is a week of feasts, I thought this would be the perfect time to share a piece by a composer from Macau. I found it while I was going through some old music at our seminary. It is a very simple choral setting of the introit of the Christmas Midnight Mass, Dominus Dixit ad Me, by Fr. Áureo Castro, who served in Macau for a long time and had contributed greatly to the local musical culture. If you are looking for something simple and can be easily learned, this would be the perfect piece. The SAB introit, which can also be arranged into a equal-voice setting, is pretty straight forward and it allows basically any “Cecilia choir” to sing it after a short practice.
* * PDF • DOMINUS DIXIT AD ME BY ÁUREO CASTRO
I hope this piece would be useful and would make the midnight Mass procession more interesting. And I hope to share more music by local composers from Macau in my future posts. I will definitely write a detail introduction of Fr. Castro in my next blog post. Stay tuned!
