Views from the Choir Loft

Free Download • Simple Choral Midnight Mass Introit

Andrew Leung · November 24, 2016 ·

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!

About Andrew Leung

Andrew Leung currently serves the music director of Vox Antiqua, conductor of the Cecilian Singers and music director at Our Lady of China Church. He is also an artist and vocal coach at the Paul Phoenix Academy.

Could Pope St. Pius X Sing?

“On 12 March 1908, the complete publication of the Roman Gradual was issued by the Vatican Press. On that very day, Dom Pothier solemnly presented the first copy to the Holy Father. A witness of the audience says that Pius X wished to be the first to see the new book; he opened it at random, at page 128 of the supplement pro aliquibus locis—it was the Introit of the new Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes. The Pope sang it with perfect taste to the last note.” (Catholic Choirmaster, February 1915)

—Jeff Ostrowski

Julius Bas Accompaniment

A very prolific harmonizer of Gregorian chant in the early 20th century was Mr. Julius Bas. He often uses a very strange technique, wherein he employs rests to eliminate the Alto, Tenor, and Bass voices. Consider what he did with “Lumen ad revelationem” here:

* JPEG • Lumen ad revelationem

It seems quite lazy, and I’ve never seen anyone else use such a technique, although Dr. Peter Wagner often switched to parallel octaves when he ran out of ideas… (Yuck!)

—Jeff Ostrowski

Hitting wrong notes

Fr. Valentine Young, OFM, used to say: “The organist can play 1,000 correct notes and one wrong note—and the only thing people will care about is the wrong note.” Last Sunday I hit some wrong notes, and felt bad. Then I remembered a story about Rudolf Serkin and started to chuckle. Charles Rosen (or was it Leon Fleisher?) told the story of Serkin playing a Beethoven Sonata in front of a large audience. The theme is all in octaves; but Serkin hit some wrong notes, and played parallel 7ths instead. This so unnerved him that every time the theme returned, he played the entire thing in parallel 7ths! We must remember that even the greatest hit wrong notes. Alfred Cortot, Vladimir Horowitz, Wilhelm Backhaus, Edwin Fischer, Sviatoslav Richter, Egon Petri—they all hit wrong notes, which we can hear on recordings. (Josef Hofmann was an exception, but he was super-human so he doesn’t count!)

—Jeff Ostrowski