♪ Music notes ♪

Once, as I Remember was written for Fairlawn Avenue Senior Choir, and first sung during Advent, 1995.

George Ratcliffe Woodward (1848-1934) was an English Anglican priest who wrote mostly religious verse, both original and translated from ancient authors. The best known of these were written to fit traditional melodies, mainly from the Renaissance era. He sometimes harmonized these melodies himself, but usually left it to his frequent collaborator, composer Charles Wood. 

David Willcocks (1919-2015) was a conductor, organist, composer and arranger, and long considered Britain’s most esteemed choir director. During the course of his remarkable life, to name but a few of his many accomplishments, he was the Music Director of the King’s College Choir of Cambridge University, and was associated for many years with the Bach Choir, based in London, England. His work with both ensembles — renowned for the brightness, clarity and impeccable intonation he routinely summoned from his singers — was considered exquisitely representative of the modern English choral tradition. He was also the co-editor (along with John Rutter) of the beloved Carols for Choirs series – carol books found in virtually every church and community choir’s library, and in which his arrangement of this morning’s opening hymn and first anthem appears. As a choral ambassador, Willcocks led ensembles in Canada, the United States and across the globe – and even worked with the Rolling Stones!

Edward Caswall (1814-1878) was a British Anglican clergyman and hymn writer. He was the curate at an Anglican parish from 1840 to 1847, but in January of 1847, he resigned his curacy and converted to Roman Catholicism. His widely used hymn texts and translations include the well-known Christmas carol “See Amid the Winter’s Snow”, as well as “Jesus, the Very Thought of Thee”, “When Morning Gilds the Skies”, and “Earth Has Many a Noble City”.

I Sing of a Maiden was composed for 4 women in the Fairlawn Senior Choir, affectionately known as “El’s Angels”. It was first performed during Advent in 1990 by Yvonne Way, Carrie Loring, Meredith Hall and Patricia Jones.

Mack Wilberg (b. 1955) has been the music director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir since 2008. He is a former Professor of Music at Brigham Young University and is active as a composer, arranger, guest conductor and clinician throughout the United States and abroad. His compositions and arrangements are performed and recorded by choral organizations throughout the world. In addition to the many compositions, he has written for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, his works have also been performed by such artists as Renée Fleming, Frederica von Stade, Bryn Terfel, and the King’s Singers. Dr. Wilberg received his bachelor’s degree from Brigham Young University and his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Southern California.

Harold Darke (1888-1976) was an English organist, composer and choirmaster. Regarded as one of the greatest organists of his time, he appeared regularly in concert, often performing his own compositions, which were tonal, conservative but imaginative, and well-crafted. Darke was appointed organist in 1916 at London’s St. Michael’s Cornhill, and remained there until 1966, except for a wartime hiatus (1941-1945), when he substituted RAF-bound Boris Ord as the Music Director at King’s College, Cambridge. In a poll of choral experts and choirmasters that was published in BBC Music Magazine in 2008, his “In the Bleak Midwinter” was voted the greatest choral Christmas carol of all time!

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was born in London, the youngest child in an extraordinarily gifted family. Her father was the Italian poet Gabriele Rossetti, and her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti also became a poet and a painter. Rossetti’s first poems were written in 1842 and printed in her grandfather’s private press. In 1850, under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne, she contributed seven poems to the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ, which had been founded by her brother William Michael and his friends. Rossetti is best known for her ballads and her mystic religious lyrics, and her poetry is marked by symbolism and intense feeling. Her collection of poetry called Goblin Market and Other Poems  was published in 1862, and it established Rossetti as a significant voice in Victorian poetry. 

Edmund H. Sears (1810-1876) was an American Unitarian minister and author who wrote a number of theological works influencing 19th century liberal Protestants. Although he wrote between 40 and 50 hymn texts, today, Sears is primarily known as the man who penned the words to It Came Upon the Midnight Clear. The carol has been sung to two tunes – the tune heard in this morning’s service was adapted by Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan) from a traditional English air. In the last verse, Sears envisions a future where peace would reign over the earth, and humanity would send back the song of peace that the angels have sung in vain for so many centuries.

Georg Weissel (1590-1635) was a Prussian pastor who served a church in Königsberg for most of his career. One of the most important of the earliest hymn writers of Prussia, he wrote Macht hoch die Tür (Lift Up Your Heads) for the first Sunday of Advent. This morning’s choral commissioning is the text of the third verse (translated into English by Catherine Winkworth). Although Weissel wrote some 20 hymn texts in total, this hymn is the only one to endure.

Catherine Winkworth (1827-1878) was the foremost 19th century British translator of German hymns into English. Her translations were polished, and yet remained close to the original, and are still used extensively in many denominational hymnals. Educated initially by her mother, she lived with relatives in Dresden, Germany in 1845, where she acquired her knowledge and interest in German hymnody. A pioneer in promoting women’s rights, Winkworth put much of her energy into the encouragement of higher education for women.

Various legends, registering differing degrees of reality and truth, inevitably surround such a famous and long-lived composition as Messiah  by George Frideric Handel (1685-1759). It is known that he wrote most of the work in an astonishingly short three weeks time, beginning on August 22, 1741. Another legend attached to the work relates to his inspiration, which casts the frenzied composition as a sort of divine dictation. Handel is said to have emerged at some point (usually, it is noted, after finishing the “Hallelujah Chorus”,) and proclaimed: “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God himself!” The first performance of Messiah  took place in Dublin, on April 13, 1742. Handel gave the London premiere less than a year later at Covent Garden, and in the almost 300 years since then, Messiah has taken its rightful place as one of the most frequently performed and most beloved choral works of all time.