My weekend looks like this--

--dress rehearsal for this:



then rush home for a birthday party for my baby who will be SIX, and then back out the next day for the actual concert.

The music is the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610, an amazing piece of choral music that I am so jazzed to have had the opportunity to sing.  Above is one of my favorite movements of the lengthy work, and below is one of my other favorites.  Sung here by the Monteverdi Choir and the English Baroque Soloists under the baton of Sir John Eliot Gardiner.

More Whitacre

A recent Eric Whitacre Virtual Choir project:

Sing out!

From CBS Sunday Morning:

Good find of the week: Hark I Hear the Harps Eternal - the Parker version

I admit I did not just find this song this week. The touring chamber choir I sang with as an undergraduate sang this piece one of the years I was in the group, and I loved it then. But it had totally slipped to the recesses of my mind until this week at the first rehearsal for my community choir's spring concert, where it appeared in the stack of sheet music I was handed as I walked in the door.

"Hark I Hear the Harps Eternal" is a shape-note hymn. In mid-eighteenth century America, shape-note singing originated out of a desire to assist people who were largely musically illiterate in singing music on sight. The basic idea was to give people a visual cue as to the note of the scale they were singing (based on four-syllable solfege):


Shape-note singing sessions still exist around this country, many of which work out of the Sacred Harp tradition.

The rousing arrangement of "Hark I Hear the Harps Eternal" I sang years ago and will be spending the next few Monday nights singing is by choral music legend, Alice Parker. Here is an excerpt--I couldn't find a YouTube recording with the audio clarity I wanted so that you would be able to hear the crisp articulation of the lower voices. I love the rhythms Parker uses--it takes the song to a whole new level.



This recording is by the San Francisco Symphony Chorus under the direction of Vance George from the CD, 1900-2000--a Choral Journey through the 20th Century.

Music Monday - Everyone Sang

I just found out today that, in a happy bit of kismet, the poem I posted on my other blog, A Habit of Reading, for last week's Poetry Friday, serves as the text for a lovely choral work from 1975 that the community chorus I sing with will be performing this spring. The author of the text is British poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), and the composer is fellow Brit Peter Willsher (b. 1951). This clip is from the BBC's 2008 Remembrance Sunday episode of Songs of Praise.