New Advent anthem

This Sunday, Saint Philip’s combined adult choirs will sing a new Advent anthem, A Prayer to St John the Baptist, by the British composer Cecilia McDowall.

The choir has been cutting its teeth on this anthem during the last month, in part because of the challenging harmonic language. The anthem is based on an ‘octatonic’ scale, a particularly mechanical scale based on a whole-step/half-step sequence that gives the music a particularly angular, otherworldly quality.

As a starting point, McDowall sets very short phrases of a famous eighth-century hymn, Ut queant laxis, itself a prayer to Saint John the Baptist, attributed to Guido of Arezzo (c. 991-1033). This hymn appears to have had a pedagogical purpose, as each phrase begins on a note of the scale. The syllable associated with each new note thus became a solemnization tool—basically, a way to teach the notes of a scale to a student.

Today, we would think of The Sound of Music and sing ‘Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do,’ but in the Middle Ages, one would have sung ‘Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si, Do’, according to the Latin text of this hymn:

Ut queant laxīs
resonāre fibrīs
Mīra gestōrum
famulī tuōrum,
Solve pollūtī
labiī reātum,
Sāncte Iohannēs.

You can hear how this works quite readily in the following performance of the hymn, in which the choir sings the modern solfege syllables in the background. Just listen to the first 32 seconds:

In McDowall’s Prayer to St. John the Baptist, she uses each line of this stanza as punctuation marks between parts of a longer poem by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915-1978). Merton’s poem, St. John Baptist, moves from a first-person description of Christ’s baptism and its significance, to a prayer addressed to the saint. Throughout the work, the organist plays a sparkling series of dancing figures in the right hand that evoke the play of water.

The combination of these two texts is really quite ingenious and beautiful. You can read the two together in the Advent Live — Volume 2 CD booklet by the Choir of St. John’s College. (https://www.sjcchoir.co.uk/listen/releases/advent-live-volume-2)

Cecilia McDowall wrote A Prayer of St. John the Baptist for this marvelous choir, which has recorded a two-disk set of Advent-specific choral music from yearly Advent services: Advent Live. This set really is a fantastic resource for the season, and both albums are readily available on Spotify.

Advent Live (https://open.spotify.com/album/4AIKjFrkCLQWmZXx0fyjhq?si=_dNVIhNCQw2K9bN-JJHKjw)

Advent Live — Volume 2 (https://open.spotify.com/album/4L1Pb97Hn2ahlpsdQxA5m4?si=-AKVXu3pSXifFx5xPcuaZA)

A Prayer of St. John the Baptist, Cecilia McDowall (https://soundcloud.com/oupacademic/05-a-prayer-to-st-john-the)

Enjoy!
—Justin Appel, Director of Music