First Sunday Music

This First Sunday in December, Saint Philip’s adult choir and chamber ensemble will present an eclectic selection of music for Advent, featuring anthems by the Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan.

MacMillan’s high standing in the art music scene is well-deserved, as he consistently produces high-caliber work in a variety of formats, including large-scale symphonic works. As a devout and active church musician, he has contributed significantly to a body of sacred choral repertoire of substantive quality and ethnic particularity, with roots in his Catholic tradition. Rather than capitalizing on popular contemporary musical characteristics—minimalism, lush harmonies, social activism—his compositions tend to engage with traditional musical processes, earthy materials, and transcendent topics, and in a way that evidences the composer’s faith.

MacMillan’s Advent Antiphon recycles music from his lovely psalm anthem, A New Song, with specific verses and Offertory or Communion antiphons for each Sunday in Advent. The refrains are simple and suitable for congregational singing, while the verses must be sung by a cantor, and involve evocative Scottish ornamentation.

One of Saint Philip’s choir’s favorite works, which often features in the Easter Vigil, is MacMillan’s eight-part motet, Christus Vincit, with words from the 11th century Worcester Acclamations. This coming Sunday, taking cues from Freddie Crowley and the Corvus Consort, the choirs will perform an arrangement of the motet during the Offertory that divides the eight parts between choir (SATB) and a saxophone quartet, with angelic solos sung by Abby Alexander.

At the Communion, we are privileged to sing a motet from MacMillan’s set of moderately-difficult mass propers written for the church year, the Strathclyde Motets. This text, In splendoribus sanctorum, is the Communion Antiphon from Midnight Mass on Christmas Day, which translates to ‘In the brightness of the saints: from the womb before the day star I begot you.’ Here, MacMillan juxtaposes four placid choral phrases with brilliant, clarion solos for a solo trumpet. These parts are repeated multiple times, while the trumpeter is given increasing freedom to choose which element to use and when to start playing. The resulting ‘aleatoric’ relationship gives the work a surprising diversity of interpretive possibilities, and a kind of improvisatory freedom.

In addition to these anthems, the chamber ensemble will provide two additional voluntaries for the services. The opening work is the Prayer of St. Gregory by Alan Hovaness for solo trumpet and organ. Hovaness was Armenian-American, and as trumpet player David Cooper points out, this piece depicts a prayer by Gregory the Illuminator, saint and missionary to the Armenian people in the early 4th century. The composer has described this popular work as ‘a prayer in darkness’, and as such, it serves as an apt contemplation on Advent themes.

We will conclude the services with a unique piece of Max Richter’s work for string quintet, On the nature of daylight, but here arranged for saxophone quartet and cello. This haunting work has appeared in multiple film scores and has even been mixed with Dinah Washington’s 1960 song This Bitter Earth to stunning effect. The work, essentially a three-part repeating cell with embellishments, manages to speak to the ambiguities and mystery of life, particularly to the meaning of pain and of the ultimate redemption of suffering.

—Justin Appel, Director of Music