First Sunday Music
On the first Sunday of each month from October through May, Saint Philip’s choirs sing a more substantial work during services, often with instruments. This “First Sunday Music” pattern is a vital part of the choral tradition at Saint Philip’s.
This Sunday, October 2, Saint Philip’s adult and youth choir will kick off the annual sequence of First Sunday Music with a beloved cantata for soloists, choir, and organ by Benjamin Britten: Rejoice in the Lamb.
This 10-part cantata was first commissioned in 1937 by the Rev’d Walter Hussey to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Saint Matthew’s Church, Northampton. Britten chose to set 48 lines from a longer work by the 18th-century poet Christopher Smart, called Jubilate Agno. It was written during a six-year period when Smart was a resident of St. Luke’s Hospital, an insane asylum.
The text follows a kind of responsorial pattern which, together with biblical references and language, reveals a mind steeped in Scripture and psalmic constructions. Britten managed to chose particularly felicitous lines from Smart’s 1,200-line poem and he set these lines with a creative arc that is quirky, empathetic, and deeply satisfying.
The work starts with a choral invocation to rejoice in God’s creation, beginning with characters from the Old Testament: Nimrod the mighty hunter, Ishmael, Balaam, Daniel, Ithamar, Jakim, and David are all referenced with sometimes fantastical references to creatures. (Even a Satyr is mentioned.) Later, various soloists deliver a series of paeans to God by recounting the activity of certain created subjects, each of which manifests God’s glory: the poet’s cat, Jeoffry; a mouse; and, flowers. The chorus returns with a particularly riveting expression of the poet’s self-awareness, including references to his interactions with “officers of the peace,” and a notion of being “beside himself.”
The choir’s final chorus is particularly exciting as the poet enumerates a list of instruments (shawm, harp, cymbal, flute, bassoon, dulcimer, clarinet, and trumpet) and a series of rhymes that accompany each in a responsorial fashion, building to an explosive statement in which God himself plays a trumpet, accompanied by “all the instruments in HEAVEN.”
Finally, and repeating a refrain from the beginning of the cantata, the choir sings “hallelujah” to a jaunty dotted rhythm—the musical trope that most readily invokes the presence of royalty—though here the rhythms are not equal, but quintuplets (groups of five notes). Britten likely uses this technique in the War Requiem to emphasize the “madness” of war, and here it allows us to contemplate how a deep sanity may exist alongside serious mental illness, possibly even connecting this work to the traditional theme of “holy foolishness” or “foolishness for Christ.”
—Justin Appel, Director of Music