ADVENT IV

This morning we explore the extreme duality of late Advent: the poise of introspection and the thrill of expectation side by side, the quiet and the quickening pulse – like an eager child’s silent glee...

Louis-Claude Daquin, Jewish by birth, lived and worked in Paris in the mid-18th century. ‘Etranger’ means ‘stranger,’ or ‘foreigner,’ and simply refers to a non-native musical tune. The texture, though, is pure, French Baroque flair…

Tara Faircloth, one of the really gifted and excellent young American stage directors, is also a wonderful singer who makes St. Philip her musical home when in between engagements… We offer an improvisation on a well-known and captivating tune based on a fragment collected by Folklorist and Composer John Jacob Niles in 1933. While in rural North Carolina he was attending a fund-raising meeting of local Evangelicals when:

“A girl had stepped out to the edge of the little platform attached to the automobile. She began to sing. Her clothes were unbelievable dirty and ragged, and she, too, was unwashed. Her ash-blond hair hung down in long skeins.... But, best of all, she was beautiful, and in her untutored way, she could sing. She smiled as she sang, smiled rather sadly, and sang only a single line of a song.”

You can keep up with Tara’s whereabouts and current projects at www.tarafaircloth.com.

Phyllis Tate (1911-1987) was known as one of the avant-garde composers of 20th century England, though you’d never know it by listening to her delightful and lucid and charming settings of old Moravian carols… I conducted the U.S. premiere of her cantata “Compassion” back in 1998, something more in her typical style… …the choir never forgave me.

The Youth Choir [whose fine bass section is coming into focus this year…] offers a ‘faux-baroque’ arrangement of the familiar round: ‘Dona nobis pacem.’ Listen for the colors in the organ accompaniment….

The Response to the Benediction is the last page of a setting of a complete meditation of Julian of Norwich (1342-1416?), the sentiment of which sums up the entire narrative of Advent very nicely, indeed.

-Keith Weber