Songs For All Seasons

Today's Song of the Day is the second of the two songs I have written to celebrate the Feast Day of the Holy Innocents, the babies who were slaughtered by order of King Herod in his attempt to find and kill the baby Jesus. This day is celebrated on both the 28th and 29th of December, the 28th in the Western Church and the 29th in the Eastern Church. This second song is called "The Holy Innocents" (not to be confused with the first one I shared yesterday which lacks the "The") and is a setting of a poem/hymn by English writer and poet Laurence Housman (1865 – 1959). Housman was a prolific writer with around a hundred published works to his name. Some of his plays were scandalous for depicting biblical characters and living members of the Royal House on stage, which at the time was illegal, and many of them were performed only privately until the subsequent relaxation of theatrical censorship. This poem was published in The English Hymnal in 1906. My setting is a ...

Today is the Feast of the Holy Innocents - a day to remember the babies of Bethlehem massacred by order of King Herod in his attempt to murder the Baby Jesus. The slain children were regarded by the early church as the first martyrs, but it is uncertain when the day was first kept as a saint’s day. It may have been commemorated with Epiphany, but by the 5th century it was kept as a separate festival. In Rome it was a day of fasting and mourning. I have written two songs for this Feast Day, the second of which I will share tomorrow, when the Eastern Church commemorates this feast day. Today's song is a setting of a poem, beautiful in its simplicity, by Christina Rossetti, simply called "Holy Innocents". It equates their terrible fate with a sleep, watched over by angels, out of which they will awaken to a world of everlasting love, light and warmth, surrounded by the "eternal Arms" of God. My setting is appropriately simple and lullaby-like, but (if I'm allow...