Songs For All Seasons

Happy New Year's Eve everyone! So we come to the final day of the inaugural year of the project - it's been a brilliant start! I have 38 songs all ready to go out to my participating Beta choirs, two Christmas songs already gone out and one video returned already! I am most encouraged by the enthusiasm shown and the complimentary feedback I have already received. Today's Song of the Day is a setting of the famous poem "Ring Out, Wild Bells" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. On the theme of ringing out the bad and ringing in the good, it entreats the reader to forget any unpleasantness of the year gone and focus on the good that can be done in the year to come. Historically, the New Year has not always begun on 1st January. The early Roman calendar began the year on 1st March. The calendar then had just 10 months, beginning with March. September through to December, the ninth through to the twelfth months of the Gregorian calendar, were originally positioned as the seventh...

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...

Today is the Feast Day of St. John the Evangelist (c. 6 AD – c. 100 AD), the name traditionally given to the author of the Gospel of John. Christians have traditionally identified him with John the Apostle, John of Patmos (the author of the Book of Revelation), and John the Presbyter, although there is no consensus on how many of these may actually be the same individual. This is a setting of a poem or hymn from hymn or carol from a book called "New Christmas Carols, 1661 AD" - there is no author attributed to it. Despite its title of "On Saint John's Day" it's actually mostly about Christmas food, mince pies particularly. This is apt as, like many others I am sure, I overbought for Christmas - as I do every year - and still have plenty of Christmas food in the house which we are slowly eating through, including mince pies! So please enjoy this song while you eat your mince pies, secure in the knowledge that you are conti...

Christmas Day is over for another year, so Happy Boxing Day to my UK readers. Boxing Day may not be celebrated world-wide, but 26th December is St. Stephen's Day throughout Western Christendom. Today's Song of the Day is a setting of a hymn, or rather the translation of a hymn in praise of St. Stephen by Adam of St. Victor: Yesterday, With Exultation. These words are probably the oldest in the entire collection, Adam of St. Victor having lived c. 1068 – 1146. The archives of Notre Dame Cathedral dated 1098 note that Adam held office there first as a subdeacon and later as a precentor. He left the cathedral for the Abbey of Saint Victor around 1133, remaining there until his death. Stephen (c. 5 AD – c. 34 AD) is traditionally venerated as the protomartyr or first martyr of Christianity. According to the Acts of the Apostles, he was a deacon in the early church at Jerusalem who angered members of various synagogues by his teachings. Accused of blasphemy at his trial, he made a s...

Merry, Merry Christmas everyone!! I hope you are enjoying your Christmas morning and commiserations to those of you with young children who were no doubt up at the crack of dawn, fizzing with excitement about Father Christmas arriving!!! I promise, it does get better! I had to actually wake my 17-year-old up this morning to come down for presents. Today's Song of the Day is a setting of a poem called The Star of Bethlehem by William Cullen Bryant (1794 – 1878), an American romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post. Born in a log cabin in Massachusetts, he started his career as a lawyer but showed an interest in poetry early in his life. Bryant wrote this poem as a hymn for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Church of the Messiah in Boston, Massachusetts. It was also sung at his funeral. In praise of the Star of Bethlehem., it rejoices that children are led to the Saviour by the Star and entreats that this continue. The Star of Bethlehem B...

Happy Christmas Eve all you lovely people! Christmas is of course the time of year when choirs sing songs that require them to imitate bells and I have naturally continued this time-honoured tradition in today's featured Song of the Day.  For Christmas Eve, I have for you a setting of a poem called "The Song of the Bells" by Canadian poet Jean Blewett (1862-1934). With a title like that, how could I resist the urge to have my choirs ding-donging away! With echoes of Charles Dickens' famous novella "A Christmas Carol" this song tells the tale of an cynical, selfish old man who, long since having lost his enjoyment of Christmas, finds joy again in giving to others on Christmas Eve. The Song Of The Bells By Jean Blewett He frowned and shook his snowy head. "Those clanging bells! they deafen quite With their unmeaning song," he said. "I'm weary of it all to-night - The gladness, sadness. I'm so old I have no sympathy to spare, My heart has...