My choir will be doing the Ralph Vaughan Williams “Antiphon” from Five Mystical Songs on Christ the King. If you don’t know that set of songs, you should load up WinMX and poke around. Or go to the library. Or hit Amazon.com.
It’s a pretty tough piece: the parts are high, there are many key changes, the organ part is a beast. We managed to learn the parts last night, so we should be in good shape for a week from Sunday.
Here’s the text:
Let all the world in every corner sing,
My God and King!
The heavens are not too high,
His praise may thither fly:
The earth is not too low,
His praises there may grow.
Let all the world in every corner sing,
My God and King!
The church with Psalms must shout.
No door can keep them out:
But above all, the heart
Must bear the longest part.
Let all the world in every corner sing,
My God and King!
VERRRRRY nice selection! What parish are you at? I’d love to attend that Mass to hear! Please shoot an e-mail to me if you have a chance.
That’s a terrific piece!
I offered to sing “The Call” from that same set for a wedding last summer, but the organist told me it was “too morbid.”
The reason? It contains the word “death.”
Going to a perfomrance of the Westerly Chorale this weekend…this piece is on the menu together will John Rutter’s “Mass of the Children”….Look forward to hearing both!
I have a recording of this… it’s an awesome piece!
St. Mark in Vienna, VA is my parish, it’s 15 miles west of Washington DC. Mass is at 10am.
We did that piece for our parish’s 75th anniversary celebration last August. (Actually, the 75th of our building, not our parish). It was a lot of fun to sing, even for us basses.
I love this hymn! It’s beautiful. The choir sang it as a recessional at my wedding in 1992. What a joyous day that was and I couldn’t have selected a better recessional hymn.