From the Organist & Choirmaster

This Sunday will feature several Anglican staples of “classics” as I like to call them. At the 10:30 am Mass the Parish Choir will sing Herbert Howells’ Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks and Vaughan Williams’ arrangement of Herefordshire Carol, both reflecting the uniqueness of English sacred music. I bring particular focus to Herefordshire Carol or “This is the truth from above.” “The truth sent from above” is an English folk carol of unknown authorship usually used at Christmas. It was collected in the early part of the 20th century by folk song collectors in Shropshire and Herefordshire and while many versions of the text exist, most of them are broadly similar. Cecil Sharp, and Edwardian folk song collector, collected an eight-stanza version from Mr. Seth Vandrell and Mr. Samuel Bradley of Donnington Wood in Shropshire. Ralph Vaughn Williams obtained a different, Dorian mode version of the carol at King’s Pyon, Herefordshire in 1909 with help from Ella Mart Leather, the Herefordshire folklorist who had first collected it from oral tradition. This version contains only four stanzas, and is known as Herefordshire Carol which was first published in the Folk-Song Society Journal in 1909. He later went on to use the carols to open his Fantasia on Christmas Carols of 1912. Gerald Finzi, with permission from Vaughan Williams and Mrs. Leather, also used the melody as the basis of his 1925 choral work The Brightness of This Day, substituting the text for a poem of George Herbert.

At Evensong, you’ll hear a great modern setting of the Evening Canticles composed by Scottish born composer Joanna Forbes L’Estrange as well as Charles Wood’s O thou the Central Orb a great Victorian piece which will add a nice contrast to the more modern harmonies the Canticles bring.