From the Organist & Choirmaster

This Sunday at the 10:30 am Mass, the Parish Choir will sing Love Bade Me Welcome as the Communion Anthem. The text of the piece is George Herbert’s stunning poem Love (3), it reads as follows:

This well beloved poem by Herbert is masterfully set to music by the American composer David Hurd who was born over 300 years after Herbert’s death in 1633. Hurd captures the vulnerability of the poem in very intense and closer harmonies in the inner voices and contrasts the upper and lower voices by using very distant harmonies that seem to clash with one another. I think that Hurd does this to highlight the question and answering between Love and the person in the poem.

It is a relatively simple anthem, using the same musical structure for the three verses, so the choir must make things interesting by observing different tempi and dynamics, rather than singing the same thing three times at the same volume and speed.

In choir rehearsal Wednesday, we went around the choir and read aloud the poem, each chorister taking one line. It’s one thing to read the text as it appears on the musical score, so often we read texts before we begin learning a piece. I find that when we do read texts before singing them, we often understand the text more and can put our emotions into it when we sing it. From reading Herbert’s poem, the conversational attitude was revealed more, and the punctuation became more clear and from that, Hurd’s notation made more sense.

I hope you enjoy this Sunday’s Communion anthem, Love Bade Me Welcome!

Cody