My first introduction to the Anglican tradition was the lovely liturgy of choral
Evensong, performed as night falls at English cathedrals - and many of the Oxford colleges. I didn't make the Worcester College choir but now, decades later, I've participated in a choral Evensong at last! This was at Holy Apostles, whose choir I
joined two weeks ago, and it was quite a deep dive. The choir has about a dozen members, four of them professional singers and the rest highly experienced, but even for such a group I imagine our rehearsal time was on the short side. (We'd also led the hymns and sung two anthems during the 11 o'clock service this morning.) We'd practiced bits of Stanford's opulent "
Magnificat" and spare "
Nunc Dimitis" at weekly rehearsals before, but made our way through Willan's wildly undulating "
Lo, in the time appointed" after just a single run-through an hour before! I stumbled discreetly twice but apparently we sounded lovely.
Quite exhilarating! And bonus: the text is one I'd just been
reading about as confirmation that the authors of the Hebrew Bible were more open to the personhood of the natural world than we are:
the mountains
and the hills shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the
field shall clap their hands (Isaiah 55:12). If they can, so can I!
My first introduction to the Anglican tradition was the lovely liturgy of choral Evensong, performed as night falls at English cathedrals - and many of the Oxford colleges. I didn't make the Worcester College choir but now, decades later, I've participated in a choral Evensong at last! This was at Holy Apostles, whose choir I joined two weeks ago, and it was quite a deep dive. The choir has about a dozen members, four of them professional singers and the rest highly experienced, but even for such a group I imagine our rehearsal time was on the short side. (We'd also led the hymns and sung two anthems during the 11 o'clock service this morning.) We'd practiced bits of Stanford's opulent "Magnificat" and spare "Nunc Dimitis" at weekly rehearsals before, but made our way through Willan's wildly undulating "Lo, in the time appointed" after just a single run-through an hour before! I stumbled discreetly twice but apparently we sounded lovely. 
