December 30, 2012 - Christmas 1

Hymn at the Cradle
The First Christmas - Celius Dougherty
Partita on In Dulci Jubilo - Kevin Hildebrand

Hymns: #105 God Rest Ye Merry, #110 Venite Adoramus,
              #115 Greensleeves, #107 In Dulci Jubilo

This week’s music is our one chance to get in all of the Christmas carols that we didn’t catch on Christmas Eve. It is also one of the few times during the church year that the choir gets a Sunday off. For the prelude I will be improvising a medley of cradle hymns. I have not completely worked out what I am doing but you can plan on strains of Infant Holy, Infant Lowly mixing with two settings of Away in a Manger (Mueller and Cradle Song) as well as snippets of other random carols and perhaps a little Brahms…

The First Christmas by Celius Dougherty (1902-1986). Dougherty received his earliest musical training at home from his mother, the valedictorian of her college, a music education supervisor, church organist, choir and band director and piano teacher. Dougherty later studied at the University of Minnesota and later Julliard where he met several prominent singers and made a successful living as an accompanist and later he and Vincenz Ruzicka toured as a piano duo. Dougherty was known as a composer for whom the text was of the utmost importance. He is best remembered for his art songs which draw on the texts of many famous American poets but also include settings of Chinese poems and entries from the dictionary and newspapers. This setting of the The First Christmas by Elizabeth Fleming is a gentle lullaby. The melodic line is evocative of the beloved carol Stille Nacht while the accompaniment goes from throbbing chords to tolling bells and then to a lovely duet with the soloist. It is easy to see that Dougherty had interest in collaborative piano; the accompaniment is almost as interesting as the vocal line.

The postlude is the Sinfonia from Kevin Hildebrand’s (b. 1973) Partita on “In dulci Jubilo.” Hildebarnd is the Associate Kantor at Concordia Theological Seminary where he studied as an undergraduate. He then went on to study at the University of Michigan with Marilyn Mason to whom the piece is dedicated. This 14^th century German melody may have started its life as a dance tune. This carol became associated with the text Good Christian Men Rejoice, is a paraphrase of the original macronic (mixed language) text by the English hymn writer and translator John M. Neale. The setting by Hildebrand is subtitled: With homage to Dietrich Buxtehude on the 300^th anniversary of his death. Buxtehude was known for his chorale based fantasias and partitas which took well known hymns and transformed them into highly decorated pieces of organ music. This Sinfonia exploits the different divisions of the organ by moving from the Great to the Positive division and for today’s piece I am contrasting the real pipes with the digital to further contrast the difference between divisions.