A little under two weeks ago, this site presented its first account of a video in the St. Mary’s Music Notes series. This series was conceived by Eric Choate, Director of Music at The Episcopal Church of St. Mary the Virgin. In the video he was seen accompanying soprano Ellen Leslie at the piano. The program, the ninth in the series, was only ten minutes in duration, presenting four songs by Déodat de Séverac. Since that release, two more videos have been added to the series.
The tenth video is a lecture-demonstration presented by bass Jess Perry, who sings regularly at St. Mary’s services. (He is also a member of both the Philharmonia Baroque Chorale and the San Francisco Opera Chorus and was last seen on this site for his role in organizing communal singing during shelter-in-place at the Opera Plaza condominium.) The topic was the Exsultet (rejoice) chant, which is sung during the Easter Vigil. The demonstration portion did not present the entire chant, which is particularly lengthy. Rather, Perry discussed the different overall segments, performing an example of each of them. All of those performances took place with the visual display of the square notation of the neumes of Gregorian chant on a four-line staff with the earliest form of a C clef:
The result was a thoroughly engaging introduction to music that has been part of religious services for about the last 2000 years.
The eleventh video presented another aspect of Choate’s musical contributions to St. Mary’s. The video served as the “virtual premiere” of his composition “Beloved, Let Us Love,” a four-part a cappella setting of verses from the first chapter of the Gospel of John. Here, again, the performance was supplemented by the (now contemporary) notation of the score. This would probably enhance the experience of those familiar with music notation, since Choate commands a highly inventive approach to the interleaving of polyphonic voices. The tempo marking is “Calm and expressive,” which could not be a better designation of the engaging rhetoric of Choate’s inventive skills.
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