Music Notes 4-14-24
Eileen and I left Los Angeles on the 4th for a 2-week trip to Paris, so last week and this week, Paul and the choir are very capably holding down the fort. In fact, by the time you read this on Sunday morning, we will have already gone to church at Saint Sulpice, the beautiful cathedral in the Latin Quarter, made famous, and infamous, in Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code. Long before Dan Brown came along, Saint Sulpice was renowned for its organ and its organists. The organ is one of the most renowned in the world and the list of resident organists over the centuries is a list of Who’s Who, including Charles-Marie Widor, Marcel Dupré and the current resident organist Karol Mossakowski. I sent him a note asking him about the organ schedule, and he told me that he was playing at the Mass on the 14th and there was a concert that afternoon. Guess where we’ll be that day……
Up until the Protestant Reformation, all music for the church was written in Latin (of course). After about 1539, it was required by law that all music for the English church was to be written in English, and Thomas Tallis was one of the first composers to really tackle that project with gusto. Thomas Tallis was born around 1505, which places him about half a century before William Shakespeare. Little is known about his early years, and in fact, there are no contemporary portraits of him – nobody painted his portrait while he was alive, so we don’t even know what he looked like. There is a rare sample of his signature, in which he spells his name “Tallys”. He eventually ended up at Canterbury Cathedral, where he was sent to Court in 1543 as Gentleman of the Chapel Royal. There he wrote and performed for King Henry VIII, King Edward VI, Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth I (until his death in 1585). It was during his Elizabethan period that he wrote one of his most famous works, the unique motet Spem In Alium, a piece written for 8 five voice choirs. We sang that piece at the Disney Hall, and the surround effect is remarkable. In 1575, he and his student, William Byrd, were given a 21-year monopoly by Queen Elizabeth I for polyphonic music, and a patent to print and publish music, which was one of the first arrangements of this kind in the country. He had exclusive rights to print any music in any language, and he and Byrd were the only ones allowed to use the paper that was used in printing music. His anthem If Ye Love Me is his most famous anthem, was from the time of Edward’s reign, and is judged to be on par with his later works during his Elizabethan period. It was first published in 1560 in a book titled Certaine notes set forthe in foure and three partes.
Hillsong Church is a Pentecostal megachurch based in Sydney, Australia. Founded by Brian and Bobbie Houston in August of 1983, the church grew to the point where the word “megachurch” is utterly redefined by them, with campuses in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Newcastle, Gold Coast and Noosa. In addition, they have international churches in London, Bermondsey (Greater London), Oxford, Guildford, Kent and Newcastle (United Kingdom), Cape Town and Pretoria (South Africa), Kiev (Ukraine), Paris, Lyon and Marseille (France), Konstanz and Duesseldorf (Germany), Stockholm, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Moscow, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Los Angeles, New York, New Jersey and 3 campuses scheduled to open this year in Arizona.
The band Hillsong United was formed in 1998 from close friends within the Hillsong youth ministry (called “Powerhouse Youth”). So many songs were being written within the youth ministry that it was suggested they make an album. The songs One and Everyday were recorded and released with the annual Hillsong worship album in 1999. They both achieved gold sales status in Australia, and the band has gone on to win five Dove Awards in 2014 and were nominated for an American Music Award and won the Billboard Music Award Top Christian Artist in 2015. Their song Oceans was released in 2013 on their album Zion and was certified Platinum – 1,000,000 copies sold.