Our Chancel Choir

Chancel Choir - Lend Your Voice!

A group of twenty-five to thirty people, the Chancel Choir provides music for most Sunday services, along with special programs for Christmas and Holy Week. During the church year the choir also presents large-scale sacred works during worship services. Rehearsals are Thursday 7:30 to 9:15 pm in the Fireside Room (from September through May.) We are always looking for new members. Come join us!

SUMMER CHOIR DATES:

June 20, June 27, July 11, July 18, July 25

Meet in the choir loft at 9:45 am to learn the piece for that day's worship service.

All are welcome.

On Pentecost Sunday, May 23, the Choir presented Paul Winter's Missa Gaia (Earth Mass). Gaia is the name that ancient Greeks gave to their home, their planet. Integrating world music with songs from the wild to celebrate the whole earth as a sacred space, the Missa Gaia was composed in 1980. Since 1985 it has been performed in the Cathedral of St John the Divine to celebrate the Feast of St Francis. Paul Winter's joyous, rhythmic, contemporary EARTH MASS incorporates the voices of wolf, whale, eagle, harp seal, Amazonian musical wren, and Russian loon with the choir and small orchestra.

"Winter has achieved a distinguished triumph in combining divergent music styles and imaginatively wedding voices, instrumentation and recorded sounds of a tundra wolf, canyon and musical wrens, harp seals, a flight of loons and singing humpback whales."

On March 28, the Choir presented Bach's Cantata #106, one of the best known of Bach's earlier cantatas. The text consists of a group of Bible verses. The work is for four-part chorus, with solos for tenor, bass, and alto. The unusual instrumental scoring of two recorders, two violas da gamba, and continuo underlines the serious nature of the work; the prevailing dark-hued texture is established from the outset in the somber but peaceful beauty of the opening instrumental sonatina which leads into a chorus propounding the theme that life and death come to all in God's own good time. The chorus develops into a lively fugal section as man's days on earth are considered, but again takes on a darker resonance as the text refers to his mortality. The tenor soloist laments the brevity of man's life on earth, only to be emphatically reminded by the bass that it is God's law that all men must die. The superb chorus that stands at the center of the cantata at first elaborates on this theme, but then tranquilly welcomes the thought of death with the words "Yes, come Lord Jesus." The idea of the repose of death is then picked up in the aria for alto with an obbligato part for viola da gamba. The bass then follows with the words of Christ to the sinner on the cross, before the chorale hymn "In dich hab ich gehoffet, Herr" (In you I have placed my hope, Lord) and a fugue on the word "Amen" bring this short, but intensely moving cantata to an unexpectedly exuberant conclusion.

On December 6, 2009, the Choir presented Britten's 'Saint Nicolas' Cantata.

2010 Sundays off

Sept. 26, Oct. 24, Nov. 28, Dec. 26

2010-11 Choir Snack Providers - contact Karen to fill a slot.