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Machaut: La Messe de Nostre Dame

The evening of May 24, 2014 will be a special musical memory for me. After a year of work on transcription and rehearsal, my medieval women’s group Schola Magdalena performed Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame for 170 listeners at St. Mary Magdalene church in Toronto. Our programme also featured plainchant, the Lady Anthems, a sample of Hildegard of Bingen, and our own version of the evening service of Compline, intended to be sung in monastic communities just before bedtime. The acoustic of St. Mary Mag’s, paired with a luminous atmosphere of candlelight, made this particularly rewarding to share with our… Read More »Machaut: La Messe de Nostre Dame

Great Navigational Errors: Episode 1

Great Navigational Errors: Episode 1 –  France Have you ever read a map incorrectly, taken a wrong turn, swerved off a highway exit too soon, ending up somewhere you were not supposed to be? I bet you have. Allow me to share some stories of astoundingly bad navigation. Episode one takes place in 2006, the hottest summer ever in France, driving north from Toulouse in the south, to visit a famous monastery called Solemnes somewhere vaguely north of Chartres, to hear some monks sing Gregorian chant so beautifully that it will transport us to some heavenly place. I’m travelling with… Read More »Great Navigational Errors: Episode 1

Happy Easter

Just in time for Easter, here is our Pax Christi video. Two previous blogs refer to this, so I am very pleased to present it to you, hot off the press, with best wishes for a happy and healthy Eastertide. Now the Queen of Seasons

Pax Christi Chorale

Interview with David Perlman; Wholenote Magazine

If you click this link below you’ll go to Youtube, and you can watch a video interview with David Perlman. We’re talking about composition, teaching, learning, writing for choirs, our new Pax Christi video, technology and other things. Click on this link: Wholenote Interview Thanks to Wholenote magazine, David Perlman and Bryson Winchester for the opportunity to chat about music!

Passion and Peace: Q and A with Susan Mahoney

Pax Christi Chorale is putting the finishing touches on our Spring concert “Passion and Peace” coming up on April 26 in Kitchener and April 27 in Toronto. We’re performing Jean Langlais’ Missa Salve Regina, Faure’s Messe Basse and Randall Thompson’s Peaceable KIngdom. Here’s a short interview with Susan Mahoney about the repertoire.   Q – All of the music in this concert was composed in the 20th century. Why did you want to move away from the Bach-Mozart-Handel canon? There’s room on the dance floor for everyone. Not every choir will take musical chances like Pax Christi does. That’s why… Read More »Passion and Peace: Q and A with Susan Mahoney

An Easter present for your choir

In case you have not visited the compositions page of this site recently, please do. You may know already that now and then I post a PDF of a composition (usually for choir) and if you click on it you can download it. My most recent “free gift” is an Easter anthem for SATB choir, organ and brass quintet with obligato timpani. The text is a hymn for Easter day, written originally in Greek by John of Damascus sometime in the eighth century, and translated by a Victorian clergyman John Mason Neale, whose portrait I include at the top of… Read More »An Easter present for your choir

Springtime’s weird sisters

Nights grow shorter. Birds return. The long, mourning Winter softens into tender Spring. Earth sweeps through her epic costume changes, and the actors come and go from the stage of our little life. Nature, in her gaudy battle garb, conspires with dreadful Disease and fickle Fate to grasp home her own before timid Time can parry. The scene is ruined. The gig is up. We watchers mourn for lost Love, lost Hope, lost Life. We mourn for the Act that could have been. Gentle reader, the play is true and hard. You too must take a role; you must lose… Read More »Springtime’s weird sisters

Two Chairs

I have two chairs at my table. One chair was purchased at Home Depot two years ago and required some assembly. The other I bought back in 1982 in a country store. Striking out on my own and requiring some furniture for my student apartment, I went shopping for furniture with my Mom. We stopped in at a miscellany store in the lovely little village of Millbank, Ontario. We loved this village because there were cool shops, a bridge, a twist in the road, and also, incredibly, the hovering spirit of the Millbank Muse who could tell the future, as… Read More »Two Chairs

Support the Arts: Invest in the city

There is a matrix of small arts groups that keeps our city vivid and warm despite the cold winter. Not all of us have huge audiences, but our specific activities spin into a great wheel of culture that reveals meaning in this confusing maze of urban life. This month, my big oratorio choir Pax Christi Chorale has been granted support from artsVest. ArtsVest will match any business sponsorships we receive before March 3rd, 2014. That’s only two weeks away, so we are quite enthusiastically looking for a business that loves choral music and might help us on our way. With… Read More »Support the Arts: Invest in the city

500,000 hits

When your blog ticker says you’ve reached 500,000 hits, is it appropriate to open a bottle of bubbly? Pax Christi Chorale and Laura Adlers set me up on my blog back in September 2010 when I left the choir for a Sabbatical break. Back then I wrote “I blog, therefore I am.” The blog really was a lifeline whilst travelling alone in Europe; a place to sort out my own experiences and record events and impressions of things I saw and people I met. It was a great comfort in my dark time of grief and provided a venue for… Read More »500,000 hits