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April update

Now that Easter is past I want to update you on some musical adventures in April. It’s a busy month, so if you’re interested in keeping in touch, here are some highlights for you. I’m always pleased to know when people are performing my music. I was particularly pleased to learn that St. Michael’s Choir school will be singing my little devotional anthem “Tantum Ergo” in Rome, and maybe even for the Pope if he isn’t too busy to hear the boys sing a concert for him in the Sistine chapel. My friend Teri Dunn conducts the choir and she’ll… Read More »April update

Remembering Bruce Hill

Pax Christi Chorale oversees the Bruce Kirkpatrick Hill Memorial Fund. This season the fund is being used to bring 50 high school students into our production of Handel’s SOLOMON. By facilitating this opportunity for young musicians to sing alongside trained adults, a professional orchestra and soloists, we hope we can pass on our love of great choral music to the next generation. I know Bruce would have been pleased as punch about this. It is simply incomprehensible that a year has passed since Bruce died. I figure pretty much everyone reading this blog was a friend of Bruce, so I… Read More »Remembering Bruce Hill

The Sunday Edition

If you listen to CBC radio on Sunday mornings, make sure to tune in to CBC 1 (99.1 on the FM dial) and listen to Michael Enright’s show The Sunday Edition and listen to his segment called “Sunday School.” In fact if you’ve just clicked on that link you can listen to it right now. The idea of this spot is that Michael is a life-long learner and is always asking questions and trying to take on something new. It was certainly fun to go down to the CBC Toronto studio and have a go at teaching this radio star!… Read More »The Sunday Edition

Free stuff

My website has something new. I’m featuring a score you can download for free. “The Glorious City” will be up on the site for about a month. Just go to the compositions page and click on the featured box and you’ll get a PDF of the score. This SSATB piece was commissioned in 2010 by the Association of Anglican Musicians in the USA, and it was sung at their annual convention that year. It is unpublished at the moment, so I thought I’d just share it with you as a gift. If you’d like to hear a recording of this… Read More »Free stuff

Schola goes modern

What do Emily Walker, Meghan Bunce, Maurice Durufle, Perotin and Hildegard have in common? Honestly I can not say for sure, but on February 7 and 8 we are going to perform works by these diverse composers that span a thousand years, thousands of miles and many generations of musical ideas and styles. It’s an interesting experiment, and it was Glen Buhr’s idea to bring us together with some young composers who would write new music for us. We (Schola Magdalena,that is) are a group of women who sing a lot of Gregorian chant, polyphonic music written in the middle… Read More »Schola goes modern

Thanks, Marta

I had an email from a colleague today. It was from Marta McCarthy, the amazing powerhouse behind choral activities at the University of Guelph. Our e-encounter was sort of arbitrary. I had sought out her advice about something far in the future. Well, I might as well tell you. She had just performed Healey Willan’s “Mystery of Bethlehem” this past December with her university choir, and I was seeking her advice about the piece, since I am planning to perform it with my own choir, Pax Christi Chorale next season. Willan’s “Mystery of Bethlehem” is a fairly large-scale Christmas cantata… Read More »Thanks, Marta

air canada

Six days in London

Mid-December is a great time to be in London, where Christmas is taken very seriously. It’s impossible to navigate around the city without bumping into carol singers, twinkling lights or “drinks parties”, and there’s plenty of sumptuous music going on. I heard the choir of Westminster Abbey sing a Christmas concert to a sold out crowd of about 2000, a dress rehearsal at Handel House of Messiah performed by my friends Trevor and Gitai, I Fagiolini singing “The Little Match Girl Passion” by David Lang at the Spitalfields festival, Paul MacCreesh and the Gabrieli Consort with Britten’s “A boy was… Read More »Six days in London

Legend of the Bird

One last musical composition for me to chase down this season is the Legend of the Bird which I’ve written for the Anglican cathedral choir in Victoria, British Columbia. This carol for a cappella choir and children’s choir will be sung at the Nine Lessons and Carols service on Sunday Dec. 23, in the cathedral at 4:30 pm. When I was asked to write the piece, I recalled a very small sculpture of a bird high on top of one of the stone pillars in the south aisle of the cathedral. I have been fascinated by this little stone robin… Read More »Legend of the Bird

The Portinari Nativity

THE PORTINARI NATIVITY        Cori Martin (2012) The ruined stable’s open to the air, a stage on which the rustic scene plays out. Here stumbling shepherds fix their gaping faces, their brothers rushing from the hill behind where heavenly hosts have choired goodwill to them. More angels, anxious, hover in the roof or roost below in feathered flocks. All keep respectful distance, hanging back, the uncertain parents, too, unmoving. All awestruck, dumb with wonder, cluster in a perfect circlet round the little one. He wears no swaddling clothes; bare skin’s exposed to winter’s chill. Only his holy glow… Read More »The Portinari Nativity

Winter Nights II

The premiere of a new piece is always an exciting event, but let me tell you, for a “modern” composer, it’s actually more thrilling when your work gets a second performance. It means you were not totally off base when you wrote the thing, and some courageous conductor will risk performing an unknown piece that the audience has never heard of. Mark Vuorinen is the brave conductor who undertakes this task in Kitchener-Waterloo this Sunday afternoon, with the Grand Philharmonic Choir and orchestra, and my old friend Michael Colvin as the tenor soloist. Winter Nights is a four movement cantata… Read More »Winter Nights II