[Magdalen] Music memories

[Molly Wolf]

Me too.  It astounds me, looking back, at the quality of choral singing I grew up with in Bennington.  Neither my high school choir nor my church choir would have thought "How Lovely is Thy Dwelling Place" was out of the ordinary, nor "He Watching Over Israel."  We sang a lot of Benjamin Britten, as well as Messiah.  I still miss that long-ago quality.

I remember walking down the hall by the music room, when I was in Grade 7 and new to the junior high/senior high building, and hearing a ghostly girl's voice singing a plangent melody that made my heart stop in its tracks.  I worried for weeks that I would never find it again -- until our school girls' choir sang Britten's "Ceremony of Carols".  That piece still gets to me fifty years later.

Molly

The man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain

> On Dec 23, 2014, at 10:48 AM, Jay Weigel <jay.weigel at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Fior me, that piece is "How Lovely is Thy Dwelling Place" from the Brahms
> "German Requiem".....not in German, however. I had just turned 15 and was
> at the UW summer music clinic, which was a 3 week gathering of high school
> musicians from all over Wisconsin, northern Illinois, and a few other
> places. There were probably 250 of us in the chorus. It was my first
> experience of singing Brahms other than the cradle song. I was too
> dumb/naive to know it was difficult. It was absolutely amazing and made the
> hairs on the back of my  neck stand up, and when we sang it in concert  I
> was nearly in tears when it was over. It still has that effect on me.
> 
> On Tue, Dec 23, 2014 at 10:36 AM, Cantor03--- via Magdalen <
> magdalen at herberthouse.org> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> In a message dated 12/23/2014 10:25:00 A.M. Eastern Standard Time,
>> gracecan at gmail.com writes:
>> 
>> It  always takes me surprise when a piece of music triggers an unexpected
>> memory.  I was just listening to "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" on NPR and
>> remembered  the first I ever sang it. I was absolutely there  again.>>>>
>> 
>> This was a favorite of the Extraordinary Form RC Rite (the Tridentine
>> Latin
>> Rite) people locally.  Because of the rules about the integrity of  this
>> Latin
>> Rite, they had to develop a Latin text for the piece.
>> 
>> Can you imagine singing "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring" in Latin?   :-)
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> David Strang.
>>