About the Program

In December 1986, we performed our first concert

program, Legends of St. Nicholas , at St. Michaels
Episcopal Church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
The audience was not large, to say the least; but never
mind, because we knew that we had found something to
keep us passionately engaged for a long time, with any
luck at all.
In The Last Noel , weve created a special concert to
celebrate our five Christmas programs, and our years
together. We offer this as our gift to you, our listeners,
who have helped to make it all possible.
We begin with five songs from the magnificent 13th
century. Our first recording, An English Ladymass,
opens with the lovely Irish prosa Gaude Virgo Salutata
from the Dublin Troper (c. 1400) and Edi beo thu, a twovoice strophic devotional song in early middle English.
The prophetic Balaam de quo vaticinans / [Ballam] is
typically English, with jolly rondellus (voice exchange)
sections superimposed on the basic motet structure.
Gabriel fram heven-king is a version of the very popular
Annunciation song Angelus ad virginem, mentioned in
Chaucers Canterbury Tales .
Lullay my child: This ender nithgt (solo: Ruth
Cunningham) is a musical reconstruction from a refrain
fragment in a 15th-century English manuscript. The story
of the infant Jesuss prophetic and miraculous
conversation with his mother recurs often in old British
poetry and song.
The poem Peperit virgo, from the 14th-century
Yorkshire Red Book of Ossory, is meant to be sung to the
tune of the secular song Brid one breere, an early example of
Why should the devil get all the good tunes? The late
medieval British carol is a choral song with verses and
burdens (refrains). In these two 15th-century carols, Ecce
quod natura and Now may we syngen, we have added
new lines using fauxbourdon technique, creating parallel
chords in a rich, full harmony. The l4th-century sequence
(liturgical poem in double versicles) O ceteris
preamabilis is triadic throughout, creating an
unmistakably English soundscape.
Haunting and rhythmically free, the traditional Irish hymn
An teicheahd go higipt (solo: Jacqueline HornerKwiatek) tells, in the style of the ancient bards, the story
of Joseph, Mary and the child Jesus flight into Egypt.

Also from An English Ladymass , the strophic song

Salve virgo virginum has the tight triadic harmony that
kept us coming back to medieval English music.
Our last program must honor our first. From Legends of
St. Nicholas , the rhythmic hymn Intonent hodie
catalogs the well-known miracles of the saint. The brief
song Sainte nicholaes, by the English mystic Godric of
Yorkshire (d. 1170), is one of the oldest in the English
language. Godric was a contemporary of Hildegard of
Bingen and, like her, was said to have received his songs
in visions of mystical beings. We have harmonized his
melody in typical English fashion. Gaudens in domino
is a medieval German two-voice song, with our own
polyphonic embellishment (written by Johanna Rose). The
13th-century French conductus Nicholai presulis is a
merry masterpiece.
Can wassel is a traditional Cornish wassail song in two
parts; weve added a bass line to its jolly refrain.
We close our program with songs from early America.
The Cherry-Tree Carol (solo: Marsha Genensky) which
dates at least as far back as the 15th century, remains one
of the most commonly collected ballads in America and in
the British Isles.
The Christmas lyric Hail the blest morn! exists in more than
one early American folk hymn setting. This one, from the
Southern Harmony of 1835, uses Star in the East as its
refrain. A British setting of the lyric A Virgin Unspotted
was popular in the American colonies, and 18th-century
American tunesmith William Billings set it again, in his
Judea. Billings and other American composers, taking as
their model the fugal movements of English choral works,
wrote many imitative 4-part fuging tunes like Rainbow
and Billings joyous Bethlehem.
The music in this program spans hundreds of years, from
St. Godrics mystical vision-born song, to the living,
traditional Christmas songs of Ireland and America. The
styles and textures vary greatly; the texts speak with many
voices. But despite all the technical diversity, we sense a
common purpose in these works. As if in response to the
quiet force of a supernatural moment, when the paths of
humanity and divinity meet, the composers of these songs
marked each piece with some special characteristic,
making each a universe in itself, and making each a unique
artistic response to the Christmas story.
Susan Hellauer