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Gloriæ Dei Cantores
Gloriæ Dei Cantores: Arvo Pärt - Stabat Mater
by C. Michael Bailey
The late Twentieth-and early Twenty-First-Centuries have been a rich and productive period for sacred choral composers. Sir John Tavener (1944 -2013), Krzysztof Penderecki (1933 -2020), Henryk Górecki (1933 -), and Tigran Mansurian (1939 -) are just a smattering of modern talent behind this ancient form. Estonian composer Arvo Pärt sits atop this collection of composers with the distinction of being the most performed, living composer today. Like Tavener, Pärt's conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy intensely colored his compositional themes. The composer's ...
read moreGloriæ Dei Cantores: James Weldon Johnson: God's Trombones
by C. Michael Bailey
In literature, the New Criticism" focused on the structure and meaning of a given text, and that these were intimately connected and should not be analyzed separately. Also, texts should be analyzed without regard to the author, era, or circumstances of the text. Clinically, this may be all well and good, but this approach to the analysis of anything is at the expense of the rich loam of experience surrounding art. That is why I will not use the New ...
read moreGloriæ Dei Cantores: Edmund Rubbra – The Sacred Muse
by C. Michael Bailey
The liner notes to The Sacred Muse highlight a conventional wisdom in music. Introducing British composer Edmund Rubbra, Craig Timberlake notes that Rubbra was... A long-lived, productive scholar, performer, and composer largely unknown to the musically inclined public and virtually ignored by today's highly dispersed musical establishment. To be sure, this is not an uncommon fate and is one shared by some other worthy contemporaries of the composer." It is all too easy, in our Adderall-addled ...
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