Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Signum Magnum...my favorite introit
This one's for the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I sing it all the time. Calms me down. I sing it much lower, of course.
Signum magnum apparuit in caelo
Mulier amicta sole et luna sub pedibus eius
Et in capite eius corona stellarum duodecim
Cantate Domino canticum novum
Quia mirabilia fecit
Signum magnum...
Small update: I've noticed something that this guy Vianini does with his choir that we don't do in ours is that he gets them to pulse the notes (I don't know the technical terms) rather than extend them into one sound. So for example, with the word fecit we would sing feeeeeci-it in my choir. But in this one they sing it fe-e-e-ci-it. Even when they go up and down, it's less of a slide through the notes and more of a pulse to each note.
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3 comments:
I believe the proper term is staccato derived from the Italian word which means to detach. Pulse works just as well though.
And man this is beautiful!
It's probably a cultural thing. The pulsing, that is. Latin sung by a German (or written by one and sung by an American choir with some crazy purist performance practice type conductor) sounds different than Latin sung by an American. So, there are "accents" in sung Latin. So, the pulsing might be the Italian "accent." It might also be a reaction to the space it is being sung in. At HR, we can *mostly* get away with those long drawn out vowels but in some place like St. Mark's (I think that's the one with 11 seconds of reverberation) you'd HAVE to enunciate a whole heck of a lot more. It could, however, just be a stylistic thing. Conductors are rather particular, you know. There's my three cents. I'll ask the fretty choirmaster about it if he ever comes home from transcribing the incredibly long piece of medieval music he was handed for his Notation final project.
Thanks, fellas! I've just posted something else to further illustrate what I'm talking about. And VA, no need to fret the fretted too much. Poor man. He's finished for the semester after this evening, yes?
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