Choral Listening Series - Recording #5
Recording #5
Drop, Drop, Slow Tears - Orlando Gibbons (performed by Voces8)
About the performers: Voces8 is an eight-voice group that performs a variety of music, from 16th-century renaissance music to modern pop music, and everything in between. Their group sound is warm and rich, but incredibly clean and pure at the same time. Many of their recordings are world-class, and they have quite a large Youtube presence now. They are affiliated with Cambridge University, where many of the singers earned their Master's degrees.
This short recording was just premiered on April 9, presumably for Easter 2020! The piece is a Passiontide hymn from the Renaissance period (ca. 1500-1650) and was likely composed for Gibbons' final collection of sacred music, published in 1623. Notice that it sounds similar to a lot of the newer church hymns we sing at McDougall; and indeed, many later hymn composers took ideas from Renaissance masters to create sacred congregational music after the Reformation.
Text:
Drop, drop, slow tears,
And bathe those beauteous feet
Which brought from Heaven
The news and Prince of Peace.
Cease not, wet eyes,
His mercy to entreat;
To cry for vengeance
Sin doth never cease.
In your deep floods
Drown all my faults and fears;
Nor let His eye See sin,
But through my tears.
- text composed by Phineas Fletcher (1582-1650)
Such beautiful writing, and the music matches the text perfectly. There is so much value to be found in a well-written hymn.
Watch the singers as they perform- the music is so precisely together, and they're not even looking at each other! The reason they can sing together in such a unified way without visual aid is because they are listening to each other's breathing. Their breaths between phrases are very calm and very deliberate, leaving no room for error about when the next phrase will happen. This is how groups perform without a conductor.
