In legend, Saint Sylvester is the saint who converted emperor Constantine, and he is celebrated on the last day of the year by western churches (eastern churches celebrate him on the 2nd of January). Typical celebrations for this feast feature a Watchnight service or midnight mass. While I get the idea that this feast is quite celebratory, again, there is little music to be found to celebrate this by art music composers. However, I found this excellent Irish early music singer named Caitriona O’Leary who has a carol whose subject matter is Saint Sylvester (she also has one on the feast day of St Stephen, too).
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By Julian Reid
We need to give more comprehensive support for the arts and not take them for granted. And since I am a Christian artist, I am calling on the Church to help lead the way in supporting the arts in the political sphere. Ultimately I am calling for a new Department of the Cabinet: the Department of the Arts. For Christians, a theological case – rooted in Scripture and on our corporate practices of Christian worship – can be made for such a department, one that can be a source of vibrant life to the arts beyond the limits of Christian institutions.
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As musician and composer, playing Messiah is always one of the highlights of the Christmas season; I look forward to it every year. It is was in the middle of performing a 2018 production of Messiah that it occurred to me that for a work with such depth and popularity, there had never been a sequel, modern, or complementary work written to Messiah.
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When Christ Jesus came to us the first time, he attracted humanity to the manger by appealing to our senses of hearing and vision. The shepherds travelled to the stable to worship because they had heard the sound of the angels, whereas the sages made the trek from distant lands because they had seen and studied the Star of David. To put it in context of music, the divine revelation of the Incarnation involved the two ways that musicians typically play music – spontaneity (shepherds) and premeditation (the sages). On this view, the Christmas story invites musicians and music-lovers to reflect on the theological messages resident in these two modes of music creation.
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