Evensong & All Saints Remembrance Service

Evensong, sometimes referred to as Choral Evensong, is a service that has strong ties to the Anglican church, with roots that date back to the Catholic church c. 1000. The modern-day order of service for Evensong will include a setting of the Magnificat (song of Mary), Nunc Dimittis (song of Simeon), a set of sung responses, anthems, a sung Psalm from the lectionary, and congregational hymns. Evensong is still sung daily in many English cathedrals and collegiate chapels at historic universities such as Cambridge and Oxford.

The music that we will present at this service will exemplify the feeling of hope for those who have passed on. We begin with William Harris' "Holy is the true light," which describes those that have passed on being in the presence of Light which causes them to "rejoice with gladness evermore."  The hymn, "How shall I sing that majesty," that follows the introit features a text by John Mason, a 17th-century English priest. A favorite line from Mason's text is where God is described as a “sea without a shore, a sun without a sphere.” We then move to a contemporary setting of the Preces (translates to ‘prayers’) by Joanna Forbes L’Estrange, which was written in 2019 for a church in North Carolina. The setting of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis is written by one of the great English composers of the 20th century, Herbert Howells. Howells wrote many settings of this text for a variety of cathedrals and chapels in England. We will sing one of his most popular settings written for King’s College, Cambridge (known in Latin as ‘Collegium regale’). The anthem is a double choir setting of “Hail gladdening light,” with a text that is one of the earliest Christian hymns, with roots in the 3rd/4th century. The final hymn is the well-known “For All the Saints,” which is composed by yet another well-known 20th-century English composer, Ralph Vaughan Williams.