Every Sunday evening, I sing with a choir that offers the ancient monastic office of compline at St. David's Episcopal Church in downtown Austin. We meet at 7 PM in the choir practice room for rehearsal. The beginning of rehearsal is always a game of "What can we sing today given who shows up?" Our director for the evening (most often David Stevens, but sometimes Barbara Manson or Howard Burkett) determines what anthems, motets, hymns, or nunc dimittis we are to sing that evening based on what voice parts and how many of each voice part is available. The choir is a volunteer choir that is largely composed of active members of the Austin music community. Due our intimate numbers, we are quite significantly affected if one or a bunch of us happens to be touring outside of Austin with our band, be called to play violin for an oratorio, or be required to lead our section in a special offering of evensong in our church ofemployment. Thankfully, the treasury of a cappella renaissance music from the Latin and English traditions are generously vast not only in the number of liturgically-appropriate texts and settings, but also the voicings of the various pieces, be it the transparent SATB of Palestrina, the sonorous TTBB TTBB of Gallus, or the quintessentially English SSATBB of Byrd. While we have a core repertoire to which we turn if our numbers for a given Sunday evening do not favor more adventurous voicings, a great of the music we sing is encountered for the first time by most of us within the two-hour rehearsal preceding the office. Since we only have one or two voices per part, there is the joy of sight-singing to be had every Sunday evening.
Joel has a question.
David has an answer.
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