songs for christmas
SATB, SA or TB with full orchestra, chamber orchestra, or piano | 4' | Graphite
Text: Paul Laurence Dunbar
Ring Out, Ye Bells! is a joyous Christmas carol. Paul Laurence Dunbar writes, "Ring out, ye bells! / All Nature swells / With gladness at the wondrous story, / --The world was lorn, / But Christ is born / To change our sadness into glory. [...] No, be not still, / But with a will / Strike all your harps and set them ringing; / On hill and heath / Let every breath / Throw all its power into singing!"
SATB, SSAA or TTBB a cappella | 4' | Graphite | Text: Charles Dickens
Glorious, Glorious adapts text from the final, jubilant scene of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. No longer the miserly curmudgeon he used to be, Scrooge resolves to live in the “Past, the Present and the Future” and to bring the spirit of Christmas into his daily life.
SATB, SSAA or TTBB a cappella | 3' | Graphite | Text: Barbara Crooker
Completing the Circle sets a text by Barbara Crooker: "Gathering branches / of green pine / in the dead of the year, / making rings of fire / in wax and wood, / completing the circle / with calls and cards, / wreathing the children / in cinnamon and chocolate, / stringing berries and corn, / stringing memories, / quilting them tightly, / in winter, / with the days of grey / and iron nights."
Available in four voicings for SATB or SSA chorus:
chorus & orchestra
chorus & chamber orchestra
chorus, string quartet & piano
chorus & piano reduction
text: Lynn Ungar | 15'
Lynn Ungar’s poem “Magnificat” presents a human perspective on the divine, contemplating how magnifying God means making God smaller, in the form of a child. Ungar's poem grounds the traditional Christmas story in minute details like the urgent hunger of an infant. Her text, like all good poems, uses the small, precise, and confined nature of poetry to magnify our humanity.
