MUSIC NOTES  This year, as we continue to commemorate the 400^th anniversary of the death of English composer William Byrd (c. 1540–1623), the Choir offers a choral setting of the Gloria from Byrd’s masterful Mass for Four Voices. Interestingly, in recent years the choir has sung many other Byrd mass movements, notably the Kyrie from this mass (Lent 2023) and movements from the Mass for Five Voices (Kyrie, Lent 2022; Gloria, 2021; Credo, Trinity Sunday 2022). Byrd was a recusant Catholic who brought musical expression to his faith by these settings of the mass ordinary in Latin. They are technically brilliant compositions that also speak to Byrd’s deep faith and also the secrecy in which Catholic worship would have been conducted. There were surely times when “four voices” would have been taken literally: one per part. In our modern, more tolerant era of ecumenism, the richness of Byrd’s writing is complemented by full sections of the choir singing each of the four voice parts.

One of the great gifts of my sabbatical leave earlier this year was the space to compose new pieces of music. I put a good deal of time and energy behind one piece in particular, “I waited patiently upon the Lord,” a choral setting of a few lines from Psalm 40 that is unashamedly in the style of one of my favorite composers: Herbert Howells. The anthem is, in a way, an inversion of one of Howells’s best known choral works: “Like as the hart.” In this Howells’s work, there are few parts for the altos; in my new anthem the altos have a starring role and are heard from the outset. “I waited patiently upon the Lord,” which is sung for the first time at the Offertory, even quotes “Like as the hart” directly at one point.  David Sinden