Gloria: Mozart's Coronation Mass in C major - the Salisbury Cathedral Choir

A short video of a lovely song sung by a great choir - but watch it especially for a fantastic look at the inside of the Cathedral!


HT Saturday Chorale.

Anglican Chant XXII: Psalm 145 (Buck) - St. Andrew's Schola Cantorum

A lovely tune, sung well by this choir from Pittsburgh.



Here are the Coverdale words:

Psalm 145. Exaltabo te, Deus WILL magnify thee, O God, my King : and I will praise thy Name for ever and ever.
2. Every day will I give thanks unto thee : and praise thy Name for ever and ever.
3. Great is the Lord, and marvellous worthy to be praised : there is no end of his greatness.
4. One generation shall praise thy works unto another : and declare thy power.
5. As for me, I will be talking of thy worship : thy glory, thy praise, and wondrous works;
6. So that men shall speak of the might of thy marvellous acts : and I will also tell of thy greatness.
7. The memorial of thine abundant kindness shall be shewed : and men shall sing of thy righteousness.
8. The Lord is gracious and merciful : long-suffering and of great goodness.
9. The Lord is loving unto every man : and his mercy is over all his works.
10. All thy works praise thee, O Lord : and thy saints give thanks unto thee.
11. They shew the glory of thy kingdom : and talk of thy power;
12. That thy power, thy glory, and mightiness of thy kingdom : might be known unto men.
13. Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom : and thy dominion endureth throughout all ages.
14. The Lord upholdeth all such as fall : and lifteth up all those that are down.
15. The eyes of all wait upon thee, O Lord : and thou givest them their meat in due season.
16. Thou openest thine hand : and fillest all things living with plenteousness.
17. The Lord is righteous in all his ways : and holy in all his works.
18. The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him : yea, all such as call upon him faithfully.
19. He will fulfil the desire of them that fear him : he also will hear their cry, and will help them.
20. The Lord preserveth all them that love him : but scattereth abroad all the ungodly.
21. My mouth shall speak the praise of the Lord : and let all flesh give thanks unto his holy Name for ever and ever.

Stanford Magnificat in G - the Salisbury Cathedral Choir

I really like this choir - and love that treble solo!



From the YouTube page:

Salisbury Cathedral Choir sing Charles Villiers Stanford's wonderful Magnificat in G. Apologies for the start and for the proud Mum of the soloist during the Gloria at the end. The clip was taken from a documentary.

And here's the wonderful text of the Evening Canticle:

My soul doth magnify the Lord : and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour.
For he hath regarded : the lowliness of his handmaiden.
For behold, from henceforth : all generations shall call me blessed.
For he that is mighty hath magnified me : and holy is his Name.
And his mercy is on them that fear him : throughout all generations.
He hath showed strength with his arm : he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat : and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things : and the rich he hath sent empty away.
He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel : as he promised to our forefathers, Abraham and his seed, for ever.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost
As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be
World without end
Amen.

"Leonid meteor shower expected to grace the sky tonight"

From NJ.com:

Step outside tonight, find a dark patch of sky, and you might catch an astronomical event.

The Leonid meteor shower — which dashes across the skies every November — is expected to reach its peak tonight and into Saturday morning.

"If it's clear, it should be a good time," Noah Petro, a planetary geologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, told The Star-Ledger today.

Experts have said tonight's Leonid shower will be modest. But under the right conditions, Petro said, you could spot a few meteors per minute. Your best best, he said, is to find a dark area, away from cities and light pollution.

This weekend's conditions are prime because the moon is new and won't cause a lot of light, Petro said. And in New Jersey, the skies are expected to be clear overnight, said Mitchell Gaines, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Mount Holly.

Reports place the Leonids' peak time tonight around 3 to 4:30 a.m. So New Jerseyans keeping watch will have to brave early-morning chills.

"Astronomy rewards people who are warm-blooded and don't sleep a lot," Petro said. "But you can see a pretty spectacular show if you're away from bright lights."

Meteors — or shooting starts — are seen when the earth passes through the dust trail of a comet, Petro said. The Leonid meteors originate from the comet Tempel-Tuttle.

"You're seeing little grains of a comet," Petro said. "It won't be as bright as Fourth of July fireworks. But you will see very fine streaks of light going over the sky. It's a very rapid streak. It'll be much faster than an airplane."

Slate.com has a guide to watching the shower.

While Saturday morning is the peak, you may spy Leonid meteors several nights after that, according to a report by ABC News.

And next month may bring an even bigger shower: the Geminids, set to arrive around Dec. 13, can produce up to 100 shooting stars an hour, the report said.

(Above, a 1996 photo of a meteor during the annual Leonid shower, courtesy of the New Jersey Astronomical Association.)

Anglican Chant XXI: Psalm 37: 1-20 - the Rivelin Singers at Wells Cathedral

Here's the Coverdale text:

Psalm 37. Noli aemulari

FRET not thyself because of the ungodly : neither be thou envious against the evil-doers.
2. For they shall soon be cut down like the grass : and be withered even as the green herb.
3. Put thou thy trust in the Lord, and be doing good : dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed.
4. Delight thou in the Lord : and he shall give thee thy heart's desire.
5. Commit thy way unto the Lord, and put thy trust in him : and he shall bring it to pass.
6. He shall make thy righteousness as clear as the light : and thy just dealing as the noon-day.
7. Hold thee still in the Lord, and abide patiently upon him : but grieve not thyself at him whose way doth prosper, against the man that doeth after evil counsels.
8. Leave off from wrath, and let go displeasure : fret not thyself, else shalt thou be moved to do evil.
9. Wicked doers shall be rooted out : and they that patiently abide the Lord, those shall inherit the land.
10. Yet a little while, and the ungodly shall be clean gone : thou shalt look after his place, and he shall be away.
11. But the meek-spirited shall possess the earth : and shall be refreshed in the multitude of peace.
12. The ungodly seeketh counsel against the just : and gnasheth upon him with his teeth.
13. The Lord shall laugh him to scorn : for he hath seen that his day is coming.
14. The ungodly have drawn out the sword, and have bent their bow : to cast down the poor and needy, and to slay such as are of a right conversation.
15. Their sword shall go through their own heart : and their bow shall be broken.
16. A small thing that the righteous hath : is better than great riches of the ungodly.
17. For the arms of the ungodly shall be broken : and the Lord upholdeth the righteous.
18. The Lord knoweth the days of the godly : and their inheritance shall endure for ever.
19. They shall not be confounded in the perilous time : and in the days of dearth they shall have enough.
20. As for the ungodly, they shall perish; and the enemies of the Lord shall consume as the fat of lambs : yea, even as the smoke shall they consume away.

There's more about this on the YouTube page.  (And, yay!  Composers included!)  It says you can download a PDF of the setting at the link below, but sadly the link seems to be broken.

The first twenty verses of Psalm 37, sung to two beautiful Anglican chants by the Rivelin Singers during their residency in Wells Cathedral, UK, in August 2012. (This is a live recording!)

The chants are by Jonathan P Eyre (assistant director of music, Bradford Cathedral - also playing the organ in this recording) and Graham Barber (professor of performance studies, University of Leeds).

The psalms were pointed and set, and the choir is conducted, by Fraser Wilson.

Visit Soundcloud (http://soundcloud.com/wilsonsounds) for related noises...
Download this setting in PDF format from http://alturl.com/2g6ro

"Obama the moderate Republican: What the 2012 election should teach the GOP"

This from William Saletan at Slate Magazine; seems about right to me.   The hysteria over Obama's election has really shocked me in its virulence; I'm not getting what's going on at all.

I don't watch TV anymore, and have not really been following what must have been an absolutely crazy trajectory in politics.  I did vote for Obama myself; I never considered Romney, for a variety of reasons.  I've never voted for a Republican for President, matter of fact. 

I really had no idea it was this bad out there.  It's something of a major shock to read the things being said and written when you haven't been a frog in the pot, sitting there getting used to the warming water.

I'm beginning to wonder if today's echo-chamber politics is maybe truly dangerous....

Cheer Up, Republicans
You’re going to have a moderate Republican president for the next four years: Barack Obama.

Dear Republicans,

Sorry about the election. I know how much it hurts when your presidential candidate loses. I’ve been there many times. You’re crestfallen. You can’t believe the public voted for that idiot. You fear for your country.

Cheer up. The guy we just re-elected is a moderate Republican.

I know how stupid that sounds. Barack Obama is the head of the Democratic Party. For five years, conservative politicians and media told you he was a raving socialist. In the heat of the campaign, when you’re trying to beat the guy, it’s hard to let go of that image of him, just as it’s hard for Democrats to see past the caricatures of Mitt Romney. But now that the campaign is over and you’re staring at a second Obama term, the falsity of the propaganda may come as a relief. By and large, Obama’s instincts are the instincts of a moderate Republican. His policies are the policies of a moderate Republican. He stands where the GOP used to stand and will someday stand again.

Yes, Obama began his presidency with bailouts, stimulus, and borrowing. You know who started the bailouts? George W. Bush. Bush knew that under these exceptionally dire circumstances, bailouts had to be done. Stimulus had to be done, too, since the economy had frozen up. A third of the stimulus was tax cuts. Once the economy began to revive, Obama offered a $4-trillion debt reduction framework that would have cut $3 to $6 of spending for every $1 in tax hikes. That’s a higher ratio of cuts to hikes than Republican voters, in a Gallup poll, said they preferred. It’s way more conservative than the ratio George H. W. Bush accepted in 1990. In last year’s debt-ceiling talks, Obama offered cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in exchange for revenue that didn’t even come from higher tax rates. Now he’s proposing to lower corporate tax rates, and Republicans are whining that he hacked $716 billion out of Medicare. Some socialist.

Yes, Obama imposed an individual mandate to buy health insurance. You know who else did that? Romney. You know where the idea came from? The Heritage Foundation. Personal responsibility—insisting that people carry private insurance so we don’t have to bail them out in emergency rooms and hospitals—was a Republican idea. Same with Wall Street reform: There’s nothing conservative about letting financial institutions gamble with other people’s money in ways that would force us to bail them out again. Even Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal echoed the market-based emissions-control policies of the 1990 Bush administration and the 2008 McCain campaign. And last year, when the EPA proposed a new air-pollution limit, Obama ticked off environmentalists by killing it on the grounds that it might jeopardize the recovery.

Remember how Democrats ridiculed George W. Bush’s troop surge in Iraq? Obama copied it in Afghanistan. He escalated the drone program, killing off al-Qaida’s leaders. He sent SEAL Team 6 into Pakistan to get Osama Bin Laden. He teamed up with NATO to take down Muammar Qaddafi. He reneged on his pledge to close Guantanamo Bay. He put together a globally enforced regime of sanctions that is bringing Iran’s economy to its knees. That’s why Romney had nothing to say in last month’s foreign policy debate. No sensible Republican president would have done things differently.

Obama’s no right-winger. You might have serious issues with his Supreme Court justices or his moves on immigration or the Bush tax cuts. But you probably would have had similar issues with Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, or Gerald Ford. Obama’s in the same mold as those guys. So don’t despair. Your country didn’t vote for a socialist tonight. It voted for the candidate of traditional Republican moderation. What should gall you, haunt you, and goad you to think about the future of your party is that that candidate wasn’t yours.