[Edit: Mysteriously appearing typos corrected]
What’s this?
It’s a section of this Substack containing an archive of videos of my choir’s anthems, along with my comments. This is the final planned post, as explained below. A longer description of the section can be found on the About page.
Love, Come Down, arranged for SSA and Piano
From the publisher’s page:
Marrolli provides her own text imploring the presence of the Holy Spirit in times of stress and challenge, leading into the familiar words of Bianco da Siena's hymn. Fragments of Ralph Vaughan Williams's tune Down Ampney appear in the accompaniment from the very beginning (although strangely misquoted in the initial upward ascent), paving the way for the melody to appear complete in the voices with rhythmic variation (and repeating the alteration of the first measure melody). The texture blossoms into three-part harmony, maintaining the Vaughan Williams melody in the top voice. Treble choirs able to sustain three parts would find this anthem engaging, and its use extends far beyond the day of Pentecost.
—Jason Overall, The Journal of the Association of Anglican Musicians, March 2025
We were small, and beset with technical difficulties here and there, but we did it! This was a special women’s chorus, singing just the offertory anthem, two weeks before the beginning of the regular choir season. We began with a Saturday workshop, a few weeks earlier, with great turnout, and the sopranos and altos almost evenly matched. This was folowed by an evening rehearsal a few days before the Sunday service, with the turnout that you see here, just six sopranos and four altos. Well, at least we fit well on the chancel.
The altos are the four mostly tall ones right of center, of which I am the first to the right of of the rear stained glass window (and the saxaphone), and we held our own against those sopranos. For me it was a wonderful way to finish out…
Behind the Scenes
I’ll pass on discussing the technical glitches this time. They’re obvious but they weren’t terrible. But this was my last planned anthem. I am not continuing with the choir when it resumes in the next couple of weeks. I recently turned 75—hard to believe—and, as I wrote about earlier, the decision has to do one way or another with multiple health issues along with driving at night. Otherwise I’d continue ‘till I dropped. But that’s messy if it happens on camera. Others in the section are at or approaching a similar place in life, and I’m not sure what is going to happen with it.
This is my third attempt at retiring from choir. The first was following Easter, 2017 at another church, and that break lasted a year and a half. The second was when my choir at yet another former church disbanded in 2020, in compliance with “the authorities”. That lasted only 10 months until, at my present church, I could no longer stand to sit there listening instead of being up there singing.
This time it’s for real. I do plan to continue in my other volunteer activities, including screens (ProPresenter operator), and to stay in practice, singing alto or soprano in the congregation. I am going to greatly miss being in the choir, but from the summer break onward I have been feeling relief and release from the stress of a time-consuming, difficult-to-sustain, and sometimes dangerous weekly routine. I might still occasionally fill in if the number of other altos drops to two or three, as it did here, and if I don’t have a conflict. Maybe.
I hope these anthems have held meaning for those of you who had been dropping by here from week to week. Thank you.
Recorded at Christ Community Church, Carmichael, California, August 31, 2025.
Excerpted from this livestream.
