# gome — choral favorites

# A few of my favorite choral pieces

6 Mar 2023, 11:00 PM

I wrote last week about my love of choral music, and how I used to think about it more when I wrote more of it. I also spent a lot of time listening to it back then. Today I’ll share a few of my favorites.

### Faire is the Heaven by William Henry Harris

Link to recording

Double choir is a technique where a composer writes parts for two separate choral units, both consisting of each part of the choir. These units then sing separate & overlapping phrases according to their organization. Faire is the Heaven is probably the best use of a double choir that I know of. Harris uses overlaps between the end of one choir’s phrase and the beginning of the other’s to create a chain of unbroken texture throughout the piece. Each idea starts as the previous finishes, smoothly transitioning you through a sublime kaleidoscope. There are a lot of ideas in the piece, but they flow together so nicely that it feels well-structured nonetheless.

This entire album is fantastic, by the way. Choral music is a huge challenge to record well, so the audio engineers who worked on this one deserve a lot of credit.

### O sacrum convivium! by Olivier Messiaen

Link to recording

Messiaen is a composer who kind of just had his own way of doing things. He didn’t write much choral music, and his mature compositional approach probably wouldn’t have been well-suited to it anyway. But O sacrum convivium is a gem of a piece, in which he brings his unique language to choral writing with lovely results. The rhythmic pattern is irregular but very slow, so it may take a moment to “feel into it” on first encounter. The harmony is generally tonal but features some forays into octatonic harmony, lending it an otherworldly but nevertheless devotional feel.

### Ubi caritas by Maurice Duruflé

Link to recording

This piece has a special place in my heart. I sang it in an honor choir I participated in in middle school, which was one of my first experiences with 4-part SATB choral music. I’m usually a tenor, but I ended up singing bass in this ensemble, which always gives you a different view of the piece. There’s this really cool “money note” the basses get to sing on the word diligamus, and it’s such a short thing, but it was what I looked forward to the most when we sang the piece. It’s also a great example of how to adapt a Gregorian chant theme, which is one of Duruflé’s specialties, being an organist.

Do you listen to choral music? Have you heard the pieces I mentioned? Do you have some favorites you’d like to recommend me? Let me know your thoughts at my Ctrl-C email: `gome ​@ ​ctrl-c.club`.