The program
Nine centuries of sacred choral music for Saint Cecilia on her feast day
Sunday, November 22, 2026 · 3–4 PM · Church of Saint Agnes · Back to the concert
In order of composition; the running order will be announced. Recordings are by other ensembles, for listening ahead.
Chant
Gregorian chant
The chant sung at Mass on Cecilia’s feast.
Audi, filia, et vide, et inclina aurem tuam: quia concupivit Rex speciem tuam. “Listen, daughter, and see, and incline your ear: for the King has desired your beauty.” The words are from Psalm 45, sung as the Gradual at Mass on the feasts of virgins, Cecilia’s among them. Gregorian chant is the Church’s own song: a single line, unaccompanied and unmetered, shaped by the words.
Sung by the octet
1150s
Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179)
A twelfth-century abbess, visionary and composer, rarely heard in concert.
Hildegard ran a Benedictine community on the Rhine, wrote books of visions, medicine and natural science, corresponded with popes and emperors, and composed some seventy chants. She is one of the first composers in history whose name we know, and her melodies soar far beyond the range of ordinary chant. O virtus Sapientiae praises the Wisdom of God, circling all things; O pulchrae facies sings of the “beautiful faces” of the virgins, in whom the King saw himself reflected.
Sung by Christa Dalmazio, soprano
1563
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c. 1525–1594)
Cecilia at daybreak, calling the faithful to put on the armor of light.
“As the dawn was ending, Cecilia said: Come, soldiers of Christ, cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light.” The text is from the night office of her feast. Palestrina’s four-voice setting, from his first book of motets for the church year, is bright and compact: a call to wake, sung as the day breaks.
Sung by the octet
1575
Palestrina
The words this concert is named for, set by the master of Roman polyphony.
Cantantibus organis, Caecilia in corde suo soli Domino decantabat. “While the instruments played, Cecilia sang in her heart to the Lord alone.” The line from the ancient account of her wedding day made her the patron saint of music, though the story has her turning inward, away from the music around her. Palestrina set it for five voices in his third book of motets, the lines weaving so evenly that no single voice leads.
Sung by the octet
1690s
Henry Purcell (1659–1695)
From London’s St. Cecilia’s Day tradition, for soprano and organ.
In the 1680s and 1690s London’s musicians marked St. Cecilia’s Day each November 22 with a newly commissioned ode, and Purcell wrote the most famous of them, Hail, Bright Cecilia. This song comes from the same years; it borrows its first line from Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
Sung by Lydia Saylor, soprano, with continuo organ
1907
Edward Elgar (1857–1934)
Eight voices singing in two keys at once.
Elgar, the great English composer and a lifelong Catholic, set lines from Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters about music that falls “softer than petals from blown roses.” He divided the choir in two, the women in one key and the men in another, and the two keys blur and meet like the drowsy music the poem describes.
Sung by the octet
1915
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943)
The Russian Ave Maria, from the masterpiece Rachmaninoff wrote in wartime.
In early 1915, with Russia at war, Rachmaninoff wrote his All-Night Vigil, settings of the Orthodox services of Vespers and Matins. Bogoroditse Devo, its sixth movement, sets the Orthodox “Rejoice, O Virgin Theotokos,” whose words are close to the Ave Maria. It begins in a near whisper, swells to a great cry of joy, and falls back into silence.
Sung by the octet
1960
Herbert Howells (1892–1983)
First sung on St. Cecilia’s Day 1961, at St. Paul’s Cathedral, London.
Howells, the great English composer of church music, wrote this hymn for the Worshipful Company of Musicians to mark his year as its Master, to words by the poet Ursula Vaughan Williams. A soaring tune gathers strength through three verses with organ. At St. Agnes it opens the concert from the choir loft.
Sung by the octet, with organ
2007
Arvo Pärt (b. 1935)
St. Patrick’s Breastplate, set by the Estonian master of stillness.
Pärt found his voice in the 1970s in a spare style he calls tintinnabuli, from the Latin for “little bells”: a melody moving step by step against the notes of one chord ringing around it. The Deer’s Cry, commissioned by the Louth Contemporary Music Society in Ireland and first sung in Drogheda in 2008, sets the closing verse of St. Patrick’s Breastplate: “Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me.”
Sung by the octet
2012
James MacMillan (b. 1959)
A double-choir prayer to Cecilia from Scotland’s leading composer.
Sir James MacMillan, a Scottish Catholic, is one of the most performed composers of sacred choral music today. He wrote Cecilia Virgo in 2012 for Royal Holloway’s annual St. Cecilia concert. Its Latin prayer asks Cecilia to carry our prayers to God, ending in a plain, certain Sancta Cecilia, ora pro nobis: holy Cecilia, pray for us. Two choirs answer each other in waves, a feat for eight singers.
Sung by the octet, as two choirs
2026
Conner McCain
A love song of Cecilia and her husband Valerian, written for this concert.
On their wedding night Cecilia tells her husband Valerian that an angel guards her, and that he will see it once he is baptized. He goes, is baptized, and comes home to find the angel beside her with two crowns of roses and lilies. Two singers are husband and wife; the third is the angel, whose line runs through the whole piece and draws the other two into harmony with it. Text written in collaboration with a parishioner of St. Agnes, and dedicated to his wife.
Sung by three singers of the octet
No recording yet: first performance at this concert.