There's a song that we sometimes sing in church, "Refiner's Fire".

I have many CD’s of classical and choral music which I play quite often.  I often have listened to Kings College Choir, the Cambridge Singers, and music by Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, and Ralph Vaughan Williams.  Do other people here have any interest in classical or choral music simply for listening?  Without out knowing much about the technical part I have acquired a considerable taste for the music just for my own pleasure. And I think at least some of that is a good thing. 🙂

@narnian78 Hooray, someone else who listens to classical music!!!   I've been a fan of it ever since I was 7 and unexpectedly fell in love with the opening movement of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (which Dad had on a cassette in the car). All I knew was that this was the most incredible music I had ever heard in my life, and I wanted more of it...

You don't have to know much about "the technical part" of things to enjoy classical music, honestly — even now, although I did learn piano for a few years and have sung in choirs since I was in high school, I only have a quite rudimentary knowledge of music theory. But all that matters is that you enjoy what you're hearing and it means something to you!

We have two classical radio stations in the UK — BBC Radio 3, which is a bit posh, and Classic FM, which is aimed at the sorts of people who don't necessarily know much about music but they know what they like. I have my car radio constantly tuned to Classic FM and I just love it. They play a lot of modern / current composers as well as the famous classics, including a lot of film music (the Lord of the Rings soundtrack by Howard Shore gets a lot of air time — "The Council of Elrond", with Enya's song in Sindarin for Arwen and Aragorn, was playing as I drove to work earlier today!). They even play video game music, so really, there's something for everyone!

And you've gone and name-dropped my favourite composer by far — Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose music I knew very little about until, in my first year in England, I heard The Lark Ascending and fell in love (again). I now know a whole lot of his works and I don't think there's anything by him that I don't like or that doesn't move me in some way. My other favourites are his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and his 5th symphony. Do you have any particular favourites by him too, Narnian78?

I also note you've mentioned the Cambridge Singers, who of course are conducted by, and mainly sing the music of, John Rutter. I've sung in a number of his choral works, including his Requiem, and once got to work with the man himself at a "Come and Sing" day he was holding here in England!! (I'll be going to a similar kind of event in Gloucester next month, but with a different conductor and mainly working on choral pieces by Vaughan Williams, which I'm hugely looking forward to.)

@courtenay 

I think one of my CD’s of King’s College Choir has some selections of choral music by Tallis, although I don’t remember what the names of the works are. That choir is considered one of the best in the world so you can’t go wrong with them.  I got hooked on “The Lark Ascending” by Ralph Vaughan Williams by listening to it on a car radio while driving near Interlochen, Michigan music camp many years ago and I had to have it on CD.  I bought many CD’s of John Rutter too and I love to listen to the Cambridge Singers after church on Sunday mornings. I am glad that you were actually able to work with Mr. Rutter.  There are also excellent CD’s available of composer’s greatest hits such as those of Bach and Mozart, and they are not very expensive. I also loved Music 101 when I was in college, which was mainly appreciation.  So I have actually loved classical music without knowing much about it.

These are two songs I have been loving recently:  

Anyone else started listening to Christmas music? October 1st has long been the official start of Christmas music for the season for us, but in recent years we haven't really put the Christmas music completely away. I have come to consider what some call secular Christmas music as cozy winter music and therefore a separate genre...it does not get played throughout the year because that would be silly. But real Christmas music is good throughout the year and even more October through early January. 

For a couple weeks I have been bouncing back and forth between Christmas music and Skillet...which seems to be annoying to some family members. I finally ordered Victorious: The Aftermath over the weekend. I was two albums behind on the Skillet collection, I'm going to wait awhile before getting Dominion since I can listen it via Hoopla. I was also listening to Victorious via Hoopla, but was getting tired of checking both albums out regularly now that I have decided I want both albums.  

SnowAngel

I haven't started listening to Christmas music per se yet, but just a short time ago on the radio, I heard this...

... which is Eric Whitacre's setting of a poem originally written in English by Edward Esch, but translated into Latin for this choral version, and the lyrics are:

(Latin)

Lux,

calida gravisque pura velut aurum

et canunt angeli molliter

modo natum.

(English original)

Light,

warm and heavy as pure gold,

and angels sing softly

to the new-born babe.

... So we could say that it's implicitly Christmas music — at least, it sounds angelic enough to me.  

We've sang an old hymn in church, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God" to commemorate the Protestant Reformation, that happened on October 31st.

Love A Mighty Fortress Is Our God. This is a really cool version.

And I remember reading somewhere that C. S. Lewis did not care much for hymns.  I wonder if he ever changed his mind after he was converted. I think he did like classical music, and some hymns have their melodies taken from Beethoven, (e.g., “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee”), Haydn, Bach, and other classical composers. Perhaps Lewis would have liked Kings College Choir and the Cambridge Singers if he were living today, although I am not sure what he thought about choral music. Ralph Vaughan Williams, a highly regarded composer of choral and violin music, lived during Lewis’ time.  Music like that might have appealed to Lewis if he ever heard it.  I like choral music much better now than when I was I was younger, but I think that is because my taste has become mature and I have more love for beautiful things now.  🙂

Posted by: @narnian78

And I remember reading somewhere that C. S. Lewis did not care much for hymns.

Yes, I've read that somewhere too — and he absolutely detested organ music, which is a bit of a bummer when you're C of E!  I'm not sure what music he liked, apart from Wagner (part of his great love for "Northernness", which he shared with Tolkien).

I'd like to think Lewis would have liked Ralph Vaughan Williams' music as well. Mind you, he wrote a lot of church music, including original hymn tunes and adaptations of existing ones, so I'm not sure what Lewis would have thought of those... (RVW's awesome Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is based on a 16th-century hymn tune, for example.) Quite ironically, RVW himself was an atheist in his younger years and at most a "cheerful agnostic" as he grew older, and yet he hugely appreciated the role of music in the English church tradition and also had a deep love for The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan — he wrote accompanying music for a radio adaptation of it in the early 1940s and later composed an oratorio based on it. He seems to have had a real appreciation of the idea of spiritual seeking and journeying, even though he obviously never found a path he could bring himself to believe in. His music certainly touches me on a profound level that I can only call spiritual, or even soul-deep — more than any other composer ever (and I've been listening avidly to what's called "classical" music since I was 7!) — so...

Actually, looking online for Ralph Vaughan Williams quotes, I've found a couple of good ones that suggest he certainly had some sense of a world or a reality beyond this earthly one, even if he didn't see it in organised religion and theology. I don't have any context for these (they're just off a quotes website), so I don't know when he made these statements or exactly what he meant by them, but they're thought-provoking all the same...

"Music is the reaching out towards utmost realities by means of ordered sound."

"But in the next world I shan't be doing music, with all the striving and disappointments. I shall be being it."

I don't know how many of us on the forum sing, but I'm sure we have different vocal ranges. I'm a mezzo-soprano, overlapping between soprano and alto (though I sang alto in a choir). So it's pretty much in between, overlapping Alto 1 and Soprano 2. I can't go down to an Alto 2 yet can't go up to a Soprano 1.

When singing a long with a song, if a song is too high, I'll go an octave lower or if it is too low, I'll go an octave higher.

I sing as an alto, usually Alto 1. I was in a wonderful choir in Melbourne for a few years before I moved to the UK in 2011, but since then, as I do shift work and my work times and days are different just about every week, I haven't been able to participate in a choir regularly. But just recently I attended a "come and sing" day in Gloucester, doing some songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams (yeah, him again... this has been his 150th birthday year and a lot of orchestras and music groups in England have been celebrating his music for that reason), along with learning the hymn tune by Thomas Tallis on which Vaughan Williams based his famous Fantasia. At the end of the day we sang the hymn (the original words are "Why fum'th in fight the Gentiles' spite, In fury raging stout?", from Psalm 2) in Gloucester Cathedral, just before a performance of the RVW Fantasia!! Now that was something, although unfortunately where we were sitting, we weren't in the best place for hearing the orchestra...

Just this past weekend, too, I was at a church summit where we got a choir together and sang two hymns for the Sunday service, both with music composed by one of the summit participants — a hymn based on Psalm 23, and a new setting of Tate and Brady's "Be Thou, O God, exalted high". Both quite complicated pieces and not easy to learn in only two days without that much time to rehearse in between other activities, but we managed it and it was a real thrill to sing them!  

@courtenay 

I wonder what C. S. Lewis thought of “The Lark Ascending” if he ever heard that piece of music. I don’t know what he thought of violin music. I think it is one of the most beautiful and moving selections of music ever written, but of course that is just my own view. And of course it is Ralph Vaughan Williams most well known work.  🙂

I am somewhat baffled by Lewis’ dislike of organ music. Although some organ music played in churches can sound tiresome to me, there are the great organ works of Bach, which I find very lively and invigorating whenever I listen to them. I would say my enjoyment of the organ works depends largely on how they are played. I enjoy some organists much more than others whenever they are playing hymns. But of course that is only my own taste since I know very little about the technical part of the music.

Posted by: @narnian78

I wonder what C. S. Lewis thought of “The Lark Ascending” if he ever heard that piece of music. I don’t know what he thought of violin music. I think it is one of the most beautiful and moving selections of music ever written, but of course that is just my own view. And of course it is Ralph Vaughan Williams most well known work.  

It's quite possibly my favourite piece of music of all time too, although RVW's 5th Symphony and the Tallis Fantasia are just about equal to it and if I had to pick just one of the three, I don't think I could bear to do it... 

The Lark Ascending was the first of those I was introduced to, just over 10 years ago during my first year of living in England. I discovered it on a CD of the "best of British music" and was in absolute awe from the opening bars onwards — all I could think, to sum it up, was: "... And THAT is why I want to stay in this country forever." It truly is the most, well, thoroughly and deeply English piece of music I've ever heard. But what C.S. Lewis would have thought of it — unless there's evidence that he definitely heard it and commented on it — may have to remain a mystery...