Credo Settings
Presented by the Institute of Sacred Music
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library,
121 Wall Street, New Haven
Free and open to the public, tickets not required.
The Yale Schola Cantorum, under the direction of Simon Carrington, will present a concert of credo settings on Friday, December 5, 2003 at 4 pm at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in New Haven at 121 Wall St. The concert will be followed by a reception.
The concert is offered as part of a yearlong celebration of the eightieth birthday and distinguished career of Jaroslav Pelikan, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale, and is followed at 8 pm by a lecture in Dwight Chapel, where Professor Pelikan will address The Will to Believe and the Need for Creed.
The concert program will consist of a selection of musical settings of creeds, and will be shared by three choirs.
The Yale Schola Cantorum will perform a range of creeds from the canon of Western choral music from different periods from the beginning of the 16th century to the present day. It will include a High Renaissance polyphonic setting, possibly by Josquin, from a parody mass based on the folk song “Ma Bouche Rit,” as well as a sequence of settings of the Lutheran credoDas deutsche Patrem: first the original melody by Luther himself, then two settings from the opposite ends of the 16th century, and finally a Lutheran setting by the 20th century Austrian composer Johann Nepomuk David, based on Luther’s original. Schola will also sing a setting by Stravinsky in Church Slavonic, another by the great contemporary Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, and a more recent setting by the American Dan Locklair. Also on the program is the premiere of Sh’ma Yisrael by Ezra Laderman, written for the occasion as a tribute to Professor Pelikan.
Two guest choirs will expand the repertoire in an easterly direction. The Hellenic College Schola Cantorum from Boston, directed by Nektarios Antoniou, will perform a series of settings of the Credo from the Byzantine and Greek traditions. The Yale Russian Chorus, directed by Mark Bailey, will perform musical settings from the Slavonic Orthodox tradition, conveying important dogmatic elements associated with—and in some cases symbolic of—Eastern theology and Orthodox belief.