MUSIC NOTES

 

Echoing the theme of NYC Pride 2026, “For all of us,” this vespers invites the congregation to rejoice in God’s expansive love and join in God’s celebration of the diversity in which he created us, and the wideness of his dwelling place. It entreats those isolated or rejected to receive hope and comfort; and invites those already comfortable to mourn with those who mourn, and comfort those who feel excluded from God’s house, God’s people, or God’s love. 

 

Beginning with a prelude of Buxtehude’s cantata “Jubilate Domino,” or “Sing joyfully to the LORD,” (Psalm 98), a theme echoed at the end of the evening in a Gregorian chant of Psalm 100, beginning with the same text, (“Jubilate Domino”). As the joy of the gospel is found in our church’s most ancient memory, heard today in passages from Psalms, Ruth, Isaiah, Exodus, and Daniel, this joy has never ceased to resound, from the 2nd- and 3rd-century Greek hymns that we sing congregationally tonight in English, to our medieval Gregorian chant tracts, to a Baroque cantata and finally a new cantata from 2026. The joy of the gospel is the beginning and end of tonight’s message.

 

Yet, as the journey of gay, trans, and queer people continues to be marked by experiences of exclusion, grief, and fear, tonight’s service also raises this struggle in song and prayer. In particular, the cantata, “What Kind of House,” composed by Collegium member Audrey Fernandez Fraser, follows an imagined journey of individuals who have been banned from the congregation of ancient Israel (Deuteronomy 23), either as a male with atypical or altered reproductive anatomy (a eunuch) or as a Moabite or Ammonite (one of the fellow Semitic peoples in enmity with the Israelites). 

 

Using exclusively Old Testament texts to allow this gospel message a wider reach, the cantata is pervaded by a sure hope for all who love God, that they will dwell with him and be his people. Musical motives echo the opening Gregorian Chant, “Qui confidunt in Domino,” with its text from Psalm 125, evoking mountains and elevated birds, and recalling how the God likens his faithful ones to Mount Zion (and the temple) itself: “As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the LORD encircles his people,” all of his people, and “they shall never be shaken.”

 

The voice of a eunuch in the cantata is represented by a countertenor, which, while not an accurate portrayal of how a eunuch would likely sound, is symbolically chosen as the most prominent gender-non-conforming voice type in classical music today, usually sung by a man in a higher pitch range most often limited to women who sing as altos or sopranos. The countertenor begins the cantata with an aria of expectant longing and “even faint[ing]” to dwell with God in his courts. Along with the Gregorian motives, the aria’s string parts quote the cantata’s closing chorale, the hymn “Glorious Things Are Sung of Zion.” 

 

This is followed by a harsh setting of the bans in Deuteronomy 23, where one imagines the dream of the preceding aria to be destroyed – “no eunuch” and “no Moabite” “shall enter into the assembly of the Lord forever.” Two excluded souls grapple with these bans in the ensuing duet.

 

The voice of a Moabite is here represented by a soprano singing the words of Ruth, a Moabite who married an Israelite, but when widowed, was sent back to her people. Yet she insisted on remaining with Israel. As the eunuch pleads and trusts in God (through a Psalm), the Moabite echoes Ruth’s Biblical pleas to her mother-in-law, which are sung to God himself: “Entreat me not to leave thee, to turn back from following thee . . . ” The duet concludes with the pair boldly insisting on their inclusion in the fold of God: “For where thou dwellest I will dwell . . . thy people shall be my people,” affirming through the words of Ruth their faith that God rewards those who, like the patriarch Jacob, wrestle for their blessing, even the blessing to take upon them the name of God's people, Israel. 

 

The duet concludes with the two affirming their faith, albeit in a sparse chant, as though left in the wilderness: “O Lord, I have called upon thee.” 

 

This gives way to a bass recitative introducing the pinnacle of the cantata: God’s revelations to Isaiah, specifically concerning those once marginalized and cast out of the congregation. 

 

In the style of Anglican chant, the choir uses a simple harmonized melody to proclaim this good news in a melodious and speech-like manner, with the strings doubling the singers, moving together in one unified voice, as God calling out to the “foreigner” not to say “the Lord has… separated me from his people,” and to the “eunuch” not to disparage himself; for God affirms that he will exalt his faithful eunuchs, and that his temple will be “a house of prayer for all people.” 

 

This is followed by an energetic chorus of rejoicing, opening with a line from the words of Shadrach, Mishach, and Abednago, the three brave boys who refused to forsake their God even at threat of burning – “Our God is able to deliver us!” – leading into by a hymn comprised of lines from the “Song of Moses and Miriam,” also known as “The Song of the Sea,” an ancient hymn sung by the Israelites to celebrate their miraculous safe crossing of Red Sea out of Egypt. The tune is best known for its pairing with W.W. Phelps’s 19th-century hymn text, “The Spirit of God.”

 

The final choral chant echoes the earlier music of the Deuteronomy bans, but this time in the voice of God through Isaiah, affirming how “high and holy” and seemingly inaccessible God’s temple is. And yet, as the music turns to a major key, God affirms that not only will the outcasts be joined with his congregation and welcomed into his house of prayer, but that the expanse of God’s temple reaches farther than anyone can imagine. For he dwells not only in a high place, but “also with the one who is contrite and lowly in spirit.” Perhaps St. John revealed it best in the Book of Revelation (21:3): 

 

“Behold, the tabernacle of God is among mortals.

He will dwell with them; 

They will be his peoples, 

And God himself will be with them and be their God.”