Christmas is nearly upon us! Celebrate the season in all its comforting glory by coming to our Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols this Sunday at 5:00 pm. On Christmas Eve, you can look forward to hearing our young Choristers at the 4:00 pm family service. The Saints & Singers Choir will lead at 6:00 pm, along with “O Holy Night” sung by professional soloists.

Our Festival of Nine Lessons & Carols is coming soon on Sunday, December 22, at 5:00 pm. Please join the St. Michael’s Singers and Choristers for hymns, carols, motets, biblical readings, and poems exploring the story of Christ’s birth.

The offertory hymn for this Sunday, December 8, is an arrangement of a Swedish Advent tune (“Prepare the Way”) by Margareta Jalkeus (now Bengtson).

The St. Michael’s Singers will finish out the liturgical church year today with classic anthems by Ralph Vaughan Williams (“Let all the world in every corner sing” from “Five Mystical Songs”) and W.A. Mozart (“Ave verum corpus”). Hymns and keyboard voluntaries will reflect the themes of Thanksgiving and the Reign of Christ.

This Sunday, November 10, we reflect and pray with the aid of three women composers. The offertory anthem is a beautiful Eucharistic motet by the working-class French composer Mel Bonis (1858-1937). Bonis (pictured above) was a prolific late-Romantic composer who masked her gender with the pseudonym “Mel” rather than Mélanie.

All Saints Evensong is tonight, November 1, which is the actual Feast of All Saints. Click below for the bulletin. Join us at 7:00 pm for this free feast of choral music by the Renaissance composers Orlando Gibbons and Tomas Luis de Victoria, as well as music by English composers William Smith and John Goss, and more!

St. Michael’s Music Director & Organist Hannah Brewer is newly back from her parental leave and very grateful for the musical leadership of Brian Fairbanks and James Walker (and the choirs!) while she was away. A fabulous season of music making is ahead, with another choral evensong coming up on Friday, November 1, at 7:00 pm for the Feast of All Saints.

Today, James is playing music by Joséphine Boulay and Eugène Gigout. Ms. Boulay, blind since the age of three, studied organ and composition at the Paris Conservatoire. Today’s “Toccata” is Gigout’s best-known work, and for good reason! At 9:00, the St. Michael’s Singers will sing two anthems in honor of St. Francis Day, “The Blue Bird,” by C. V. Stanford; and Kevin Siegfried’s arrangement of the Shaker song, “Heavenly Display.”

We continue this Sunday in our Season of Creation. The St. Michael’s Singers will lead settings of Psalm 19: The heavens declare the glory of God. In today’s Gospel, St. Peter declares that Jesus is the Christ.