by Mike Telin

For the past eleven years, Quire Cleveland’s Carols for Quire concerts have become a holiday tradition. Over the years, the program — which began with pairing old and new carols — has explored numerous facets of the festive songs that are sung around the world during the Christmas season.

“Carols for Quire VI” featured French Noëls while “Carols VIII” presented a multitude of languages including Finnish, Abenaki, Afro-Portuguese, Mohawk, and Wendat, as well as English, Latin, and Spanish. The ninth edition was titled “Carols of Yore,” and the tenth highlighted the “O Antiphons.” This year the program will examine the Christmas story from the point of view of the angels and shepherds.

On Thursday, December 1 at 7:30 pm at Our Lady of Peace Church in Cleveland, Jay White will conduct the ensemble in “Carols for Quire XII: Angels and Shepherds.” The program will be repeated on December 2 at 8:00 pm at St. John Cantius Church in Tremont, and on December 3 at 8:00 pm at St. Paschal Baylon Church in Highland Heights. The concerts are free. Click here to view the program booklet.

“Last year we focused on Mary,” White said during a telephone conversation. “We haven’t left Joseph out of the story — he’s been there every so often. But when I was looking at possible topics for this year, I started thinking about who received the message” — the news of the birth of Jesus — “after Mary had figured it out and she and Joseph went to Bethlehem. And it was the shepherds who received it from the angels. I was also thinking of how amazing it must have been for the shepherds to have witnessed this celestial event, with the angels telling them it was happening and they should go see it.” [Read more…]

by Mike Telin

Have you ever walked into a Cathedral and heard music coming from some place and you needed to find out where? While your ear told you to proceed down the left side of the building, as you got closer you discovered that the sound was actually originating from the other side of the space.

While scientifically this phenomenon is known as the acoustic, “more importantly it’s the concept of having the space become the nth member of the ensemble,” artistic director Jay White said during a recent telephone conversation. =

On Friday, May 13 at 7:30 pm in the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, White will lead Quire Cleveland in “Resonant Glory: Music for Grand Spaces.” The program, which celebrates the union of music and architecture, will be repeated on Saturday at 8:00 pm at St. Noel Church in Willoughby, and on Sunday at 5:00 pm at St. Sebastian Church in Akron. The concerts are free.

White said that his inspiration for the program came while he was making a list of his favorite pieces for double choir. “I thought, wait a minute, why do we have double choir works to begin with?” Answering that question led White to alter his approach to making the list. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

Quire Cleveland will resume live concerts this weekend, with three performances of the 11th edition of its annual Carols for Quire scheduled for December 2, 3, and 4 in great ecclesiastical spaces around the city.

I reached conductor Jay White by phone in his studio at Kent State University and began by asking him what was involved in restarting a choral machine that’s been silent for two seasons.

“It’s been interesting,” he said. “As you can imagine, many of the singers, unless they had any kind of a church job over the course of the pandemic — when they were recording something and sending it in — there’s been very little if any ensemble work at all, or it’s been one singer on a part. Most of the members of the ensemble, myself included, haven’t had much opportunity to sing in the past 20-some-odd months.

“That said, what has been working well is that the enthusiasm and excitement for wanting to do this work is infectious to the point where people are really stepping up,” he said. [Read more…]

by Daniel Hathaway

There are myriad ways to organize a concert of carols. For Quire Cleveland’s tenth “Carols for Quire” program, to be presented by his professional singers in three venues from December 20-22, conductor Jay White turned to Renaissance settings of ancient antiphons for structure. “These three concerts are sponsored by the letter O, just like in Sesame Street,” he said in a phone conversation from his studio at Kent State University.

Let’s explain. By the eighth century, the Roman church had developed a series of devotional antiphons to be sung one-per-day during the last week before Christmas as introductions to the Magnificat hymn at Vespers. Derived from the prophecies of Isaiah, each begins with “O” and names a specific attribute of the Messiah — Sapientia (Wisdom), Adonai (Lord), Radix Jesse (Root of Jesse), Clavis David (Key of David), Oriens (Daystar), Rex Gentium (King of Nations), and Emmanuel (God with us).

These antiphons will be familiar to those who know the hymn O come, O come, Emmanuel, a compilation of the “O” antiphons in poetic form which appeared in Germany during the early 18th century, originally with only five stanzas. Paired with a 15th-century French melody in the widely-adopted Hymns Ancient and Modern in 1861, the hymn came into general use in English-speaking countries. [Read more…]