New Music Upload (Choral Capers)

Welcome back, everybody! I've yet another new piece for you, this time for SATB choir. The title of this piece is Te Deum Laudámus, and its first movement is ready for you today: Laudate Hominis. It's waiting for you over on the Works page or in the video tab down below. I hope you enjoy! Don't forget to follow me on Facebook and subscribe to my mailing list for new music straight to your inbox! Thanks for listening! I truly appreciate all your support.

Shout out to Joshua Curtis for making my stained glass glow!

Te Deum Laudámus is a prayer from the Book of Common Prayer. The title translates to "We praise Thee, O God." The prayer is about how all the earth and heavens praise the Lord, detailing the praises of mankind and the angels. The subtitle, Laudate Hominis, translates to "Praise of Mankind", making this movement exclusively about mankind's praise to God.

The idea to set this text came in a bit of a strange way. I had mostly written the music before setting any text to it. Being somewhat terrible at making up lyrics, (or song names, for that matter...) I was having a difficult time figuring out what to do next for this piece. I was sitting in my chair, trying to think of an exciting title for the piece. After some time of concentrating on this, I nodded off. While I was asleep, I heard the words "Te Deum" and snapped back awake. I had no idea what it meant, so I Googled it. Lo and behold, it's a text from the Book of Common Prayer! Being a Pentecostal guy, I can't say I've ever read much from this book. Maybe once in highschool literature class, but definitely not this particular prayer. I thought the lyrics would be perfect for choral music, so I started setting them right away.

Here are the lyrics that I used for this movement translated to English: (thanks Wikipedia!)

We praise thee, O God : we acknowledge thee to be the Lord. All the earth doth worship thee : the Father everlasting...

The glorious company of the Apostles : praise thee. The goodly fellowship of the Prophets : praise thee. The noble army of Martyrs : praise thee. The holy Church throughout all the world : doth acknowledge thee...

I set the lyrics of the Te Deum prayer in Latin for a variety of reasons.

1. Latin sounds cool. It has a mysterious, arcane quality that can lend some weight to the sacred nature of the lyrics. Churches have been using Latin for centuries, after all.

2. I wanted experience setting text from a different language than my own. Not that setting a text in English is too easy by any means. I think that using Latin made me focus more on text declamation than I may have in English. Google Translate was invaluable for this, since it will speak the Latin words aloud so I could hear how to arrange them properly.

3. Latin is a common choir language. It is a language that shows up so much in choral music that no professional choir would have any trouble singing through this piece. It shows up in choral works from around the world too. In a way, this makes Latin one of the most versatile choir languages.

Te Deum Laudámus is written for SATB choir, meaning the choir contains Sopranos, Altos, Tenors, and Basses. There are a few parts where each voice section has to split in two, enabling me to orchestrate larger chords. Because of this, the size of the choir has to be at least eight singers. This division of voice sections (called divisi) is fairly prevalent in the soprano section in this movement, though not used as often in the other sections. In fact, the bass section only has to split up for the final note. The easiest to hear example of divisi is at the end of the piece, where I spread out all the voices using the pyramid technique. Each voice comes in one at a time, gradually stacking one on top of the other. This creates a nicely contoured sound that is dramatic and sort of looks like a pyramid in the score. See the picture below.

Check out that juicy chord based off of an A Phrygian scale!

Thanks again for taking the time to listen to my work and read my long winded articles. I hope you are blessed by this piece, or at the very least relieved of about six minutes of boredom. Be sure to stay tuned, as this is just the first of three (maybe four) movements. There will be more choral goodness to come!

Happy Easter!

Nathan C. Curtis

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