Cecilia Virgo

Vocal score

Forces or Category: 6S 6A 6T 6B unaccompanied

New Horizons

Part of the New Horizons series
Text celebrates St Cecilia
Very beautiful and rewarding music

Cecilia Virgo

Vocal score

Gabriel Jackson

Description

for 6S 6A 6T 6B unaccompanied
This expansive piece requiring 24 singers sets an anonymous 16th-century text of supplication to St Cecilia. From the cascading imitation of its opening to the monolithic triads of its close, it remains spellbinding and invokes a powerful sense of the divine. Inspired by the great motets of the Eton Choir Book, this is seriously beautiful music with particular appeal for committed choirs.

Programme Notes:

The florid, ecstatic music of the Eton Choirbook is a particular obsession of mine so I was very excited that Cecilia Virgo was to receive its first performance alongside pieces from that miraculous repertoire. My first attempt to engage with this extraordinary music, A Vision of Aeroplanes (premiered by the BBC Singers in 1997) took its cue from the ever-changing combinations of voices and ornate, complex counterpoint characteristic of early Tudor polyphony. Cecilia Virgo is more

Cecilia Virgo

Vocal score

Gabriel Jackson

New Horizons

Composer Information

Gabriel Jackson (b.1962)

One of Britain's foremost composers, after three years as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral, Gabriel Jackson went on to study composition with Richard Blackford and John Lambert at the Royal College of Music. Particularly acclaimed for his choral works, his liturgical pieces are in the repertoires of most of Britain's cathedral and collegiate choirs and he is a frequent collaborator with the leading professional groups of the world. From 2010-2013 he was Associate Composer to the BBC Singers. In 2014 his hour-long The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, commissioned for the 750th anniversary of Merton College, Oxford, was premiered in its chapel. May 2015 saw the premiere at the Latvian National Opera of Spring Rounds for soprano, choir and orchestra, commissioned by the Riga-based youth choir Kamer for their 25th anniversary. He was recently commissioned by The Marian Consort to write Stabat Mater to mark their 10th anniversary. Gabriel Jackson's website