“Like earnest clergy and distant seraphs!” is the performance instruction at the top of the score of Laetentur Caeli

This is the fourth of the “Five Christmas Fanfares” for 8-part choir, all of which use antiphonal textures where the men and women of the choir sing in response to each other in alternating blocks of contrasting music. All five fanfares also have distinctive rhythmic characteristics and are short and dramatic in style. The texts are all in Latin and were found in a Roman Missal given to me on the occasion of my babyhood baptism by my paternal grandparents, Samuel and Florence Camm.

Go to “Five Christmas Fanfares”

This is the most serene of the five fanfares, being slower in tempo, and remaining in the same time signature throughout, although it has to be admitted that the phrases and melismas sometimes work against that regularity at times! The tenors’ and basses’ “earnest clergy” music using an opening-out texture that I have used a few times most notably in Pierced Hemisphere and Who Killed Cock Robin?, in which a single line melody is sung in unison except for on a few syllables where the parts open out into a chord, and then come back together again. The sopranos and altos are more serene in their music, and the seraphs and clergy sing separately for most of the anthem. At the and though, the two groups and their two types of music fit together serenely and joyously!

Laetentur caeli,
et exultet terra ante faciem Domini:
quoniam venit.

Let the heavens be glad
and the earth rejoice in the presence of the Lord,
for he has come. (Ps 95)

You’ll find scores for Laetentur Caeli here!