This week we share selections from guest curator Wesley Chinn who curated our holiday season posts at the end of 2020. We look forward to sharing holiday favorites with you in person at our first concert back this coming December!

I grew up in a thoroughly mixed household in Northern California--my father was raised as a Chinese Mormon born in Utah, and my mother’s family were Eastern European Jews. As a mostly secular Jew, I usually didn’t think much about Christmas carols until it was time for our annual carolling party (our hodgepodge of beliefs came together around music). General consensus in my Brooklyn home today is that it’s ok to listen to Christmas music any time after Thanksgiving, but during my time as a professional choral musician, I came to have great affection for a lot of music that is associated in particular with Advent, the ecclesiastical season spanning the four weeks before Christmas.

Music for Advent often focuses on themes of waiting or anticipation, and like much of the Advent repertoire, today’s selection centers on the Virgin Mary. The text is an 1869 paraphrase by Catherine Winkworth of the well-known “Es ist ein’ Ros’ entsprungen” (“Lo How a Rose E’er Blooming”). Howells’s gorgeous setting evokes the stillness of winter and the gentle beauty of the rose, with the mellifluous baritone solo (beautifully performed by ensemble member Jason Eck) making explicit that it’s Mary who is the Rose.

There’s a lot to be unpacked about the imagery of Mary as a spotless rose, and in a longer format I might put my undergraduate women’s studies degree to use deconstructing it. Instead, I’d like to reflect on a point about Advent and Mary that my wife observed to me one Christmas (while she was pregnant), which is that if we take the Christmas story literally, Mary would have been 9 months pregnant. As anyone who has been or been around someone who has been pregnant that long knows, for most people, there’s a healthy dose of “can’t wait to be done with the waiting” involved.

I think it’s safe to say that this feeling, of being ready to move on to the next phase—ANY TIME NOW!!!—is one we can all relate to in this, of all years. This anthem, however, invites us to consider the time of waiting as one of calm repose and patient trust in the future. For me at least, this is very much a hard feeling to maintain right now, but I very much hope that the meditative beauty of Howells’s music can help you lay your cares aside for a few precious moments.

– Wesley Chinn

HERBERT HOWELLS A Spotless Rose

Voices of Ascension
Dennis Keene, Artistic Director
Jason Eck, Baritone

Recorded live at the CANDLELIGHT CHRISTMAS CONCERT
Wednesday, December 17, 2019, The Church of the Ascension, New York City
The singers in this performance are represented by the
American Guild of Musical Artists, AFL-CIO.