Music Notes: Holy Week 2026

Music Notes: Holy Week 2026

Congregational music is fundamental to our liturgy and in many cases informs our choral music as well. Since so much of it remains constant from year to year in Holy Week. However, this year’s notes, in order to keep to a reasonable length, focus on the choral music we have chosen for this year. I encourage you to review Music Notes from previous years for more about the hymnody and the liturgies themselves.

Though our choir does not ordinarily sing much truly Baroque music, that style’s concern to evoke, or even provoke, strong emotions makes some of it particularly suitable for Holy Week, when the liturgy’s usual call to still, rather than stir, the passions gives way to a more devotional approach. Our choral music appropriately scales the heights and plumbs the depths of the events of the week.

Palm Sunday

Carl Heinrich Graun, known particularly as an opera singer and composer in the first half of the 18th century, also wrote music for the Church, including a couple of Passion cantatas. The first chorus of one of these serves as the 11:15 a.m. Offertory anthem: ‘Surely he hath borne our griefs’ (Isaiah 53.4). In the opening section (later repeated in a different but related key) the chorus as a unit calls the listener to attention; this is followed by a passage in imitative texture, the voice-parts entering one by one: in a way, a typically Baroque ‘prelude and fugue’. The piece is often sung today without its original accompaniment, but it is incomplete without the texture of repeated chords that firmly establish the tragic mood, reinforced by the twisting-and-turning harmonic progressions, and I will play the simple instrumental parts (originally for strings and oboes) on the organ.

At 9 a.m. the Communion anthem sung by the Choral Scholars is a setting of the Epistle of the day, the great hymn of Christ’s self-abasement and exaltation from Philippians 2, by prolific and long-lived Italian Baroque composer Giuseppe Ottavio Pitoni. Though parts of this piece (including the first section, most of which consists of a canon in four parts) are written in a style not far removed from that of the late Renaissance, which all composers still studied and many still emulated in their church music well into the 18th century, the central portion contains serpentine harmonic progressions, and large falling intervals in the soprano part, portraying the mood of the text ‘...even death on a cross’, much more typical of the high Baroque.

Maundy Thursday

This liturgy has a simplicity and serenity about it that is almost unique in the entire Church’s year. Neither exactly joyful nor yet quite explicitly tragic, it seems not to need or want the drama inherent in the Baroque style, and the music this evening consists especially of chant and chant-like melodies.

In addition to the congregational hymnody, the choir sings three hymns of its own, during the footwashing and Communion. ‘You laid aside your rightful reputation’ is a fine modern text by Rosalind Brown that refers to the same passage from Philippians read on Palm Sunday, then moves to the scene of the Maundy Thursday foot-washing before looking back at other events in which Christ chose to associate with outcasts. It is set to remarkably subdued and exquisitely beautiful music by C.H.H. Parry, otherwise known especially for his bombastic choral setting of ‘I was glad when they said unto me’. The mournful melody is strictly modal (it is playable on the white keys of the piano and stays within one scale) and accompanied by beautiful harmony featuring several expressive suspensions (lightly dissonant harmonies that beg to be resolved to consonances).

‘Three holy days enfold us now’, by Delores Dufner, a Benedictine nun, summarizes the elemental objects, actions, and events of Holy Week; it is set to a chant melody in a metrical (rather than a free-flowing) version, of which I have made a simple choral arrangement.

‘O Bread of life, for sinners broken’ places us, celebrating the Eucharist, at the Last Supper. The Chinese text was written in the 1930s by Timothy T’ing Fang Lew; the pentatonic tune (playable on the black keys of the piano, a characteristic not only of East Asian music but of many other traditions around the world), entitled ‘Sheng En’ (Holy Grace), was written around the same time by Su Yin-Lan. It is characteristic of modal tunes (including pentatonic ones) that they can be presented and accompanied in a variety of ways but are equally capable of standing entirely on their own; to sing this shapely melody entirely unadorned befits the special character of the Maundy Thursday liturgy.

At the Offertory the choir sings a setting by Tudor composer William Mundy of Christ’s ‘new commandment’ to love one another. Such early English anthems replaced the often very dense textures and great length of Latin-texted English Renaissance music with a clarity, directness, and brevity that is enriched by often very careful attention to the prosody of the English text and gently enlivened by many rhythmic units of three beats ‘floating’, as it were, within the overall duple meter. Another typical feature is the repetition of the latter half or so of the piece.

Good Friday

‘O sacred head, sore wounded’, which we will sing congregationally on this day, is a free rendering by English poet Robert Bridges of a Latin hymn, ‘Salve caput cruentatum’, written perhaps in the thirteenth century, and previously translated into German by the great 17th-century hymnist Paul Gerhardt. This Latin text taking as it inspiration the various parts of the body of the crucified Christ, supplemented by scriptural verses, also forms the basis of a cycle of seven cantatas entitled Membra Jesu nostri, written in 1680 by the great German composer Dieterich Buxtehude. At noon the choir, with soloists and the special timbre of Baroque-replica stringed instruments, will sing the cantata addressed to the Knees of Christ, which takes as its key verse (sung by the chorus) Isaiah 66.12: ‘You will be brought to nurse and dandled on the knees [of Jerusalem, portrayed as a mother]’. Buxtehude’s rich harmonic language, made especially possible by the writing in 5-part harmony, highlights the deeply devotional nature of this text.

At the evening reprise of the Good Friday liturgy, the Choral Scholars will sing music from early-20th-century England, George Oldroyd’s ‘Song of the Passion’. This setting of a late medieval devotional poem is about Christ’s Passion, but is itself an outburst of passion, of the poet’s many turns of mood ‘when... think[ing] on Jesus’ blood’: tender love; shock; self-conviction; ultimately profound gratitude. Pensive, improvisatory single vocal lines give way to rich harmony full of suspensions and resolutions; an extremely wide range of volume and a constant push and pull of tempo are other musical tools used for emotional expressiveness.

Easter Day

Our Offertory anthem, ‘Sing praise to Christ’, comes from a cantata that was once attributed to J.S. Bach but may instead have been written by his predecessor in his final post at Leipzig, Johann Kuhnau. The voices enter in pairs in lightly imitative writing before all voices sing together using some of the same buoyant thematic material; though the accompaniment (which I will play on the organ) is scored only for strings, lively dotted-rhythm figures near the end call to mind festive trumpets and drums. The whole evokes the joy of the occasion most effectively.

A 16th-century hymn, ‘Erschienen ist der herrlich Tag’, with its proper tune, forms the basis of our Communion anthem. Both the richly evocative text and the infectious tune were written by Nicolaus Herrmann and published in 1560. Of the 14 original stanzas I selected and translated seven, focusing on Christ as conquering hero and Passover Lamb (reluctantly omitting several vivid but perhaps slightly obscure other symbols, as well as the scenes of the women at the tomb and the Road to Emmaus account in order to keep to a reasonable length), and set the tune for three-part choir. See Hymn 201 for the tune and a translation of a different part of the original.