Chantez a Dieu by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck

Sung by the 1990 Arkansas High School All-State Choir conducted by Andre Thomas. To be sung by the Washington Collegium under the direction of Benjamin Hansen on this Sunday, the 19th of July, at 7:30 PM at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington DC.

Straddling the lines between Renaissance and Baroque, Northern and Southern Europe, Catholicism and Protestantism, Sweelinck was a composer caught between worlds. An organist and improvisor of extraordinary talent, his music mingles influences from all the European centers in which he lived and visited into a seamlessly synthesized personal voice. Though Dutch by origin, he had an enormous array of musical contacts in London, Venice, Paris and every German center, each of which gave him new influences to absorb. The synthesis he made helped to create a musical lingua franca of music which his great admirer Bach developed into the system we now refer to as Tonality.


(Fantasia Chromatica by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. The organist is Helmut Walcha.)