Carrickfergus Grammar School Carol Service, 2021 скачать в хорошем качестве

Carrickfergus Grammar School Carol Service, 2021

The Annual Festival of Nine Lessons with Carols has long been a highlight of our school year and one of the best memories of past students, with many returning year after year to hear again the words and music of the season. This year we continue to adapt as we rise to the challenges of meeting and singing together throughout another Advent and Christmas Season. We are delighted that following last year’s requirement to produce the service virtually, with most of us singing in year groups or even in our own homes, we are now able to continue our tradition of reading scripture and singing music together. Although it would be lovely to have a large congregation of parents, family and friends joining with us as in previous years we hope that you still enjoy listening at home and look forward to future years when we will appreciate being together again. To show your appreciation of the work of our students, we encourage you to offer a donation to ‘Mary's Meals’ by following this link. https://gofund.me/aa262f14 £15.90 is all it takes to feed TWO children for a whole school year and donations made to Mary’s Meals this winter will be matched, with up to £1.6 million available. Film stars Sophie and Emma Thompson are backing their new campaign, Double The Love, which will help them to feed even more hungry children. Your donations will help the charity: To provide a daily meal, in a place of education, for children in the world’s poorest communities. To provide relief for those suffering, in any part of the world, as a result of humanitarian crises or poverty; to help people escape poverty; and to provide care for orphaned, abandoned and vulnerable children. To raise awareness in the UK and worldwide of poverty issues through education. The service follows the plan laid down over 100 years ago for Christmas Eve 1918, by Eric Milner-White who had returned from the battlefields of the Great War. It is familiar throughout the world thanks largely to the annual broadcasts from the Chapel of King’s College in Cambridge. The service provides a time for both choir and congregation, who this year are isolated at home but together in spirit, to reflect on the ‘development of the loving purposes of God...’ seen ’...through the windows and words of the Bible’. The carols and anthems are subservient to the words of scripture providing an opportunity for a response to the texts through traditional and contemporary music. The Bidding Prayer encourages us to reflect with gratitude to God for ‘all those who rejoice with us but on another shore and in a greater light’. The centre of the service is still found by those who ‘go in heart and mind’ and who consent to follow where the story leads. The choirs of Carrickfergus Grammar will, in turn, weave carols old and new between the readings. We particularly looking forward to giving the UK premiere of a setting of In The Bleak Midwinter by composer Timothy Allen. Tim is originally from England but now lives in America following ten years as part of the musical scene of Northern Ireland when we was organist in Londonderry and taught at Queen's University. There are four vocal groups leading the singing today: the Senior Choir made up of boys and girls from Year 11 to 14, the Junior Girls’ Choir who welcome all young ladies from their first days in the school in Year 8 until Year 11, the Boys’ Voices who are always keen to bring together the young gentlemen of the school from any year group and a newly formed vocal ensemble from a group of students who were keen to do a little more together - Voces Aspirantes (Aspiring Voices). All our groups have maintained our ethos of working with each voice without audition, helping anyone who wishes to work together to achieve musicianship that wouldn’t be possible on their own. The lessons are read by representatives of the school community and although you may be sitting at home, we encourage you all to join with us for the hymns that you know – or at least hum along. Our Carol Service this year may be missing our friends and family but we know that they will be watching from home and so we carry on this important moment in our school’s calendar. We hope that 2022 will be a refreshing year for us all as we hope to be able to welcome you along to more live concerts and times when we can just be together, making and enjoying great music. May you have a peaceful Christmas, and a happy New Year.