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O Heiland, Reiß Die Himmel Auf
"O Heiland, reiß die Himmel auf" (O Saviour, tear open the heavens) is a Christian Advent song. The text was first printed in 1622, attributed to Friedrich Spee; the melody was first printed in 1666. History The song was first published in Würzburg in the collection ''Das Allerschönste Kind in der Welt'' (The most beautiful child in the world). Its author is not named, but is thought to be Friedrich Spee, due to similarities to his later collection ''Trutznachtigall''. The text was written in the context of the Thirty Years War, the plague and witch trials. The text was first sung to the melody of "Conditor alma siderum". The melody known today appeared first in the '' Rheinfelsisches Gesangbuch'' of 1666. The song is focused on the longing for the arrival of a Saviour. It has been included in both Catholic and Protestant hymnals; in Protestant hymnals sometimes with an added seventh stanza of unknown authorship. It is part of the Catholic ''Gotteslob'' as GL 231, of the '' Ev ...
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Christian Hymn
A hymn is a type of song, and partially synonymous with devotional song, specifically written for the purpose of adoration or prayer, and typically addressed to a deity or deities, or to a prominent figure or personification. The word ''hymn'' derives from Greek (''hymnos''), which means "a song of praise". A writer of hymns is known as a hymnist. The singing or composition of hymns is called hymnody. Collections of hymns are known as hymnals or hymn books. Hymns may or may not include instrumental accompaniment. Although most familiar to speakers of English in the context of Christianity, hymns are also a fixture of other world religions, especially on the Indian subcontinent (''stotras''). Hymns also survive from antiquity, especially from Egyptian and Greek cultures. Some of the oldest surviving examples of notated music are hymns with Greek texts. Origins Ancient Eastern hymns include the Egyptian ''Great Hymn to the Aten'', composed by Pharaoh Akhenaten; the Hurrian ''Hym ...
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Rorate Caeli
"Rorate caeli" or "Rorate coeli" ('Drop down, ye heavens') are the opening words of in the Vulgate. The text appears at several points in the Christian liturgy during Advent. Use in the western Mass and Offices The text is frequently sung to plainsong at Mass and in the Divine Office during Advent where it gives expression to the longings of Patriarchs and Prophets, and symbolically of the Church, for the coming of the Messiah. Throughout Advent it occurs daily as the versicle and response after the hymn at Vespers. The text is used in the extraordinary form of the Roman Rite: *as the Introit for the Fourth Sunday in Advent, for Wednesday in Ember Week, for the feast of the Expectation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and for votive Masses of the Blessed Virgin during Advent; *as a versicle in the first matins responsory of Tuesday in the first week of Advent; *as the first antiphon at Lauds for the Tuesday preceding Christmas and the second antiphon at Matins of the Expectation of ...
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Richard Wetz
Richard Wetz (26 February 1875 – 16 January 1935) was a German late Romantic composer best known for his three symphonies. In these works, he "seems to have aimed to be an immediate continuation of Bruckner, as a result of which he actually ended up on the margin of music history". Biography 1875–1906: Youth Richard Wetz was born to a merchant family in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia (now Poland). Although his family owned a piano, no family member was particularly interested in music. The young Richard, who felt drawn to music early on, did not receive regular piano lessons until the age of eight years, but quickly taught himself by composing smaller piano and song pieces. He later stated that he resolved to dedicate his life to music by the age of 13. After passing his final examinations in 1897, he went to Leipzig to study at the conservatoire under such tutors as Carl Reinecke and Salomon Jadassohn. After only 6 weeks, however, he discontinued his studies after suffering ...
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Johannes Weyrauch
Johannes Weyrauch (20 February 1897 − 1 May 1977) was a German composer and cantor. Life Childhood Weyrauch was born on 20 February 1897 in Leipzig. His mother, Maria Große, who had received a thorough musical education and worked in several cantor houses, introduced her son to sacred music at an early age. His father, Friedrich Louis Weyrauch, was a merchant by profession and was able to finance his son's attendance of the . Through his stepbrother (from his father's first marriage), Weyrauch got in touch with the music of Richard Wagner, which had a decisive influence on his musical life: :''My brother sent me into the Ring when I was 14 years old - with the success that I became Wagner mad. A pedagogical, irreparable mistake, because since that time I have had no proper relationship with most operas.'' Parallel to his schooling at the Gymnasium, Weyrauch became a pupil of Helene Caspar, a music teacher and writer known around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, who i ...
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Hugo Distler
August Hugo Distler (24 June 1908 – 1 November 1942)Slonimsky & Kuhn, ''Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians'', v. 2, p. 889 was a German organist, choral conductor, teacher and composer. Life and career Born in Nuremberg, Distler attended the Leipzig Conservatory from 1927 to 1931, first as a conducting student with piano as his secondary subject, but changing later, on the advice of his teacher, to composition and organ. He studied there with Martienssen (piano), Günther Ramin ( organ) and Grabner (harmony). He became the organist at St. Jacobi in Lübeck in 1931. In 1933 he married Waltraut Thienhaus. That same year he joined the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers' Party), reluctantly, as his continued employment depended on his doing so. In October 1933 Distler was appointed head of the chamber music department at the Lübeck Conservatory, and at about the same time he began teaching at the Spandauer Kirchenmusikschule (Spandau school of church music).Klaus ...
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Johann Nepomuk David
Johann Nepomuk David (30 November 1895 – 22 December 1977) was an Austrian composer. Life and career David was born in Eferding. He was a choirboy in the monastery of Sankt Florian and studied at an episcopal teacher training college in Linz, 1912–1915, after which he became a school teacher. He studied briefly (1921–22) at both the Musikhochschule (where was a composition student of Joseph Marx) and the university of Vienna (where he studied with Guido Adler). He returned to Linz in 1922, where he acted as musical director of the Linz "Kunststelle" until 1924. From January 1925 until the autumn of 1934 he was a teacher at a local catholic school, founded and directed a Bach choir, and was organist at a Protestant church at Wels. He then became professor of composition and theory at the Musikhochschule in Leipzig (November 1934 – January 1945). From 1945 to 1947 he was professor of music at the Mozarteum, Salzburg, and finally, from 1948 to 1963, professor of theory and co ...
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Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms (; 7 May 1833 – 3 April 1897) was a German composer, pianist, and conductor of the mid- Romantic period. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, he spent much of his professional life in Vienna. He is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow. Brahms composed for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, violin, voice, and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works. He worked with leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim (the three were close friends). Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire. Brahms has been considered both a traditionalist and an innovator, by his contemporaries and by later writers. His music is rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Classical masters. Emb ...
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Dorian Mode
Dorian mode or Doric mode can refer to three very different but interrelated subjects: one of the Ancient Greek ''harmoniai'' (characteristic melodic behaviour, or the scale structure associated with it); one of the medieval musical modes; or—most commonly—one of the modern modal diatonic scales, corresponding to the piano keyboard's white notes from D to D, or any transposition of itself. : Greek Dorian mode The Dorian mode (properly ''harmonia'' or ''tonos'') is named after the Dorian Greeks. Applied to a whole octave, the Dorian octave species was built upon two tetrachords (four-note segments) separated by a whole tone, running from the ''hypate meson'' to the ''nete diezeugmenon''. In the enharmonic genus, the intervals in each tetrachord are quarter tone–quarter tone–major third. : In the chromatic genus, they are semitone–semitone–minor third. : In the diatonic genus, they are semitone–tone–tone. : In the diatonic genus, the sequence over the ...
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O Heiland, Reiß Die Himmel Auf (Erstdruck Mit Melodie, Rheinfelsisches Gesangbuch 1666)
"O Heiland, reiß die Himmel auf" (O Saviour, tear open the heavens) is a Christian Advent song. The text was first printed in 1622, attributed to Friedrich Spee; the melody was first printed in 1666. History The song was first published in Würzburg in the collection ''Das Allerschönste Kind in der Welt'' (The most beautiful child in the world). Its author is not named, but is thought to be Friedrich Spee, due to similarities to his later collection ''Trutznachtigall''. The text was written in the context of the Thirty Years War, the plague and witch trials. The text was first sung to the melody of "Conditor alma siderum". The melody known today appeared first in the '' Rheinfelsisches Gesangbuch'' of 1666. The song is focused on the longing for the arrival of a Saviour. It has been included in both Catholic and Protestant hymnals; in Protestant hymnals sometimes with an added seventh stanza of unknown authorship. It is part of the Catholic '' Gotteslob'' as GL 231, of the '' ...
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David Gregor Corner
David Gregor Corner, (1585 – 9 January 1648) was a German Benedictine abbot, hymn writer and theologian best known for his influential 1631 ''Gross Catholisches Gesängbuch'' ("Great Catholic Hymnal"). Born in Hirschberg, Germany (now Jelenia Góra, Poland), he studied theology at Prague, Graz and Vienna, where he earned a doctorate. He became a pastor in Retz in 1614. In 1628 he became a novice monk at Göttweig Abbey. By 1636, Corner was the abbot of Göttweig, where he became a leading figure of the Counter-Reformation, and was made Rector of the University of Vienna in 1638.''The Presbyterian hymnal companion'', (Westminster John Knox Press, 1993) , 229 He died 9 January 1648 at Göttweig. His magnum opus, the ''Gross Catholische Gesängbuch'' was published in 1625, and a later publication from 1631 contained 546 hymns and 276 melodies (including 76 Latin hymns), one of the largest song books of the 16th and 17th century. This collection featured devotional Catholic hymns for ...
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Gregorian Chant
Gregorian chant is the central tradition of Western plainchant, a form of monophonic, unaccompanied sacred song in Latin (and occasionally Greek) of the Roman Catholic Church. Gregorian chant developed mainly in western and central Europe during the 9th and 10th centuries, with later additions and redactions. Although popular legend credits Pope Gregory I with inventing Gregorian chant, scholars believe that it arose from a later Carolingian synthesis of the Old Roman chant and Gallican chant. Gregorian chants were organized initially into four, then eight, and finally 12 modes. Typical melodic features include a characteristic ambitus, and also characteristic intervallic patterns relative to a referential mode final, incipits and cadences, the use of reciting tones at a particular distance from the final, around which the other notes of the melody revolve, and a vocabulary of musical motifs woven together through a process called centonization to create families of related ch ...
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Friedrich Spee
Friedrich Spee (also ''Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld''; February 25, 1591 – August 7, 1635) was a German Jesuit priest, professor, and poet, most well known as a forceful opponent of witch trials and one who was an insider writing from the epicenter of the European witch-phobia. Spee argued strongly against the use of torture, and as an eyewitness he gathered a book full of details regarding its cruelty and unreliability.Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld: ''Cautio Criminalis, or a Book on Witch Trials'' (1631), translated by Marcus Hellyer. University of Virginia Press, 2003. . Thtranslator's introduction (pp. vii–xxxvi)contains many details on Spee's life. He wrote, "Torture has the power to create witches where none exist." Life Spee was born at Kaiserswerth on the Rhine. On finishing his early education at Cologne, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1610, and pursued extensive studies and activity as a teacher at Trier, Fulda, Würzburg, Speyer, Worms and Mainz, where he was ...
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