I often joke that I can just about play the Schubert Ave Maria in about fifteen keys, which means that for at least three of those variants each hand is playing in a different key simultaneously. This rather lovely contrafactum is a mainstay of just about any occasion in Romish worship, as Thomas Day remarks about the wedding and funeral of JFK, this song was sung by the same soloist on both occasions. But this isn't a bashing up session about church music.
I've been spending a bit of time looking at the Five Mystical Songs of Ralph Vaughan Williams lately. Part of the reason is to do with training a choir of young people. The Call is an obvious item of repertoire to teach at the early stages, given the lovely modal character of the piece, and that the hymn version is relatively simple to prepare for performance. Even if you regard this as a hymn, it still makes a very satisfactory unison anthem. There's plenty of room for making artistry by insisting on long phrases and using dynamics to enliven the projection of the text.
Having done that, I'm now moving to introduce the song version, for which a score can be found here, and below you'll find a video of a performance.
I'll probably end up dividing the labour so that the adults get a chance to shine in the second verse, and making sure that everyone's on board for all the rhythmic changes on the final page.
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