A definitive collection of 100 anthems from Tudor times to the present, this book includes favorites as well as lesser-known pieces. The anthems were selected for their practical usefulness for church choirs today, bearing in mind the needs of smaller choirs: the anthems are mostly for SATBwith or without keyboard accompaniments.

Designed to complement The Oxford Book of Flexible Anthems, this collection enables church choirs of all types and sizes to have at their fingertips easy music for every occasion. Flexibility of scoring is presented in a constructive and realistic way, with particular provision for unison or two-part singing and a focus on ease of learning.

This collection aims to provide a comprehensive survey of a highly significant part of the Christian Year: Ash Wednesday and Lent, Passiontide, Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter. Its contents span all musical periods of what is a marvellously rich area of church music and it contains much that is not widely available elsewhere under one cover. Ash Wednesday to Easter for Choirs includes a number of less familiar works together with new or recent arrangements of well-known tunes, such as Philip Ledger's 'This joyful Eastertide', Simon Lindley's 'Now the green blade riseth', and Bob Chilcott's setting of 'Were you there?'. Some of the anthems, for example Richard Shephard's 'Sing, my tongue' and Grayston Ives' 'Ride on', have been newly commissioned specifically for this collection, thus filling certain gaps. Wherever possible new practical performing editions of 16th-century repertoire have been prepared, reflecting current scholarship and including an English singing translation and, where, the original had none, a dynamic scheme. Such dynamics are the editors' suggestions only and may be freely ignored or adapted. Note values have in some instances been halved. Unaccompanied items include keyboard reductions for rehearsal.

The instant New York Times bestseller and companion book to the PBS series. “Absolutely brilliant . . . A necessary and moving work.” —Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., author of Begin Again “Engaging. . . . In Gates’s telling, the Black church shines bright even as the nation itself moves uncertainly through the gloaming, seeking justice on earth—as it is in heaven.” —Jon Meacham, New York Times Book Review From the New York Times bestselling author of Stony the Road and The Black Box, and one of our most important voices on the African American experience, comes a powerful new history of the Black church as a foundation of Black life and a driving force in the larger freedom struggle in America. For the young Henry Louis Gates, Jr., growing up in a small, residentially segregated West Virginia town, the church was a center of gravity—an intimate place where voices rose up in song and neighbors gathered to celebrate life's blessings and offer comfort amid its trials and tribulations. In this tender and expansive reckoning with the meaning of the Black Church in America, Gates takes us on a journey spanning more than five centuries, from the intersection of Christianity and the transatlantic slave trade to today’s political landscape. At road’s end, and after Gates’s distinctive meditation on the churches of his childhood, we emerge with a new understanding of the importance of African American religion to the larger national narrative—as a center of resistance to slavery and white supremacy, as a magnet for political mobilization, as an incubator of musical and oratorical talent that would transform the culture, and as a crucible for working through the Black community’s most critical personal and social issues. In a country that has historically afforded its citizens from the African diaspora tragically few safe spaces, the Black Church has always been more than a sanctuary. This fact was never lost on white supremacists: from the earliest days of slavery, when enslaved people were allowed to worship at all, their meetinghouses were subject to surveillance and destruction. Long after slavery’s formal eradication, church burnings and bombings by anti-Black racists continued, a hallmark of the violent effort to suppress the African American struggle for equality. The past often isn’t even past—Dylann Roof committed his slaughter in the Mother Emanuel AME Church 193 years after it was first burned down by white citizens of Charleston, South Carolina, following a thwarted slave rebellion. But as Gates brilliantly shows, the Black church has never been only one thing. Its story lies at the heart of the Black political struggle, and it has produced many of the Black community’s most notable leaders. At the same time, some churches and denominations have eschewed political engagement and exemplified practices of exclusion and intolerance that have caused polarization and pain. Those tensions remain today, as a rising generation demands freedom and dignity for all within and beyond their communities, regardless of race, sex, or gender. Still, as a source of faith and refuge, spiritual sustenance and struggle against society’s darkest forces, the Black Church has been central, as this enthralling history makes vividly clear.

This story gently unfolds with intriguing characters and the sound of music, which Hoff manages to make fly off the pages with her glorious and passionate descriptions. ("Christian Library Journal") 560 pp.

A definitive collection of 100 anthems from Tudor times to the present, this book includes favorites as well as lesser-known pieces. The anthems were selected for their practical usefulness for church choirs today, bearing in mind the needs of smaller choirs: the anthems are mostly for SATBwith or without keyboard accompaniments.