Notes on texts for NCS concerts

I sing with the New Cambridge Singers, an amateur chamber choir based in Cambridge. When I find time, I sometimes write up some notes on the texts for the music we’re singing. This page should link to all those notes.

Don’t expect deep scholarship here. The point is just to clarify meanings, indicate allusions, and so forth, for the benefit of anyone wanting to sing these texts. Also, don’t expect infallibility or any pretence of objectivity.

Some texts appear more than once. In such cases (which I’m afraid I haven’t indicated here) each set of notes is generally a copy-and-paste of the previous one, but sometimes I’ve made corrections and not transferred them to the older notes. So you should generally prefer the most recent set of notes for each text.

All translations in these notes are deliberately plodding and literal. Do not use them in any context where that would be a bad thing.

If you want to use any of these notes for your own purposes, please ask me. The answer will almost certainly be yes, but I may wish to draw your attention to more-than-averagely unreliable bits or look through for typos first.

     — Gareth McCaughan