I have posted two songs for today, quite different ones. I wanted to post both, but I was having a hard time coming up with a pretext to do so, since I normally only post one when I put music up here. (To those of you rational human beings who are thinking, "Uh, why isn't 'Because you feel like it' a good enough reason to post two songs?", shh.) Then I remembered that this, in addition to being one of the most important feasts of the Church's year -- indeed, in one sense, the root of every other feast, as it marks the beginning of the Incarnation -- it is also one of the feasts that Catholic and Orthodox Christians celebrate on the same date. So my excuse is a celebration of that fact.
Appropriately, the former of these songs is a piece of Latin polyphony by William Byrd, one of the finest composers of the English Renaissance and a convert from Anglicanism to Catholicism, while the latter is by the nomadic, anarchist band Psalters, whose album The Divine Liturgy of the Wretched Exiles is heavily influenced by Orthodox motifs. This one in particular incorporates the Trisagion or "Thrice-Holy," traditionally chanted at some point during the liturgy of the Scriptures (often before the Epistle is read, but it seems to vary in different places).
I couldn't get the video settings that I know how to work with to cooperate, so the second one is at this link.
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