The Windkey and the Lamplighter

It’s Advent again (where did the year go?) and since I didn’t manage to record any new Advent carols for you all, I will republish my series of the O Antiphons. I’ll come back and add to this post every day, rather than posting N times with no new content. Unless I have new content, but you can judge for yourself how likely that is…

December 17: O Sapienta
December 18: O Adonai
December 19: O Radix Jesse
December 20: O Clavis David
December 21: O Oriens
December 22: O Rex Gentium
December 23: O Emmanuel

As my birthday present to myself a few weeks ago, I bought a guitar.
It’s beautiful. It’s also apparently Canadian (La Patrie, so it’s actually Quebecois and probably speaks better French than me.) Oddly, I can’t find a picture online of one just like mine—it came with steel strings, which I replaced with new steel strings, and all the La Patrie guitars online have nylon strings and different patterning around the sound hole.

Anyway, I am having a lot of fun. My left-hand fingers still hurt whenever I play, (and somewhat the rest of the time—I don’t really have callouses yet) but over the last three weeks I have gone from barely being able to play anything to being able to play at least one song, at least five chords (G, Eb, D, A, and C, in order of how good they sound on average) and being able to change between chords often fast enough that (if I had more songbooks) I could play songs at speed.
It makes me *so happy* to tune my guitar. (I have a pitch pipe to tune the low E, and then tune by ear from there. It works out pretty well, since I have a good ear.) Its also really loud, so I bet I could play outside or in crowds and be heard.

Once I get non-lazy, perhaps I will take some of the folk songbooks I have from when I did vocal solo singing and write out some chord accompaniments for them. I bet they will be pretty easy to play, they just don’t have chords (and certainly don’t have guitar tab). The one songbook I have *with* guitar tab is Billy Joel’s “River of Dreams” album, which is really really hard and has a lot of F chords, which I can’t currently even fake. I suppose I should not be surprised that the Piano Man’s music is hard to play on guitar…

Document is my favorite album of music. This may be from its connections to my summer camp from the early 90s. This may be because it’s one of the first albums I owned, and I can’t hear Lightning Hopkins without remembering the smell of October air over the Charles. REM’s new album, Accelerate, feels like a Document from an alternate universe. I haven’t quite figured out why. The lyrics are different, and some of the songs are in different places—and there’s no equivalent to Oddfellows Local 151.

But I’d been pretty sure that this music wasn’t in the world, and couldn’t enter the world save through he year 1987. But here it is.

1. Nightengale’s Lament, Simon R Greene
2. Angels of Light and Darkness, Simon R Greene
3. The Eyre Affair, Jasper Fforde
4. The Priviledge of the Sword, Ellen Kushner
5. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen
6. Domes of Fire, David Eddings
7. Infected, Scott Sigler
8. Small Favor, Jim Butcher
9. Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carrol (on my Palm Pilot)
10. The Shining Ones, by David Eddings
11. Saucer, by Stephen Coonts
12. Saucer the Conquest, by Stephen Coonts
13. Sorcery and Cecelia, by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer
14. The Hidden City, by David Eddings
15. The Grand Tour, by Patricia C. Wrede and Caroline Stevermer
16. Lost in a Good Book, by Jasper Fforde
17. Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow

The last antiphon is actually the first verse of the hymn, O Come
Emmanuel. Since today is the last day of the sequence, I’ve also
posted the whole sequence (but sung with this verse last).

Wikipedia says that "The first letters of the titles taken
backwards form a Latin acrostic of "Ero Cras" which translates to
"Tomorrow, I will come", mirroring the theme of the antiphons."

O Emmanuel
O Rex Gentilum
O Oriens

O Clavis David
O Adonai
O Sapienta

The text in Latin of this verse is:

O Emmanuel, Rex et legifer noster,
exspectatio Gentium, et Salvator earum:
veni ad salvandum nos, Domine, Deus noster.

O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver,
the hope of the nations and their Saviour:
Come and save us, O Lord our God.

Listen Here to just this verse.

Listen to the entire song

O Rex Gentium, et desideratus earum,
lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum:
veni, et salva hominem,
quem de limo formasti.

O King of the nations, and their desire,
the cornerstone making both one:
Come and save the human race,
which you fashioned from clay.

This one is text from Isaiah that you’ll recognize:

"For a child has been born for us, a son given us; authority rests
upon his shoulders; and he is named Wonderful Counsellor, Mighty
God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." Isaiah 9:6

And some from Isaiah that you may not:

"He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many
peoples; they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their
spears into pruning-hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against
nation, neither shall they learn war anymore." Isaiah 2:4

Listen Here to O Rex Gentium.

This one I could almost have translated by myself, but I had the
Wikipedia article right there, so I didn’t. Also, the sung
translation uses "Dayspring" instead of "sunrise".

O Oriens,
splendor lucis aeternae, et sol justitiae:
veni, et illumina sedentes in tenebris, et umbra mortis. 

O Sunrise,
splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

Listen Here to the fifth verse of "O Come Emmanuel", a translation
of O Oriens.

This has one of my favorite Isaiah prophecies: "The people who walked
in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of
darkness deepon them light has shined." Isaiah 9:2

Another exciting installment in our continuing Advent series of
recorded live music from me!

O Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel;
qui aperis, et nemo claudit;
claudis, et nemo aperit:
veni, et educ vinctum de domo carceris,
sedentem in tenebris, et umbra mortis.

O Key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel;
you open and no one can shut;
you shut and no one can open:
Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house,
those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

The text comes from Isaiah 22:22 and Isaiah 42:7

Listen Here to a poetic English translation of O Clavis David

O Radix Jesse, qui stas in signum populorum,
    super quem continebunt reges os suum,
    quem Gentes deprecabuntur:
        veni ad liberandum nos, jam noli tardare. 

O Root of Jesse, standing as a sign among the peoples;
    before you kings will shut their mouths,
    to you the nations will make their prayer:
        Come and deliver us, and delay no longer.

This verse references Isaiah’s prophecies that a "shoot from the stalk
of Jesse" Isaiah 11:1 "shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the
nations shall inquire of him" Isaiah 11:10

Listen Here to a slightly less faithful (but more poetic) English
translation than the one above.

O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel,
    qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,
    et ei in Sina legem dedisti:
        veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento. 

O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel,
    who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush
    and gave him the law on Sinai:
        Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.

This text references Isaiah 11:4-5 and Isaiah 33:22

Listen Here to an English translation of O Adonai

I forgot to include my sources for yesterday’s text, so I will put
them here. CatholicEducation.org has a good article and so does
Wikipedia, and I originally got this idea from the introduction to
Advent for Choirs