Knitting to Music

On Sunday afternoons, I watch "In Concert" - on EWTN - a Roman Catholic Channel on our channel. It's an oasis of time for lovers of choral music and today was no exception when they featured choral sacred music of the 20th century, with Leonard Bernstein, John Rutter, and Poulenc as the featured composers.(Thanks Mom for calling me to remind me that this was on - I was glued to the progress of Katrina and had forgotten). When I turned it to the music, it took it all of one measure on the organ to know what was being performed (I love when that happens - thanks to my good training at FSU!) - Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms was being performed and my guess is they performed all of it, but I only heard the second movement, its most lyrical of the three movements. I got to wondering why it was called that so did some research and found it was commissioned by Chichester Cathedral, hence its name.

It brought back fond memories of performing this challenging piece - as a highschooler at FSU's music camp, we learned and performed it - no easy feat to do in a short period of time - and learned it in Hebrew, in which its lyrics were written. (In looking at those lyrics, I can't believe we learned that and some of it even comes back to me!)

I like finding and listening to music during knitting and this one I thought how hauntingly beautiful it is. In reading on the history of the piece, I found it was once in West Side Story, but didn't make it in the final cut, but there are snippets here and there in the musical that ring true of Chichester Psalms.

Listen to excerpts on one of the CDs on Amazon - for some reason it made me want to pick up my knitting needles, especially that 2nd movement.

I also like listening to Anonymous 4 cds while knitting - what do you listen to while knitting?