Sanctus done

Admittedly, I was hoping (knew that it was at the least a sound possibility) to finish the Sanctus today;  but I was mindful also of the several false starts on the piece.  Nevertheless, I think I've made my way through to the end, and Heinrich has already written back to say he likes it all right.

So, yes, this feels like the season to wrap up the Mass, Op.106, which means addressing the Gloria remaining.

To recapitulate:  it started with my feeling that I wanted to set the Kyrie, and I called Paul to ask if a Kyrie would be suitable for use at FCB.  In the course of that chat, Paul asked, Is this the first movement of a complete Mass?  Which up until the moment when he asked, it wasn't, particularly.  But I thought, Why not?  (That was when I formed the idea, too, of dedicating each movement of the Mass to a choral director who has been a musical support of my compositional work.)  Only I was not going to set to writing it up movement after movement right away, but as the spirit moved.  And I thought I would start out (I mean, after the Kyrie, dedicated to Paul Cienniwa, was done) with the Credo (dedicated posthumously to Bill Goodwin), simply because there is so much text ... I wanted to feel that I had found my musical "solution" to the challenge of all that text early on.

The composition of the Credo got drawn out (various factors) but once it was done, I thought how nice that the Agnus Dei is such a compact text ... and I then composed that movement (dedicated to Mark Engelhardt) in a fairly short span of time.

At which point, I pretty much left the project alone for a longish while.  However, I had shown the Kyrie and Agnus Dei to Heinrich, who periodically has the King's Chapel choir sing the three numbers (Kyrie, Sanctus & Agnus Dei) from a Mass during their Sunday service.  Thus it was the Sanctus which was next in line for my attention (and thus appropriately, with Heinrich Christensen as dedicatee).

There remains now the Gloria, although I think I may "start" by reviewing the Credo, and adjusting places where the altos sing together with the sopranos, only rather higher than altos ought to be expected to sing.  (I suspect, too, that I may need to add rehearsal keyboard to much of the Credo.)