Under the direction of Dorico, the EastWest Symphonic Choirs sing the Christmas carol Hark! the Herald Angels Sing, with brass accompaniment provided by Garritan Personal Orchestra. The arrangement and lyrics come from the 1940 Episcopal Hymnal (see Verses and Refrain), although I did shift the barlines, transpose from F to G, and omit the Amen.
Merry Christmas to the Dorico team and to all the users who make this forum such a helpful resource.
For my last video of the year, the EastWest Symphonic Choirs sing six verses of the Christmas carol The First Nowell.
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night.”
Love this though I do (and a merry Christmas to you too!) it highlights what a weird and changeable thing language is - no whale indeed! No whale to you sir!
I was writing a letter to Santla Claus, and they told me there was “No L, no L, no L, no L…”
Oh well, oh well, oh well, oh well.
In the 1940 Episcopal Hymnal, the word is hyphenated Now-ell, which causes people to sing the first syllable as if it rhymes with cow.
woww! beautiful, can you share how to use this Symphonic Choir, i have it as well but cannot make any sounds in Dorico
AFAIK to currently use Symphonic Choirs and WordBuilder with Dorico, you need to use Play version 5 on Windows. However, Ulf has fixed a bug which prevented people from using Play version 6 or Opus with Dorico, and that fix should appear in Dorico 4 early next year.
Beautiful!
Bravo !!
@johnkprice,
Well done, and thank you for the creative work! I was actually on the fence about renewing my EW subscription next month, it never occurred to me to use use the choirs.
Beautiful/Clean engraving as well
This reminds me of whenever I hear non-native choirs try to sing in English. There are always funny inflections (vowel sounds) that strike the native ear as incredibly odd, but in the end, you can understand most of it.
What would make for a very interesting test would be to have 1-2 live singers dub each part over this recording to smooth out the rough edges. I suspect the end result would be acceptably pleasant. You’d get the proper vowel sounds from the real singers but a fuller sound with this track behind them.
I concede that real singers would sound better than a virtual choir, just as real instruments would sound better than a virtual orchestra. And I suspect that you would be better equipped to perform this “very interesting test” than I would.
I realise how much work you put into the choir. EastWest choirs require such a lot of work to get the words to sound right, inevitably. But it’s worth it. Great work.
Thank you for acknowledging the effort that goes into making these videos. If you haven’t already done so, you might enjoy watching my video of The Shepherds’ Farewell by Hector Berlioz which I posted here. I put more effort into this performance than any other I’ve created, and feel it represents the pinnacle of what I know how to accomplish with the Symphonic Choirs.
It is wonderful that You share the results of Your hard work with us. Thank, you!