music        news/events        bio        contact        recordings Meditation Upon 'Canticles' 1990 SATB chorus organ  duration 5' first performance: } Marsh Chapel Chorus, cond. Julian Wachner Marsh Chapel, Boston / March 15, 1991 / WBUR live broadcast PROGRAM NOTE This work sets two brief passages from the Preparatory Meditations of Edward Taylor. Taylor (c.1642–1729) was minister of the frontier town of Westfield, Massachusetts from 1671 until the end of his life. Throughout this time he composed some of the most intense and sustained devotional literature in colonial America including over one hundred and sixty poems written as preparations to his celebrating the Eucharist. Taylor was as rigid and unforgiving when it came to doctrinal matters as any 17th-century Puritan. The poems, however, while expounding his Calvinist view of the universe, are enlivened with the most heady and sensual images—of perfumes, spices, oils, flowers, exotic birds. The verbal richnesses of these ecstatic meditations, contained by Taylor's fiercely ordered view of creation, produced poetry of intense beauty and oddness. TEXT My Blessed Lord, art Thou a Lilly Flower? Oh! That my Soul thy Garden were, that so Thy bowing Head root in my Heart, and poure might of its Seeds, that they therein might grow.  Oh! That I was the Bird of Paradise!  Then in thy Nutmeg garden, Lord, thy Bower Celestiall Musick blossom should my voice Enchanted with thy gardens aire and flower. This Aromatick aire would so enspire My ravisht Soule to sing with angells Quire.  Edward Taylor (c.1642–1729)