In legend, Saint Sylvester is the saint who converted emperor Constantine, and he is celebrated on the last day of the year by western churches (eastern churches celebrate him on the 2nd of January). Typical celebrations for this feast feature a Watchnight service or midnight mass. While I get the idea that this feast is quite celebratory, again, there is little music to be found to celebrate this by art music composers. However, I found this excellent Irish early music singer named Caitriona O’Leary who has a carol whose subject matter is Saint Sylvester (she also has one on the feast day of St Stephen, too).
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This December, the Church began praying what are known as the “O Antiphons” each evening during Vespers, or Evening Prayer. Outside of Vespers, the O Antiphons are more familiar in their adapted form as the verses for the quintessential Advent hymn, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.”
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Advent is a strange time for the Christian, who often finds herself caught between two calendars: on the secular calendar, the moment the last bite of Thanksgiving goes down, the Christmas season begins, and will stretch until the magic of Christmas morning, after which it is fairly immediately extinguished. But on the Church calendar, we are in a season of waiting, of expectant longing, right up to the fall on darkness on Christmas Eve, at which point we begin a season og rejoicing too intense to be confined to one morning, and so which stretches through the following twelve days. The soundtrack of this now and not yet double season, controlled as it is by secular concerns, is mostly skewed towards premature celebration. But some of its songs strike the right chord of expectation for the Christian. “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” is one of those.
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