No. Your shinbone is named after an ancient Greek wind instrument, sort of like a flute.
Everybody got that? Maybe it’s just me, but I’m very distractible. So it’s good for me to get that out of the way. What does “tibi” mean? Basically, “to you.” Latin nouns and pronouns have various forms that determine their use in a sentence so that you don’t have to use a preposition. And you don’t have to worry about word order. You just have to learn all six types (called “cases”) of nouns and pronouns. Then you have to learn tense, voice and mood for each verb, and degrees of comparison for each adjective . . . and don’t get me started on the adverbs. It’s very complicated. How did the Romans have time to conquer the world when they had to learn all this grammar? Beats me.
Anyway, Latin, despite its complications, is kind of a cool language. So, to get back to the text of the Gloria, the overall wording is taken directly from the “Ordinary of the Mass,” from the Book of Common Prayer. Two words here need explanation. “Ordinary” does not mean “boring” but regulated, part of a set order. “Common” does not mean “not valuable or low class” but something that is part of a community, that is common or available to all.
Is the Gloria a composition specifically for Christmas? Again, the answer is no. The premiere actually took place in May 1974. But we think of it as a Christmas piece, and it is performed mostly at Christmas, largely because of the first section which echoes the song of the angels that the shepherds heard on the night of Jesus’ birth: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will to men.” Let’s pick that one apart, shall we? I have always thought that “in the highest” referred to Heaven, so that the phrase meant something like “May God be glorified in Heaven.” But the real meaning is more about God and less about a place: “May God be glorified in the highest degree.” And whose “good will” are we talking about? The most common translation is “good will towards men,” with the implication being that God is showing His own good will to men. But the grammatical construction does not support that translation; it is actually “peace to men of good will.” So the emphasis shifts to the heart attitude of the people who are receiving God’s peace. The Latin for “will” is “voluntatis.” You can see the root of our words “volition” and “volunteer” there. Humankind gets to choose how to respond to the offer of God’s peace.
I must move on, having used up half my word count already. Let me point out a couple of interesting words in the middle section, the “Domine Deus.” Here the emphasis moves from God the Father to God the Son. An important word is unigenite, which has echoes of “unique” but specifically means something along the lines of “the only one born.” The old King James Bible says, “only begotten.” Orthodox Christian doctrine does not say that Christ had a heavenly birth or beginning but is eternally co-existent with God the Father.
What about deprecationem? Doesn’t that sound like “deprecating,” as in “he gave a self-deprecating laugh”? Well, it is the same word, but somehow the meaning we have for it today is quite a bit different from the original. A “deprecation” was originally a prayer, especially a prayer to ward off evil. So the Son, who takes away the sins of the world, is asked to receive our prayers. And one last interesting word before I move on to part III: dexteram. Does that sound like “dexterous”? It’s indeed the same word, but it means “on the right.” Christ is said to be sitting “on the right” of God the Father. Because the right side, and therefore the place at someone’s right hand, was seen as the place of honor, the word eventually came to mean “handy, quick, skillful, especially with the hands.” I could go into a whole rabbit hole here about cultural, Scriptural and political notions of right and left, but I’ll restrain myself. (Even in physics certain particles have right and left spin. Did you know that?) The idea of being someone’s “right-hand man” is surely derived from this picture of the Heavenly relationship between the Father and the Son. How the right and left got those associations to begin with is another question, one to which I don’t have the answer right now.
A key word in the final section is solus, obviously meaning “solely” or “alone.” For, or therefore (quoniam) God alone is sanctus (holy), Dominus (Lord) and altissimus (most high, referring specifically to Christ—and don’t you see the word “altitude” there?). The third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, gets one brief mention, and then we’re off to the grand finale. Rutter wraps the end back to the beginning, repeating the great “Gloria in excelsis Deo” before moving into the “amen” section, a joy and a challenge to sing with its shifting meter and rhythm. The choir cuts off and the brass ends the piece. Maybe a faint, faint, earthly echo of the real thing?
Here’s a monumental performance of the third movement:
I couldn’t resist closing with a verse from a song we used to sing at a former church whose pastor was seriously in love with old Puritan hymns. This is from “Jerusalem My Happy Home” (with, of course, “Jerusalem” being a reference to Heaven) and dates to 1795:
There David stands with harp in hand
As master of the choir:
Ten thousand times that man were blessed
That might this music hear.
© Debi Simons
