John Burge

Commissioner: The Royal Canadian College of Organists, the Northeast Region of the American Guild of Organists, and the Canadian International Organ Competition, commissioned Aquam Refectionis for the 2017 Montréal Organ Festival’s opening service.

Premiere: The Choir of St. Andrew and St. Paul's Anglican Church, organist, Jonathan Oldengarm and Jean-Sébastien Vallée, conducting, at St. Andrew and St. Paul's Anglican Church, Montreal, PQ, on July 3, 2017.

Duration: 6 minutes

Choral Score Purchase: This work can be purchased directly from this website by making a payment for a bulk order based on the number of members in the choir.  After payment is made using the checkout icon and Paypal, a link is instantly sent to the purchaser to enable the immedatiate downloading of the score's pdf.  The receipt indicates that the choir has permission to make the number of copies paid for but if desired, the choir will be provided with a personalized cover page that states the choir has a photocopy site license to reproduce the number of copies purchased.  Alternatively, choirs are encouraged to contact John Burge directly should they wish to receive an Invoice and/or make payment using cheque or e-transfer.

Program Note: Aquam Refectionis is one of many pieces that John Burge has composed that draws upon the poetry of Margaret Avison (1918-2007).  Indeed, John Burge was the first composer to receive permission from Margaret Avison to set her words to music with his 1987 unaccompanied choral work, Sunblue–Three Images of Canadian Spring.  The great Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye described Avison as one of Canada’s first truly distinctive English Canadian poets, emphasizing the way that she supplanted the vestiges of Canada’s colonial heritage and fixed poetic forms.  She was a devoutly spiritual person often finding her religious inspiration mirrored through the imagery and metaphor of Canadian nature and landscape.  The short eight-line poem used in this work is the first of five short poems originally titled, “The Christian’s Year in Miniature,” and it begins with the line, “Beside the still waters.”  With this opening, Avison is perhaps making reference to familiar words of Psalm 23 (“He makes me lie down in green pastures.  He leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul”).  The equivalent Latin phrase for “still waters” in the vulgate bible is “Aquam refectionis.”  These two Latin words are often translated as “refreshing water” and are a fitting title for the work.  As Avison's poem blossoms through such phrases as, “Now the skies soar with song,” so to does the music for choir and organ grow in volume and rapture. 

Text:

Beside the still waters,
Infant-pure,
God is, in flesh.
Now the skies soar

With song.  Heaven utters.
In a white blur
Lost, in a rush
Caught up, we hear.

-Margaret Avison (1918-2007)

Margaret Avison's words were published as, "The Christian's Year in Miniature, No. 1" in ALWAYS NOW, Volume 1 of her Collected Works [The Porcupine's Quill, Erin ON, 2003, p. 206].  Used with kind permission of the publisher.