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Catalogue No. : DCD34072
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Choir of Merton College, Oxford
Reed Rubin Directors of Music
Peter Phillips, Benjamin Nicholas
Organ Scholars
Natasha Tyrwhitt-Drake, Anna Steppler
Sopranos Jennifer Cearns, Philippa Dand, Anna Graebe, Sarah Hewlett, Catriona Hull, Emily Lay, Catherine Leatherland, Emily Meredith, Charlotte Robinson, Rachel Ryan, Emily Tann
Altos Myriam Burr, Rachel Fright, Caroline George, Jeremy Kenyon, Katharine Pates
Tenors Timothy Coleman, Guy Cutting, Zakiy Manji, Mothusi Turner, Ronald Yip
Basses William Bennett, Jonathan Burr, James Geidt, William Gunson, Richard Hill, Jack Halsey, Fergus McIntosh, Benjamin Stewart, James Williams
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Compact Disc Booklet:
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Catalogue No. : DCD34072
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IN THE BEGINNING
Choir of Merton College, oxford
Peter Phillips, Benjamin Nicholas directors of music
Beth Mackay mezzo-soprano
Natasha Tyrwhitt-Drake organ scholar
Pages:
Recorded on 25 & 26 April 2011 in Merton College Chapel, Oxford Producer and Engineer: Paul Baxter 24-bit digital editing: Adam Binks
24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter Design: John Christ
Booklet editor: Henry Howard Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.co.uk
With thanks to the Warden and Fellows of the House of Scholars of Merton College, Oxford
1 In the Beginning was the Word [13:22]
Gabriel Jackson (b1962)
Emily Tann soprano
Guy Cutting tenor
2 Lugebat David Absalon [8:08] Nicolas Gombert (c1495-c1560)
3 When David Heard [3:27]
Thomas Weelkes (1576-1623)
4 When David Heard [14:12]
Eric Whitacre (b1970) Guy Cutting tenor
5 Nunc Dimittis [3:53]
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c1525-1594)
6 Nunc Dimittis [3:25]
Gustav Holst (1874-1934)
Jenny Cearns soprano
Mothusi Turner tenor
7 Nunc Dimittis [4:52]
Paweł Łukaszewski (b1968)
Rachel Ryan soprano
Rachel Fright alto
Timothy Coleman tenor
William Gunson bass
8 In the Beginning [17:51]
Aaron Copland (1900-1990)
Beth Mackay mezzo-soprano
Total playing time [69:14]
Thomas Weelkes: Sacred Choral Music
Tewkesbury Abbey Schola Cantorum / Benjamin Nicholas director DCD34070
Thomas Weelkes is remembered as one of the outstanding English composers of the seventeenth century. This survey of his sacred music features first recordings of several new reconstructions by scholar Peter James. Benjamin Nicholas’ Tewkesbury choir delivers telling performances that passionately convey Weelkes’ range, imagination and technical accomplishment.
‘It is very hard not to use superlatives when speaking of Ben Nicholas and his choir at Tewkesbury Abbey.’ — Choir Schools Today 2008
‘… angelic purity…’ — The Guardian, December 2007
Songbook
The Trebles of Tewkesbury Abbey Schola Cantorum
Benjamin Nicholas director / Helen Porter piano / Carleton Etherington organ DCD34097
The Schola Cantorum choristers of Tewkesbury Abbey have been assembling their own unique Songbook for some years: a great variety of songs that the trebles sing in concerts, and which they learn in individual singing lessons. Under the direction of Benjamin Nicholas each boy is built up as a soloist, not simply to be able to sing solos, but so that he can learn to sing in a soloistic way. This is evident most of all in the distinctive singing of 11-year-old Laurence Kilsby, whose gifts won him the BBC Chorister of the Year competition in 2009.
‘The trebles splendidly vindicate the tradition that places them at the heart of English cathedral music’ — Gramophone, April 2009
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Sanctum est verum lumen: multi-part music for choir
National Youth Choir of Great Britain / Mike Brewer director DCD34045
Tallis’s monumental Spem in alium is one of the greatest glories of Western polyphony, and its effects reverberate through all the other pieces on this disc. The NYCGB’s massed voices dazzle in this programme of polychoral jewels from the Renaissance, interspersed with virtuoso contemporary tributes including Gabriel Jackson’s towering 40-part motet Sanctum est verum lumen
‘Under Mike Brewer’s expert direction, the young voices of the National Youth Choir make properly massive impact’
— Sunday Times, October 2008
‘There’s nothing austere or tranquil about the singing here: God is being praised, not feared by these glorious performers’
— Classic FM Magazine, December 2008
The Three Kings: Music for Christmas from Tewkesbury Abbey
Tewkesbury Abbey Schola Cantorum
Carleton Etherington organ, / Benjamin Nicholas director DCD34047
In the vast, echoing space of their medieval home the Tewkesbury Abbey Schola Cantorum celebrates the awe and mystery of Christmas with a sequence of carols from the last two centuries that combines familiar names with offerings from some of today’s foremost composers.
‘I doubt whether there are many more admirable choirs outside Westminster, Oxford and Cambridge than the Tewkesbury Abbey Schola Cantorum. … Nicholas’s choir give proof yet again of the qualities that place them firmly in the front rank: flair, acumen, versatility and poise’
— Church Times, December 2007
In the Beginning
This recording heralds a new beginning for choral music at one of the University of Oxford’s oldest academic institutions. In 1264 Walter de Merton established an independent, self-governing foundation for the combined purposes of religion, education, learning and research. The glorious chapel, with its world-renowned acoustics and remarkable medieval glass, was one of the first college buildings to be completed. It has been a focal point for Christian worship in the college for almost 750 years, as well as serving as a parish church until the end of the nineteenth century.
Music has undoubtedly played an important part in the history of this outstanding building, but it was as recently as 1 November 2006 that the Warden and Fellows of Merton resolved to enhance the college’s musical tradition by setting up a choral foundation. Consisting of 18 choral scholars, two organ scholars and two Directors of Music, as well as a number of volunteer singers, the new Merton College Choir began singing services in October 2008. This disc, which includes the choir’s first commission, literally puts on record something of what the choir has achieved since then, under the direction of Benjamin Nicholas and Peter Phillips.
It is probably true to say that, in embarking upon this new venture, the college was
taking a considerable risk. In 2006 it was not possible to predict how the project would be funded, who would want to audition for the choir, or how good the vocal quality would be. Thanks to the generosity of many Mertonians, most notably Reed Rubin and the Reed Foundation, and the commitment, skill and enthusiasm of those who have sung in the choir during its first three years, its music has brought considerable enrichment to the worship offered in the chapel as well as inspiration and enjoyment to congregations and audiences alike.
This first disc of Oxford’s newest choral foundation takes as its theme beginnings and endings, a powerful and recurring subject not only within the Judeo-Christian tradition, but also within human experience as a whole. In this selection of pieces, this theme is explored and viewed through the lens of settings of two foundational texts, from the openings of the Book of Genesis and the Gospel of St John.
Given its significance within Christian theology, it is surprising that there is no tradition of musical settings of the Johannine Prologue, a point noted by Dr Nicholas Fisher when he commissioned Gabriel Jackson to write this piece for the Choir of Merton College in 2008. The translation chosen was that of the King James Bible, whose Gospel
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of St John was one of the books translated at Merton College by a group of scholars which included Sir Henry Savile (Warden of Merton, 1585-1621).
Telling of the coming of John the Baptist and of the incarnation of the Word, the luminous consonance so synonymous with Jackson’s music creates a sound-world both rapt and timeless. The piece is broadly in three sections. Emerging from a deep, primeval pedal, the unison chanting of the choir’s first phrases is coloured by chords that pick out significant words, ‘God’ being given special emphasis each time by a simple triad, followed by a quietly ecstatic ululation from the organ. As the first light begins to glow, we hear a glistening, star-lit descant, before the music subsides into silence again.
The second part begins with a duet for tenor and soprano (echoes of Adam and Eve perhaps?) telling of John the Baptist’s prophecy. One of the most extraordinary things about these central verses is the almost hypnotic repetition of the word ‘light’, an effect intensified by repeating the words still further, first over bright, stabbing organ chords, then with near-manic obsessiveness, as the organ trills and tremolandi attempt an ever more dazzling brightness before finding release in a long-breathed fortissimo melisma ‘which lighteth every man that cometh into
the world,’ replete with a carillon of bell sounds and fistfuls of brilliant clusters.
The third section brings a return to the mood of the opening as the text reflects on the meaning and significance of what we have heard. A duet for the upper voices, over shimmering arpeggios, gives way to a final iteration of the ‘God’ chord, before an a cappella chorale gives quiet voice to that ‘grace and truth’ with which the piece ends.
From beginnings we move to endings, in a trio of works based on the biblical story of Absalom, son of King David. A murderer and conspirator, Absalom was caught by his hair in an oak tree during a battle and shot through with arrows. The lament of his father over his dead son has been a favourite theme of both art and music, and is represented here in the works of Gombert, Weelkes and the contemporary American composer Eric Whitacre.
A pupil of Josquin, Nicolas Gombert was celebrated among his sixteenth-century contemporaries as a textural innovator. His command of his eight voices in Lugebat David Absalon is masterful, achieving real intimacy despite the density of the counterpoint. The piece opens with a simple scalic motive, weeping delicately downwards through all the parts (later balanced by the rising opening
Mezzo-soprano Beth Mackay is in her final year in the Alexander Gibson Opera School at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, where she studies with Patricia Hay. Beth has won the Annie Ridyard Award (Royal Northern College of Music) and been a finalist in the Frederic Cox Award (RNCM), and the Italian Aria Competition (RSAMD). She has come second in both the Governor’s Prize for Recital Singing and the Frank Spedding Lieder Prize (RSAMD). Beth’s postgraduate studies have been supported by The Robertson Scholarship Trust, The Dewar Arts Awards and The Sir James Caird Travelling Scholarship Trust.
Beth is enjoying a diverse career as a concert and oratorio soloist in works from Purcell to Tippett, with choral societies all over the UK. She made her BBC Proms debut in summer 2010 as a soloist in Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music
Beth’s opera roles include Nancy ( Albert Herring ), Larina (Eugene Onegin), the Baker’s Wife (Into the Woods), Cherubino (Le Nozze di Figaro ) and Lady Macbeth (The Okavango Macbeth ). She has performed in excerpt series as Dorabella (Così fan Tutti ), Idamante (Idomeneo ) and in the title roles in Ariodante, L’Italiana in Algeri, The Rape of Lucretia and Serse, to name a few.
In June 2011, Beth will appear as Hänsel in Hänsel und Gretel at the RSAMD, and in July she will play Alisa in Clonter Opera’s production of Lucia di Lammermoor
Beth appears on the Delphian label’s collection of songs and choral music by Howard Skempton, The Cloths of Heaven (DCD34056), and was a featured soloist on Scotland at Night, choral and solo settings of Scottish poetry (DCD34060), to critical acclaim.
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Biographies
Peter Phillips was educated at Winchester College and St John’s College, Oxford, where he was Organ Scholar between 1972 and 1975. He founded the Tallis Scholars in 1973. He taught at the Royal College of Music until 1988, after which he devoted himself to concert-giving and recording. He became Reed Rubin Director of Music at Merton College in 2008. Peter has written a music column in the Spectator since 1983 and became the publisher of the Musical Times in 1995. He first worked in Merton College Chapel in 1974, since when he has returned with the Tallis Scholars and the BBC Singers to make many broadcasts and recordings. He hopes now to build on this experience with the singers of the new Merton College choral foundation.
Benjamin Nicholas has held the post of Reed Rubin Director of Music of Merton College, Oxford since 2008. In that time he has conducted the choir on tour in France and in the USA and has directed the Passiontide at Merton festival. He is also Director of Tewkesbury Abbey Schola Cantorum, the choir of men and boys which sings the weekday services in Tewkesbury Abbey, and Director of Choral Music at Dean Close School, Cheltenham. In 2011 he succeeds Andrew Carwood as Director of the Schola Cantorum at the Edington Festival. A graduate of Oxford University, he was Organ Scholar of St Paul’s Cathedral from 1998 to 2000 where he worked under John Scott. Whilst at St Paul’s he was also Director of Music at St Luke’s Church, Chelsea.
Benjamin Nicholas regularly works with large choral forces, and has recently conducted performances of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius, Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony and Verdi’s Requiem. He has given organ recitals in many major venues in the UK, including St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey and York Minster, and in the USA.
Benjamin Nicholas is widely represented on disc and has recorded with Delphian since 2006.
to the more declamatory Part II). At ‘Heu me’ (‘Ah me’) the texture briefly fragments, little gasping exchanges passed between the voices, and Part I comes to a close on the insistent echoes ‘O fili mi’ (‘Oh my son’) as they fade fretfully away. This portrait of grief gains further intensity in Part II where a rare moment of homophony ‘O fili mi’ strips away all technical distractions from the emotion underpinning this extraordinary motet.
Celebrated for his secular madrigals, Thomas Weelkes brings all his rhetorical skill to his sacred anthem When David Heard The setting is declamatory, driven by its vernacular text, and although word-painting shapes the melodies it is the harmony that cuts deepest. Built around diminished intervals, Weelkes’ anguished harmonies are further wracked by false relations; but for impact even the most brutal of dissonances is outdone by the sudden major tonality of the final phrase – an unexpected and poignantly insufficient gesture of resolution.
Charged with personal significance, Eric Whitacre’s When David Heard is the composer’s only setting of a biblical text to date. The son of the work’s commissioning conductor was killed in a car accident, prompting the composer to engage with the tradition of musical mourning. The result is larger and more deconstructed than many
of Whitacre’s other works. Hovering between A minor and D minor, When David Heard gains its character in the added-note and cluster chords which colour the tonality. On two climactic occasions through this set of motivic variations the choral texture builds up to an 18-part cluster chord – a rootless cry of unresolved grief.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s setting of the Nunc Dimittis is written for double choir, and is typical of the composer’s late style, using its techniques to unusually meditative effect. The phrases are long and developed in a smooth homophony, with little of the punchy exchanges found in the composer’s double-choir Magnificat. The motives develop organically as the music intensifies, yielding scalic passages of polyphony that establish the two choirs not so much as rivals but co-dependent entities, each intensifying and completing the utterances of the other, and culminating in the close imitation of the dancing Gloria Patri.
The Nunc Dimittis is the Gospel canticle for Compline, and associated with evening services in many Christian traditions. Its role in the Anglican rite of Evensong has prompted settings by nearly all the major English composers, including an elegant double choir treatment from Gustav Holst The gradual building-up of the opening
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pianissimo chord establishes a contemplative mood that gives way to rather more sprightly polychoral writing, including a rhythmic ‘lumen ad revelationem’ (‘a light to lighten’), and the vibrant exchanges of the Gloria that grow into a pealing ‘Amen’.
No less atmospheric is the setting of the same words by the contemporary Polish composer Paweł Łukaszewski. Setting the main four-part choir against a quartet of soloists, the work has a prayerful quality that comes from the chanted repetition of ‘Domine’ (‘Lord’) from the solo quartet that underpins the whole piece. Łukaszewski’s sumptuous diatonicism blossoms through the work into a chordal release, before retreating once again to interiority for a hushed coda ‘lumen ad revelationem gentium’.
‘In my end is my beginning.’ So deduces Mertonian TS Eliot. We close where St John’s Prologue begins, with creation. Taking the familiar rhythms of Genesis as his text, Aaron Copland created an oratorio in miniature. In a rare example from Copland of a capella writing, the composer combines his four-part choral forces with a solo mezzo- soprano to create a work at once folk- inflected and undeniably modern.
There is a directness about In The Beginning in performance that belies its considerable
technical difficulties. Using the soloist as narrator (her recitative-like lines are instructed to be sung as though ‘reading a familiar and oft-told story’), Copland structures his work around the seven days of creation, a repeated chant refrain from the chorus punctuating each one. Bare fourths and fifths give the harmony a sense of rootedness, anchoring moments of bitonality and the pervasive chromatic colouring.
Counterpoint among the voices is rare; the chorus functions most often as a single rhythmic unit – a musical Greek chorus, whose role is evocative. Their dance-like ‘let there be lights’ section glitters with light- footed brilliance, in contrast to the slow- moving ‘great whales’ and the suddenly filled-out, hazy harmonies of the ‘mist’. The work’s climax – the creation of man – arrives in the very closing bars. It’s a daringly simple gesture, but one that resonates as much in the mind as the ears.
Alexandra Coghlan Gabriel JacksonThe Revd Dr Simon Jones, Chaplain of Merton College
The new choral foundation at Merton College is one of the most exciting initiatives in sacred choral music of recent years. Established in 2008, the choir has already, under its founding Directors of Music Peter Phillips and Benjamin Nicholas, built up an enviable reputation for the highest standards. In the UK the choir has sung has sung in St Paul’s and Winchester Cathedrals, the Temple Church in London and St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle. Foreign tours have included two visits to France, whose highlights were a sung mass at Notre Dame in Paris and a sell-out performance of Mozart’s Requiem in St Germain-des-Prés, while in 2011 the choir toured in the USA giving concerts in Philadelphia and New York.
The choir’s repertoire spans five hundred years. Services in Merton College Chapel regularly include works by Byrd and Tallis, Palestrina and Victoria, as well the European romantic composers, and Britten, Tippett and Walton from the 20 th century. The choir has already been active in commissioning new pieces, and recently Gabriel Jackson, Matthew Martin, Howard Skempton and John Tavener have all written for the choir. In concert, the choir has also performed Bach’s St John Passion and Handel’s Messiah.
Merton College celebrates its 750 th anniversary in 2014, and the choir will play an important role in the celebrations. A major commissioning project will result in the new Merton Choirbook (Jackson, Martin and Tavener have already written for the project); this will be one of the most comprehensive collections of church music from the twentyfirst century.
Updates on the choir’s news and activities can be found at www.merton.ox.ac.uk.
Reed Rubin Directors of Music Peter Phillips, Benjamin Nicholas
Organ Scholars Natasha Tyrwhitt-Drake, Anna Steppler
Sopranos Jennifer Cearns, Philippa Dand, Anna Graebe, Sarah Hewlett, Catriona Hull, Emily Lay, Catherine Leatherland, Emily Meredith, Charlotte Robinson, Rachel Ryan, Emily Tann
Altos Myriam Burr, Rachel Fright, Caroline George, Jeremy Kenyon, Katharine Pates
Tenors Timothy Coleman, Guy Cutting, Zakiy Manji, Mothusi Turner, Ronald Yip
Basses William Bennett, Jonathan Burr, James Geidt, William Gunson, Richard Hill, Jack Halsey, Fergus McIntosh, Benjamin Stewart, James Williams
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subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’ And God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for food:’ and it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the hosts of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it he had rested from all his work which God created and made. These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man
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to till the ground. But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
Genesis 1:1–2:7
1 In the Beginning was the Word
Gabriel JacksonIn the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light, that all men through him might believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear witness of that Light. That was the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father,) full of grace and truth.
John 1:1-14
2 Lugebat David Absalon
Nicolas GombertLugebat David Absalon, pius pater filium, tristis senex puerum: heu me fili mi Absalon, quis mihi det ut ego pro te moriar, o fili mi Absalon. Rex autem David filium cooperto flebat capite.
Porro rex operuit caput suum, et clamabat voce magna: fili mi Absalon.
David mourned for Absalom, a loving father for his son, an old man grief-stricken for a boy: ‘Ah me, my son Absalom, who will let me die instead of you, oh my son Absalom.’ And King David covered his head and wept for his son.
Then the king uncovered his head and cried out in a great voice: ‘My son Absalom.’
3 When David Heard
Thomas WeelkesWhen David heard that Absalon was slain he went up into his chamber over the gate and wept, and thus he said: ‘My son, Absalon, O my son, my son Absalon! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalon, my son, my son.’
adapted from II Samuel 18:33
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Texts
4 When David Heard
Eric Whitacre
When David heard that Absalom was slain he went up into his chamber over the gate and wept, and thus he said: ‘My son, Absalom, O my son, my son Absalom! Would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son.’
adapted from II Samuel 18:33
5 Nunc Dimittis
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina
6 Nunc Dimittis
Gustav Holst
7 Nunc Dimittis
Paweł Łukaszewski
Nunc dimittis servum tuum, Domine, secundum verbum tuum in pace: quia viderunt oculi mei salutare tuum, quod parasti ante faciem omnium populorum: lumen ad revelationem gentium, et gloriam plebis tuae Israel.
[Palestrina and Holst:] Gloria Patri, et Filio, et Spiritui Sancto: sicut erat [Palestrina: in principio, et] nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.
Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast
prepared before the face of all people to be a light to lighten the gentiles, and to be the glory of thy people Israel. (Luke 2: 29-32)
Glory be to the Father and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
8 In the Beginning Aaron Copland
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be light:’ and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, ‘Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.’ And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.
And God said, ‘Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear:’ and it was so. And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good. And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after its kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth:’ and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after its kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after its kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.
And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years: and let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth:’ and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day.
And God said, ‘Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven.’ And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.’ And the evening and the morning were the fifth day. And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind:’ and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let him have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and