1. Angelus ad virginem
2. Comfort, Comfort Ye My People
3. Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence

My recitals, particularly at Culver, consistently include improvised elaborations of hymn tunes. For years, colleagues have encouraged me to write some of these down so that others could play them. Doing so wasn't that easy a proposition, however, because indeed they were improvised. Creating something spontaneously does not necessarily lead easily into committing something to paper. Also, when one has a written arrangement, one is more inclined to "clean up" many details—wrinkles in the music that would be fine when you hear something only once, but which might not so readily stand up to the scrutiny of practice and repeated performances. These three pieces were written relatively quickly, over Christmas vacation in 2009–2010, and come quite close to the sort of thing I would do with these in improvisation. (In fact, I'm certain that some passages of these settings are very close indeed to the way I improvised on them occasionally.)

My friend and colleague Lisa Lonie, carillonneur of St. Thomas Church, Whitemarsh, and Longwood Gardens (both in the greater Philadelphia area) challenged me to write some hymn settings that would issue a challenge to the player—settings that went well beyond the demands of the "usual" hymn settings. As one who relishes a challenge, the latter encouragement was what got me motivated to complete this project. I've never felt there were enough settings of Advent carols, so this to me was the obvious direction for my efforts. I had not encountered any settings of "Angelus ad virginem." The brilliance of the tune suggested a virtuoso treatment, along the lines of the improvisations I finish with at the end of our annual Lessons and Carols services at Culver. These pieces are written in a sequence of keys and moods so that they may effectively be played straight through as a set, but they are also intended to be just as useful separately. (No doubt I will play them separately sometimes.) They don't necessarily need to be played in the original order, either. They are presented here in the order they were written, but might well work best played in the reverse order, for a "big finish."

—John Gouwens