Benjamin

Benjamin was the last-born of Jacob's thirteen children (12 sons 1 daughter), and the second and last son of Rachel in Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition. He was the progenitor of the Israelite Tribe of Benjamin. In the Biblical account, unlike Rachel's first son, Joseph, Benjamin was born in Canaan. In the Samaritan Pentateuch, Benjamin's name appears as "Binyaamem" (Hebrew: בנימין, "Son of my days"). In the Qur'an, Benjamin is referred to as righteous young child, who remained with Jacob when the older brothers plotted against Joseph. Later rabbinic traditions name him as one of four ancient Israelites who died without sin, the other three being Chileab, Jesse and Amram.

Name

According to the Torah, Benjamin's name arose when Jacob deliberately corrupted the name Benoni, the original name of Benjamin, since Benoni was an allusion to Rachel's dying just after she had given birth, as it means son of my pain. Textual scholars regard these two names as fragments of naming narratives coming from different sources - one being the Jahwist and the other being the Elohist.

Abraham

Abraham (/ˈeɪbrəˌhæm, -həm/ (Hebrew: אַבְרָהָם‎,  listen )), birthname Abram, is the first of the three biblical patriarchs. His story, told in chapters 11 through 25 of the Book of Genesis, plays a prominent role in Judaism, Christianity, Islam and the Bahá'í Faith.

According to Jewish tradition and the Bible's internal chronology, Abraham was born in the year 1948 from Creation (1813 BCE). To date, there has been little if any archaeological or other scientific evidence to confirm his existence at that time. Scholars variously consider Abraham to have lived as late as the seventh century BCE, or that he is a later, literary construct and not a historical person. Potentially, excavation of his traditional burial site, the Cave of the Patriarchs at Hebron, along with carbon dating and/or DNA analysis from the bodies in comparison with the shared Y-chromosomal genes among Jewish and Arab people, his patriarchal offspring by tradition, could provide evidence confirming his existence and chronology.

Choir

A choir (/ˈkwaɪ.ər/) (also known as a chorale or chorus) is a musical ensemble of singers. Choral music, in turn, is the music written specifically for such an ensemble to perform. Choirs may perform music from the classical music repertoire, which spans from the Medieval era to the 2010s, and/or popular music repertoire. Most choirs are led by a conductor, who leads the performances with arm and face gestures.

A body of singers who perform together as a group is called a choir or chorus. The former term is very often applied to groups affiliated with a church (whether or not they actually occupy the choir) and the second to groups that perform in theatres or concert halls, but this distinction is far from rigid. Choirs may sing without instrumental accompaniment, with the accompaniment of a piano or pipe organ, with a small ensemble (e.g., harpsichord, cello and double bass for a Baroque era piece), or with a full orchestra of 70-100 musicians.

The term "Choir" has the secondary definition of a subset of an ensemble; thus one speaks of the "woodwind choir" of an orchestra, or different "choirs" of voices and/or instruments in a polychoral composition. In typical 18th- to 21st-century oratorios and masses, chorus or choir is usually understood to imply more than one singer per part, in contrast to the quartet of soloists also featured in these works.

Friday Afternoons

Friday Afternoons is a collection of 12 songs by Benjamin Britten, composed 1933–35 for the pupils of Clive House School, Prestatyn, where his brother, Robert, was headmaster. Two of the songs, "Cuckoo" and "Old Abram Brown", were featured in the film Moonrise Kingdom.

Composition

Not long after graduating from the Royal College of Music, Britten started composing his collection of mostly unison songs (the last song, "Old Abram Brown", being in canon) to texts he selected from Walter de la Mare's anthology Come Hither. Britten noted in his diary on 2 November 1933 (just over a month before his twentieth birthday) that he had composed that afternoon "a song, for R.H.M.B. & Clive House, very light & bad – 'I mun be married a Sunday'". "Ee-Oh!" followed on 19 December.

There was no further mention in Britten’s diary of composing school songs until May 1934, when he spent time with Robert at Clive House and helped by coaching pupils in cricket and taking singing classes. He then resumed work on his songs, including "A New Year Carol", a setting of the traditional "Levy-Dew". He completed the collection in August 1935 with the song "Begone, Dull Care".