Choir of the Sound will be performing in the Greater Seattle Choral Consortium’s Seattle Sings festival on October 10 at Saint Mark’s Cathedral. One of the songs we will be performing is Gerald Finzi’s “My Spirit Sang All Day,” which we performed in this space in March 2015. Finzi is most renowned for setting English poetry to song, including the works of Thomas Hardy, Robert Bridges, John Milton, and Shakespeare. “My Spirit Sang All Day” was the third in a series of seven settings of poems by Bridges that Finzi published after his marriage to Joyce Black, although this piece was likely written while they were still in courtship. Notice the number of times the word “joy” is used throughout the song (Finzi’s wife was normally called “Joy”). He spent most of his adult life in seclusion in the English countryside, where he grew apple trees and saved numerous rare apple species from extinction.