The Josephine Octave

Will Strassberger
Aug 13, 2023
4 min read

Pope Francis proclaimed 2021 to be the Year of St. Joseph. In honor of Christ’s foster father, I wrote a motet based on a poem I found about the death of St. Joseph. I was hopeful that the smaller, elite schola at the major seminary would like to sing it to commemorate the Year of St. Joseph. However, without much of an explanation, they excluded my work from their repertoire and told me to kick rocks. Such is life.

For the summer of 2022, I was assigned to Our Lady Star of the Sea Catholic Church in Ponte Vedra, FL. It was a lovely parish that was well run with excellent resource management. That is to say, I was fortunate to have more time on my hands than I usually did at the seminary. I decided I would put this time to good use, so I began researching topics for composition. It was only then that I discovered the text from my St. Joseph motet was sourced from a 1741 hymnal called the Coeleste Palmetum, “Heavenly Palmtree.” The book contained collections of hymns proper to the feasts of popular saints. There were eight hymns in each collection, one for each time of prayer throughout the day. The Officium Parvum de Sancto Ioseph, “Little Office of Saint Joseph,” had eight of these hymns celebrating his life and–courtesy of the seventh hymn that I first stumbled upon–his death.

I wasted no time in cranking out seven more motets to complete the setting of all eight hymns, a little octave of music for St. Joseph, if you will. And based on the tremendous success of that first motet back in the seminary, I had the bright idea to call the Cathedral Basilica of St. Augustine and schedule a world premiere about one year away, on August 4, 2023. I had no funding, no choir, and a very weak track record of public performances. But I knew my work was valid and worthy of a premiere. Thus began the shopping around of my oratorio that nobody asked for. Oh, it was also at this time that I left seminary formation and took a job as the Pastoral Associate of a parish in Jacksonville, FL.

Virtually every choral ensemble in Northeast Florida turned down my offer to perform The Josephine Octave. It was either not the right time, too much music, or they just didn’t care who I was. And then I heard about the Don Thompson Chorale. They had an impressive history of recording albums, traveling the world, and primarily singing sacred choral music. They were under the direction of a new conductor, Adam Hooper, and I got the impression they were looking for a large project to sink their teeth into. Fortunately my instincts were right, and we struck a deal to premiere my oratorio. Concurrently, I was singing in the Jacksonville Symphony Chorus and we were rehearsing for Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem. Due to the demanding immensity of the work, we were joined by choral singers from the University of North Florida, Jacksonville University, and the Florida State College of Jacksonville. These young voices added strength and intensity, and it gave me an idea. I started networking with the college students and invited them to sing in The Josephine Octave. I don’t know what it is about overworked music students, but throw them an original composition and a world premiere and they will pounce!

Now that I had the choir and the funding, I needed to get people interested in the performance. I made about a thousand postcard advertisements for the premiere and sent them to every Catholic parish in the region. Things only snowballed from there. My old high school mentioned me in a Facebook post, which was picked up by Clay County Sheriff Michelle Cook in a “student spotlight”–which is hilarious because I was far from being a student at the time. From there the local newspaper interviewed me and at some point the information about my upcoming premiere made it onto the news for Northeast Florida. Marketing, folks!

And it worked. Within a few months, The Josephine Octave went from being a project that nobody wanted to touch to being the talk of the town. When August 4, 2023 rolled around, the Cathedral Basilica was absolutely packed. I was blessed to have my family and friends there supporting me, but as I looked out into the audience I realized the vast majority were perfect strangers who just wanted to listen to new sacred music. For years I imagined that one day I would stand at the steps of the sanctuary of that cathedral and be greeted by the people of God. Of course, I thought it would be because of my ordination to the priesthood, but there I stood as nothing more than a composer, humbly receiving the acclamation of the audience. In the words of the great philosopher, Iroh, “Destiny is a funny thing.”