Music Notes 2015 – Advent IV On S. Cecilia’s Day (22nd November) 1903, Pope Pius X delivered himself of a moto proprio. This is a papal document issued by the Pontiff on his own initiative, and personally signed by him. The title by which this particular one is known is – from its opening words in Italian – Tra le Sollecitudini, which is Italian for Among the concerns. He starts by saying that among the cares that are on his shoulders is the requirement to ensure that the worship of the church is conducted with decorum. He warms to his theme in some 5,500 words in English translation, and the gist of it is that he has concerns about the kind of operatically inspired music that was often used in services in the nineteenth-century Roman Catholic Church, while he would much rather that everyone should readopt Gregorian chant – oh, and by the way, the music of the Renaissance masters (i.e. Palestrina, Lassus, Victoria) is also a jolly good idea. It has not, perhaps, helped this document to be taken always as seriously as was intended that its Italian title encouraged a number of musicians to refer to it as the Pope’s Tra La La for short. Nevertheless, it was indeed meant as a serious document, and had quite a significant impact on what happened in the church in the early part of the twentieth century. Pius X would have been upset to know that, in spite of his words, the Viennese-style masses of Mozart and Schubert, and the later lush offerings of Rossini and Puccini and their contemporaries were not excluded from the life of the church. He would have been even more upset to know that, within sixty years, liturgical practice was being revised in such a way that worship bands, well-meaning singers with guitars, and even rearrangements of well-known secular tunes would have so comprehensively overtaken a large part of his church’s musical practice. To what extent this was the result of a backlash against unduly conservative policies unwisely issued just at the wrong moment is a matter of judgment. Having written in his document that Latin was the proper and exclusive language for signing the liturgy, he would presumably be prostrate were he to witness these later musical forms being used virtually always with vernacular texts. The mass setting this Sunday morning is a direct result of Tra le Sollecitudini. In 1912, the organist at Westminster Cathedral was Dr Richard Runciman Terry, often referred to just as R.R. Terry. Today he is often remembered for his choral Christmas Carol Myn Liking, but there is a much more important reason for celebrating him. He it was who really threw himself into the resurrection of the Latin music of the great Tudor composers of England such as Byrd, Tallis and Phillips. Their English church music, written for the reformed English church, had been extensively performed in the English church, but the Latin music was either ignored, or else suffered the fate of having its texts replaced with appropriately Protestant words, often on a completely different subject from that in the composer’s mind. Terry was, in fact, a little ahead of the papal curve, because his interest in reviving this music began while he was Organist and Director of Music at Downside School. Indeed, his appointment at Westminster Cathedral – he was its first Director of Music – began

two years before Tra le Sollecitudini was promulgated. The fact is that he and Pius X were just on the same page. Tudor Latin music was all very well, but with an entire year of music to find, and with the papal limitations very much in mind by 1912, he found himself asking Sir Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music what could be done. Stanford was, perhaps, not the right person to write music for the Roman Catholic Church, but he had a young student, one Herbert Howells (1892–1983), whom he thought might be able to help, although he was no more a Roman Catholic than was Stanford. Within just a few years, Howells had produced nine works for Westminster Cathedral, dedicating each of them to R.R. Terry. The first of these was the Mass in the Dorian Mode, a title that not only identifies it as a mass setting, but stresses the connection with the Gregorian world by its reference to the system of modes that pre-dated the more modern diatonic system of keys. Howells wrote the piece in a remarkably clear modal and polyphonic musical language, clearly borrowing from the renaissance style as well as its tonal system. It is a remarkably beautiful piece, and the overall sound is often referred to as “translucent” with good reason. For those of us who know Howells’s later style, this will be a somewhat surprising musical language. Nevertheless, his love of music of this period lasted under the surface through his entire life. Not long before he died, he said all through my life I've had this strange feeling that I belonged somehow to the Tudor period. You may find this piece significant evidence that he was right. More Howells for the motet at the Offertory – in this case, his well-loved carol A Spotless Rose. This is one of a set of three carols published together, of which the others are Sing lullaby, and Here is the little door. Howells himself wrote: This one I set down and wrote after idly watching some shunting from the window of a cottage which overlooked the Midland Railway. In an upstairs room I looked out on iron railings and the main Bristol to Gloucester railway line, with shunting trucks bumping and banging. I wrote it and dedicated it to my mother – it always moves me when I hear it, just as if it were written by someone else. Somehow he managed to exclude the bumping and banging of the railway entirely from this mellifluous and beautiful carol… The evening brings our main Nine Lessons and Carols of the season. As there are no fewer than four carol services to write about here, including this one, this will be a brief run through the salient features of each. Sunday evening’s service draws the most direct inspiration from the Christmas Eve service held every year at King’s College, Cambridge, and broadcast on BBC radio live (with a pre-recorded and rather different version on the television earlier). This is a service originally introduced by Bishop Benson of Truro (later Archbishop of Canterbury) in 1880 in the temporary Cathedral there, and later transported to

Cambridge with some amendment by Eric Milner-White while Dean of King’s College. As is the custom at King’s, the choir’s first carol is a setting of Adam lay y-bounden. We vary this quite considerably each year – the well-known version by Boris Ord, a former Director of Music at King’s, is sung each year at our Advent Carol Service – and this year it is by Thomas Hewitt-Jones (b.1984), grandson of two composers who lived and worked in Gloucestershire. Our next carol comes from the same county: Tomorrow shall be my dancing day – again familiar words in other settings – is set in a wholly original version by John Sanders (1933–2003), formerly Director of Music at Gloucester Cathedral. This is followed by Of a Rose by Cecilia McDowell (b. 1951), a remarkable and prolific composer, especially of choral works. She is somewhat famous for having written a work for the Portsmouth Choir called The Shipping Forecast, which combined the poetry of Seán Street, with the psalm, They that go down to the sea in ships, and finally, the words of the radio broadcast of the Shipping Forecast itself. This rather different piece was written in 1993 to a fourteenth-century text. The Rose is, of course, the Blessed Virgin Mary. Today maiden Mary is by Michael Nicholas (b. 1938), organist and master of choristers at Norwich Cathedral from 1971 to 1994, during which time our former Director of Music, David Trendell, was one of his choristers and, indeed, briefly a successful recording artist. A trio of Mary-related carols from the choir is completed by Gabriel’s Message by the extraordinarily gifted Jim Clements (b. 1983). This is an arrangement of the well-known ancient Basque tune, here reinvented originally for the talented a capella group, Voces8, which whom he has worked extensively. Earlier this week, there was the interesting experience at another event of Rupert conducting the Royal Holloway Choir in this piece in the presence of Voces8 – an interesting crossing over of musical connections. The birth narrative in the readings is followed by Sleep, holy babe by Alexander Campkin (b. 1984), a further one of the group of younger generation living composers whose works appear in this service contrasted with a few works from a previous generation. This, one of his earlier works, has received numerous performances and formed a useful calling card for what has been becoming an increasingly successful career as a composer, managed alongside being himself a choral conductor. The story of the shepherds is followed by The Shepherd’s Carol by Bob Chilcott (b. 1955), who has achieved a kind of choral superstardom, especially in connection with Christmas, often compared in this respect with John Rutter from a somewhat senior generation. This is a hugely atmospheric and effective piece, written originally as one of the annual commissions from King’s College, Cambridge, for their Christmas Eve carol service. For the first time, after the reading about the Magi, we jump backwards to an earlier generation and out of the UK with Videntes stellam by Francis Poulenc (1899–1963). Poulenc wrote Quatre Motets pour un temps de Pénitence in 1939 – beautiful pieces for Lent. It wasn’t until November 1951 that he turned his attention to Christmas and began work on the Quatre Motets pour un temps de Noël that include this movement, finishing them in May the following year. The final

piece from the choir is Alleluya, a new work is come on hand by Peter Wishart (1921– 1984), a strongly individualistic composer, whose music is characterized by a very distinctive lyricism that is considerably on show in this energetic carol. This is, therefore, a service that surveys a wide but very high quality range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century carol composition from different generations of predominantly UK composers. We think you will enjoy it very much. Monday night, 21st December at 18:00, brings our annual carol service based around A Ceremony of Carols by the English composer, Benjamin Britten (1913–1976). This is a work for three upper voices – two soprano/treble lines and one alto line – accompanied by harp. It was written in the implausible surroundings of the M.V. Axel Johnson, a Swedish cargo vessel, on which Britten and Peter Pears were returning to the UK after a stay in the United States that lasted from 1939 to 1942. Leaving in mid-March, they finally arrived in Liverpool more than four weeks later. During that time, they had been largely confined to their cabin, which was small, miserable, and airless, and with the benefit of an adjacent refrigeration plant that had a noisy compressor running constantly. There was also the constant threat of being torpedoed by a U-Boat to consider. Out of this unpromising environment, however, came fresh and delightful music that Pears described in his diary from the time as “very sweet and chockfull of charm”. He was right. The journey took them via a stop in Halifax in Nova Scotia, and by chance, Britten found a book of medieval poems there that provided most of the texts for the sequence. Beginning and ending with the plainchant for Hodie, Christus natus est sung by the choir, the intervening movements were drawn by Britten from this source. We perform it with readings and congregational carols interspersed between the movements of the work, and somewhat to our surprise on its first outing, the sequence works really well, and allowed us also some freedom in finding readings suitable to the sequence. If you haven’t experienced the extraordinary charm of this service, with the upper voices of the Priory Church Choir singing to the harp’s accompaniment from the sanctuary, it is well worth trying this out. On Tuesday, 22nd December at 18:00, we have the first of what we think will become another Priory Church tradition, a carol service inspired by the Christmas traditions of North America, and specifically the United States, entitled A Star-Spangled Christmas. In point of fact, if you visit an Anglican church in the United States for a carol service, you are likely to find them also following in the traditions of King’s College, Cambridge to a large extent. Our goal is, therefore, not to copy this US “tradition”, but rather to search out the contributions that the United States has made to Christmas music and showcase them here. If this happens to make a resident or visiting citizen of that part of the world sentimental or nostalgic, we shall feel we have done a good job. This will hopefully be helped by the fact that we will be singing the carols that originated in the United States – for example, O little town of Bethlehem – to the tunes by which they are best known there.

As with our Nine Lessons and Carols, the choir’s contribution to the service opens with a setting of Adam lay y’bounden, but this time by the prolific US composer Carson Cooman (b. 1982) from Rochester, New York. His is an energetic and wide-ranging career, with a very broad range of works represented in his catalogue, and a performance record that extends from Carnegie Hall to the basket of a hot air balloon. If only there were more room to expand on these themes here… Veiled in darkness is by Glenn Rudolph (b. 1951 in Miami, Florida), who has been active in choral music in the Pittsburgh area since 1977. He is not immune to self-irony, since his personal website operates under the title of Reindeer Music. The next choral item is an arrangement of Ding Dong, merrily on high by one of the current giants of the American choral tradition, Mack Wilberg (b. 1955), Music Director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in Salt Lake City. Their annual Christmas music extravaganzas are a sight to behold and are usefully made freely available online. There are not so many churches that boast an entire symphony orchestra and massive production facilities alongside an enormous choir of very high quality, but they manage it. This arrangement is a sheer joy, as are all of Mack’s pieces for this season. This is followed by a setting of the well-known words of Jesus Christ the Apple Tree by Anthony Piccolo (b. 1946, New Jersey). Piccolo comes quite close to being a cheat in this service, because he actually came over to spend time in England and stayed for nine years, singing in various cathedral choirs and composing an astonishing amount of music, much of which is still published by UK institutions such as Oxford University Press and – as is the case with this piece – the Royal School of Church Music. Nevertheless, back he went to the US, so he definitely counts as an American composer once more. Another arrangement by Mack Wilberg follows, this time of O holy night, much loved and sung in the United States, although originally by Adophe Adam (1803– 1856), a French composer and music critic. Nevertheless, it is so well-known today in the US that it almost counts as an American work. The Lamb is by George Whitefield Chadwick (1854–1931), a composer from Massachusetts who was one of the group that came to be known as the New England School of American composers. In a very slight trick, we then hear the American tune written for Away in a manger, but in fact arranged by Bob Chilcott. The justification for this is that he represents here the extraordinary incursion of composers published by Oxford University Press into the American choral scene, so that just as our Christmas tradition in the UK is highly influenced by American carols, so their tradition is now heavily impregnated with carols by John Rutter and Bob Chilcott. Moreover, this is an arrangement of their tune… O magnum mysterium by Morton Lauridsen (b. 1943) is one of the best known choral works to have come from the United States. Wikipedia reports “A native of the Pacific Northwest, Lauridsen worked as a Forest Service firefighter and lookout (on an isolated tower near Mt. St. Helens) before traveling south to study composition.” Finally, a lighter tone: this recognizes the obvious origins of jazzinflected music in the United States in a quirky arrangement of On Christmas Night –

otherwise known as The Sussex Carol – by Bob Krogstad (1950–2015), who died earlier this year in April. He was widely known for his music arrangements, especially of Christmas carols, and managed to earn himself the nickname of “Mr Christmas” in certain quarters. This arrangement will not disappoint… On Wednesday, 23rd December at 18:00, we have our now annual carol service inspired by the great German Christmas music tradition. Last year, we made the service part-German, part-English, with the choir handling the German, but many people said afterwards that they would have liked to sing the German words themselves, either because they themselves come from a German-speaking culture, or because they have German as a second language. So, this year we are going to try having the congregational singing and Lord’s Prayer in both English and German simultaneously: everyone is free to pick whichever language is preferred at any given moment. The choir’s music picks up on the great tradition of Christmas music that is so special in German culture. There could be no better place to begin than with Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), especially since these notes are being written in Leipzig on this occasion, the site of Bach’s final and greatest period of employment, and a city that now positively rejoices at its connection with him, even if at the time the attitude in many quarters here was so very different. The music is his chorale prelude on Wachet auf – known in English as Sleepers wake – with the chorale sung by the choir. The second choral item is in German, but is actually by the distinguished Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (b. 1935). However, he is very much part of the German musical scene, having moved to Vienna and then Berlin as part of a somewhat protracted struggle with Soviet officialdom. Even after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, he has continued to divide his time between Berlin and Tallinn, and holds German citizenship. We leap back several centuries for the next item, to a canon created by Melchior Vulpius (1570–1615) from the music of the hymn Es ist in Ros’ entsprungen. There is a long and somewhat complex history to this hymn, the details of which are too complex for this week’s notes, but which takes in an original inspiration from the Song of Solomon, which leads to a focus on Mary, transferred after the Reformation to a reference to Isaiah’s prophecy concerning the stem of Jesse. Whatever the textual details, the melody was published with 23 (!) verses in the Alte Katholische Geistliche Kirchengesäng, published in Cologne in 1599, and has been much arranged, revised, manipulated and varied ever since. Last year, we sang Ich steh’ an deiner Krippen her as a hymn, but this year we are going to hear the text set to original music by Sigfrid Karg-Elert (1877–1933), a German composer strongly associated with the city of Leipzig, where he taught theory of music and composition at the Conservatory. He was deeply out of sympathy with the outlook that led to the rise of fascism in Germany, and his death in 1933 undoubtedly spared him what would have been a very nasty collision with

the developing politics in the country at the time. Mariä Wiegenlied is a well-known Christmas song with music by the great German composer Max Reger (1873–1916) and a text by the author Martin Boelitz. The song in fact turned into a major hit for Reger, in part because of its delightful interweaving of the carol Joseph, lieber Joseph mein into the music, so much so that the publisher agreed to produce it also in a version for chamber orchestra and voice. We will hear it at this service in a further rearrangement into a choral work, realized by Richard Proulx (1937–2010) for three upper voices. This is actually a point of contact between our American and German carol services, because Proulx was in fact from Minnesota, although he spent most of his working life in Chicago. The catalogue of his works produced in his lifetime contained a section described as Noulx from Proulx. The next choral item gives us another view of a German carol seen through Anglo-Saxon eyes, in our own Rupert Gough’s arrangement of Stille Nacht. This wonderful adaptation of the best-known German carol, originally from Austria, is in fact recorded on Rupert’s marvellous new album recorded with his Choir of Royal Holloway College, called simply Carols from Royal Holloway, and available at the bookstall. If you have had access to the London evening paper The Evening Standard, you may have seen an article recently about the unexpected origins of some of our best-loved Christmas carols by Andrew Gant (b. 1963) who among other roles, is Stipendiary Lecturer in Music at St Peter's College, Oxford, but also active as an arranger, composer, conductor, singer, and goodness knows what else. Among his major accomplishments, however, is an outstanding book on Christmas Carols, which should be in your letter to Santa if he hasn’t supplied it to you previously. His arrangement of the carol Still, still, still, an Austrian Christmas song, is based on a folksong melody. The first lines translate as Hush, hush, hush, for the little child wants to sleep! As well as being a well-known German-language carol, it long since crossed the Atlantic and has become well-known in America as well. The story of the Magi brings us to Peter Cornelius’s definitive Drei Könige wandern aus Morgenland, known in English as Three Kings from Persian lands afar – which to be honest is not quite a literal translation, but never mind. This unites a text and a sort of narrative recitative written by Cornelius himself, with the pre-existing chorale melody with words by Philipp Nicolai that we know as How brightly beams the morning star, cleverly using the latter to accompany the former. In fact, although we have become used to hearing the chorale sung by the choir behind the soloist, this was not Cornelius’s intention. He wrote it for soloist with piano accompaniment, and it was the sometime organist of Worcester Cathedral, Sir Ivor E. Atkins (often, for obvious reasons, known as Ivory Atkins) who had the happy idea of re-forming it to be accompanied by choir, first in male voices only, and then in full choir, the version that is more or less universally known today. Finally, we hear the choir sing Puer natus in Bethlehem by the great German composer Samuel Scheidt (1587–1654), one of the most important early baroque composers, who was born in Halle, just down the road from Leipzig, and home to what is referred to as Leipzig Airport. This is not

Halle’s only claim to musical fame, since Georg Friedrich Händel was also born there in 1685, perhaps due to something in the water or in the pattern of lightning in this part of Germany. This piece is one of Scheidt’s collection of Sacrae Cantiones, published in 1620, and is an especially useful work, since he provided two sets of words for it: the Christmas text we will be using this Sunday, and Surrexit Christus hodie for Easter – not a bad technique for getting your music heard more often.