Music Notes 2014 Passion Sunday

Transcription

1 Music Notes 2014 Passion Sunday Passion Sunday marks the start of the two-week period known as Passiontide, a period that leads us through the forthcoming week, then Palm Sunday and into Holy Week itself and the wonderful intensities of the Triduum, the three-day period from the evening of Maundy Thursday to the evening of Easter Sunday. There are many reasons why people may not be able to attend all the Holy Week services, but when it is possible, the thread of narrative, and the growing intensity of experience that runs from the Palm Procession on Palm Sunday morning, through the singing of the Passion, and then on through the Mass of the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday, the Good Friday Solemn Liturgy, and on to the kindling of the new fire and light of Easter on Holy Saturday evening, and of course, the joys of Easter Day itself, is very involving and powerfully moving. Those who can only make part of this sequence seem to me to miss out terribly, rather as though one had to miss the middle acts of a Shakespeare play and come back in without experiencing the build-up that leads to the Fifth Act s resolution. This Sunday s mass setting, Missa Pange lingua by the Flemish composer Josquin Des Prez ( ), is probably his best known work. It happens also to be his last mass setting, his highest achievement in this genre, written at the height of his powers and with his style at its most mature. It is also a work in which each of us has an above-average chance of hearing exactly what he is up to compositionally. This is because the plainchant on which the setting is based is one with which we are all likely to be familiar: Pange lingua. Indeed, we sing this chant for the final hymn this Sunday, and it will reappear on Maundy Thursday during the Procession of the Blessed Sacrament to the Altar of Repose in the Lady Chapel. However, the words will be different on each occasion, and that is because the opening words, Pange lingua gloriosi are common to two completely different texts. The first is Pange lingua gloriosi proelium certaminis, which is believed to have been written by S. Venantius Fortunatus, Bishop of Poitiers in the sixth century. The text is a celebration of the Passion of Christ. Verse 8 (of 10) begins Crux fidelis, which we know from our Good Friday Solemn Liturgy, where we hear it sung in the setting by King John of Portugal. This is the remnant of a tradition whereby the entire hymn was sung in a rather unusual order during the Good Friday Liturgy with the Crux fidelis interspersed throughout it as a refrain. The pulse of the text is considered by some to have been based on a marching song used by Roman soldiers: Ecce, Caesar nunc triumphat qui subegit Gallias that is, dum-de/dum-de/dum-de/dum-de/dumde/dum-de/dum-de/dum! Every one of the three lines of each verse follows this pattern in the Latin, and Dearmer s translation in Common Praise (# 121) follows suit. It certainly gives it structure and the hymn quickly found a permanent place in the liturgy of Passiontide and for any celebrations of the Holy Cross.

2 Seven hundred years later, S. Thomas Aquinas consciously used the same three initial words for a hymn in praise of the Holy Sacrament for use on Corpus Christi: Pange lingua gloriosi corporis mysterium. He followed the same rhythmic pattern, and the one difference apart from the content is that his text rhymes so that each of the three lines that make up a verse ends with the same syllable. It is, of course, also suitable for all feasts in which the Holy Sacrament is the focus of attention, and the Mass of the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday is obviously one of these. As a congregation, we know the chant in a slightly amended form three notes the same, then go down one, then up a fourth whereas the real plainchant inserts one note upwards after the first two. This is only important because the melody as used by Josquin is very slightly different by this one upward note from the version we sing at the end of the Solemn Eucharist today. He really works this melody, using it to start the Kyrie, the Gloria and Credo (neither of which we use today) the Sanctus, Benedictus and each part of the Agnus Dei. Being such a well-known melody, you will have little trouble hearing it popping up again and again throughout. In one way, this is a straightforward Cantus firmus mass i.e. one substantially based on a plainchant. But Josquin plays around with duetting parts, and indeed the Pleni sunt coeli section of the Sanctus, the Benedictus and the second Agnus Dei are each written just for two voices. Even when in four parts, he often pits two of the voices against the other two so that they are duetting duettists. This is a surprisingly spare texture to use so extensively, but Josquin manages it brilliantly. The whole setting appears so thoroughly imbued with the chant that the work seems more like a set of variations on it. It has extraordinary variety and also extraordinary unity, and it is no wonder that this is seen as Josquin s ultimate creative expression in this field. The motet at the Offertory is the cause of some confusion. For many years it was described as having been composed by Orlando Gibbons ( ), but we know now that it was written by Henry Loosemore ( ). He was organist of King s College, Cambridge for an impressive 43 years from He lost this and another anthem to Gibbons for so many years because of the work of Thomas Tudway, Loosemore s successor at King s College, who included them in a collection he copied out that is now in the British Museum, in which he attributes both to Gibbons. We just don t know why he made this mistake. The thing that we do know, thanks to some clever detective work by Professor John Morehen, a recent Past Master of the Worshipful Company of Musicians, is that the copy of this anthem in the archives of King s College Cambridge is in Loosemore s own hand, and the other contemporaneous copy that probably came from the King s source firmly declares that this is the work of H.L.. There are anyway many harmonic touches that make it unlikely to be the work of Gibbons. Incidentally, the other Loosemore work attributed to Gibbons is frightfully dull Loosemore was a rather uneven composer and would be most unworthy of the greater composer. Meantime, O Lord, increase

3 my faith is a very effective piece with some beautiful word-painting, such as the elongated notes at Strengthen me that seem to picture the supplicant stretching the sinews of faith to make them stronger, a simple little falling figure to illustrate charity, and a briefly stretched out cadence to illustrate patience. The voluntary actually picks up on the Gibbons reference, so we are giving you a little of the great master, even if he has lost out on the motet. This is a Fantazia of foure Parts that comes from a collection called Parthenia, being (it claims) the first collection of music written for the virginals Parthenia is derived from Parthenos, the Greek word for a virgin and used in the New Testament in the Nativity accounts. The virginals is a keyboard instrument like a miniature harpsichord. The collection contains only music by William Byrd, John Bull, and Orlando Gibbons, and it is inscribed to The High, Mighty and Magnificent Princes, Frederick Elector of Palatine of the Reine and his betrothed Lady Elizabeth the only daughter of my Lord the King. Elizabeth was the daughter of James I, and the Prince Frederick was in England in 1612 to meet her, marrying her in Whitehall Palace in This collection was published in 1612, presumably in celebration of the betrothal. You might like to know that it is also apparently the first book of music to have been printed from copper (rather than wooden) plates. This Fantazia is a piece of great charm and elegance, and if the sound world of the organ is a little different from that of the virginals, Gibbons would have had no problem with the transfer. Indeed, many of his harmonic touches work even better in the sustained acoustic world of the organ. The canticles at Evensong are sung to the Evening Service in E by Daniel Purcell ( ), the younger brother of the great Henry Purcell. After a spell singing in the Chapel Royal, he went in his mid-twenties to be organist at Magdalen College, Oxford. After some five or six years there, he returned to London and became a composer for theatrical performances. In 1713, it all gets rather interesting. While at Magdalen, he had got to know a certain Dr Sacheverell, a Fellow of the college from Sacheverell was then presented to the living of St Andrew s Holborn. Upon his arrival at the church, he discovered that an organ had been installed there by the firm of Harris in 1699, but never used, because the church had never paid for it. He promptly started a Great Project to undertake fund raising, and the organ was duly paid off. The obvious next step was to appoint an organist, and his mind turned to the gifted young man he had known at Magdalen, Daniel Purcell, whom he duly appointed. Then he ran into a snag. The Vestry effectively the PCC claimed that they had the right to appoint organists. John Bloxham, nineteenth-century historian of Magdalen College, describes the Vestry of the time as a select one. Sacheverell must have thought them ungrateful, since there would have been no possibility of using the organ at all without his initiative, but they failed to come up with a candidate, and so Purcell served undisturbed for some four years from But in 1717, the Vestry finally struck, appointing Maurice Greene, composer of last Sunday evening s canticles as their organist, displacing Purcell, who anyway died not

4 long thereafter and was buried in the churchyard of St Andrew s on 26 th November However, the best laid plans In March 1718 Richard Brind, organist of St Paul s Cathedral, also died and Greene promptly moved there as his successor, leaving St Andrew s with their organ but neither of their recent organists. Henry Purcell s son Edward applied for his uncle s former post, but the beastly Vestry wasn t going to let another Purcell in and snubbed him. We are not quite done with cross-connections... The canticles we are going to hear this evening were written while Daniel was at Magdalen, and there they remained shrouded in obscurity until John Stainer, a former chorister of St Paul s Cathedral, arrived as organist in He it was who rooted them out of where they were stored and, thinking them rather fine, reintroduced them to regular use. When Stainer was translated back to St Paul s Cathedral as organist in 1871, the canticles went with him and stood much larger on that stage. For which reason, we have them in our repertoire today, and Daniel Purcell continues to be remembered as a church composer. If only there were time to go into his extraordinary career as a punster The anthem is My God, my God, look upon me by John Blow ( ). Blow me down if he isn t yet another former St Paul s Cathedral choirmaster and, as it so happens, Henry Purcell s great teacher and mentor! Blow is famous for having been so impressed by his pupil that he stood aside at Westminster Abbey (to which he had been appointed eight years after starting at St Paul s) in his favour, resuming his duties after Henry died so tragically young. The text is from Psalm 22, quoted by Jesus on the Cross, and thus central to the preoccupations of Passiontide. It is described technically as a full anthem, meaning that it is composed through from start to finish as a seamless piece of music, distinguishing it from the more bitty nature of a verse anthem, a genre to which Blow also contributed well. The musical language is ardent and emotive and full of tension and urgent appeal, as one would expect. The voluntary at the end of Evensong the last concluding voluntary we will hear until after the Easter Vigil is the Fugue in E minor, BWV 548 by Johann Sebastian Bach ( ), known colloquially as The Wedge because of the way that the subject (the basic melody on which the whole piece is based) begins with a single note, then moves outwards from there alternately on each side until the two parts of the melody are an octave apart. The atmosphere of the fugue is actually derived from a central episode in the Prelude (which we will not be hearing) and it takes over its wild, fantasia-like atmosphere, with increasingly athletic runs around the keyboard that makes it an extremely exciting work. Much of Bach s major organ music was written relatively early on in Weimar, but this piece comes from a group of late works composed during his last and most significant appointment in Leipzig. As with the Josquin in the morning, it is a work that represents the composer at his most mature and most assured.

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