Music Notes 2015 Trinity XVII

Transcription

1 Music Notes 2015 Trinity XVII On Wednesday this week, Bishop Jonathan Baker was installed as Guild Vicar of St Andrew s, Holborn. In the same service, Fr Mark was licensed as Assistant Vicar. Bishop Jonathan spent the first part of the service in what is called the Choir Dress of a Catholic Bishop, including a violet cassock, rochet, mozzetta, with a violet zucchetto a form of skull-cap on his head. For the second part of the service from the point of the Offertory onwards, he changed into a white alb and a gold chasuble, not unfamiliar from our own Eucharists. In the congregation were a number of priests, many of whom were wearing a wide variety of clothing, mainly out of the Anglo and/or Roman Catholic traditions, including one rather surprising cassock-alb. The first verse of the opening hymn went as follows: Joy to thee, Queen, within thine ancient dowry - joy to thee, Queen, for once again thy fame is noised abroad and spoken of in England and thy lost children call upon thy name. Ladye of Walsingham, be as thou hast been - England's Protectress, our Mother and our Queen! Of course, none of this fazes those of us accustomed to modern Anglo-Catholic tradition, which often seems almost to have crossed over with the Roman Catholics, so that some of the rituals and traditions that used to be their preserve are now found best preserved in the Church of England and a few other parts of the Anglican world. The choir music was by two robustly (Roman) Catholic composers: the Spanish-Mexican Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla (his Missa Ego flos campi, which we hear at Midnight Mass each year) and the Austrian Anton Bruckner (a setting of Ave Maria). The final congregational item was one of the most familiar Anglo-Catholic Central hymns, Ye who own the faith of Jesus sung to the tune Daily Daily. Just before that, we had sung the Salve Regina together to plainchant, with the Bishop and other members of the sanctuary group at the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Coming from West Smithfield, literally just up the road from St Andrew s, Holborn, one couldn t help reflecting that just about everything that we had done that evening would have seen us led to a pyre outside our own church to be burnt at the stake at one point in this country s Reformation history (though the overwhelming majority of people actually burnt at the stake in Smithfield were Protestant). Moreover, we might have seen the clergy being imprisoned for their part in it until relatively recently. After all, it was only in 1880 that the Revd T. Pelham Dale, Rector of St Vedast Foster Lane was imprisoned for ritualistic practices under the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874.

2 It also made one wonder what those people caught in the past between their love for the Catholic Church and the political ecclesiastical realities of their day would have made of what we were doing. Thomas Tallis, at St Mary-At-Hill near the Monument, Catholic to the core, would have been astonished that we were at a service within the same Church of England for which he produced one Protestant-friendly work after another. William Byrd ( ), meanwhile, writing by turns anguished and assertive works of Catholic liturgical music out in Stondon Massey, would have had a great deal to think about, had he seen where and how the Church of England looks today. The setting this Sunday at the Solemn Eucharist is his Mass for Five Voices. Joseph Kerman, a leading scholar in Byrd studies and world-respected musicologist who died in April last year, divided Byrd s output into a series of more or less clear stages. The first of these covered his progress from being the somewhat frustrated organist of the very Protestant Lincoln Cathedral to the Chapel Royal, where he would have found many musicians and composers much more congenial to a Catholic convert. His music during this time seems full of self-imposed challenges: mastering cantus firmus settings (music based on a plainchant), canons, imitations of other composers, and so on. Then in 1589 and 1591 he published his Cantiones sacrae, quite suddenly a much more confident and also impassioned set of motets of extraordinary richness, strongly expressing both personal religious devotion and coded anguish at the situation of Catholics in England at the time. Byrd s three mass settings, for four voices, then for three, and finally for five, were published in , and respectively and mark a distinct third period in his compositional activity. Finally, in 1605 and 1607 came his Gradualia, a collection of more than 100 settings of Mass Propers texts specific to a particular feast or season that provide a complete liturgical cycle for the year. That third period in which the three masses appeared coincides with Byrd moving from Harlington in Middlesex to live with his family in Stondon Massey in Essex, close to the estates of Sir John Petre, a notable Catholic patron, around whom an entire, if discreet, community worshipping in the Catholic tradition had formed. It can surely be no coincidence that at the moment that Byrd joined such a community, he also began to generate a great cycle of works specifically suitable for such an environment. The Mass for Five voices, which, unlike the four-part and three-part settings, is written for the vocal forces that Byrd usually found most conducive to getting the texture he wanted, is nevertheless surprisingly austere in its style. This is not a triumphalist work in any sense how could it be, given the situation? Rather, it is restrained and reserved. Because we sing a congregational Credo, we will miss the most telling moment of this setting, when he places the words Et unam sanctam catholicam et apostolicam ecclesiam ( and in one holy catholic and apostolic church ) between two sections for reduced vocal forces to produce maximum contrast, and

3 then bashes out the text with full choir in solid chords, lest anyone miss the significance. The whole work finishes with an Agnus Dei in which the final plea for peace seems to be deliberately undermined by an inability of the music to settle until the final cadence, and even then it just stops rather than producing any kind of satisfying conclusion. It is as if in this refusal to produce a comforting conclusion Byrd wants to say that there was no peace for him and his fellow Catholics. How important it is to live in the right times No such concerns for the composer of the motet at the Offertory, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina ( ). It is his setting of O Sacrum convivium. Interestingly, when he himself came to write a mass with this title, it was not his own motet that he used as the jumping off point (Wikipedia gets this wrong, by the way), but rather the motet of the same name by last week s mass setting composer, Cristóbal de Morales. Palestrina s motet was published in Venice in 1572, in Motettorum liber secundus for 5, 6, and 8 voices in fact, this motet is for five voices. As was usual, it is built on the plainchant music to which the text is sung, and he weaves a complex and rich texture around it. How different the situations of the two composers. It may be fanciful to read this back into the music, but Palestrina seems somehow confident, untroubled by theological issues, and just getting on with the job of writing a piece in praise of the Blessed Sacrament. Byrd would have felt similar confidence in his own theology and as a composer, but how different he must have felt about the circumstances in which he was composing. For Palestrina, writing this motet would have been a straightforward act of personal devotion and professional duty. For Byrd, his Catholic music was high-risk and produced in the knowledge of what it could mean if information about what he was doing fell into the wrong hands. The evening Canticles are the Evening Service in Bb by the contentedly Protestant Henry Purcell ( ). Modern choirs find this a bit low if sung as written, and so modern editions are usually transposed upwards, in case your perfect pitch reveals that these pieces are not being sung in the advertised key. In fact, these are part of a set of ten pieces that together make up a complete group of the canticles needed by a cathedral or large parish church. They include the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, but also their alternatives in the prayer book, Cantate Domino and Deus misereatur, (in practice, virtually never done, so deeply are the Mag & Nunc engrained these days). There are also settings of the Te Deum, Benedictus, Benedicite and Jubilate for Matins, and a Kyrie and Nicene Creed for use at a Communion Service. This set is not unique in its completeness, but there are not many others. It will have been incredibly useful to church musicians at the time, just one of the reasons why the set spread quickly all over the country and survives in so many contemporaneous copies to this day. Purcell s anthems go in more for complex harmony and word painting than his canticles. The function of these texts in a relatively formal and repetitive role in the

4 services seems to evoke from him a more formal structure and language but they are none the worse for this. They are outstandingly good, beautifully structured and elegant to a fault. As a rule, Purcell alternates sections for full four-voice choir with contrasting sections for soloists that are usually either three upper or three lower voices. The coming week includes Michaelmas Day the Feast of S. Michael and All Angels. Rupert has included a reference to the feast by including as the Evensong anthem Factum est silentium by Richard Dering (c ), an English composer, born illegitimate in Hampshire. Lest one thinks that someone from such circumstances was necessarily doomed to a miserable life in those days, he went on to obtain a BMus from Christ Church, Oxford, and then accompanied the British Ambassador to Venice. At some point, as with Byrd, he converted to Roman Catholicism, not the easiest option at the time, and this seems to have helped his decision to live abroad for several years. Eventually, he returned to England to work for Charles I and his Catholic wife Henrietta Maria (famously uncrowned because of her faith). His music was obviously used in their royal services, but more bizarrely and unexpectedly revealing, continued to be used in the Commonwealth, reportedly having been Oliver Cromwell's favourite devotional music. Factum est silentium conflates some texts from Revelation by bringing together the phrase There was silence in heaven with the dragon fought with the Archangel Michael. The voice of a thousand thousand was heard saying: Salvation, honour and power be to almighty God. Alleluia. The motet comes from Dering s collection of six-part motets that he published under the name Cantica Sacra in 1618, all of which have clearly benefited from his contact with Italian madrigals and their colourful word-painting. Knowing this, it is no surprise to find that the silence in heaven is created by music of static stillness just for the four highest voices, at the end of which a little winding figure in the top three introduces movement, almost like the dragon starting to unwind his tail. Suddenly the war breaks out audibly in all the parts. Dering illustrates the music dramatically at every opportunity. If we see this as essentially a sacred madrigal, it fits with the tradition of there being quite some flexibility in the tempo of the different sections, and indeed in the dynamics. Salvation, honour and power be to almighty God is expressed with dramatic breadth, and then a positive peroration of Alleluias breaks out to bring the vision to an end. Palestrina and Purcell were both happy with their religious lot; Dering and Byrd very much not so. One can hardly say that the sense of persecution and danger under which the latter two lived for parts of their lives was necessary for them to write such transcendent music, because the first two managed to do this from positions of no threat or anxiety of that kind. Perhaps it just shows that a great artist will always find a way to create something wonderful, irrespective of context. Still, it would be interesting to know what these four would respectively have made of St

5 Andrew s on Wednesday evening. Actually, the fact that they each fit into our own liturgical practice, and that we are still performing music from such different situations, is a positive and optimistic sign.