The restored organ console of St Anne Limehouse - a Gray...
44
The Magazine of the Guild of Church Musicians No 90 September 2016
Transcript of The restored organ console of St Anne Limehouse - a Gray...
Laudate
The Magazine of the Guild of Church Musicians
No 90 September 2016Laudate is typeset by Michael Walsh HonGCM and printed by Express Printing Ltd,
Elbridge Farm Business Centre, Chichester Road, Bognor Regis, West Sussex PO21 5EF
The restored organ console of St Anne Limehouse - a Gray and Davison of 1851
From the Editor of Laudate
How quickly Summer fades!
Several of you have commented on Timothy Storey’s excellent articles for us and carrying on the theme of Charles Wood, I’m delighted to present Jeremy
Dibble’s transcript of a lecture he gave in July to the Southern Cathedrals’ Festival here in Chichester. Tim has also expressed some controversial opinions about ‘real’ Christmas carols which you might care to respond to in time for our January edition.
Please do get the two important dates into your diaries which the Registrar has given opposite: 22 November for the Annual Presentations and 5/6 May for the AGM in York.
If you’re free, we’d love to welcome you there on both occasions.
With every good wish to you all
It is worth mentioning that all opinions expressed in LAUDATE are the personal views of the individual writers and not necessarily
the official view of the Guild of Church Musicians itself.
CONTENTS
Notes from the Registrar ................................................................................................................... 1
Ancient and Modern: The ‘Janus-Like’ chemistry of Charles Wood’s Church Music
~ Professor Jeremy Dibble .........................................................................................................2
An Island Cathedral’s Musical Renaissance ~ Peter Litman ....................................................8
Church Music Future ~ Jon Payne ................................................................................................ 12
The Archbishops’ Award (revised) ~ Hugh Benham ................................................................. 14
My Favourite Hymn Tune ~ Humphrey Clucas ......................................................................... 15
John Taverner – an Introduction ~ Hugh Benham ................................................................... 17
Obituary: Megan Inglesant ~ Rt Revd Richard Fenwick .......................................................... 22
News from St Michael’s Cornhill .................................................................................................... 24
Goodbye HSBC, hello Unity Trust Bank ~ Robert Andrews .................................................... 25
Letters to the Editor ........................................................................................................................... 26
Campaign for REAL Carols : a personal view ~ Timothy Storey ............................................. 27
‘Just do it nicely’ – Harry Bramma at 80 ~ Timothy Storey ..................................................... 29
The Southern Cathedrals’ Festival : the first 50 years ~ Geoffrey Simmonds ................... 33
Australian Correspondent’s Report ................................................................................................ 37
YOUR ARTICLES AND OPINIONS ARE EAGERLY SOUGHTIt would be good to receive more feedback from Guild members about what you want to see in Laudate.
You are welcome to contact the Editor by any of the following means:By post at 5 Lime Close, Chichester, West Sussex PO19 6SW
Tel: 01243 788315 or email: [email protected]
Do visit us on the internet at www.churchmusicians.org
Front cover: The [Australian] Cathedral Singers, after the first engagement of their 2011 England tour : Vigil Mass at Westminster Cathedral
Back cover: The restored organ console of St Anne Limehouse – a Gray and Davison of 1851 by kind courtesy of Barry Williams
The National Collegeof Music & Arts, London
Patron: Huw Edwards BA(Hons) HonFNCM BAFTA Award 2005 Royal Television Award 2005
President: Jeffery Fraser FRCO LRSM AMusA
Principal: Michael Walsh DMus GTCL FTCL HonFNCM HonGCM FGMS
Director of Studies: Andrew Wilson BMus(Lon) PGCE
Development Director: Paul Cheater BA ACP FCollP HonFNCM FGMS Cert.Ed
Finance Director: Michael Feben-Smith BEd(Hons) FGMS HonFNCM
The National College of Music & Arts, London was established well over 100 years ago and specialises in external music examinations and speech subjects. The College has music exam board centres throughout the United Kingdom and in some countries overseas.
Diplomas in all subjects up to the level of Fellow are available. Further details may be obtained from [email protected] or visit the College’s website: www.nat-col-music.org.uk.
Established 1894Incorporated 1898
Patrons: Rt Revd & Rt Hon Dr Richard Chartres, Lord Bishop of LondonProfessor Dr Ian Tracey, Organist Titulaire of Liverpool Cathedral
Master: Dr David Bell Chairman: Professor Dr Maurice Merrell Secretary General: Dr Michael Walsh Treasurer: Dr Andrew Linley
The Guild of Musicians and Singers was formed in Oxford in June 1993 with the aim of bringing together amateur and professional musicians in working and fraternal ways. One major aim has always been to encourage young musicians in the pursuit of their studies and the Guild has set up a fund with bursaries for students to help them with examination fees and other aspects of their careers in music. The Guild is non-denominational and covers all genres of music. However, we do have a large church music based membership and we try to encourage and support young organists, as there is such a shortage.The Guild has many distinguished musicians among its Hon Fellows, including Sir Mark Elder, Dr Vasily Petrenko, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Dr. Francis Jackson, Andrew Carwood, Benjamin Grosvenor and Rick Wakeman. Our retiring Master, Dr David Bell, will be giving a talk at our next General Meeting at Allhallows-by-the-Tower at 2pm on the 15th October 2016. Academic Dress is available and membership is £15 a year. Further details are available from the Guild’s website: musiciansandsingers.org.uk.
www.
September 2016 1
Notes from the Registrar
I am pleased to report that, in October, the Editor of Laudate, Dr Michael Walsh, and his wife, Elisabeth, will be visiting our
friends and colleagues in Australia, taking with them, of course, our greetings and best wishes, but also to discuss important matters. Bishop Richard Hurford, our Australian Sub-Warden, has been in touch and it looks as though it’s going to be a fairly hectic couple of weeks for Michael and Elisabeth, but we look forward to receiving a full account and to seeing the pictures!
The Autumn Presentations are being held at the Guild Church of St. Michael, Cornhill, London, on the 22nd November at 3.30pm. Those being presented with our HonFGCM are Carleton Etherington of Tewkesbury Abbey, Dr Peter Litman from the Isle of Man, and Lindsay Gray, Emeritus Director of the RSCM. We look forward to greeting them on the day.
This is also an especially important occasion for The Guild because it will incorporate a Memorial for the late John Ewington, OBE, MA. Mrs Hélène Ewington and, hopefully, her family, will be present and the service is to be sung by the professional choir of St. Michael’s. The anthem that Michael Walsh wrote ‘In memoriam’ will be performed and the setting (Brewer in D) and the anthem (‘My soul there is a country’ – Parry) which were all John’s favourite pieces. We shall also sing his tune ‘Highbrow’ set to ‘Firmly I believe and truly’. I do ask for the fullest possible support for this important event.
Finally, I wish to give notice of our 2017 Annual Conference which is to be held in York on Friday, 5th and Saturday, 6th May.The guest speaker on the Saturday morning will be Dr James Bowman, CBE, one of (if not the) world’s most famous countertenors. He will talk to us about his training, career and experience. I have heard him give a lecture on these lines and I can assure you of an absolutely riveting presentation. Details of the York
Conference will follow in the next edition of Laudate, but please book the dates. We are assured of a warm welcome at the Minster from the Precentor, Canon Peter Moger, who is also one of our Academic Board members It promises to be a spectacular conference and I look forward to seeing you all there.
Congratulations to Dr Donald Hunt who has been elected as one of our Honorary Fellows. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, it has not been possible to arrange a presentation of the certificate and hood to Dr Hunt. These have therefore been sent to him, but we hope that it may be possible for him to attend one of our meetings in the future when he can be presented and we can express our congratulations in the usual way.
Congratulations too to another of our Honorary Fellows, Nigel Groome, who is leaving Beckenham Parish Church after well over thirty years’ superb service there. He has been appointed Director of Music at St Matthew’s, Westminster. Well done Nigel, and our best wishes to Susannah and their son Harry.
2 Laudate 90
Ancient and Modern: The ‘Janus-Like’ chemistry of Charles Wood’s Church Music
Jeremy Dibble
Perhaps the most enduring of Charles Wood’s many anthems is ‘Hail, gladdening light’, a setting of John Keble’s translation of the
third-century Greek hymn. Thought to date from around 1912, though not published until 1919 by Chappell’s Year Book Press, it epitomized much of the composer’s mature sacred art form. Germane to this anthem is an understanding of Wood’s innate, ‘Janus-like’ aesthetic. His indisputable love of the ‘old’ shines through in the Renaissance-like eight-part sonorities, the use of antiphony (reminiscent of the Venetian style of the Gabrielis and Schütz’s Psalmen David), the exploitation of modal harmony and the clear-cut classical structure. Yet, Wood’s ‘new’ stylistic credentials – the dexterous manipulation of diatonicism and diatonic dissonance, the deployment of striking modulation, the use of ‘continuing variation’ technique (in which the reprise of the first section is markedly altered) and one of the most exhilarating climaxes in Anglican a cappella music – locate the anthem firmly within Romanticism.
Born in Armagh on 15 June 1866, Charles Wood grew up steeped in the tradition of Anglican church music as a chorister at Armagh Cathedral where he sang alongside his father, a choral vicar, and several of his musical brothers. At Armagh Wood seems to have gained the benefits of tuition from Thomas Osborne Marks who, after twelve years as the assistant to Robert Turle (who held the post of organist for almost fifty years), rose to become master of music at the cathedral in 1872. Marks successfully obtained his Mus.D. from Trinity College, Dublin in 1874, the year in which Wood joined the choir, though it was not until 1880 that Marks began to school him in the skills of harmony and counterpoint. Marks’s lessons must have had a degree of thoroughness for his prodigious pupil clearly developed a proficiency noticed by his adjudicators, among them Stanford and Parry, when he applied for a scholarship to the newly-formed Royal College of Music in 1883. Indeed, such was his technical ability and the promise shown by his juvenile compositions that he was elected to the
Morley Open Scholarship in Composition with assistance for board and lodging.
Wood continued to show great potential at the Royal College of Music under Stanford’s guiding hand. In fact, his career might well have taken a different turn had he pursued his love of instrumental music, a prowess for which was amply demonstrated in performances of a string quartet in D minor (which Stanford showed to Joachim) and a piano concerto. Chamber music, in particular the idiom of the string quartet, remained a special and rarefied focus for him throughout his life: it was consistent with Wood’s love of Beethoven and the intellectual thought engendered by a passion for counterpoint. Yet, when the opportunity arose for an organ scholarship at Selwyn College, Cambridge in 1888, the direction of his career was changed forever. Selwyn, in fact, did not hold onto him for long, for when the more prestigious post of organist and director of music at Gonville and Caius presented itself in 1889, Wood grasped this with alacrity and church music once more became both a practical and creative preoccupation.
An indication of the sheer attainment of Wood’s contrapuntal technique is exhibited the eight-part motet, ‘O Lord, rebuke me not’, written in the second year of Wood’s time at the RCM. Bold in its use of counterpoint and use of dissonance, it reveals and astonishing confidence and fluency in its handling of the stile severo reminiscent of seventeenth-century masters such as Lotti and Caldara. Such a technique had almost certainly been encouraged by Stanford, who, at this time, had developed a close interest in modal counterpoint through his friendship with the early music scholar William Smith Rockstro. Yet, notwithstanding his mastery of the ‘old’ style, Wood’s Romantic credentials are evident in the deftly transformed reprise of the opening, now harmonised in a chromatic manner, in the closing eleven bars (Example 1 opposite).
‘O Lord, rebuke me not’ remained unpublished however (until it appeared in an edition by Richard Barnes in 1986) and very little in the way of anthems appeared by Wood until the end of the Edwardian
September 2016 3
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4 Laudate 90
era. During this period the composer spent much of his time composing functional music for chapel services and feast days in the college calendar. A handful of settings of the evening canticles in E flat (c. 1890-1), D (c. 1897-8), C minor (c. 1899-1900) and F (c. 1907-8), brought him a modicum of fame, though his reputation as a composer of church music was essentially local. Rewarded with a Fellowship at Caius in 1894, a rare honour in the university (and one denied Stanford at Trinity), Wood was fondly known at the RCM, where he taught counterpoint as a visiting professor for the rest of his life, as the ‘Cambridge’ man. Cambridge remained his spiritual home, the fount of his musical creativity, and where he rose eventually from a lecturer in the Faculty of Music to become Professor of Music in the last two years of his life.
There is much evidence of Wood’s interest in antiquarianism in the corpus of attractive madrigals he wrote between 1886 and 1891, and of his fascination for the Irish folksong revival to which he contributed numerous solo and choral arrangements. Increased momentum was lent to this interest, however, after he began to collaborate with a former graduate of Caius, the Rev. George Radcliffe Woodward. One of the original founders of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society in 1888, Woodward emanated from the High Church Anglican tradition and was one of the late nineteenth-centuries antiquarians par excellence. Inspired by Neale and Helmore’s Carols for Christmas-tide (1853), he published his own eponymous collection of twelve carols in 1892, some of which were harmonised by Wood including ‘Sweet was the sounge the Virgin sang’ and ‘Blessed be that Mayde Mary’. This initiated a long collaboration between the two which included publications such as the Cowley Carol Book (1901; second edition 1919), Songs of Syon (third edition 1910), An Italian Carol Book (1920) and the Cambridge Carol Book (1924), and from which popular arrangements of ‘This joyful Eastertide’ (Cowley Carol Book) and ‘Ding dong! merrily on high’ have become standard repertoire. From this work Wood developed a widely-acknowledged expertise for plainsong, hymnody and psalmody which was reflected in his many settings of the evening canticles based on old melody and chant. In addition, he contributed arrangements of hymn tunes to the Yattendon Hymnal (1899), the 1904 edition of Hymns Ancient & Modern (of which he was a member of the music committee) and the Irish Church Hymnal (1916) as well as composing a number of original tunes of his own. A further stimulus arose in 1903
with the opening of Westminster Cathedral and the call from R. R. Terry, its first director of music, for Latin settings of the mass and music for Vespers. Among its contributors (such as Buck, Stanford, Vaughan Williams, Holst and Howells), Wood composed two six-part a cappella settings of the ‘Nunc dimittis’ (1916), the short motet ‘Haec dies’ (1920), surely a tribute to William Byrd, and the Missa Portae Honoris (1922) written at the suggestion of his old RCM friend, S. P. Waddington.
Wood’s assimilation of old techniques was also deployed as a means of generating a new, Romantic ‘neo-classical’ style (one that can be seen, for example, in Stanford’s Service in F and Parry’s neo-baroque A Lady Radnor Suite). It is evident in his Three Preludes on Melodies from the Genevan Psalter (1908) and Sixteen Preludes on Melodies from the English and Scottish Psalters (1912) for organ which belong very much to the repertoire of Stanford’s two sets of Preludes and Postludes Op. 101 and 105 and Parry’s two sets of chorale preludes. This form easily translated into choral terms as the genre of the ‘hymn anthem’, favoured by Stanford, Bairstow and Harwood and especially by Wood. A finely wrought example lies in the effective treatment of Louis Bourgeois’ psalm melody of 1551, ‘O thou sweetest source of gladness’ (published 1931). In the form of a chorale prelude, Bourgeois’ melody appears as cantus firmus (fixed voice) in the choir to which is added a polyphonic accompaniment from the organ. Beginning austerely, this accompaniment incrementally develops so that, by the last verse, we enter a more contemporary world of harmony, affirmed by the radiant ‘Amen’. This same mélange is evident in other anthems such as ‘God omnipotent reigneth (published 1927) based on a psalm tune by Pierre D’Aques and ‘View me Lord’ (published 1938) on a fifteenth-century Bohemian melody as well the often-performed Evening Service ‘Collegium Regale’ and the a cappella Evening Service in G for double choir (both composed in 1915). But perhaps the culmination of Wood’s use old melody is most typically observed in his setting of the St Mark Passion which was written in response to a commission from another prominent Anglo-Catholic, the Rev. Dr Eric Milner-White, who had become Dean of King’s College, Cambridge after his return from the war as an army chaplain. Whilst recovering from an operation for appendicitis, he wrote to Wood asking for a new work for Holy Week that might be an alternative to Stainer’s Crucifixion and Bach’s passion settings which the organist, Arthur Henry Mann, felt were impossible to execute effectively on
September 2016 5
the organ.1 Milner-White was of course well-known as a liturgical innovator, not least with establishing the tradition of the service of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s in 1918, so the idea of a new liturgical experiment was entirely congenial to him after the original request had come from the Provost of King’s, Walter Durnford. The need, Milner-White exhorted, was considerable, not only for King’s but for the larger parish churches and the public school chapels, so Wood hurried to Milner-White’s bedside in order to discuss the content and the shape of the music, including the congregational hymns.2 Wood’s response was an extended liturgical setting of the passion story from the Gospel according St Mark shaped into five ‘lessons’ or episodes which he completed in less than a fortnight in August 1920. Central to the austere side of the Passion was the plainsong melody of ‘Pange lingua’ but other psalm melodies were integrated such as Tallis’s
1 The entire letter to Wood is included in Copley, I., The Music of Charles Wood: A Critical Study (Thames Publishing: London, 1978) 172-3
2 See letter from Milner-White to the RSCM, 25 May 1961, quoted in the preface to the RSCM edition (1981).
FIRST MODE MELODY (‘My God, I love Thee, not because I hope for heav’n thereby’). Following the model of the Lutheran passion, the narrative was taken by tenor, though some of the later narrative passages were also given to the chorus, emulating an even earlier practice of seventeenth-century Lutheran passion models, while the role of Jesus is taken by a bass. Many of the choruses follow the ‘turba’ (crowd) paradigm. Some of these adopt a more sober polyphonic, sixteenth-century style, while others are entirely Romantic in their use of a late nineteenth-century harmony and rhythm. And there are points when both styles closely intermingle, such as in the appearance of Tallis’s tune. Here the embellished accompaniment features an ‘obbligato’ solo for treble in the last verse (Example 2 below) whose source clearly derives from Bach.
To suggest, however, that antiquarianism altogether dominated Wood’s musical outlook would to misunderstand the composer’s genuine penchant for Romanticism. His partsongs (and solo songs) are fine examples of advanced diatonic and chromatic harmony, a style which also inhabited many of his anthems. His setting of H. R. Bramley’s ‘O Thou, the central orb’ (c. 1914) has remained the most
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6 Laudate 90
popular example of this idiom, but there are other fine instances, namely his setting of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s ‘O Lord thou seest from yon starry height’ (1918) with its affecting melody, poignant dissonance and plangent cadences, and the wedding anthem ‘True love’s the gift’ (c. 1912) using words from Walter Scott (which was later published as a partsong). This delicious miniature gives the impression of being a preliminary study for Wood’s most Romantic utterance, ‘Expectans expectavi’, an elegy he wrote in 1919 in memory of his son Patrick Wood and Charles Hamilton Sorley who were both killed in the war. Sorley was the son of a close Cambridge friend, William Ritchie Sorley, Professor of Moral Philosophy and a gifted poet whose words (the last two stanzas) Wood took from Marlborough and Other Poems published posthumously in 1919 by Cambridge University Press. ‘Expectans expectavi’ was the high-water mark of Wood’s Romantic church music. Its intense, yearning diatonic language, epitomised by the opening wistful lyricism of the organ, the rich dominant-thirteenth harmony (enhanced by the co-existent ninth and eleventh – see Example 3a) and the plaintive opening for the choir (‘This sanctuary of my soul’) are deeply memorable. Equally adroit, too, is the manner in which Wood integrates the opening organ theme and dominant thirteenth into the choral material (Example 3b). A carefully crafted tonal plan, in which D flat and A major are subtly contrasted, and a sonata form full of dexterous modification (including the beautifully modified recapitulation and the haunting ‘memory’ of the main theme before the close) serve perfectly to underpin the powerfully introspective sentiment of Sorley’s verse.
The publication of ‘Hail, gladdening light’ and ‘Expectans expectavi’ in 1919 sums up another important fact about Wood’s church music in that much of it was either published late in the composer’s life or posthumously. Furthermore, as Copley argues, Wood appears to have embarked on serious project to write a series of large-scale anthems just before the war at the instigation of Martin Ackerman, editor of the Year Book Press, though Milner-White also claimed that they sprang from their friendship after the collaboration on the St Mark Passion.3 It has also been plausibly suggested that Wood intended to write some form of cycle of anthems appropriate to the major feast days of the Christian calendar,4 an idea which would
3 Copley, 147.
4 Ibid. See also the letter from Milner-White to
have been congenial to Milner-White’s innovative liturgical mind, though in the end this intention, if it existed, was undermined by the much later piece-meal publication of many of the works. It is also more than likely that Wood had in mind the rapidly growing reputation of King’s College choir who were more than able to manage the difficulties posed by the multi-voiced pieces.
The idea of a series of anthems for the Anglican year accorded very much with the old Tractarian sense of order, estbalished during the nineteenth-century church revival. It was also reflected in Wood’s choice of texts, many of which were drawn from the Apostolic Fathers or from other early Christian sources in translations by Ecclesiological figures such as J. M. Neale, Oxford Movement leaders such as Keble, or scholars such as H. R. Bramley and W. J. Blew. The first of these anthems to be published was ‘Great Lord of Lords’ in 1913. A double choir anthem for ATB, with words by Bramley, was well suited to Trinity. ‘Hail, gladdening light’, using a translation by Keble and which has already been discussed, appeared in 1919. ‘Glory and Honour and Laud’ (which ranges from SATB to double choir) with its allusions to medieval dance, takes it text from Neale’s translation of the ninth-century Theodulph of Orleans. A tightly organised ternary structure, Wood makes skilful use of the dance theme ‘en rondeau’ together with techniques of ostinato, all of which is coloured by a ‘severe’ tincture of the Dorian mode and the open fifths of the fanfare figures. Yet, to balance this archaic amalgam is a thrilling climactic reprise for eight voices which develops the initial ‘rondeau’ both tonally and thematically in a thoroughly modern fashion. ‘Glory and Honour and Laud’ was not published until 1925 (when it was first performed at the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival under Wood’s direction) while the Easter anthem, ‘’Tis the day of Resurrection’, arguably Wood’s masterpiece, did not appear in print until 1927 when it was sung at Hereford (though not under Wood who died the previous year). Styled a ‘motet’ by the composer, it deployed another of Neale’s translations, this time by St John Damascene. More intricate contrapuntally in its studious use of canon, the anthem is conspicuously Byzantine in its tripartite scheme of ‘Heirmos’ and central ‘Troparia’, the latter of which is distinctly Bachian in its use of a Genevan psalm melody ‘Du fond de ma pensée’ (from Songs of Syon) with antiphonal ‘comment’
the RSCM, 25 May 1961, quoted in the preface to the RSCM edition (1981).
September 2016 7
from the second choir. By contrast, the dance-like ‘Heirmos’, is a tour de force in its use of double-voiced canons across the two choirs as is the splendid use of thematic augmentation in the finals bars. This characteristic combination of old and new is evident in two other large-scale double-choir anthems, ‘O King most high’ and ‘Once he came in blessings’, both of which make use of translations of early texts and were not published until the 1930s. Why the delay occurred in issuing these works is not clear but the opportunity to hear these
substantial works was evidently rare and it would appear that his premature death at 60 prevented him from hearing several of them. Moreover, it suggests that the composer never entirely enjoyed the proper acclaim due to him during his life as one of the Anglican church’s greatest luminaries. Today, of course, Wood’s sizeable contribution to Anglican church music is happily respected, though a rediscovery of his distinctive and individual style and the rich variety of his liturgical works is long overdue.
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8 Laudate 90
An Island Cathedral’s Musical Renaissance
Peter Litman HonFGCM
‘Where is the Isle of Man?’ … that was my first question on hearing about a potential job at the Island’s
Cathedral. One of the beautiful outposts of the Church of England, the diocese of Sodor and Man is in fact the oldest diocese in the Church of England, established in 447. The ancient Cathedral within Peel Castle on Patrick Island has long sat ruinous, and in 1980 the Victorian Parish Church of Peel (Kirk German) was elevated to serve as the diocesan and island Cathedral. I arrived in 2012 to find essentially a small parish church set up. St German’s was essentially the parish church of Peel and occasionally it became a ‘cathedral’ (when the Bishop was in residence) and musical resources from around the island were assembled for those rare occasions. Just prior to my arrival, the Sub Dean and Vicar was installed as the first Dean of St German’s Cathedral since the eighteenth century. Since the fall of the ancient Cathedral, the Bishop of Sodor and Man was also styled ‘Dean ex-officio’ of the Cathedral and Chapter. However, with the appointment of a new Dean came change, and I was appointed the first full time Organist and Director of Music.
My challenge was to construct a music programme worthy of the Island’s Cathedral. Rather than replace the small but faithful group of singers when I arrived, initially I decided to work with them, introducing simple anthems into the Sunday morning service. Concurrently, I initiated my campaign to have child choristers singing in the Cathedral again. My research showed that though the Parish Church of St German (the current cathedral building) like many Victorian churches boasted a huge choir of men boys and women with hats; the actual ‘Cathedral’ (which had been until 1980, the private chapel of the Bishop for c.200 years) had not had child choristers since 1755 when Bishop Hildesley ‘educated, clothed and fed ten boys and ten girls of the parish for the chapel’s choir’. It is now generally believed that this act was more likely social philanthropy than musical education as they did not last very long! But could it be that Sodor and Man was the first diocese to have encouraged girls to be cathedral choristers, as early as 1755?
Within six months I had recruited ten choristers
(boys and girls) and they were formally admitted as the first Cathedral Choristers of St German’s Cathedral in February 2013.
Across the course of the next few years, gradually the parish choir retired making the group untenable for the future, I took the opportunity to recruit and establish a group of lay clerks just in time for a visit from the BBC to record and broadcast two episodes of Songs of Praise!
So, in 2016, the Cathedral Choir now boasts 18 choristers (9 boys and 9 girls) and 18 voluntary lay clerks and 2 Choral Scholars. The costs of two Choristers are sponsored by island businesses and one by a prominent island family.
I am often asked ‘how I did it?’ … If I knew how to write it down, I’d publish it and make a million!
However, without being condescending and teaching ‘grandma to suck eggs’ I can attempt to offer a few thoughts:
Whilst I could wax lyrical about rehearsal techniques, conduct ing pedagogy and an appropriate repertoire building programme, there are a few principles which I learned from my time as a primary school teacher that I consider most important.
September 2016 9
10 Laudate 90
Planning and preparation: I have found that being over-prepared really works. Planning the repertoire, rehearsals and services well in advance and publishing the details not only in the official capacity of a music list, but for both the child choristers and adults. Particularly with children, marking up the music in advance and writing yourself ‘lesson plans’ for each rehearsal (at least for the first year) helps to make sure that you cover the basic ground quickly.
Rather than relying on the same adult singers each week, increase the number of singers to form a ‘bank’ of singers you can draw upon, – basically no singer has to sing every single week (there will be singers that want to sing each week, and that’s a bonus!) For example if you have monthly Evensong in your Parish, include other singers from a local choral society with good sight reading skills for that once a month service, it’s amazing how they become an integrated part of the team quickly.
When recruiting children, I suggest constructing a programme based around the ‘three r’s’ (recruitment, rehearsal, retention). Establish the trebles as a separate group and be flexible about when to involve them. For example, maybe establish them singing Evensong alone before augmenting them to the adult section, or then into a morning service.
Don’t underestimate what we used to call ‘awe and wonder’: When I was a parish musician in Canterbury at St Martin’s Church, I established a professional quartet of singers that sung a Renaissance mass setting once a month. After a few months I noted that the service seemed to attract a number of young families and children. I decided to question the young families and children as to why they came to this particular service and not the family service down the road at St Paul’s Church. A seven year old told me that he came because it was ‘quiet and no one wanted him to do or say anything’ – in a nutshell – awe and wonder! I have found that Choral Evensong in the parishes, if done with dignity and solemnity can produce the same results (as we as adults experience it in our greater Cathedrals). Do talk to your clergy about how they can contribute to creating a sense of ‘awe and wonder’ at Evensong (particular tone of voice, particular ceremonial etc.) At St German’s Cathedral we always start Evensong with the singing on the Phos Hilaron, whilst the lights are ceremonially lit, the probationers are mesmerised!
Most of all trust your singers. Be enthusiastic, structured but flexible in your approach, allow the choir to grow in an organic way, drive publicity hard and keep them in the public eye. Believe that your choir can achieve the results you want, particularly with children I have found that having high expectations of them encourages them to achieve.
So, nothing new … no great secret … be prepared for sleepless nights, possible confrontations and little recognition of the good you are doing in the beginning, it’s all about the work you put in to start with…if it’s right for your community and church it will snowball to success.
My choir have just come back from a four day residential tour of Kilkenny, Waterford and Old Leighlin Cathedrals in Ireland. Four years ago when I started, the prospect of this would seem unthinkable. Not only was such a tour musically vital but it engineered the possibility of the choir spending time together socially which encouraged a team and corporate sense amongst the singers. Coordinating a big scale tour is a big job, so firstly on a smaller scale, why not approach your local Cathedral and ask them if your choir could visit and sing Evensong for a day either with the resident Cathedral Choir or alone? Make a day of the experience; give them a cultural visit to something nearby in the morning before rehearsing for the service in the afternoon.
“Where there is devotional music, God is always at hand with His gracious presence” ( JS Bach)
Above a l l , remember Chr is t ian humi l i ty, particularly in a changing and often challenging church. Musicians can be fragile people with precious egos, we believe in what we are doing and we have to believe that we know the best way to get the job done in order to achieve the best results. I always try to keep an open and regular dialogue with my singers, clergy, congregation and supporting organists. Learning to analyse oneself in a positive, non-critical frame is not easy and takes much practice – we used to call it ‘action research’ in teaching or creative ways of problem solving!
When things get tough, go and play the organ … I find it works!
To end with another quote from JS Bach:
“I worked hard. Anyone who works as hard as I did can achieve the same results.”
September 2016 11
REMINDER …Next Year’s AGM will be
held at YORKThe dates will be Friday, 5th May and Saturday, 6th May 2017. Evensong is 5.15pm on Fridays and Saturdays at the Minster, so people will be able to attend Evensong on Friday before getting ready for the dinner.
Full details will appaer in the January edition Laudate.
BiographyPeter Litman initially studied organ at Canterbury with Neil Wright and from 2009 – 2012 was an articled pupil to Roger Fisher. Formerly, from 1996 to 1999, he was organ scholar at Christchurch College, Canterbury and in his final year won the college’s Alan Parnell prize for piano accompaniment. From 2003 – 2007 Peter was director of the MA Choral Education course and university organist at Roehampton University in London. As director of Choral Education, he taught choral direction, preparing and training students working with both the BBC Singers and National Youth Choir of Great Britain. Returning to church music, in 2009 Peter was appointed
Organist and Choirmaster to St Peter’s Collegiate Church, Ruthin (now Ruthin Minster) and was founder-director of the University Chorus at Glyndwr University in Wrexham. He was guest conductor of the Conwy Music Festival for two consecutive years. In 2012 Peter was recruited as the first full-time Organist and Director of Music at St German’s Cathedral on the Isle of Man. The Cathedral also acts as the National Cathedral for the Island and as such, hosts a number of significant National events each year. Peter made his debut as an organist on BBC Songs of Praise in 2013.
He holds graduate degrees in musical performance and is a Fellow of the London College of Music.
ALL SAINTS’ PARISH CHURCH
BANSTEAD, SURREY Diocese of Guildford
Our 12th-century church needs a
DIRECTOR of MUSIC / ORGANIST to train our enthusiastic all-age robed choir
and lead the music for Sung Communion (Common Worship) every Sunday, Choral Evensong (BCP) once a month
and Festivals
Friday evening practices 3-manual Norwich electronic organ
Salary: £7250 a year plus wedding and funeral fees
For further details please contact All Saints’ Parish Office Email: [email protected] Tel: 01737 379289
SEEK LOVE SERVE
12 Laudate 90
Church Music Future
Jon Payne
Church Music Future is a new organisation which provides practical support and advice to clergy, musicians, lay ministers,
and congregations with their music provision. CMF launched in November 2015 at the Anglican Catholic Future conference at St Peter’s, Eaton Square, and has so far attracted in excess of 500 members.
CMF’s philosophy is simple: all churches can – and should – have access to good church music, regardless of size or resources. For some, this involves helping churches to train a cantor to provide simple, effective music leadership. For others, establishing a new choral tradition (or re-establishing an existing one in decline) is the priority. But there is no reason why any church cannot, with the right help, find ways to use music effectively, both within the liturgy, and as a valuable tool for mission.
With such an enormous breadth of liturgical and musical styles, and local circumstances, around the UK, it is clear that a “one size fits all” approach is unlikely to result in the renaissance of good church music that we all wish to see. And this is why CMF works at the very local level, tailoring its support to the individual circumstances of the church in question.
CMF also believes that good music does not flourish within a vacuum – there are implications for the whole church and wider community. Put simply, a church music project which has the ‘buy in’ of a wider group of stakeholders stands a higher chance of succeeding than it does if the priest or musician decide to ‘go it alone’. Consultation with the PCC and church officers, congregation (both regular and occasional), local schools, community organisations, and music education hubs, is highly beneficial. So CMF offers not only musical support, but guidance from specialists in fund-raising, education, liturgy, marketing, and PR too.
Alongside the support for individual churches, clergy, and musicians, CMF offers a range of inspirational and practical training events and workshops. A recent workshop in Westminster led by Revd Canon Jeremy Davies and Nigel Groome explored the music of Fr André Gouzes. Francis Novillo led an Ecumenical Music Day for the Dioceses of Brentwood and Chelmsford. And Jon Payne launched CMF’s online guide to appointing and paying church musicians with a well-attended webinar. From these small beginnings, the programme is being expanded over the next year to include events in the Midlands and North of England.
September 2016 13
And the third component to CMF’s work is its website and online presence. A ‘knowledgebase’ with free factsheets and advice on common church music questions is already live – as is a weblog, electronic newsletter, and opportunities to engage via Facebook and Twitter.
CMF’s advisers are experienced professional musicians, each with a passionate commitment to developing church music in the UK and beyond. Nigel Groome (St George’s, Beckenham), Jon Payne (Bradford Cathedral), and Frances Novillo (Mary Immaculate and St Gregory the Great, High Barnet) offer musical advice. Catherine Demetriadi, an experienced fund-raising and development manager, helps churches to find funding for new music initiatives. Her husband, Julian Demetriadi, a specialist in marketing and PR, advises churches on how to publicise their work. Baz Chapman, former National Manager of the government’s Sing Up initiative in primary and secondary schools, and co-founded of the National Teachers’ Choir, helps churches to work collaboratively with the ‘music education hubs’ around the country. And Revd
Oliver Coss, recently appointed as Rector of All Saints, Northampton, advises on liturgy and ways to incorporate music successfully into worship. This strong team hopes to assist churches both large and small to find relevant ways of establishing high-quality church music at the heart of worship and as an essential part of mission and community outreach. They have already worked with 9,300 musicians, 767 clergy, and 1,299 churches, and hope to build a large community of like-minded people with an interest in church music.
Membership of CMF is free, with members paying only for the events or advice/support they access. CMF has already formed a fruitful partnership with Anglican Catholic Future, and looks forward to working closely with the Guild of Church Musicians and other church music organisations in the months and years to come.
To find out more, please visit:
www.churchmusicfuture.com or search for ‘Church Music Future’ on Facebook or @churchmusicfu on Twitter
14 Laudate 90
The Archbishops’ Award (revised)
Hugh Benham
It was decided in 2014 that the syllabuses for the Guild’s examinations, although all excellent, needed refreshing in the light of our wish to
make these qualifications more appropriate for a wider ‘audience’ – including Christians who are not Anglicans or Roman Catholics.
The Archbishops’ Award has two ‘pathways’ – one for (church) musicians, and the other for worship leaders – with the aim of leading on to the Archbishops’ certif icates in Church Music (ACertCM) and Public Worship (ACertPW).
I hope that the following outlines of the two pathways may whet your appetite if you do not hold the existing Award or a higher award. If you are a choir director or have other leadership responsibilities in church music, or as a priest or minister, perhaps you know of people who might enjoy and benefit from working on the new Award?
(Please note that the website is not up to date at the time of writing this. So, if you are interested in the Award and would like to see the full syllabus and the mark scheme, please contact the Examinations Secretary, or the Chairman of the Academic Board at [email protected] )
Pathway 1: Archbishops’ Award for Musicians
1. Sing, play, accompany or direct two or more contrasting pieces of your own choice
2. Answer questions on the music offered for Task 1
3. Appraise a previously unheard recorded performance
4. Written Project or Presentation
5. Option – i.e. Composition OR Attendance at approved events and/or courses (with written critique) OR Tests for Keyboard players or Instrumentalists or Singers
Pathway 2: Archbishops’ Award for Worship Leaders
1. Give a previously-prepared short address on a short Biblical passage or verse of your own choice
2. Give an unprepared (non-Biblical) reading
3. Speak fluently on a topic chosen by the examiner for at least one minute (up to a maximum of three minutes)
4. Written Project or Presentation
5. Option – i.e. Devising a service and reporting on its use OR Attendance at approved events and/or courses (with written critique) OR Inventing materials suitable for use with children or young people
Final note. The Archbishops’ Preliminary Certificate was revised in 2015, and is now available for candidates to enter. The Archbishops’ Award, approved in the summer of 2016, was the work of a sub-committee consisting of Dr Helen Burrows (the Examinations Secretary), Mr Roger Wilkes, Mrs June Williams (Registrar and General Secretary) and myself. A number of other people from the Academic Board, the Council, and elsewhere provided useful comments. In particular I should like to thank Mr Nicholas King for his work on the mark scheme.
The Guild’s two beautiful badges for the Archbishops’ Preliminary Certificate and Award are available from the Registrar. The Preliminary Certificate (left) costs £10 and the Award £15
(both prices include p&p). NOTE: Any Guild certificate or diploma
holders may wear either of these badges.
September 2016 15
Which is your favourite hymn tune?
I’ve asked a number of well-known musicians to contribute their all-time favourites, and our first to contribute is composer Humphrey Clucas.
COE FEN
Coe Fen is a patch of meadowland between the east bank of the River Cam and The Leys School, Cambridge. The Leys is
where Ken Naylor, composer of the hymn tune, taught music from 1953 to 1980. I never met Mr. Naylor during my years as a King’s Choral Scholar (1960 – 1963), but we did do some of his close harmony arrangements, which circulated in manuscript; ‘You’re getting to be a habit with me’ was a particular favourite. We would sing them at parties, or for our own amusement; it was the sort of thing that the King’s Singers, a few years later, turned into a highly professional occupation.
I got to know Coe Fen better during a postgraduate year at Cambridge later in the 1960s; it had a children’s playground, to which my wife and I sometimes took our very small son. He particularly liked the swings, and would protest loudly when it was time to go. He was a young person who knew his own mind.
Coe Fen the hymn tune I did not come across till about 1995, when I was a Lay Vicar of Westminster Abbey; it was a particular favourite of the then Precentor, Dominic Fenton. One of the Canons, with whom it was not a favourite, complained that it seemed to come round every three weeks. I noted it then as a good tune, but thought little more about it; it tended to crop up at the end of a long Sunday, which is not a time for thinking.
I only became fully aware of it during a parish church choir stint, after I had retired from the
Abbey. Roger, the young and enthusiastic organist, was a Coe Fen fan, so much so that he wanted it at his wedding. He also wanted an SATB harmony version for the middle verses – it is, of course, a unison tune – and would I oblige? It seemed to me an illicit thing to do, both artistically and also, quite possibly, in the strictly legal or copyright sense. But folk must have what they want at their weddings, and I did what he asked, carefully keeping my name off it.
My parish choir period lasted little more than three years; the voice was in terminal decline, and it was time to stop. I sang my last note at Christmas, 2003, but there had been a moment of truth a fortnight earlier. Roger had put down Coe Fen again – hardly an Advent hymn, but perhaps he was missing it. Quite suddenly, I was overcome by the thought of all I was leaving behind – about fifty years of singing, or knowing that I could if I wanted to, and most of it in churches, chapels and cathedrals. By the end of verse one I was choked up and couldn’t go on. I was standing by Iris that day; Iris was about seventy-five, a gentle and conscientious pillar of the church. Faced in rehearsal with two versions of ‘O little one sweet’, she wondered why we were doing the (to her) less familiar one; perhaps, I suggested, it was
How shall I sing that ma jes- ty- which an gels- do ad mire?-
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16 Laudate 90
because Bach outranked Martin Shaw. “Oh,” she said, “I shall have to take it home and practise.” I don’t think Iris noticed my silence. Or perhaps she was too polite to mention it.
So why was it Coe Fen, of all things, which had that effect? One can analyse the tune, of course. Taking two lines of text as a phrase, there are four phrases, and the highest note of each is one step higher than its predecessor – a progression. And then each phrase is seven bars long, except for the third, which has an extra bar leading to the highest note of all – a masterstroke. There is, too, the harmonic language to be looked at.
But all this takes one only so far. The best hymns are a match of words and music. ‘Dear Lord and Father of mankind’ to Repton; ‘All my hope on God is founded’ to Michael (though without Howells’ rather odd descant); rather surprisingly, ‘O God, our help in ages past’ to the stolid St Anne – this is about as good as it gets. And just a little tampering can destroy it.
Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day
is one of the great quatrains. A modern hymn book, excoriated by Barry Williams in his Rochester AGM talk, prints ‘Will bear us all away’ – which is the work of a cloth-eared vandal. The same hymn book dumbs down the wonderful part-writing in Rockingham (‘When I survey the wondrous Cross’, another winner). And so on.
Ken Naylor, it is true, had a small problem of word-setting to negotiate. The basic metre of each of John Mason’s verses is, of course, the same, but within that framework there is a little rhythmic variation, particularly at the starts of lines. ‘How shall I sing that majesty’ – stress on the first syllable; but ‘Thy brightness …’, or ‘Enlighten …’ – stress on the second. The two rising notes at the start of the tune somehow minimise the awkwardness – though why one doesn’t mind ‘A sound of God comes to my ear’ I can’t quite explain.
But what words these are! ‘Ten thousand times ten thousand sound Thy praise; but who am I?’…
‘Lord, send a beam on me’ (crescendo on the long note)… ‘Then shall I sing and bear a part With that celestial choir’ … Individually we are utterly insignificant; and yet here, carried by Ken Naylor’s fine tune, is the ultimate hope and vision, surely, of every church and cathedral singer: to be one with the heavenly choir. It was this that I found so overwhelming – and still do. (I cannot believe it is quite the same for organists.)
These days our regular worship (my wife and myself ) is the 8 a.m. parish church Eucharist: traditional language, no music. I hardly attend Choral Evensongs, or even turn on the broadcasts. A part of me feels that I have done all that; why listen to Wood in D (say), when there is so much more music to explore – great quantities of Bach and Haydn, all those Schubert songs … So it was a delight, for a change, to go to Evensong in Rochester Cathedral with the Guild – and there, to conclude the service, was Coe Fen. This time I hardly made it beyond the second line. Well … as I wrote at the very end of my memoirs, about the afterlife: ‘There will be music, and I shall be part of it. And when that happens, I shall have come home.’
Humphrey Clucas
September 2016 17
John Taverner – an introduction
Hugh Benham
It is curious that two very significant figures in the history of English choral music should have almost exactly the same names – from pre-Reformation times John Taverner, who died in 1545, and very
recently John Tavener with one r.
This article is intended to draw wider attention to the music of the former, who is comparatively neglected despite the outstanding quality of much of his work.
Apart perhaps from Tallis, Taverner is the most important English composer between Dunstaple and Byrd, if we judge in terms of the variety, stature and number of his existing surviving works, the reception of his music in the 16th and early 17th centuries, and the quality and individuality of his music.
‘While he was essentially a local figure, for his music was [apparently] unknown outside England, in purely musical terms works such as the mass Corona spinea can stand honourably alongside the greatest compositions of the continental masters’.1
Taverner’s life
Information about John Taverner’s life is scarce. We do not know, for example, anything about his parentage, or the place or date of his birth – although this is unremarkable for the days before parish records were kept of births, marriages and deaths.
The first reference to Taverner is as a singer at Tattershall Collegiate Church in Lincolnshire in the mid 1520s. It is likely that he was born not far from there, and clear that he had already acquired a considerable reputation as he was invited to become the first master of the choristers at Cardinal College, Oxford. This college was a grandiose new foundation named after Cardinal Wolsey, but it did not survive in its original form for long, as its founder was soon in disgrace. (It was renamed Henry VIII’s College, before later becoming Christ Church.)
Taverner returned to Lincolnshire in 1530, and worked at Boston Parish Church (probably as master of the choristers) for a few years. Following Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the reformist attack on the sale of the celebrated ‘Scala coeli’ indulgence, the financial position of this church declined, and Taverner probably abandoned his musical career altogether. Very shortly before the end of his life, he was appointed one of the first aldermen of the newly-incorporated borough of Boston.
At one time Taverner was thought to have converted to Lutheranism while at Oxford, but recent research suggests that he remained an orthodox Catholic. He worked for a time as an agent of Thomas Cromwell, but there are no grounds for thinking that he was a cruel and bigoted fanatic, as has sometimes been implied.2
Some reasons why Taverner’s music is not more widely known
Taverner’s remoteness in terms of time (he was active about 500 years ago) and the consequent unfamiliarity of his style are difficulties for some people.
The music can seem ‘aimless’, partly because in many pieces the music unfolds in very leisurely fashion with little use of repetitive and unifying devices such as imitation – although in the masses Corona spinea and The Western Wind, for example, there is sometimes a very attractive use of melodic sequence and of motivic patterning.
18 Laudate 90
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This passage is likely to have been sung by soloists rather than by the full choir. Several sections, including this, suggest that Taverner had available some particularly capable trebles. In some present-day performances, the music is transposed to sound a tone or minor 3rd higher than as notated by Taverner. Not everyone agrees that this is historically appropriate.
The tenor sings a pre-existing melody (assumed to be plainsong) as a cantus firmus in (very) long notes.]
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September 2016 19
Extensive melisma, where a single syllable carries many notes, sometimes makes it difficult or impossible to follow the text. In the longer masses the twenty-five words of the Sanctus can take up to nine or ten minutes to sing, each voice singing the text through once only without repetition.
Many pieces are in five or six parts (rather than four), and aside from this they present considerable performance challenges except for those experienced in extended unaccompanied vocal polyphony of this kind.
Taverner’s music is part of a peculiarly English tradition, which has sometimes tended to be dismissed as peripheral or insular in comparison with the central continental tradition of Josquin, Lassus, Palestrina, Victoria, etc.
Few of Taverner’s pieces have any obvious place in modern worship, having been composed for the pre-Reformation Latin liturgy according to the use of Salisbury. Moreover many of them (including even the shorter masses and the settings of Magnificat) are inconveniently long. A few venerate the Blessed Virgin Mary to a degree that some will find inadmissible. The most ‘usable’ work is probably the first setting of the responsory Dum transisset sabbatum, which is occasionally heard at Choral Evensong in Eastertide.
A brief survey of Taverner’s music
By the standards of many later composers, Taverner’s list of compositions is quite short. However, some pieces have almost certainly been lost, or destroyed by zealous Protestant reformers. But Taverner may well have regarded himself as principally a singer who composed rather than a composer who happened also to sing.
Eight masses have come down to us, three of them for six parts on a grand scale, the remainder for four or five parts. A few isolated sections and movements for the Mass also survive.
The six-part masses Gloria tibi Trinitas and Corona spinea are particularly fine and on the largest scale; the other six-part mass, O Michael, is distinctly inferior, and it is reasonable to question the correctness of the attribution of this work to Taverner in its single manuscript source.
Two five-part masses, Mater Christi and Small Devotion, are derived or ‘parody’ masses – that is, they incorporate material, including entire polyphonic passages, from the votive antiphons Mater Christi and Christe Jesu pastor bone (the second of which may have originated with a text beginning O Wilhelme, paster bone.) [‘paster’ should of course be ‘pastor’]
The Mean Mass is so called because the highest part was composed for a mean (a low boy’s voice as opposed to a treble). This mass is more concise than the others, with some text repetition, and more use of imitation and chordal (homophonic) writing. It is probably among Taverner’s last compositions, and almost uniquely suggests some continental influence.
Of the four-part settings, the Plainsong Mass uses a restricted range of note values – perhaps for the benefit of less than expert singers? There had been a small but important tradition of such rhythmic plainness in English music of the late 15th and early 16th centuries (which appears to have had nothing to do with later reformist pressures for clear enunciation of text).
Most accessible for modern listeners is the four-part mass The Western Wind. The work has, continuously, thirty-six statements of an attractive secular melody of uncertain origin, shared out between treble, tenor and bass parts. Taverner’s textural and harmonic resourcefulness in this ‘set of variations’ is remarkable.
Example 2: overleaf:
This is the first presentation of the cantus firmus in the mass The Western Wind. (Taverner’s masses have no Kyrie, but begin with the Gloria.) The note values are Taverner’s originals. The two manuscript sources for the mass are inconsistent in their use of F sharp ‘leading notes’. One interpretation of the available evidence is shown here, with F sharps in bars 7-8, but not in bars 13-14 and 21-22.]
20 Laudate 90
Music for the Divine Office (for Matins, Vespers and Compline) includes three settings of Magnificat, and several responsories (one of them a setting for four boys’ voices of the eighth responsory for Matins of All Saints, Audivi vocem). A responsory (or respond) followed a scripture reading. When sung in plainsong, an opening for soloist(s) was followed by a longer section for choir. A solo verse was succeeded by a repeat of part of the choral section. In some responsories, the first part of Gloria Patri (‘Glory to the Father’) was sung to the same music as the verse, after which there was another repeat from the choral section.
Most of Taverner’s other works are votive antiphons – pieces addressed to Jesus, the Blessed Virgin Mary or another saint, sung during acts of devotion that followed the offices of Vespers and Compline.3 Judging from the number of 16th- and early 17th-century manuscript sources, the extended votive antiphon Gaude plurimum (addressed to the Virgin) was one of Taverner’s most widely-known pieces.
Example 3: see opposite page
‘This example shows the first passage from Gaude plurimum that is scored for all five parts (it follows a duet and a trio). The words mean ‘Rejoice, most holy Virgin’, and are part of a long prose text based on the five earthly joys of the Virgin. Gaude plurimum is singled out for particularly extensive stylistic comment in John Taverner (2003), pages 71–94.
Taverner’s original note values have again been retained in this simplified transcription. The work may have been sung at a lower pitch than as notated by Taverner – perhaps about a tone lower.]
His Mater Christi, a more concise work with some short antiphonal exchanges between different groups of parts, begins by saluting the Virgin, but is mostly a prayer to Jesus, with a number of Eucharistic references.
Hearing Taverner’s music
Live performances of Taverner’s music are not numerous or frequent, but various excellent recordings are available.4
Almost all of Taverner’s works have been recorded by The Sixteen, directed by Harry Christophers. Other recordings with mixed voices include those by the Tallis Scholars (under Peter Phililips). Boys’ voices feature of course in recordings made by Westminster Abbey Choir (directed by James O’Donnell) and the successor to Taverner’s own choir, Christ Church Cathedral Choir, under Stephen Darlington.
Footnotes1 The present writer’s view, as expressed in John Taverner: His Life and Music (Ashgate, 2003), page 253.2 For a little more information about Taverner’s life, see The New Grove (2001), and/or in Chapter 1 and the
appendixes of John Taverner (2003). 3 See, for example. John Taverner, page 10. 4 The Presto Classical website, for example, has good search facilities, but in any online search you may encounter
some confusion between Taverner and Tavener.
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September 2016 21
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22 Laudate 90
Megan Inglesant, Hon FGCM: 1921 – 2016A Tribute by the Right Reverend Dr Richard Fenwick,
Bishop of St Helena
A few months ago, at noon on 9th June the Funeral Mass took place of the late and greatly respected Megan Inglesant who
passed away peacefully at the Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend on Monday 30 May. The Mass was celebrated at the gracious old Abbey Church of St Mary’s, Margam in South Glamorganshire, and so large was the congregation that the grounds of the Castle Orangery next door had to be taken over for parking. The international performer Nicolas Kynaston played the organ music before and after the Service; Canon Graham Holcombe, Residentiary Canon of Llandaff Cathedral, a highly accomplished organist, accompanied the Mass. The fact was that Megan was a hugely loved and respected personality who had served with great distinction as the Abbey Organist for just on 65 years – an astonishing achievement.
So firstly, to set the scene, where … and what is Margam Abbey? For those who’ve never visited Margam Abbey before, do take the chance to leave the M4 at Junction 38 just to the East of the large industrial town of Port Talbot. Follow the signs onto the old A48 towards Pyle, then turn left on the little country road which leads through the woods, and out into what was once a clearing in the ancient forest. There in front of you is the Nave of what was, before the Reformation, a major Cistercian monastic house in Wales. It’s a magical place – and a very holy one too.
The abbey was founded in 1147 as a daughter house of Clairvaux by Robert, Earl of Gloucester, and was dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary. However, early Christian crosses found nearby (and preserved in the Margam Stones Museum just next door) make it clear that there was a much earlier Celtic monastic community on that site. The Norman founding abbot was William of Clairvaux, and later on, the third abbot, Conan, was praised by Giraldus Cambrensis, whom he entertained during Geralds great preaching tour to drum up support for the Crusade in 1188.
However, by 1536 there were just 12 monks left, and the abbey was dissolved by King Henry VIII, the lands and buildings being sold to a local grandee, Sir Rice Mansel of Oxwich, in the Gower. From the Mansel family the abbey passed to their descendants, the Talbot family. Then in the 19th century, the famous South Wales Industrialist Christopher Rice Mansel Talbot built his mansion, Margam Castle which
overlooks the abbey and its ruins. In the meantime however, as with a number of other religious houses such as Pershore, Malmesbury, Wymondham – or Kidwelli further to the West in Carmarthenshire – a portion of the original large monastic church (in this case the Nave) had been preserved at the dissolution in 1536. So, it is this handsome fragment, restored by Gilbert Scott in the 1860s, which continues to be used as the parish church, serving both the country area around it – as well as the Eastern part of the Steelworks town of Port Talbot.
So much for the background of the Abbey she served so devotedly, and now for Megan herself …
Megan Wills (as she was) was born not far away in Park Street, Kenfig Hill in 1921, and it was a time when many of the South Wales industrial and pit villages were still suffering very badly from the effects of the Great War. No family was untouched by the carnage of the trenches, and not only was local industry seriously affected by the lack of able-bodied men to do the heavy work but very often those families had little money to spare on anything other than survival. Megan was a very fine and confident musician from her earliest years – in fact she was only 13 years of age when she became the Assistant Organist of the local Parish Church of St Theodore there in Kenfig Hill. But it was simply not possible to send her off to study full-time at the Royal College or the Royal Academy – or indeed to any of the other conservatories, as she would have wished. And so she did what so many other generations of promising young musicians in the provinces have done, and she took her qualifications externally through the London College of Music and the Trinity College of Music. Her ALCM in Organ was followed by the ATCL, and then the LTCL, both in Organ.
Megan Inglesant (1921 – 2016)
at the console of the Auguste Gern organ at Margam Abbey
September 2016 23
Again, although unable to go full-time to a conservatory, Megan studied under a couple of the very celebrated local organists and teachers of South Wales. Firstly she took lessons under the formidable teacher and performer Vera Henry-Llewellyn, who for many years played and taught on the fine 3 manual Bryceson Brothers instrument at St Mary’s, Nolton, Bridgend. From here she went on as a student to the equally formidable and celebrated Dilys Morgan Lloyd, Organist of the great Town-Centre Church of St Mary’s, Swansea.
Following this she regularly travelled up to London as a pupil of Douglas Hawkridge, Professor of Organ at the Royal Academy of Music – and it was under him that she took her LTCL. So it was that, well equipped, she started her career in Organ, Piano and Theory teaching, centred on the Abbey as well as her studio in Kenfig Hill – but also travelling well beyond to other parts of South Wales. In addition she was pianist, accompanist and peripatetic teacher in several of the large local Borough schools.
Indeed, her very great skill as an accompanist meant that she was in great demand by local choirs throughout the area. She toured Canada as a guest organist and pianist for the very highly regarded Kenfig Hill and District Male Voice Choir. Again, she was also invited to tour Germany as accompanist with another well-known Male Voice Choir, Cor Meibion Cwm Garw.
Yet solo performance was also a great love, and during her career as a professional musician, Megan gave many organ recitals throughout Wales and beyond – and always of course at Margam Abbey – of which she became the longest serving Organist in its history.
The large 3-manual instrument at the Abbey, of which she was so justly proud, was built by August Gern, and was the gift to the church of Christopher Rice Mansel Talbot for the wedding of his daughter Bertha in 1866. Before he started his own Organ Building firm, Gern was of course the Manager in Britain for the great French Master Organ Builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, and the detached console stands in typical French fashion, just below the front display pipes, and with the player (back to the organ case) facing out over the console into the Nave. It’s a very fine instrument with refined flute choruses, “gritty” and assertive diapason choruses, and fiery reeds … though perhaps the reeds have been slightly “smoothed-out” for British ears over the years!
Megan was passionate about that instrument, and she played it with enormous skill – for skill she had
in abundance! At the absolutely packed Induction Service of Fr Terry Doherty as the greatly loved new Vicar in 2002 (another excellent musician) she played a tough programme which included not only Whitlock (the Five Short Pieces), but several of the Choral Preludes from the Klavierübung – and all topped off with a splendid performance of the Langlais “Te Deum” … which certainly shut the chatterers in the congregation up!
The clergy were just entering the Abbey, and one of the priests turned to his neighbour in procession and remarked: “Ah … splendid! They must have got somebody down from the Cathedral …” Ha … not a bit of it! For ’twas our Megan herself, immaculately capped, gowned and hooded, with a page-turner beside her, in absolute control of the instrument, and the music. She was going on for 82 at the time!
But in all her music she had a real missionary zeal. Teaching was important to her, and she was enormously proud of one of her young organ students who is at present the Senior Organ Scholar of St Peter’s College, Oxford, Daniel Pugh-Bevan. In addition to this, she was a founder of the Margam Abbey Music Foundation. This aims to promote and ensure the Abbey as a venue for performances, especially by young people. It also aims to provide financial resources, through a Trust Fund, to help young musicians – especially by offering “financial help and performance opportunities to young musicians of outstanding ability … in the splendid setting of the Abbey”. Finally, the Foundation aims to ensure that the Abbey organ itself “continues to be kept in sound condition to meet the needs of the worship of God, and as a suitable instrument for recitals and concerts”. Would that there were many more with Megan’s vision.
Now, you might think that all this in a musical career was enough for anyone to be getting on with. But Megan Inglesant also had very firm political convictions. It was in 2008 that she was elected as a Labour Councillor for the Bridgend County Borough Council. This at the age of 87. When the news of her death came through last June, the Leader of the Council paid special tribute to her for all her work in so many different fields. In tribute they all stood for a minute’s silence in the Council Chamber.
---ooo0ooo---
Megan was very well known in many parts of the UK, and it was at the proposal of one of Britain’s most distinguished Organists that she was made an Honorary Fellow of the Guild of Church Musicians at the presentation ceremony in the Chapel Royal
24 Laudate 90
News from St Michael’s CornhillSTOP PRESS! Octoberfest – More Light on Darke!One hundred years ago, Harold Darke (1888-1976) began his fifty-
year stint as Director of Music at St. Michael’s which they are celebrating
with a variety of special musical events.
• Monday 3rd October 1pm International recitalist James McVinnie
gives an all-Bach recital in tribute to Darke, one of whose greatest loves was the music of J.S. Bach.
• Monday 10th October 1pm there will be a service of Thanksgiving for the life of Richard Popplewell (Director
of Music here 1966-1979).
• Saturday 15th October 2.30-5.30pm, Richard Brasier directs a workshop for the Royal College of Organists
on the music contained in A Little Organ Book for Hubert Parry (1918), a collection of pieces composed as a
memorial to the Director of the RCM when Darke attended as a student and as a professor.
• Monday 17th October 1pm Jonathan Rennert plays the Organ Sonata (1934) by Darke’s close friend, Herbert
Howells.
• Saturday 22nd October, 2.30-5.30pm, David Stancliffe, formerly the Bishop of Salisbury, directs a workshop
for singers and enthusiasts of sacred music. David is an outstanding and fun conductor!
• Monday 24th October 1pm, Simon Johnson & Peter Holden, organist and sub-organist of St Paul’s Cathedral
will perform Simon’s new arrangement of Gustav Holst’s The Planets suite.
• Friday 28th October 10am-4.30pm the third Cornhill Colloquium, The Language of Music, will discuss the
relationship between music and words with speakers including Radio 3 and Gramophone reviewer, Caroline
Gill; composer and pianist, London College of Music, Professor Francis Pott; The Revd Alice Goodman from
Cambridge; Professor Francis O’Gorman from the University of Edinburgh and Dr Simon Jackson from the
University of Warwick. The day will also feature a program of organ music by Harold Darke to be played by
the current Director of Music, Jonathan Rennert.
• Sunday 30th October 11am, Dedication of the Darke plaque during the eucharist. Preacher, Dr Richard
Shephard, distinguished sacred music composer.
• Monday 31st October 1pm, The Annual Harold Darke Memorial Recital, given by Jack Stone, this year’s very
talented Harold Darke prize-winner at the Royal College of Music. The programme will include music by Bach
and Darke – note the deliberate rhyme!
of the Savoy in 2010. Again, she had already been honoured with the much-coveted Archbishop of Wales’ Award in Church Music (AWACM) in the Presentation ceremony at Brecon Cathedral in 2003.
A final thought …
During her illness over this last three years or so, many of Megan’s playing duties have fallen to a distinguished former Precentor of Guildford Cathedral, Canon Richard Hanford, who has retired to a house nearby in Bridgend. They are very fortunate indeed to have Fr Richard’s help, for like the Vicar, Fr Terry Doherty, and Canon Graham Holcombe who played for the Funeral Mass, he is a very fine player indeed. But one is inevitably left wondering how on earth so many
of our greater churches will manage as this present generation of skilled and dedicated musicians moves on to higher things!
However, thank heavens, it is that same sense of mission that Megan had which has always been at the heart of all our work in the Guild of Church Musicians. But it is a salutary warning that the future of Church Music, especially in the provinces, is a real and ongoing challenge to every single one of us!
---ooo0ooo---
For her family and friends, our thoughts and best wishes. And to you yourself Megan, thank you for all your friendship, kindness and great work over such a long and distinguished lifetime.
September 2016 25
Goodbye HSBC, Hello Unity Trust Bank
Robert Andrews, Treasurer
As indicated in the last edition of Laudate, the Guild has been forced to change its banking arrangements. As far as I can ascertain
the Guild has maintained its bank accounts with Midland Bank/HSBC since it was incorporated as a charitable company in 1905. When I became treasurer I discovered that the Guild’s bank account was being operated by HSBC as an unincorporated club account and also it was still in the former name of the Guild that was changed in 1987. Because the Guild was not recognised by HSBC as a limited company the mandate implied that the signatories were personally liable for the Guild’s debts. I also had a constant battle with changing counter staff who were reluctant to accept cheques in the Guild’s post 1987 name.
A couple of years ago I suggested to Council that the Guild might consider changing its banking arrangements. The Guild issues a high number of small cheques that have to signed by two authorised signatories. This meant that I was constantly sending cheques to John Ewington for signature and onward transmission. An invoice or expenses could easily take three weeks from receipt until payment because cheques were doing a double circuit of the Post Office. In this electronic age the solution was on-line payments, but few banks offer on-line facilities incorporating dual control of payments. The Charity Commission “recommended” either Unity Trust Bank or CAFCash as banks offering dual control of on-line payments and as I am a trustee of four charities with accounts at Unity Trust Bank, that was my preferred option. Unfortunately, John’s untimely death meant that we didn’t proceed with the change. However, when June Williams was appointed to replace John I took the opportunity to insist to HSBC that the account should be operated as a charitable company, and that the name of the account should be updated to “The Guild of Church Musicians”. Having spent nearly forty years working for NatWest I should have known not to interfere with banking arrangements that appear to be working. Although the changes requested were made, it meant that control of the Guild’s accounts moved from the personal to the corporate banking division of HSBC. We were soon being treated, not as a small charity with a turnover of £15,000pa, but as an international conglomerate. The first “correspondence” I received was a form
requesting details of the Guild’s tax status in each country where it has members. I ignored it! Then we were asked for a list of members, and immediate members of their families, who were involved in politics, the judiciary or the armed services. Again I ignored it! Then they wanted proof of identity, not just for the signatories, but for all members of Council. Council members duly completed lengthy questionnaires, but almost as soon as I had dispatched them I received a formal notification that our account would be closed on 19 May 2016. Unless we had opened a new account with another bank by that date, we would be sent a cheque for the balance of the account and we would then have no banking facilities.
Fortunately, we were able to open an account with Unity Trust Bank, with only relatively minor hiccups. As a specialist charity bank, they are much more receptive to our needs. Although they have no presence on the High Street, transactions can be carried out both at NatWest branches and also at the Post Office. They have an efficient on-line banking system which means that a quick exchange of emails with June or Jeremy and payment can reach the beneficiary’s bank account on the same day, cutting down on both time and postage costs.
As for the 19 May deadline imposed by HSBC, we gave them formal instructions to transfer the Guild’s accounts to Unity Trust Bank, but the date came and went with nothing happening. It took several chasing letters before the account was finally closed on 10 August, but in the meantime we have been very happy to put all our transactions through Unity Trust Bank.
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What does this mean for members?Members who currently pay their subscription by standing order will find that the standing order has been cancelled. Indeed, I have already received an email from one member who has been notified of the cancelation by their own bank. I will be writing to all members who currently pay by standing order enclosing a new standing order form that can be sent to your bank or used to set up payments via on-line banking. I am taking the opportunity to put membership numbers in the reference field, which will make it much easier for me and for my successors to correctly identify the payments received from members. You should receive the letters in early September. I have delayed it until then because my own bank NatWest will not accept standing orders where the first payment is more the four months in the future. I suspect that other banks may adopt a similar policy therefore I didn’t want the
forms to be put in a drawer awaiting the due date.If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me by email to [email protected] or by phone to 01268 733817.
Standing orders are the easiest way to ensure that your membership subscription is paid on time. If you do not already use the standing order system, please consider setting one up. If you contact me I will send you the necessary form.
Overseas membersSome of our overseas members remit payments electronically using an IBAN number. Please note that the IBAN number has also changed therefore please contact me for the new number if you intend to use this facility.
Robert Andrews
Treasurer
Letters to the Editor
Dear Michael
I was delighted to read Timothy Storey’s article about the anniversaries of composers births and deaths. The Charles Wood anniversary has, of course, a particular resonance in Armagh, and has been marked in a variety of ways. There is the annual Charles Wood Festival of Music (21-28 August) which this year focuses particularly on Wood’s church music, and will include performances of his St Mark Passion, Mass in F, Evening services in E flat no.1, E flat no.2 and F (Coll Reg) as well as many anthems. On the date of his birth, 15th June, Professor Jeremy Dibble gave an illustrated lecture and the following Sunday the Cathedral choir sang an evensong of Wood’s music, including the hymn-tunes Emain Macha and Armagh and some of his organ music. The biography by Ian Copley, referred to in the article, is still on sale in the cathedral gift shop in Armagh.
Revd Dr Peter Thompson HonFGCM
Rector, St Michael’s Castlecaulfield & St Patrick’s Donaghmore
Succentor & Assistant Organist, St Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh
Dear Michael
I enjoyed reading the article about Parry’s “Jerusalem”.
At my junior school (1939-42) fraternisation with the opposite sex was discouraged by having separate playgrounds, and although we used the same room for assemblies, segregation was ensured by holding ours at different times.
The boys did not sing “Jerusalem” but I heard the girls singing it through the walls, and I remember being pleasantly surprised by the unexpected early arrival of a D on the word “sleep” on the beat. (The corresponding word in verse 1 is off the beat.) Parry’s brilliance in making this small rhythmic alteration still thrills me, although I have heard and played it many times.
Ron Bayfield
September 2016 27
Campaign For REAL Carols : a personal view
Timothy Storey
We had a very nice carol party here the other night – we sang all REAL carols, no Wenceslases or Silent
Nights; we … finished up with the First Nowell at 12, and then more drinks.
(R. Vaughan Williams, December 23, 1956)
When I was the organist of a church in London’s Square Mile I used to dread the Black Fortnight in December when
I had to play for an average of one Carol Service each day, when it seemed that every bank or law firm descended upon the church, often with its own choir and a form of service of its own devising. The sheer predictability of the congregational hymns was depressing; I fervently wished that the Herald Angels would find something different to sing, and more than once I squirmed in sympathy and embarrassment at the efforts of some unwilling (and not very capable) soprano to emulate what the BBC insists on describing as the Lone Chorister in King’s College Chapel on Christmas Eve. I became quite good at playing verse 2 in G flat or G sharp, depending on the key in which the soloist had finished.
I was made even more uncomfortable by what the choirs chose to sing on their own. Traditional, beautiful carols were conspicuously absent, displaced by various examples of the currently fashionable Christmas Part-Song genre or, even worse, by the home-made efforts of a choir’s members or conductor. I came to a belief and fear that we have lost a knowledge of what a real Christmas carol is and what it should set out to do. As the preface to the Oxford Book of Carols (OBC) put it in 1928: ‘carol services’ are … not infrequently held even today at which not a single genuine carol is sung. If things were bad then they are indisputably no better now. I propose several easy tests by which the genuine article may be detected.
VERY REAL: traditional British words and melody. At the time when Vaughan Williams was writing Norfolk Rhapsodies and the Tallis Fantasia to introduce his favourite tunes to a wider public, he chose for his Fantasia on Christmas Carols the three examples that he must surely have felt were the best of their kind – and they are! If you are not planning to sing This is the truth
sent from above and The Sussex Carol (On Christmas Night all Christians sing), why not? It may be a little difficult to fit Come all you worthy gentlemen into a service, but it would finish a concert in fine, robust style. Other ‘genuine articles’ are A Virgin most pure (I will even send you my arrangement); Hereford Carol (Come, all you faithful Christians), very beautiful and with a recently-published arrangement by Christopher Robinson (Novello/Music Sales); A Gallery Carol (Rejoice and be merry); The Lord at first did Adam make, Yeoman’s Carol (Let Christians all with joyful mirth) (OBC) and Joys Seven, wonderfully well arranged by Stephen Cleobury. Richard Lloyd has made a surely unbeatable arrangement of I saw three ships (Novello/Music Sales), and Francis Jackson has worked his own particular magic on The Cherry Tree Carol (Banks Music Publications). Then there are our old friends God rest ye merry and The First Nowell. Be it noted that the texts are nearly all narrative, objective, unsentimental and Biblical.
REAL: traditional words, original tune lost. Four very familiar texts fall into this category, all of them preserved in the Sloane Manuscript (and all set in Britten’s Ceremony of Carols). Peter Warlock set Adam lay ybounden, but Boris Ord’s setting is deservedly popular and is hallowed by long association with King’s College Chapel, another of whose Organists, Philip Ledger, has also provided effective and appealing music for this text (OUP). I sing of a maiden has received a simple, classic setting from Lennox Berkeley; and we have the luxury of no fewer than three admirable versions of I saw a [fair] maiden/Lullay my liking, from Gustav Holst, Edgar Pettman and Richard Terry. Welcome, Yule has a setting by Hubert Parry, jolly and exuberant but a fearful tongue-twister for the singers.
REAL: traditional words, original tune lost, or replaced by a new one. I would give honourable mention to William Mathias, who succeeds in evoking the melodic and rhythmic attractiveness of the true carol in A babe is born all of a may, Sir Christemas and Wassail Carol. It would be good to compare the numerous recent versions of There is no rose with the mediaeval original; Joubert’s is by now something of a classic. One might apply a similar test to the Coventry Carol.
REAL: Foreign tune, English translation or substitute English version. The most
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prolific translators were the Revds Sabine Baring-Gould, John Mason Neale and George Ratcliffe Woodward, and their versions appeared in the Cambridge, Cowley or University Carol Books; offprints from all of these were readily available and may still be found in well-established choir libraries. All my heart this night rejoices, Christ was born on Christmas Day, Ding dong!, merrily on high, Gabriel’s Message, Hail, Blessed Virgin Mary, King Jesus hath a garden, Shepherds, in the field abiding, The Infant King and Up, good Christen folk, and listen were mainstays of the King’s repertoire throughout the time of Boris Ord and David Willcocks, and many a parish chorister felt some pride in singing the same carols as the members of that famous choir, and in attempting to sing them just, or nearly, as well. Does this connection exist even now?
One should not forget Quittez, pasteurs, a lovely tune arranged by Kenneth Leighton with the English text O leave your sheep (Novello/Music Sales), and Quelle est cette odeur agréable, which boasts several arrangements and a number of translations including one which I cannot resist re-punctuating, in best ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’ style: ‘What is this rare and pleasant odour? Shepherds, pervading everything.’ Perhaps there was something their best friend had not told them! Finally, I admit to having a soft spot for a carol just as woefully misbegotten as Good King Wenceslas. In this case also J. M. Neale applied his own text to a Springtide carol from that wonderful 16th-century collection Piae Cantiones, but O’er the hill and o’er the vale does fulfil a need for Epiphany carols; it is available from OUP in a colourful arrangement by Antony Baldwin, whose music is always worth careful examination. Finally there is the very special case of In dulci jubilo, a Macaronic Latin/German carol whose double-choir arrangement by an Englishman, Robert Lucas de Pearsall, is quite without compare and is surely the prototype of the sophisticated treatments we know and love today.
NOT REAL: new words and tune, and the dreaded first person singular. The rot began with Balulow, a sixteenth-century poem by three Scots brothers. The young Jesu sweet is urged to make his cradle ‘in my spreit’, in return for which ‘the knees of my heart sall I bow’. Me, me, me! ‘Balulalow’ seems to be an onomatopoeic cradle noise similar to ‘lulla’ or ‘lullay’ as found in the Coventry Carol or the 16th-century Lute-book Lullaby (sweet was the song the Virgin sang), to neither of which can exception be taken, as all their focus is on the Babe and the Blessed Virgin, where it belongs. The rot really set in with the
publication in 1872 of a poem by Christina Rossetti; it was not designed for a musical setting, but In the bleak midwinter was discovered by the editors of the English Hymnal and furnished with a hymn-tune by Gustav Holst; it makes a rotten hymn because the music of the first verse does not fit the others, thus wrong-footing a congregation. I fear it became popular for all the wrong reasons, such as the very English weather in the first verse, the portrayal of Mary’s maiden bliss and the very human needs of the Christ-child, with the reader, or singer, then the focus of attention in the last verse – what can I give him, I would do my part, etc. The setting by Harold Darke published in 1911 omits the verse beginning ‘Angels and archangels may have gathered there’, and in the third verse some timorous soul changed ‘A breast full of milk and a manger full of hay’ to ‘a heart full mirth’ etc. Later printings restored the unexpurgated original, but under pressure a soloist used to the first edition was apt to bring forth such gems as ‘a heart full of milk’ or ‘a breast full of mirth’; and one can only feel sympathy with the tenor, singing from memory on a live broadcast, who invented ‘Enough for him whom Cherubim worship day and night, a breastful of milk and, er, O what a sight!’ At least once the phrase in question has been printed ‘A breastful of mild’, a delightful prospect indeed! Darke’s setting is deservedly a classic and can hardly be left unsung, but beware of what the words are saying.
A similar caution should be applied to a couple of nineteenth-century American imports. O little town of Bethlehem just about gets away with it, as the Holy Child of Bethlehem is bidden to come to us, not to me, and so my previous strictures are evaded. One is somehow suspicious of a text which has seemed to lack its proper tune; the original American melody is delightful in its way and the better-known of the two settings by Walford Davies is exceptionally beautiful though hardly congregational. It was an act of genius by Vaughan Williams when he paired the text with a folk song, The Ploughboy’s Dream; clearly he regarded the result as a REAL CAROL, and so must we.
One must however regard Away in a manger as pernicious. It has no tune to call its own, and the words are self-centred and sentimental in the extreme: be near me, I love thee, stay by my side. And, in the twenty-first century, we should no longer be asking Jesus to look down from the sky, where we presume he is no longer thought to live. Do children really like this sort of thing? or tosh like How far is it to Bethlehem? The Animal
September 2016 29
Rights lobby has presumably banned Rocking for the singers’ offer to lend a coat of fur. Children should be introduced at the earliest opportunity to grown-up carols which they could treasure for the rest of their lives.
TOTALLY UNREAL: words by the composer, or someone’s poem. Avoid at all costs! This disposes of a great deal of the Christmas music which has become so popular and familiar in the last forty years or so. Many of the so-called carols (more accurately to be described as Christmas Part-Songs) so optimistically composed and published each year fail the REAL CAROL test, as do most of the ‘carols’ commissioned by Dr Cleobury.
A final plea: give the congregation something REAL to sing. Right at the start I expressed my distaste for Once in royal David’s city and Hark! The herald-angels sing. Now I would add the perhaps heretical view that there is no law of
the universe that Carol Services must begin with the one and end with the other; but if you must have them, please take pity on the congregation and do them in F major. Instead, explore other hymns such as Christians, awake and See amid the winter’s snow; and I would be prepared to wager that God rest you merry and The First Nowell do not represent the limit of your congregation’s knowledge of Real Carols. Try Good Christian men, rejoice, The Angel Gabriel and The Holly and the Ivy; Ding! Dong! Merrily on high is too hard for untrained singers, but Angels from the reams of glory is easier and the words actually mean something! A child this day is born goes to the same tune as Teach me, my God and King; it might be worth a try, though you might wish to edit out the phrase ‘an host incontinent.’ Finally, and at last, whatever else you do, Of the Father’s heart begotten is simply essential and must never be ignored; it is the greatest of all Christmas hymns, and simply says it all! Happy Christmas!
‘Just do it nicely’ - Harry Bramma at 80
Timothy Storey
One of our best-loved and most characterful Honorary Fellows will soon reach his fourscore years, so it seemed appropriate
to say something about Harry Bramma’s long and distinguished service in cathedral and parish church and as Director of the RSCM at a difficult and challenging time. When was it not so with the RSCM?
Let us take Harry take cathedral musician first. He was Christopher Robinson’s assistant at Worcester Cathedral during the decade or so when the choir was among the very best in the country: he trained a succession of very able pupils at the King’s School, Worcester, several of whom are highly distinguished as organists, conductors or singers; and he rebuilt the traditional choir of men and boys at Southwark Cathedral when it seemed to be on the verge of extinction after some very difficult years.
Harry was born on Armistice Day 1936, and received his early training in the choir of St Paul’s, Shipley, a ‘good parish choir’ where he learnt the classics of English church music. He had lessons from Melville Cook at Leeds Parish Church and went up to Oxford as Organ Scholar of Pembroke College, reading both Music and Theology and coming under the
influence of Bernard Rose, who became a life-long friend. Then came Retford Grammar School, where Harry established a rapport with some fairly tough customers, winning their respect and persuading them that there might be something in this classical music business after all. Cathedral choristers and public school ‘hearties’ held no terrors thereafter!
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Meanwhile his near-contemporary Christopher Robinson, Organ Scholar of Christ Church, Oxford, had taught for three years at Oundle and then been appointed Assistant Organist of Worcester Cathedral in 1962. When the Cathedral Organist Douglas Guest left for Westminster Abbey the following year, Christopher was appointed to succeed him; the resulting vacancy for an Assistant was filled by Harry Bramma; and so began a most exciting partnership, broken by Robinson’s move to St George’s Chapel, Windsor in 1975. Harry also taught at the King’s School (which serves as Worcester’s choir school) and became its Director of Music two years later.
The Cathedral Choir had enjoyed a good reputation under David Willcocks and Douglas Guest, but it was soon to be in a class of its own. Christopher Robinson had been influenced by the choir-training of Meredith Davies at New College, Oxford; but more importantly, in Harry’s words, ‘he just had what it took’. The boys developed a bright, resonant tone, not ‘continental’ like the sound of the Westminster Cathedral or St John’s, Cambridge boys, but distinctive, flexible and powerful. There was a succession of ‘golden voices’ among the boys, and several colourful characters among the men, including Henry Sandon of ‘Antiques Roadshow’ fame. An early recording for the Abbey company featured some outstanding treble soloists, and then came the memorable Elgar recording of 1969, with colourful organ accompaniments from Harry including the notorious semiquaver scale passage in Give unto the Lord. ‘I wasn’t a bad player then’ he modestly says.
When Harry ta lks about those days, the overwhelming impression is of fun. There was a flourishing social life in the cathedral community, and the countryside around Worcester offers any number of good inns for an evening out. He certainly worked hard: it was also the Assistant’s task to run the Cathedral Voluntary Choir, a large body of men and boys which under Harry’s direction became good enough to take the Cathedral Choir’s place on occasion. Worcester is probably unique in still having two boys’ choirs. There was one never-to-be-forgotten Sunday when he played for the Parish Eucharist at 9.30, Mattins at 10.30 and Choral Eucharist at 11.30 with the Cathedral Choir, a special service at 2.30, the Cathedral Choir at 4.00, the Voluntary Choir at 6.30 and a school service at 8.00 – ‘the worst Sunday of my life!’ He helped to prepare the Worcester Chorus for the Three Choirs Festival,
and latterly he also conducted the Kidderminster Choral Society.
School music had been in a somewhat parlous state, and Harry saw it as his mission to involve the whole school in musical performances. So successful was he that games practices had to give way to rehearsals of the choral society. Stephen Cleobury (King’s, Cambridge), Andrew Millington (Exeter Cathedral), Stephen Darlington (Christ Church, Oxford), Geoffrey Webber (Gonville and Caius, Cambridge) and Christopher Tolley (Winchester College) are eminent church musicians who were trained by Harry at the King’s School, to say nothing of academic musicians such as Peter Hewitt, the conductors Nicholas Cleobury, Jonathan Nott and Jonathan Darlington, and the internationally famous operatic tenor Richard Berkeley-Steele.
Hs work with the Worcester Cathedral Voluntary Choir made him the ideal candidate when Southwark Cathedral needed an organist in 1976. Under E. T. Cook the music at Southwark between the world wars had been highly regarded, but his style had seemed too esoteric for the cathedral’s post-war régime, and during the prime years of ‘South Bank theology’ the story had been one of an unhappy decline, with the musical content of Sunday services considerably reduced and the paid lay-clerks dismissed, partly as a matter of principle and party because the cathedral was in severe financial trouble. St Olave’s Grammar School, from which the boys had been drawn, had moved to Orpington, and local boys were hard to recruit and of poor quality. Harry inherited fourteen, of whom seven were useless and a thorough nuisance into the bargain; of the remaining seven, six were on the verge of retirement.
Provost Frankham did not mind what kind of choir his cathedral had, so long as it was good, but Harry was determined that a cathedral should have a traditional all-male choir. With the aid of former pupils in the musical world, and one or two sympathetic headteachers, he soon had a steady stream of recruits. He is particularly proud that the wife of a United Reformed Minister personally escorted a promising recruit to and from the cathedral several times every week ‘because he was worth it’; and indeed there was a pronounced ecumenical aspect to the choir for many years. Several of the boys were from ‘trendy Islington schools’ where teachers were addressed by their first names, and fairly soon he was ‘Harry’ rather than ‘Sir’ with no loss of respect or efficiency but a perceptible gain in family feeling. Sunday lunch for
September 2016 31
the choir became a popular institution, cooked by parents in turn and with Harry taking his place in the rota.
Within a couple of years the choir was f it to broadcast Evensong on Radio Three, and by the end of Harry’s time at Southwark the quality of such broadcasts was remarkable, with more than a touch of the Worcester polish. He had two outstanding assistant organists, first John Scott (shared with St Paul’s) and then Andrew Lumsden. Money was found first for three paid lay-clerks and then six, and on his move to the RSCM in 1989 Harry handed on to his successor Peter Wright a flourishing establishment which has been further developed to include girls’ and adults’ choirs. Another of Harry’s legacies was his work as organ advisor to the diocese, supervising the conservation of several notable instruments and overseeing the restoration of the cathedral’s famous Lewis organ, with the reversal of Henry Willis III’s so-called improvements. I asked Harry what might have happened had he not gone to the RSCM in 1989. He is sure that the time had come for a move from Southwark, because it was not the sort of job that one should do for too long. One or two Cathedral Chapters must surely wish that they had appointed him when they had the chance! He certainly looks back on his years at Worcester and Southwark with great pleasure, and he must surely be said to have ‘made a difference’ to both places.
It has been the lot of Directors of the School of English Church Music and its successor the Royal School of Church Music to close something down or to move premises, sometimes both! Even the Founder Sir Sydney Nicholson had to shut down the SECM’s residential college at Chislehurst and re-locate operations to Tenbury, Leamington Spa and Canterbury, but it did seem that his dreams were belatedly realised with the appointment of Gerald Knight as full-time Director, the move to Addington Palace in 1954 and the granting of a Royal Charter. There was to be no revival of the pre-war choir-school, but a residential college was established for adult students, who could practise the skills of choir-training and service accompaniment with the aid of a choir of dayboys. If you wish to know more, I can warmly recommend The Royal School of Church Music - The Addington Years by John Henderson and Trevor Jarvis, available from the RSCM Online Shop.
To Knight’s successor Lionel Dakers fell the unpopular task of closing the residential college, which was losing money and failing to attract enough students. He had the student rooms refurbished
and made attractive as a venue for short residential courses, which proved popular until Dakers retired in 1989 and was succeeded by Harry, who was able to continue them for a few years, but was faced with the imminent expiry of the lease on Addington and the need to find alternative premises. The RSCM seemed to need a new role, with more attention paid to the needs of ordinary churches, and he upset a few die-hards by offering a welcome to ‘informal musical styles’ and girls’ choirs, but some of the heat seems to have gone out of the argument with the passage of time.
Harry’s experience of the ejection of the Royal College of Organists from its home opposite the Royal Albert Hall to a couple of rooms at St Andrew’s Church, Holborn had convinced him that the RSCM needed a proper home of its own, which members could visit for meetings, to purchase music or to consult the library. The bequest by Lady Susi Jeans of Cleveland Lodge, her home near Dorking, seemed providential, and although the building was found to be in very poor condition and thus expensive to renovate, Harry became an extremely accomplished fund-raiser and the target was reached. Unfortunately it proved impossible to organise accommodation locally for residential courses, and thus Cleveland Lodge could only be a partial replacement for Addington. Nonetheless Harry was able to create a very happy atmosphere there, and our very own June Williams, his P. A. for several years, has told me what a ‘marvellous boss’ he was, punctilious in his replies to correspondents and thus in constant demand for his wise advice and encouragement. One might also note that he brought about a very definite thawing of relations between the RSCM and the Guild of Church Musicians. He retired in 1998, but was then very happy to revive old skills by teaching undergraduates for two years at King’s College, Cambridge and then for five more years at Christ Church, Oxford.
Lionel Dakers had admitted to feeling the loss of a church and organ he could call his own, so it was hardly surprising that Harry should accept the call to All Saints’ Church, Margaret Street, in London’s West End. Recent history had been troubled. The distinguished organist and choirmaster Michael Fleming had resigned when the tiny residential choir-school was closed in 1968, a move inevitable and still regretted by some for many years afterwards. The boy trebles were replaced by adult sopranos, but many of the choir’s traditions were steadfastly maintained by Fleming’s successor and former assistant Dr Eric Arnold, who died in post in 1988.
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There followed a brief and unsettling interlude until Harry was persuaded to come to the rescue; he had just started his work at the RSCM, so he only offered to tide things over for three months. In the event he stayed until 2004!
His inevitable absences on RSCM business were covered by the appointment of an excellent Assistant Organist, Nicholas Luff, a former colleague at Southwark; but there was no feeling that All Saints was a mere part-time job and the choir flourished to the extent of its being invited to make several broadcasts of Choral Evensong, invariably followed, as on Sundays, by Benediction, complete with ‘sound effects’ from the thurible as the Blessed Sacrament was censed. Harry was completely at home with the church’s traditions and was immensely proud of its musical inheritance from ‘in-house’ composers such as the Organists Walter Vale and William Lloyd Webber and the Honorary Assistant Norman Caplin; there is also a strong historical connection with the music of Rachmaninov. Harry made significant additions to that inheritance. CD recordings of the choir include plainsong hymns from the New English Hymnal, Music for Benediction, Music for All Saints and All Souls, the Music of William Lloyd Webber and Harry’s own compositions (under the direction of his successor Paul Brough, who has also recorded a collection entitled The English Rachmaninov).
Harry is proud that he left the choir in good heart and financially independent of the parish’s day-to-day running costs; he was also involved in the raising of funds for the complete restoration of the church’s 1910 four-manual Harrison organ. This was a real labour of love on the part of Harry and the builders, in which the ’improvements’ of the 1950s were reversed even to the extent of the re-creation of Arthur Harrison’s characteristic 4-rank Harmonics (15, 19, 21, 22) on the Great. He is especially
gratified that this is the first example to have been made since the 1930s, and that he was responsible for it! Si monumentum requiris, etc. As a friend and former colleague of Harry put it “You could sum up Harry’s CV in these words; ‘whatever situation he encountered, he just sorted it’”
For several years I had the pleasure of singing under Harry’s direction as a deputy at All Saints, a musically challenging experience, chiefly on account of the large amount of plainchant to be sung (even the psalter was sufficiently different from the familiar Briggs and Frere as to be a trap for the unwary), but also a rewarding one through the extent and variety of the choir’s repertoire, which included a judicious representation of the English school for which Harry expresses and demands a proper respect. There was also the pleasure of working in an exceptionally friendly atmosphere, an atmosphere which surely owed much to Harry’s mature musical judgement, wide experience and benign personality. One could also savour the famous ‘Harry-isms’ which need his warm Yorkshire accent for their full flavour; he has a high regard for a ‘well-crafted piece’ but it has to be pronounced ‘craffted’. When he described Poulenc’s Mass in G as doo-lally for its eccentric scoring, one felt that he did not regard it as well-crafted. One knew precisely what he meant by ‘this music needs to move on castors’ or by an injunction to ‘jump on the moving vehicle’ or to ‘sustain like billy-o’ or simply to ‘do it nicely’, a phrase which might seem to sum up the whole of Harry’s life.
What sort of birthday present might he like? He would surely be delighted if your Advent Carol Service included his well-crafted [sic] and highly effective arrangement of Carol of the Advent (People, look East); it is published by the RSCM in Songs for the Holy Family.
September 2016 33
The Southern Cathedrals Festival: The First 50 Years
Geoffrey Simmonds
The period around 1959/60 was quite a watershed in the twentieth century’s turbulent history. World war was an abiding,
if gradually receding, memory, having given way to a war of the cold variety, with barely a month passing without some new ‘advance’ in military capability (and the Berlin Wall had still not even been built). Totalitarian régimes abounded, and, if one were looking for evidence of just how seriously they could impinge on the life of a creative artist, the example of the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich readily provides it.
Across the Atlantic (and indeed half-way across the Pacific) Alaska and Hawaii became the 49th and 50th States of the Union. Fidel Castro assumed control in Cuba, prompting the CIA to instigate an unsuccessful assassination plot. The Marx Brothers made their last film, Barbie made her début, and John F Kennedy announced his intention to stand for the Presidency: (as part of his campaign he and his Republican opponent Richard Nixon took part in the first-ever TV Presidential debate, a practice the UK has now also adopted 50 years on). The space race was as yet hardly out of the starting-blocks. There had been several unmanned flights, but to date the only living beings to have journeyed beyond earth’s atmosphere were two monkeys: manned flight would duly follow shortly, with mankind then quite improbably setting foot on the surface of another astral body, the moon, in less than a decade, just as the newly elected Kennedy had pledged.
At home, as indeed elsewhere, the on-going love-affair with the internal combustion engine was gathering pace, as symbolised by the opening of the first stretch of the M1 (Watford to Rugby) and the introduction of the BMC Mini (then a truly mini vehicle, unlike the tank-like version of the twenty-first century). This contributed to a speedy increase in car-ownership, though still only embracing less than half of the eligible population for quite some time to come. Much the same could also be said of the relatively novel television; the radio, still generally referred to as the wireless, remained many people’s preferred medium of broadcast home entertainment. Returning to the transport theme London’s iconic Routemaster buses were starting to enter fleet service in significant numbers. So, in
summary, even with spam fritters still featuring on many a school dinner menu, and the looming Cuban missile crisis threatening to cast its dark and ominous shadow, the developing ‘Zeitgeist’ was one of a new readiness to begin looking forwards again rather than back. This was, after all, now the threshold of the ‘swinging’ Sixties.
Such was the state of temporal affairs when the Associated Board entertained its examiners to a Grand Luncheon in London’s Connaught Rooms. Among those on the guest list were John Birch, Alwyn Surplice and Christopher Dearnley, respectively Organists of Chichester, Winchester and Salisbury Cathedrals. While relaxing post-prandially on settees in an alcove on the Mezzanine Floor, the subject of reviving the discontinued Southern Cathedrals Festival, previously held intermittently between 1904 and 1932 ( John Birch having taken with him a flier of original 1904 vintage), was raised. It was decided to re-institute it in 1960, just as a one-off, see if it made any money and then consider perpetuating it further. Far from the least of its purposes was to occupy some of the Choristers’ time during the weeks between the end of School term (early to mid-July, roughly as now) and the cessation of Cathedral services, which in those days extended way beyond that time, in some years even into August. Rehearsing SCF music moreover would never begin until after the end of School term for that very reason. Winchester was chosen as host, primarily because that was where the Festival’s first run had come to its premature end (after, of all things, a row over who should pay for the tea!) and secondarily on account of its most central geographical location. Once all the sums had been completed the Festival emerged £20 to the good (even with lunch having been paid for twice!), and, on that basis, another one was planned for the following year. SCF was re-born.
The revived SCF’s 1960 début was modest, comprising just one combined Choral Evensong and one concert, both taking place within a matter of hours. The music selected for Evensong was largely designed to mark the 150th anniversary of Samuel Sebastian Wesley’s birth, and this service was recreated in 2010, his bi-centenary. The rate of SCF’s increase in scale was however distinctly
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rapid. Even as early as 1964 it had been lengthened to four days (Thursday-Sunday, with the ‘home’ Cathedral’s Sunday services included in the Festival Programme for the first time). Other additions in that year were a second concert, the communal Festival meals, a lecture and the Festival Eucharist, all these joining the Organ Recital and Evensongs sung by individual choirs (though not yet all three within the one Festival), which had already become regular features in the interim. That the sermon at this first Eucharist was preached by none other than the Festival President, His Grace The Archbishop of Canterbury, added a further endorsement to SCF’s growing status. Reflecting perhaps its increasing confidence for the future, that year’s Festival Programme also included a declaration of its ethos. With the Choral Evensongs and Festival Eucharist, the acts of worship, continuing at its very core (one might even say ‘As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be’), the Festival stated its wider aim of offering its three constituent choirs a rarer opportunity to perform more extensive works well beyond their scope in isolation, whether or not with fuller instrumental/orchestral accompaniment. It was clear now that SCF was here to stay. The following year however would see the addition of yet another significant dimension.
The Very Reverend Walter Hussey, then Dean of Chichester, was shrewd, persuasive and artistically well-connected (no less a figure than Benjamin Britten was already among those from whom he had elicited commissioned works). Leonard Bernstein, a multi-talented Jewish American whose most notable achievement to date as a composer was a reworking/updating of a Shakespearian drama of conflict among the Veronese nobility as a tale of street-gang warfare in down-town New York, was, to say the least, not an obvious choice for SCF’s very first such enterprise. Nonetheless the approach was made, Dean Hussey knowing full well that Bernstein was currently on sabbatical from his conductorship of the New York Philharmonic and seeking productive ways to fill his time. One needs hardly record that the result of this was ‘Chichester Psalms’, still entitled ‘Psalms of Youth’ until quite late in the preliminaries. Even now, 45 years on, this work still holds pride of place among SCF’s commissions, having subsequently gained an abiding place in the wider musical world. Hindsight and posterity can now judge Dean Hussey’s choice as no less than inspired, not least because it also enhanced SCF’s own profile immeasurably.
The story of Bernstein’s (non-)payment for his efforts has passed into SCF legend. One version is that, while being seen off by Dean Hussey, he finally ventured, ‘I don’t know what I can charge…’. But before he could finish Dean Hussey responded (interrupted?), ‘Well, that’s really extremely kind of you’ (or something similar). I hope you enjoy a good and safe flight home’. Bernstein’s eventual reward consisted of the expense of his hire-car to take him to London and a presentation Parker 51 pen!
From then on newly commissioned works became a regular feature of the Festival. Consequently there have been but few years since without at least one addition to that number, the imbalance of any fallow years generally being restored by other Festivals incorporating two, or even three. Time and space preclude a listing of every single one, but a glance at the following representative (hopefully!) selection gives an idea of the calibre of composers who have contributed in this way – William Mathias, Malcolm Williamson, John Tavener, Kenneth Leighton, Elizabeth Maconchy, Jonathan Harvey, Sir Lennox Berkeley, Geoffrey Burgon, Richard Shephard, Robert Walker, Patrick Gowers, Richard Lloyd and Malcolm Archer. Whilst providing the three choirs with fresh contemporary challenges, the composers themselves can also derive a special creative fulfilment from their work in this repertoire, as more than one of those listed has openly acknowledged. William Mathias furthermore commended SCF for its ‘interest in extending the Church choral tradition in adventurous ways’ in
Walter Hussey by Graham Sutherland. The Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
September 2016 35
1982, the year of his ‘All Wisdom is from the Lord’. He, along with the majority of the names above, is also conspicuous as not being primarily a Church musician, thus illustrating SCF’s designedly more widely-ranging appeal. All the same noted Church musicians do make equally valuable contributions, and latterly a most welcome and encouraging trend has seen past and present members of our own three choral foundations invited to extend their association in this way. Long may it continue.
Before leaving the subject of commissions altogether, it was a minor disappointment to your writer to look back and discover that Patrick Gowers’ ‘Viri Galilei’, a memorable and atmospheric work performed in Salisbury in 1988 (and 1997) which has also gone on to enjoy regular performances elsewhere, was not in fact an SCF commission, having been written for the consecration of the new Bishop of Oxford at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1987. It remains however a striking example of the sort of work that our three choirs can tackle together, but not alone. Also I doubt if anyone present on the day in Winchester in 1987 when John Tavener assumed control of the rehearsal of one of his own pieces, (not, as it happens, a newly commissioned one), will ever forget it. Clothed in white suit, blond locks flowing,
he truly cut an almost Messianic figure conducting some of his characteristically slow-moving music with the most expansive gestures imaginable.
Resuming the chronological thread of SCF itself, the next major innovation was the addition of a late-evening entertainment eventually named the ‘Fringe’. This would see the ‘home’ Lay-Vicars/-Clerks, customarily together with friends and other local luminaries (Bishops, Deans, Residentiary Canons, Organists, Vergers), very much in lighter mood. All manner of more or less likely things might, and still do, happen, including, on one occasion, an item by a pseudo-punk rock group1. I have even heard tell of three bearded, bespectacled, tutu-clad ballet-dancers here, in Chichester, in 1992! Surely that couldn’t be true, could it?! …
With a fairly standard pattern established, including the two concerts on the Friday and Saturday evenings now being well differentiated, the former a reflection on a theological or liturgical theme generally incorporating complementary appropriate readings, and the latter more of an out and out concert, SCF saw little fundamental change for
1 The Editor pleads guilty to that one. I recall having a mohican haircut attached to my somewhat bald pate and brandishing a Fender Stratocaster.
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quite some while. Within that framework however there was room for each host Cathedral to put something of its own stamp on things. Chichester’s insuperable space constraints have always led to a greater intimacy and the impossibility of engaging more than a small instrumental ensemble for Saturday concerts, for instance: Winchester, on the other hand, would be larger in scale, typically adding in such embellishments as an eve of Festival concert with full Choral Society and Symphony Orchestra forces: and Salisbury has traditionally been the regular home of the polychoral 40-part Motet. Initially at least the copies of Tallis’ ‘Spem in alium’, for example, were of such magnitude that they almost totally concealed the smaller Choristers trying to manoeuvre them and sing from behind an apparent wall of sky blue paper! With that particular work also containing two bass parts in each of its eight five-part choirs, i.e. more than our three choral foundations could muster up in total, alternatives were occasionally required. I personally can recollect singing in the same ‘choir’ as an ex-King’s Singer, he not actually singing, but playing a double-bass!
With SCF patently thriving in the way that it was, others elsewhere paid it the greatest compliment by seeking to follow its example. So it was that more Festivals were instituted along broadly similar lines, often instigated by people whose first-hand experience of SCF, before moving on to pastures new, had allowed them to appreciate such events’ intrinsic value. Among these have been Festivals involving the Northern Cathedrals, the Borders Cathedrals and the West Riding Cathedrals (whose very name gives away that it started before the national administrative re-organisation of 1974). Several are still extant, though not the latter which was discontinued after an unseemly internecine wrangle between cloth and console (distantly echoing the original SCF’s own 1932 experience).
The next revision of SCF’s format came about in 1994, that being the year of the first wholesale indigenous contribution from the female of the species. This necessarily brought about a further expansion of the Festival’s schedule, and not solely on account of having effectively to accommodate four, and then five, choirs rather than just three. In the interest of aspiring towards as whole a truth as possible, one is compelled to record that finding a satisfactory solution to this issue led to one of SCF’s rather less harmonious episodes. That particular storm was however weathered, the distaff side has duly become an integral element of the Festival and
SCF has both survived and gone on to renewed robust health.
And now, 50 years on, what of temporal life? Well, Routemaster buses are still plying their trade in London, though in drastically reduced numbers and only on stretches of a selected handful of routes which can be branded and marketed as ‘heritage’, or when hired for private occasions. As to more serious matters, our planet is still far from being war-free, though its theatres now are not necessarily the same as previously (aficionados of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will already be aware however that conflict in Afghanistan is certainly nothing new, that being the country from which Dr John Watson had only recently returned after military service before embarking on his lengthy association with Mr Sherlock Holmes). Nor sadly are oppressive régimes yet a thing of the past. The biggest single change in day-to-day life over the past half-century however just has to be the IT revolution and the increasingly all-pervasive thrall it exerts, all of which is not to deny its many attendant benefits. Concomitantly words such as ‘spam’ and ‘wireless’ have come to mean something totally different from hitherto, although I did read recently (and serendipitously perhaps) that spam fritters are still staple fare in, of all places, a Benedictine convent! Whether in the world of 1960 or 2010 or whenever, events such as SCF continue to fulfil a vital perennial need for what they offer by way of spiritual nourishment. The exact proportionality of religion/worship, music/art or friendship/unity at the source of the memories taken away from this, or any year’s, Festival will doubtless be different for each and every individual attending, whether as composer, performer, cleric, official, volunteer helper or member of a congregation/audience. In the midst of all the thoroughly justifiable anniversary celebrations, one should yet be mindful that this year’s SCF is also taking place against the rare, if not unprecedented, background of a currently serving member of one of our choral foundations having sadly and suddenly passed away since last year’s.
In conclusion may I firstly thank most warmly those who have assisted me in compiling this attempt at an overview. They will know who they are, and I will not risk invidiousness by mentioning any individuals by name. Also I apologise if anyone’s particularly cherished SCF memory has not found a place here: the seam of SCF is a very rich one to mine, and space regrettably finite. Finally I find I can do no better than quote from another former Dean of Chichester, The Very Reverend Robert Holtby, in his message
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for the 1989 SCF programme in Chichester, his last Festival before retirement. “There are no happier memories than those of the annual experience of SCF. It is essentially to do with Cathedral music, past and present, and therefore with worship. We seek to revivify the old and to welcome the new, eschewing nostalgia in the one and novelty for its own sake in the other. One more glimpse of God is given through heavenly harmony, and our vision enriched. May we ever safeguard this treasure, and may it always be an instrument of love”. And then in turn quoting from Chichester poet William Collins, “whose memorial by the great Flaxman is in our beloved Cathedral”,
and who resided in the Royal Chantry building which now houses Chichester Cathedral’s Offices (and where your writer also dwelt during his very first year in Chichester, possibly, so I was led to understand at the time, in the very same rooms as Collins!),
“O music! Sphere-descended maid,
Friend of Pleasure, Wisdom’s aid”.
Spiritual nourishment indeed.
Geoffrey Simmonds was a tenor lay vicar of Chichester Cathedral choir from 1976-1996 and is a regular contributor to the Southern Cathedral Festival brochures.
Australian Correspondent’s Report
2016 Annual Festival Service
We wish to remind Australian members that the 2016 Guild Festival Service will be held at the Guild Church, St John
the Evangelist Anglican Church, Gordon, at 3pm on Sunday 23rd October. The order of service, with the theme, Laudate (stolen or borrowed!) has been prepared by the Rev’d Dr Daniel Dries, rector of the Anglican Parish of Christ Church St Laurence, Railway Square. There will be choral and instrumental music in the service as well as congregational singing. We are delighted to report that Sheryl Southwood, director of music at St Paul’s Anglican Parish, Burwood, will conduct a combined choir drawn from St John’s and St Paul’s parish choirs, the St Paul’s Vespers choir and The Cathedral Singers, among others. Several of our study candidates are in line to be presented with Guild awards.
After some toing and froing via the ether, our special guests at the service will be our esteemed Laudate editor, Michael Walsh, and his wife Elisabeth. Their Australian visit should provide opportunity for meetings and social contact with local members, exchange of ideas, and opportunity to show our appreciation for Michael’s work for Laudate and The Guild. It is hoped our guests will visit Newcastle, Canberra and Bathurst, and at the same time get to see some of our sights and so-called ‘sunburnt’ country at a time when it isn’t characteristically affected by deluge, drought or bushfire – fingers crossed!
At the Guild ChurchRecent happenings of note were an evensong with viol consort and a ‘Songs of Praise’ special event on 14 and 26 August respectively.
The 14 August evensong was sung by the St John’s Evensong Choir, an auditioned group catering for singers who are not able to commit to regular rehearsals and services. This service with viols a re-run of a well-received event of a few years ago featuring Purcell’s evening canticles. On this occasion, choir and consort tackled Gibbon’s Short Service and anthem Behold, Thou hast made my days.
‘Songs of Praise’ provided an opportunity to focus on hymns in their own right, outside the context of Mass or the Office, and learn more of what is behind the texts, tunes and their pairings. The congregational hymns were in keeping with the theme of ‘Light’ and were accompanied by the St John’s director and assistant director of music, Dr Brett McKern and Nicola Chau with something of the history of each presented by our Australian subwarden Bishop Hurford. The St John’s Parish Choir, St John’s 8 am Singers and The Cathedral Singers joined forces in the hymns, the St John’s choirs sang O Christ, who art the Light and Day to a Mode viii plainsong tune as the introit and TCS presented Holst’s Turn back, O man.
Have you recently had a noteworthy church music-related event in your parish that would be of interest to fellow Guild members? If so, please feel free to forward a short article and photograph to <[email protected]> for inclusion in the correspondent’s report.
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Nicola Chau, St John’s Evensong Choir, viola da gamba players and Dr Brett McKern at the 14 August evensong. Photo: Padraig Byrne
The Cathedral Singers, St John’s parish choirs, Bishop Hurford and TCS patron Sir Trevor Garland AM after Songs of Praise on 26 August. Photo: John Ross Edwards
Corporate Member: The Cathedral SingersThe Guild of Church Musicians in Australia presently has three corporate members : The Cathedral Singers, an independent ecumenical choir, Holy Name Schola of Holy Name Catholic Parish, Wahroonga, and the Anglican Parish of St John the Evangelist, Gordon, the Guild Church in Australia. In the course of the next few editions of Laudate,
through a short article on each, it is intended to highlight their histories and activity. In this edition we begin with The Cathedral Singers.
The choir was set up by Mrs Shirley Mills in 1989 at the suggestion of the then-Dean of St Andrews Angl ican Cathedral, Sydney. Bishop Ken Short had recently taken up the appointment of Dean, and recommended that the Cathedral have a second choir to deputise for the main choir during holiday breaks. Shirley already held a position at St Paul’s Anglican parish in
Wahroonga, but agreed to implement the new choir. From the outset, Bishop Short’s vision was that for this second choir, ‘the basis will be that their contribution will be in the form of worship
rather than performance”. This emphasis remains today–the choir did and still does occasionally sing in recital but remains first and foremost a liturgical choir.
Fourteen singers were chosen by audition from June–August 1989. It appears tenors and basses were the last positions to be f illed, but their f irst deployment was at the service referred to as ‘Evening Prayer’ in the Order of Service, at 7 pm on Sunday 22nd October. Their designated accompanist was Craig Warton.
The initial requirement was for TCS to sing for fourteen services a year, but additional work was soon to come their way, partly stemming from Shirley’s realisation that, to raise the standard and remain viable, the group needed more opportunities to sing. (This was the beginning of what today is TCS’s primary function: to sing cathedral-style choral music in the liturgical context wherever it is wanted, in parishes of all denominations.) So too came donations, an expanding library of music and the need for a public relations officer and committee.
It wasn’t long before the choir was singing for more functions, charitable events and services in other
September 2016 39
churches than in the cathedral itself. Newspaper clippings from the 1990s in choir archives contain articles and photographs of the choir in several social columns and, in the pages of the Blue Mountains Gazette, even in the ‘Entertainment & Dining’ section!
Shirley Mills retired as director in 1997 and their second accompanist, Eric Peterson, a St Andrew’s lay clerk and deputy organist, was appointed to the position. Visits to larger country towns in regional NSW and a tour of New Zealand in 2004 were highlights. Shortly after the New Zealand trip, Eric Petersen resigned from his role at St Andrews, including directorship of the choir. TCS became an independent ecumenical choir and incorporated body at this time, a process requiring much thought and consideration of financial, legal and administrative issues. ‘Cathedral’ was retained in the name, also after much thought, as the core repertoire and style of its music remained the same.
After changes at St Andrew’s Cathedral and incorporation, the choir (and its substantial library!) moved base to the Anglican parish of St Paul’s Burwood for a short time, then again in 2008 to what is now the Guild Church, St John the Evangelist, Gordon, though continuing to deputise at St Andrew’s among many other commitments. Other achievements include several commercial recordings and a second placing in the City of Sydney Eisteddfod. (TCS is still a ‘choir in residence’ at the Guild church, where it rehearses weekly and sings several times a year, and remains appreciative of the parish’s ongoing support including that of rector and Guild chaplain Fr Keith Dalby.)
In 2005, Brett McKern became the choir’s new director and principal accompanist. TCS applied for recognition on the Register of Cultural Organisations and, as a result, were able to accept tax deductible donations. In 2008, Dr Ian Dicker became their patron.
TCS was able to appoint its first organ scholar, Sian Gardner, in November 2006 and became the first Australian corporate member of the Guild in 2007. Stacey Yang followed in Sian’s footsteps as organ scholar from 2008–2009. Three choral scholars came later in 2010–2011, sopranos Kathleen Miller-Crispe and Adriana Crugnale and tenor David Shergold who completed his ACertCM during his time with TCS and also served for a period on the Guild’s then Australian Advisory Council, now the Australian Council.
Under Brett McKern’s direction, TCS made singing tours of English cathedrals and churches in 2008 and
2011, both enormous undertakings, each requiring nearly two years to plan. Amongst many other engagements, TCS was able to sing at the then-Guild Church of St Katharine Cree in 2008 and for the annual Guild membership promotion evening hosted by President Dr Mary Archer in her London home.
Following Brett’s resignation taking effect at the end of 2011, directorship of the choir is now in the hands of Jim Abraham, an ‘ex-pat’ from Guernsey and former organ scholar at York Minster who jokes that his Australian trumpet-player wife Melissa came for a holiday and brought him home as a souvenir! Following Dr Dicker’s sad but peaceful passing in late 2012 at the age of 83, Sir Trevor Garland AM, the former Solomon Islands’ Honorary Consul-General in Sydney, became patron. TCS has often enjoyed his hospitality when singing for annual ‘Carols at the Consulate’ for members of the Solomon Islands and diplomatic communities, where they have also been entertained by spectacles generally not seen in church, such as expert displays of Solomon Islands fire dancing!
TCS is of course always interested in hearing from potential new members. The choir’s web site is at <http://www.cathedralsingers.org.au> where anyone interested in auditioning can find contact details for director Jim Abraham or admin committee secretary Jan Kneeshaw.
It is very hard to summarise such a history without the story becoming a mere shopping list of names, dates and places that seems an inadequate reflection of the time, effort and sheer hard work put into the choir over the years by its many, many past and present members in support of church music tradition. TCS in its 27th year continues to travel throughout greater Sydney to sing its core repertoire in the liturgical context in churches ranging from St Mary’s (Catholic) Cathedral and Christ Church St Laurence (Anglican) in the Sydney CBD to St Alban’s Anglican Church in Leura in the Blue Mountains and many assorted parishes in between. (The annual trip to Leura for Advent lessons and carols has been a fixture for about 24 years!) It continues also to travel to regional centres such as Mudgee, Bathurst, Canberra, Yass and Goulburn, to present occasional recitals of sacred music and to sing for (mostly) sacred and (a few) secular carol events, the secular occasionally resulting in some colourful experiences, Christmas falling at the end of the working year and start of summer holidays as it does in Australia!
Neville Olliffe
Australian Correspondent
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1 Three directors cut the TCS 25th Anniversary cake – Brett McKern, Shirley Mills and present director Jim Abraham – while patron Sir Trevor Garland AM looks on.2 Solomon Islands fire dancing is not TCS’s only colourful extra-liturgical experience … assaulted by clowns outside Leicester Cathedral in 2011.3 … and Christmas carolling, Australian style …
4 Matching vodka, lime and lemonades on the house – half-time break at carols for a Christmas function in a Paddington pub on Sydney’s famous Oxford Street.5 Outside the premises of street carolling sponsor Benefit Cosmetics, Oxford Street, Paddington.
6 Christmas carols at Customs House, Circular Quay complete with – what else – Santa Claus and Vikings! (We think the Vikings were launching a new brand of ‘boutique beer’.)
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From the Editor of Laudate
How quickly Summer fades!
Several of you have commented on Timothy Storey’s excellent articles for us and carrying on the theme of Charles Wood, I’m delighted to present Jeremy
Dibble’s transcript of a lecture he gave in July to the Southern Cathedrals’ Festival here in Chichester. Tim has also expressed some controversial opinions about ‘real’ Christmas carols which you might care to respond to in time for our January edition.
Please do get the two important dates into your diaries which the Registrar has given opposite: 22 November for the Annual Presentations and 5/6 May for the AGM in York.
If you’re free, we’d love to welcome you there on both occasions.
With every good wish to you all
It is worth mentioning that all opinions expressed in LAUDATE are the personal views of the individual writers and not necessarily
the official view of the Guild of Church Musicians itself.
CONTENTS
Notes from the Registrar ................................................................................................................... 1
Ancient and Modern: The ‘Janus-Like’ chemistry of Charles Wood’s Church Music
~ Professor Jeremy Dibble .........................................................................................................2
An Island Cathedral’s Musical Renaissance ~ Peter Litman ....................................................8
Church Music Future ~ Jon Payne ................................................................................................ 12
The Archbishops’ Award (revised) ~ Hugh Benham ................................................................. 14
My Favourite Hymn Tune ~ Humphrey Clucas ......................................................................... 15
John Taverner – an Introduction ~ Hugh Benham ................................................................... 17
Obituary: Megan Inglesant ~ Rt Revd Richard Fenwick .......................................................... 22
News from St Michael’s Cornhill .................................................................................................... 24
Goodbye HSBC, hello Unity Trust Bank ~ Robert Andrews .................................................... 25
Letters to the Editor ........................................................................................................................... 26
Campaign for REAL Carols : a personal view ~ Timothy Storey ............................................. 27
‘Just do it nicely’ – Harry Bramma at 80 ~ Timothy Storey ..................................................... 29
The Southern Cathedrals’ Festival : the first 50 years ~ Geoffrey Simmonds ................... 33
Australian Correspondent’s Report ................................................................................................ 37
YOUR ARTICLES AND OPINIONS ARE EAGERLY SOUGHTIt would be good to receive more feedback from Guild members about what you want to see in Laudate.
You are welcome to contact the Editor by any of the following means:By post at 5 Lime Close, Chichester, West Sussex PO19 6SW
Tel: 01243 788315 or email: [email protected]
Do visit us on the internet at www.churchmusicians.org
Front cover: The [Australian] Cathedral Singers, after the first engagement of their 2011 England tour : Vigil Mass at Westminster Cathedral
Back cover: The restored organ console of St Anne Limehouse – a Gray and Davison of 1851 by kind courtesy of Barry Williams
The National Collegeof Music & Arts, London
Patron: Huw Edwards BA(Hons) HonFNCM BAFTA Award 2005 Royal Television Award 2005
President: Jeffery Fraser FRCO LRSM AMusA
Principal: Michael Walsh DMus GTCL FTCL HonFNCM HonGCM FGMS
Director of Studies: Andrew Wilson BMus(Lon) PGCE
Development Director: Paul Cheater BA ACP FCollP HonFNCM FGMS Cert.Ed
Finance Director: Michael Feben-Smith BEd(Hons) FGMS HonFNCM
The National College of Music & Arts, London was established well over 100 years ago and specialises in external music examinations and speech subjects. The College has music exam board centres throughout the United Kingdom and in some countries overseas.
Diplomas in all subjects up to the level of Fellow are available. Further details may be obtained from [email protected] or visit the College’s website: www.nat-col-music.org.uk.
Established 1894Incorporated 1898
Patrons: Rt Revd & Rt Hon Dr Richard Chartres, Lord Bishop of London Professor Dr Ian Tracey, Organist Titulaire of Liverpool CathedralMaster: Dr David Bell Chairman: Professor Dr Maurice Merrell Secretary General: Dr Michael Walsh Treasurer: Dr Andrew Linley
The Guild of Musicians and Singers was formed in Oxford in June 1993 with the aim of bringing together amateur and professional musicians in working and fraternal ways. One major aim has always been to encourage young musicians in the pursuit of their studies and the Guild has set up a fund with bursaries for students to help them with examination fees and other aspects of their careers in music. The Guild is non-denominational and covers all genres of music. However, we do have a large church music based membership and we try to encourage and support young organists, as there is such a shortage.The Guild has many distinguished musicians among its Hon Fellows, including Sir Mark Elder, Dr Vasily Petrenko, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Dr. Francis Jackson, Andrew Carwood, Benjamin Grosvenor and Rick Wakeman. Our retiring Master, Dr David Bell, will be giving a talk at our next General Meeting at Allhallows-by-the-Tower at 2pm on the 15th October 2016. Academic Dress is available and membership is £15 a year. Further details are available from the Guild’s website: musiciansandsingers.org.uk.
www.
Laudate
The Magazine of the Guild of Church Musicians
No 90 September 2016Laudate is typeset by Michael Walsh HonGCM and printed by Express Printing Ltd,
Elbridge Farm Business Centre, Chichester Road, Bognor Regis, West Sussex PO21 5EF
The restored organ console of St Anne Limehouse - a Gray and Davison of 1851
