Program Notes
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) wrote operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces, and orchestral compositions, including nine symphonies. Strongly influenced by music of the Tudor Period (1485–1603) and English folk song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.
Vaughan Williams was born to a well-to-do family with strong moral views and a progressive social outlook. Throughout his life he sought to be of service to his fellow citizens and believed in making music as available as possible to everybody. He wrote many works for amateur and student performance. He was musically a late developer, not finding his true voice until his late thirties. His studies in 1907–1908 with the French composer Maurice Ravel helped him clarify the textures of his music and free it from German influences.
Mass in G Minor
The Mass in G Minor was written in 1921. The composer dedicated the piece to Gustav Holst and the Whitsuntide Singers at Thaxted in north Essex, but it was first performed by the City of Birmingham Choir on 6 December 1922. Though the first performance was in a concert venue Vaughan Williams intended the Mass to be used in a liturgical setting
In the late nineteenth century, England had been dominated by the German-influenced composers Parry, Stanford, and Elgar, with the maverick Delius lurking on the sidelines. It was only really with Vaughan Williams that music began to speak with a radically different, quintessentially English voice, something which modern ears now take for granted. It could be argued that Vaughan Williams’s Mass in G Minor was the first substantial, unaccompanied setting to be written with a distinctly English voice since the time of William Byrd in the sixteenth century.
Richard Terry, the consummate musician-liturgist of his generation, was delighted with the new setting: “I’m quite sincere when I say that it is the work one has all along been waiting for. In your individual and modern idiom you have really captured the old liturgical spirit and atmosphere.”
This duality between the “modern idiom” and the “old liturgical spirit” lies at the heart of the composition’s success. It takes as its starting point the sound world of the sixteenth century with its modal writing and subtle imitation, a style which Vaughan Williams had already utilized in his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. The Mass seems to reach back to a long-forgotten world, yet it is not some atavistic exercise but new music, colored by Vaughan Williams’s love of rich harmonies and made more dramatic by the juxtaposition of sinuous Gregorian-like lines with blazing choral antiphony. These effects are achieved by a scoring very similar to the “Tallis Fantasia,’” which had so gripped concert-goers at the Three Choirs Festival over a decade earlier in 1910. Two four-part SATB choirs (string orchestras in the “Fantasia”) work in dialogue with a solo SATB quartet (solo strings) who provide more personal, impassioned comment.
Herbert Howells (1892–1983) was most famous for his large output of Anglican church music. He was born in Lydney, Gloucestershire, where his father played the organ at the local Baptist church. Howells showed early musical promise, first deputizing for his father and then moving at the age of eleven to the local Anglican parish church as choirboy and unofficial deputy organist.
A formative experience for the young Howells was the premiere of Ralph Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. Howells liked to relate in later years how Vaughan Williams sat next to him for the remainder of the concert and shared his score of Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius. Both Vaughan Williams and Tudor composers, including Thomas Tallis, profoundly influenced Howells's later work.
Requiem
In 1935 Howells’s son Michael died at the age of nine, a tragedy that inevitably cast an immense shadow over the composer’s life. Until quite recently it was thought that the Requiem was composed in response to Michael’s death, but we now know that Howells composed it in 1932 or 1933, originally intending it for the choir of King’s College, Cambridge. For some reason the music was never sent to King’s, and its existence remained unknown until its eventual publication in 1980, only three years before the composer’s own death. After the tragic events of 1935, Howells increasingly associated the Requiem with his lost son, so much so that a few years later, when he was composing Hymnus Paradisi, a work specifically intended as Michael’s memorial, he used substantial parts of the earlier Requiem, re-scoring it for soloists, large chorus, and orchestra.
One of the earliest and most fundamental influences on Howells was Gloucester Cathedral, with its immense, vaulted spaces and glorious east window. Howells wrote of it as “a pillar of fire in my imagination.” He consciously set out to mirror these essentially architectural elements of spaciousness and luminosity in his music, and these characteristics can clearly be heard in the Requiem. Significantly, the main climax of the work occurs at the words “et lux perpetua luceat eis” (let light perpetual shine upon them)—a symbol of hope and comfort, confirmed in the closing pages by the final release of tension and the gradual transition to a simple, peaceful D major.
Take Him, Earth, for Cherishing
On November 22, 1963, forty-six year old John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the United States thirty-fifth President, was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. The first music performed in his memory may well have been at Boston’s Symphony Hall. People who were at the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Friday afternoon concert were given the shattering news by Erich Leinsdorf, who then conducted an impromptu performance of the Funeral March from Beethoven’s “Eroica” Symphony.
And not long after Kennedy's death, Herbert Howells was asked to write a piece for a joint Canadian-American Memorial Service. The piece, “Take Him Earth for Cherishing,” was completed the following spring and was first performed November 22, 1964—the first anniversary of Kennedy’s death—by the Choir of the Cathedral of St. George from Kingston, Ontario, in Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery.
Howells himself described his work:
“I was asked to compose an a cappella work for the commemoration [of Kennedy]. The text was mine to choose, Biblical or other. Choice was settled when I recalled a poem by Prudentius (AD 348–413). I had already set it in its medieval Latin, years earlier, as a study for Hymnus Paradisi. But now I used none of that unpublished setting. Instead I turned to Helen Waddell’s faultless translation. . . Here was the perfect text—the Prudentius ‘Hymnus Circa Exsequias Defuncti’. The motet is sung here as intended—wholly for unaccompanied voices. Formally it is roughly A-B-A; in texture variably 4- to 8-part. Tonality anchors (first and last) on B, but admits chromatic phases. . . . Finally, a near-funeral march tethered again to B, but in the more consoling major mode.”
Take Him Earth for Cherishing would then be performed at Howells’s own memorial service in St John’s College Chapel, Cambridge in May of 1983, nearly twenty years after it was first performed in memory of John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
Gustav Theodore Holst (1874–1934) was an English composer, arranger, and teacher. Best known for his orchestral suite The Planets, he composed many other works across a range of genres, although none achieved comparable success. His distinctive compositional style was the product of many influences, Wagner and Richard Strauss being most crucial early in his development. The subsequent inspiration of the English folk-song revival of the early 20th century and the example of composers such as Maurice Ravel, led Holst to develop and refine an individual style.
There were professional musicians in the previous three generations of Holst's family, and it was clear from his early years that he would follow the same calling. Unable to support himself by his compositions, he played the trombone professionally and later became a teacher—a great one, according to his colleague Ralph Vaughan Williams. Among other activities, he built up a strong tradition of performance at Morley College in London, where he served as musical director from 1907 until 1924. He pioneered music education for women at St Paul's Girls' School, where he taught from 1905 until his death in 1934.
Nunc Dimittis
This work was composed at the request of the then director of music at Westminster Cathedral, Richard Terry. It was first performed on Easter Sunday in 1915 and then promptly forgotten. According to Imogen Holst (his daughter, who was a talented composer herself), the original manuscript had been lost; however, there was a part-autograph score that enabled her to reconstruct the work. It was given its first modern performance by the BBC Northern Singers under Stephen Wilkinson in 1974 during the Aldeburgh Festival. Edward Greenfield, reviewing this concert in the Musical Times (August 1974), considered it “a reaction against The Planets (which was occupying him at the time).” He continued, “Holst's inspiration was sweetly Elizabethan, with an exhilarating bell-like Gloria.” The work was published by Novello in 1979.
The words of this liturgical piece are in Latin rather than the well-known Thomas Cranmer translation from the Book of Common Prayer. This reflects its use for the late-night service Compline in the Roman Catholic Book of Hours.
—Patricia Jennerjohn
Acknowledgements:
Wikipedia
John Bawden
