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Music Notes: Septuagesima, Third Sunday before Lent – 9th February 2020
It is difficult to believe that it is already just over seven years since the death of Richard Rodney Bennett (1936–2012) – he contrived to expire on Christmas Eve 2012. He was a remarkable composer and performer. As a student at the Royal Academy, he studied with Howard Ferguson and Lennox Berkeley, although perhaps with little evidence of this in his later works. While at the Academy (where he would later teach himself), he struck up a good relationship with the British avant garde composer Cornelius Cardew, before going to study with Boulez in Paris, who impressed him deeply, although not permanently. At that time, he was much taken with Boulez’s music, and with it, the entire serialist school. “Serial” here refers to a style of composition in which (in its classic version) a sequence of notes is defined – usually not something that most people would call a “tune” in the conventional sense – and the composer then uses this as the “input” for a work, manipulating the so-called “tone row” in a variety of ways to form the structure of the music. To be rather blunt, this doesn’t work well for many people, and it is often what people mean when they speak of “squeaky gate music”. Still, it became a very important compositional device for many years in the hands of a large number of composers. For a time, it almost succeeded in knocking most other approaches to composition out of the way. In recent years, this has changed again. Tonal music – which actually never went away – has come once again to the fore, and now serial and tonal approaches are considered respectable, although the latter tends to win with audiences overall.
Lest you be worried that we will be hearing serial music this Sunday morning, Bennett later moved quite sharply in a “tonal” – i.e. more conventionally tuneful and harmonic – direction. His range was, in any case, extensive. For example, he was completely at home creating and performing jazz. After he moved to live in New York in 1979, his jazz sessions at the Algonquin Hotel became the stuff of legend. In parallel with the jazz and his serious compositions for a host of performers, he was also a prolific and very successful film music composer. This is where he already has a strong connection with the Priory Church, because it was Bennett who wrote the music for Four Weddings and a Funeral. The last “wedding” was filmed in our church, being the one in which Duckface slugs Charles when he calls off their marriage while already standing in front of Rowan Atkinson’s vicar before our High Altar. Still, my personal favourite among his films is the last of the Harry Palmer films based on Len Deighton’s books, Billion Dollar Brain. Indeed, I value highly a menu on which he wrote me a greeting from the composer of Billion Dollar Brain, Richard Rodney Bennett. Others might love his music for the 1974 film version of Murder on Orient Express. He told me once of being outside a music shop in New York and seeing in the window a work described as Misty by Richard Rodney Bennett. Being pretty sure he had never written such a piece, he went in to examine it, and discovered that this was his main tune from Murder on the Orient Express with the words Misty, you have murder in your eyes added as lyrics. This points up a fact about most film and TV 2
music: the rights therefin belong wholly and exclusively to the production company, who can do what they like with them!
Not so the Missa Brevis, which Bennett wrote in 1990 for the Choir of Canterbury Cathedral, and which we will hear this Sunday morning. There is a fine recording of this by the Cambridge Singers, conducted by John Rutter – of whom more below when we get to Evensong. If you want to try out the Mass in advance, follow this link:
https://open.spotify.com/album/0TZwSzcjpUtmFul36kyFqo?si=Y5R7RxyqR4ODfQF1 pu27dQ
The Missa Brevis begins with the eighth track. You might like to try out the rest of the album as well, which provides an excellent survey of some of Bennett’s very best choral music in excellent performances. The mass is set for unaccompanied choir.
The Communion motet is Vaughan Williams’s much-loved micro-anthem O taste and see, which he was commissioned to write for the present Queen’s coronation in 1953. The text comes from verse 8 of Psalm 34, although the text he uses is subtly modified to make it flow more pleasingly. It is a very good example of what deceptively simple means, because its delicate and seemingly straightforward lines beguile very effectively. We begin with a soprano soloist, who sings a pleasing melody, which is all the more moving because it is pentatonic. What this means, simply, is that you can play it all on just the black notes on the piano, so that each octave of the scale has just five (that’s the penta bit – the same root as in Pentecost) notes in it. There are several interesting examples of how powerful this can be. One fine example is the slow movement of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9 – From the New World. You may associate its tune with Hovis bread or with the song Going home. Dvořák’s first stab at the melody used a conventional scale, but the final version is fully pentatonic. If you play each version, you quickly realize how emotionally powerful melodies formed from a pentatonic scale can be; and this is the case with this motet as well.
Evensong is being sung for us by the boys of St Paul’s Cathedral at the unusually early time of 15:15 on Sunday afternoon. The Responses will be sung to plainchant. The Canticles, meantime, are a unison setting: the Evening Service in C minor, by Sir George Dyson (1883–1964). Originally from Yorkshire and the son of a blacksmith, Dyson’s family had little money, but a great love for music. They encouraged him in his studies as an organist, and in due course he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. There, in 1904, he was also awarded the Mendelssohn Scholarship, established by some of Mendelssohn’s friends in London after his death. This enabled Dyson to spend some time studying in Italy and Germany. He endured harrowing experiences in the trenches of the First World War, although he did write a Manual of Grenade Fighting that was officially adopted by the War Office – an unusual side-line for so warm and humane a figure. Perhaps also rather unexpectedly in those days for someone from his background, after the War he went 3
into public school music education, working at a succession of establishments very successfully. In due course, he added teaching at the Royal College of Music to being Director of Music at Wellington College. When Sir Hugh Allen retired as the RCM’s Director in 1937, Dyson was well-placed to be appointed in his stead. He saw the college through the Second World War, even sleeping on the premises to try to ensure their safety, and eventually retired to Winchester in 1952.
We know that the setting was written in 1924 for the school where Dyson was a music master, but that leaves us with a slight problem. In that year, he came to the end of his time at Wellington School and moved on to Winchester College. So, for which of these was this intended? The brilliant Paul Spicer in his excellent book on Dyson contends strongly that it was for Wellington. There is good evidence from a much later Director of Music at the school that in 1924 there was no formal choir in the place, and that this only came into being in the 1940s. The idea, slightly more difficult to imagine happening today, was that the entire school would learn to sing this unison setting, with the organ providing accompaniment. It is certainly a sturdy work, and there is more to this than just the strong and forthright melodic lines from which it is constructed. Although a unison work might suggest to us treble voices, it was of course intended for an entire public school, from – say – 13 to 18 to sing, so “broken” male voices, even in those days when boys’ voices “broke” rather later, would have been pretty prominent. As a result, this representation of the Virgin’s ecstatic utterance in the Magnificat is undeniably butch, something of the character of the original voices seeming to have seeped into the nature of the music itself. The Nunc Dimittis is – slightly perversely, given the title of the setting as a whole – in C major, but with really marvellous sideways shifts into interesting tonal areas.
The anthem is by John Rutter (b.1945) and is one of his most popular non-Christmas choral works: For the beauty of the earth, a setting of the first four verses of the familiar hymn. Incidentally, this hymn is often seen as being primarily about nature, and so used at Rogationtide or Harvest, or whenever the creation or the environment is the subject. However, Folliott S. Pierpoint (1835–1917) wrote it for inclusion in a publication of Eucharistic hymns by the name of Lyra Eucharistica, Hymns and Verses on The Holy Communion, Ancient and Modern, with other Poems. This makes particular sense when you know that the last two lines of the first seven original verses are: Christ, our God, to Thee we raise, This, our sacrifice of praise, while the eighth and final verse runs: For Thy Virgins' robes of snow, For Thy Maiden Mother mild, For Thyself, with hearts aglow, JESU, Victim undefiled, Offer we at Thine own Shrine Thyself, sweet Sacrament Divine. Many modern hymnbooks – which anyway tend not to include all eight verses – alter the seventh line of each verse so that it ends Lord of all, to thee we raise, this our joyful hymn of praise – other bowdlerizations of Pierpoint’s original text are available. Rutter also uses this wording. The change strikes me as unfortunate. It’s not that Pierpoint wasn’t writing about the countryside; it certainly was the inspiration for the hymn. However, he moves in each verse from contemplating a blessing that we have received – the countryside, the natural world, our senses, 4 family and friends, and so on – to our response to this in the most Holy Sacrifice of the Altar. Watering this down to “just” a hymn of praise and obliterating the Eucharistic element is a real loss of important meaning.
It is a fact is that not everybody gets one with Rutter’s music, although it should also be said that most people actually do get on with it very nicely. Still, it’s always rather a surprise when anybody says “I don’t like Rutter” – meaning the music, rather than the person. To dislike all of it seems rather extraordinary, because his stylistic range is so wide. Works of great seriousness – for example, the commission for the King’s College, Cambridge carol service in 1987, What sweeter music – sit alongside strongly contrasting “light”, popular works in his overall catalogue, with much in between these extremes. The key thing is always to try to understand why he wrote each piece, because it is then much easier to understand why it is the way it is. A spectacular example of this is his Christmas piece, The very best time of year, in which it is absolutely essential to know that it was written as background music for an item in an American television show. It instantly makes sense, in a way that wouldn’t be the case if one were to think it was intended for, say, liturgical use.
With For the beauty of the earth, it helps to know that this is dedicated to Rosemary Heffley and the Texas Choral Directors Association. In fact, Rosemary Heffley died on 29th January last year after a long career in choral music in Texas. She taught at Mesquite High School (Mesquite is a suburb of Dallas), and later went to teach music education and choral singing at Texas Christian University, the University of North Texas, and Southern Methodist University. She was also one of the founders of the Children’s Chorus of Greater Dallas. From 1979 until 1981, she was President of the Texas Choral Directors Association, and in 1980, Rutter wrote this setting of part of Pierpoint’s text at her request. Knowing this context seems to make sense of the character of this piece. Although the boys of St Paul’s Cathedral have been singing this in the version for two treble lines for many years, it wasn’t really designed with the English cathedral tradition in mind, but rather picks up on the Texan context for which it was intended. Indeed, if you listen to Rutter’s recording of the four-part version with orchestra (there are multiple versions of this, testimony to its general popularity with many choirs), you will hear that it includes the use of a drumkit. You may or may not be sad to learn that this is unlikely to be the version performed on Sunday.