There Is Sweet Music

Welcome to tonight’s concert, and a special welcome to our San Francisco audience on the occasion, for the first time in many years, of the Guild Chorus expanding our concert set from two to three performances.

We are on The Grand Tour this season and stop this time in England, where choral music has enjoyed two eras of exceptional popularity and creativity. The first extends from about 1550 to 1700, from England’s Renaissance into the early Baroque, and the second era spans the twentieth century. Much distinguished sacred music was written, and secular music flourished as well during both the early period and the modern. I have picked some of my favorite pieces to explore both genres from the two eras. Our survey of England’s early music consists of a selection of sacred anthems followed by a set of secular songs, and the second half of the program repeats the pattern, drawing from the more recent repertoire. But one program cannot encompass all the significant English composers and trends, so please do not be too disappointed if your own favorite composer has been left out.

Early English Sacred Music

In the 1530s when Henry VIII suppressed the monasteries, cathedrals that had been under monastic control became independent and were free to employ laymen in larger choirs. To take advantage of their size, anthems were often written in textures of five to eight parts. Choirs of men and boys flourished in the larger cathedrals, establishing a tradition of excellence that persists today, and these well-trained forces, both then and now, inspired the composers whose music you hear tonight. The choristers usually sat divided into two groups on either side of the church in front of the apse in an area that became known as the “choir.” This division of the singers also lent itself well to compositions for two choruses singing antiphonally. You will hear this first in Gibbons’s “O Clap Your Hands” and again in several works after the intermission. The Church of England’s break from Rome also introduced settings of English texts. Latin church music was still composed for private use by Catholic families, and Elizabeth I did permit the singing of Latin in college chapels.

The program opens with an anthem by the great Baroque composer, Henry Purcell (1659–1695). After a boyhood singing in the choir of the Chapel Royal, where he was first encouraged to compose, he became the organist at Westminster Abbey. This entitled him to a salary and also provided the rent of a house. Soon afterward, Purcell was appointed organist of the Chapel Royal and for the rest of his short life created theater music and church anthems in the service of Charles II and then of James II, for whose coronation in 1685 he composed “I Was Glad.”

A century earlier, William Byrd (1543–1623) was known for his skill at writing in many styles, making each his own, including madrigals and songs as well as sacred forms. He, too, rose to fame quickly. Although there are no records of his childhood, it is likely that Byrd grew up far from London in Lincoln. At age 20, he was appointed organist and choirmaster at Lincoln Cathedral and, as a composer, promptly hit his stride. When recruited to the Chapel Royal in 1570, he moved to London. On top of a generous wage from his new employer, Queen Elizabeth, the chapter of Lincoln Cathedral continued to pay Byrd a quarter of his former salary for sending them, from time to time, “church songs and services.” Byrd and his equally famous contemporary, Thomas Tallis, secured a patent from the crown in 1575 for the printing and marketing of sheet music and lined music paper, a trade with quite a limited history in England up until that time. Placed at the head of their famous joint volume of five- and six-voice Latin motets on penitential texts, Cantiones quae ab argumento sacrae vocantur, was Byrd’s “Emendemus in melius,” a favorite with the public. In this motet, the composer was able to match the long, fluent paragraph of text with a homophonic style of unusual intensity.

Christopher Tye (c.1505–1573?) studied at Cambridge, taking a doctorate in music and also serving briefly as lay clerk at King’s College and later as choirmaster of nearby Ely Cathedral. His connections at the university introduced him into the court of Henry VIII in 1544, likely as tutor to the boy prince soon to be Edward VI. Tye wrote many anthems for the Chapel Royal during Edward’s and Mary I’s brief reigns, but in 1558, the year their sister Elizabeth took the throne, he returned to Ely and became a priest. “Omnes gentes plaudite,” a setting of Psalm 47 divided into two parts, is an accomplished essay in motet techniques from the continent.

One of the most important composers of the early seventeenth century, Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625) was a chorister at Kings College, Cambridge, like Tye, and also a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, like both Byrd before him and Purcell after. Having become a favorite of the court of James I, he was appointed organist of Westminster Abbey, again like Purcell, but died of a stroke just two years later. Gibbons is best known for his Anglican service music. Although famous as a pioneer of the verse anthem, which alternates sections for full choir with accompanied solo sections, he preferred the full anthem, in which he could more fully utilize his command of counterpoint. Gibbons’s eight-part “O Clap Your Hands” is a supreme example of his mastery. Note the stylistic differences between his setting of Psalm 47 and Tye’s written some 75 years earlier.

Early English Madrigals

In the fourteenth century, the madrigal was a quite particular Italian poetic and musical form. Then, in the sixteenth century, the term came into general use for musical settings of various types of secular verse. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the madrigal spread throughout Europe, becoming the most popular form of secular polyphony. It served two major social functions at that time, one public and one private. The festive madrigal, usually designed for one particular occasion, added to the spectacle at large public ceremonies. The chamber madrigal helped more or less cultivated amateurs to pass the time at court, in academe, or at home.

In 1588 an anthology of Italian madrigals was published with English translations. Based on these Italian models, the form took root in England, but in a manner that was characteristically English in expression. Thomas Morley (1557–1602), who wrote an instruction book for the encouragement of amateur singing entitled A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, is the composer chiefly responsible for grafting the Italian model onto native root stock. The madrigals that close the first half of our program tonight are by four of England’s most accomplished practitioners of the form. We sing Thomas Morley’s “Hard By a Crystal Fountain,” then “Music Divine” by Thomas Tomkins (1572–1656), William Byrd’s “This Sweet and Merry Month of May,” and finally, “Sing We at Pleasure” by Thomas Weelkes (c.1575–1623).

Modern English Sacred Music

In the nineteenth century, the vocal music that reigned supreme in London was opera, mostly foreign opera. Yet the churches still continued the tradition of men-and-boys choirs, and madrigal societies kept alive the practice of singing in small groups. The rebirth of English music late in the nineteenth century came about not in London, but in provincial England, where the formation of choral societies and the growth of music festivals was based on the popularity of oratorio, rather than opera. Starting in the mid-1860s, these festivals provided unusual opportunities for such leading composers as Parry, Stanford, and Elgar to produce new choral works.

Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924), with Morning, Communion and Evening Services in B flat, composed in 1879, set a higher standard in English church music than had been achieved since Purcell’s time, two hundred years earlier. As a professor of composition at both the Royal College of Music and Cambridge, he taught the next two generations of English composers, among them Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, and Herbert Howells. Stanford was well established as a composer just after the turn of the century, in 1905, when Trinity College, Cambridge, commissioned the Three Motets, Op. 38, from which we sing “Coelos ascendit hodie” for double choir.

Herbert Howells (1892–1983), who studied at the Royal College of Music under Stanford and later taught there for 60 years, did not think of himself as a religious man, yet he is most remembered today for his church music. Hymnus Paradisi, a requiem scored for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, is considered his masterpiece. He wrote it in 1938, three years after his nine-year-old son died of spinal meningitis. Twelve years later, at the prodding of his friend Ralph Vaughan Williams, he allowed it to be performed, and the successful premiere led him to compose other works for large forces. What was not known then is that in 1936, right after the tragedy, Howells’s grief had also inspired another very personal, heartfelt work. For 45 years, until he was nearly 90, the Requiem you will hear tonight remained hidden away in his files. Since its publication, this exquisite work has found a permanent home in the repertoire of choirs worldwide.

At the end of the twentieth century John Tavener (b.1944) emerged as one of England’s leading voices in sacred music. In 1985 he wrote “A Hymn to the Mother of God,” scored for two six-part choirs, on a text from the Russian Orthodox liturgy, in memory of his mother. It is, like much of his music, heavily influenced by his orthodox religious practice and by the avant-garde trends in music of minimalism and mysticism. Tavener has imbued the piece with a transcendent beauty.

Modern English Choral Songs

Of England’s twentieth-century composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) may be second in renown only to Britten. He was active throughout his career as a composer and also as a teacher, conductor, and administrator. His interest in composing began early, but he progressed slowly. Vaughan Williams studied at home and abroad well into the first decade of the new century before his distinctive voice began to emerge in 1910 with Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, for string orchestra, a personal favorite of mine. From then on, his style kept evolving as he turned out a steady stream of new works in all musical genres. Vaughan Williams’s Three Shakespeare Songs is a late work written shortly after his Sixth Symphony and his great operatic masterpiece, The Pilgrim’s Progress. The songs were specially composed for the National Competitive Festival of the British Federation of Music Festivals in 1951.

A year earlier, in 1950, Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) composed his Flower Songs as a gift for the silver wedding anniversary of friends. From the set of five songs, we sing the last two. Although forty years Vaughan Williams’s junior, Britten, too, was well into his illustrious career at mid-century. His triumphs in the prior five years included the Spring Symphony for orchestra, chorus, and soloists, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, the cantata Saint Nicolas, and the opera Peter Grimes. His success in such a variety of genres speaks to his genius.

In a return to the lush harmonies of the early twentieth century, our program “There Is Sweet Music” closes with a setting by Edward Elgar (1857–1934) of that Tennyson text. This marvel of chromatic writing starts with a long phrase in G major sung by the men’s chorus, to which the women reply with a phrase in A flat major. Although the two choirs are, in fact, notated in their separate keys throughout, Elgar’s clever use of accidentals allows the men and women to sing together much of the time without the keys clashing. The final strains, “sleep, sleep, sleep,” rocking softly back and forth between the two keys, will send you out into the night to seek the comfort of your bed.

We hope you enjoy this concert, and we look forward to sharing beautiful a cappella music from around the world with you again in June.

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