2017 is the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation

Sunday 20^th August, 11.15 am

Choral Matins with glorious music sung by St Mary’s Choir

Short Address by The Revd Will Gibbs: ‘What does the Reformation means for us today?’

All welcome

Music for Choral Matins by Damian Cranmer

No Choral Evensong in August, but, a little over a year after this column first called for it, we are to get a Choral Matins. Many thanks to Jonathan and Will. Firstly, though, are you for one or two ts? I’m for only one because of the linguistic link back through the French matin to the Roman god of the morning, Matuta. But there’s more to it. The first Prayer Book of King Edward VI of 1549 has “An order for mattyns dayly through the yere”, but elsewhere uses Matins. I can find no mention of Matins in the second Prayer Book of 1552, which uses only “Morning Prayer”. And the only reference to “Mattins” (and, for that matter, Evensong as well) in the 1662 BCP is in the table of Proper Lessons for Sundays and Holy-Days. The order of service is for Morning Prayer, and the psalms are set for use at Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer. All of which makes me wonder why Matins remains such a familiar term for the traditional morning service.

The Morning and Evening Prayers, or Matins and Evensong, of the Prayer Books of Edward VI were a skilful reworking of material from the canonical hours, Matins from Matins, Lauds and Prime, Evensong from Vespers and Compline. The shape of each is the same, Confession and Lord’s Prayer, Preces, portion of Psalter, two lessons, two canticles, Apostles’ creed, Responses, collects, anthem and prayers. The Preces and Responses are identical in both services, and we shall sing the setting of William Smith of Durham. Smith (1603-1645) is, as far as I’m concerned, unknown except for these responses, but it was these responses which led the way for the introduction, in the 20th century, of the more adventurous settings which dominate today’s choral services. Smith’s remain the most recognisable of the more elaborate settings.

A hundred years ago, most cathedrals had sung Matins and Evensong every day of the week. Evensong continues to thrive, but Martin Thomas in his book English Cathedral Music and Liturgy in the Twentieth Century makes an interesting comment on the demise of regular weekday Matins:

The reasons for this decline [as claimed by the paper The Present State of Cathedral Music of 1934] were not connected to the growing liturgical emphasis on the Parish Communion and its cathedral equivalent: ‘there is no evidence…. that the decline in the practice of singing Matins daily is due to the singing of Holy Communion instead’. Rather, it was a combination of the difficulty of retaining lay clerks unless they had independent means, and the growing unwillingness of head-teachers and parents of the choristers to allow choristers to miss such a large part of the school day, that had been the most significant factors in the decline.

On Sundays, both in cathedrals and parish churches, the history is quite different; gradually throughout the 1900s, Communion took over from Matins as the main Sunday morning service. It would be interesting to know when regular Choral Matins stopped in Redbourn. Any former members of the choir with memories? When I played in Petersfield in the 1970s we had weekly Communion and Matins, both sung with choirs – difficult then, and unsustainable for long.

Matins, and particularly the Te Deum, were the natural vehicle for public celebration until well into the last century with the Festival Te Deums of Vaughan Williams and Britten, and the Coronation Te Deum of Walton as notable examples. Handel wrote Te Deums to celebrate the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) and victory at the battle of Dettingen (1743). I, for one, have little idea of the significance of these events, and there may be others who know of them only through the music. There is some evidence that at the time the British public was less interested than the Hanoverian exiles. So, pace Shakespeare, Handel’s music after 300 years “gives life to” these unmemorable events.

If you’re going to revive Matins, you can’t do better than go for the canticle settings by Stanford, and we’ll sing his Te Deum and Jubilate in C. Stanford knew that, if you were going to get home for lunch, you needed not to dwell too much over the text of the Te Deum, and there is no repetition of the words. But as always Stanford is able to create a satisfying form by repetition of musical material. The Jubilate ends with the same jubilant Gloria, characterised by antiphonal effects between choir and organ, as the more well known Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis from the same service. The anthem is “O thou, the central orb” by Charles Wood (1866-1926). Like Stanford, he was an Irish composer though from Armagh in the north, and I have mentioned before how the Celts managed to avoid the excess of sentimentality of the English Victorians. Think of the wonderful Welsh and Irish hymn tunes of the period. Wood has contributed many of the most enduring pieces of church music of the early 20th century, and “O thou, the central orb” is one of his best.

In the month of Isobel’s and my Golden Wedding, Jonathan has kindly offered to play the piece that my father wrote for our marriage in August 1967. So Philip Cranmer’s ‘Toccata for a Wedding’, published by OUP in 1969, will be the voluntary.

Damian Cranmer

First an update on last month’s column: within a week of writing “although we don’t (yet) applaud sermons and anthems”, I was in an Anglican church where the congregation burst into spontaneous applause at the end of the anthem!

And so to the music for our July Evensong. The responses will be sung in the setting by Thomas Tomkins (1572-1656). These responses are not as well known as, particularly, those by Byrd and William Smith of Durham, although they are now quite regularly heard on the BBC’s Choral Evensong. Tomkins is interesting because he outlived his fellow Elizabethan and Jacobean composers by more than 30 years, long enough for his post as organist at Worcester Cathedral to become redundant when the city surrendered to parliamentary forces in 1646. By this time he had been in post for 50 years and I had always thought of him as happy to serve his time away from the capital, a bit like Weelkes in Chichester (more about him when Jonathan does his Hosanna or Alleluia, I heard a voice). These two composers interest me at the moment because, in looking at the music sung at Christ Church, Oxford from the 1880s, when such records began, I have found neither mentioned until the 1920s, whereas Tallis and Gibbons, to a lesser extent Byrd, and even Richard Farrant, of composers from the same period, feature strongly. One reason could be that neither Tomkins nor Weelkes was included in Cathedral Music, a collection of nearly 250 pieces compiled by William Boyce in the 1760s. But in Tomkins’ case, it was not because he was stuck in Worcester. In fact he was a member of the Chapel Royal as singer and organist and must have spent much time in London. His madrigals were probably better known than his church music, of which his son made a collection after his death.

We sing the canticles to Darke in F. Harold Darke (1888-1976) spent 50 years as Organist at St Michael’s, Cornhill (1916-1966) and is best known for his setting of the carol ‘In the bleak midwinter’. I associate this piece with King’s College, Cambridge, and Darke spent four years of the Second World War as Acting Director of Music there in the absence of Boris Ord; but now I check my copy I find that it was copyrighted in 1911! So the best I can hope for is that he took it with him to Cambridge! Of the complete service in F from the 1920s, the setting of the Communion is perhaps even better known than the evening canticles. Cathedral choirs these days regularly sing the Latin masses of Byrd, Palestrina, Victoria, Haydn and Mozart within the modern Eucharist, and it is a measure of the enduring quality of the music of Harold Darke, who cannot be said to have made much of an impression as a composer outside church music, that his setting of the Book of Common Prayer words for the Communion still finds a place in the repertory. The modern words of Evening Prayer have not, by and large, caught the imagination of composers and, in sung services, “My soul doth magnify the Lord” is more likely to be replaced by “Magnificat anima mea Dominum” than by “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord”. It’s not exactly the ultimate test, but Wikipedia gives only the Latin and BCP texts! Darke’s setting is very varied with textures from solo lines to double choir in eight parts. The organ of course plays an important role and it’s interesting to see how much of it isn’t “in F”: the whole of the Nunc Dimittis, until the Gloria, is in D minor.

The anthem is ‘Sing praise to God who reigns above’ by Percy Whitlock, of whom I have written a couple of times recently. The words are taken from the English Hymnal (a hymn not in HON) and are a translation of a 17th century German chorale, Sei Lob’ und Ehr’. Whitlock set three verses of the EH hymn, but ended each verse with the refrain from the first “To God all praise and glory” and in each case this is the climax of the verse. The piece was written for the Diocesan Choirs’ Festival at Rochester Cathedral in 1928. I mentioned the equivalent festival at St Albans in the 1960s last month. These festivals grew out of the Choral Revival of the 1840s and were held at both diocesan and national level. At one time up to 5000 singers would take part in huge events at the Crystal Palace; in 1987 the Royal School of Church Music was able to gather 850 singers at the Albert Hall to celebrate its Diamond Jubilee. And even today, the diocese of Salisbury maintains its June Festival with a history of over 150 years.

The voluntary is the first movement of JS Bach’s Sonata in C BWV529. This is the fifth of a set of six pieces often known as trio sonatas because they use the texture of the instrumental works by composers such as Corelli, often two violins and continuo. On the organ the two hands play on different manuals partly to get matching but different sounds, but also to keep out of each other’s way – the right hand is sometimes lower than the left. Meanwhile the feet provide a harmonic bass. So there are three independent melodic lines and, although you are playing only three notes at any one time, the interaction of their independence produces a challenge which I find completely impossible! My compliments to the organist!

Damian Cranmer

This month I’ll start at the end – with the voluntary. What is a voluntary and for whom is it voluntary? The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (that’s the one in only two volumes of over 3500 pages each) gives a meaning up to the Reformation of “music added to a piece at the will of the performer”, leading to “an organ solo played before, during, or after a church service….” from the early 18th century. The playing of such a piece, particularly at the end of a service, is voluntary for an organist only to a certain extent – it is expected. For everyone else it is entirely voluntary, clergy and choir who depart to their vestries, and congregation who sit and listen, depart, greet friends and tidy the church. And what about applause? There were times when applause would never have been considered appropriate in church, but we now applaud brides and grooms and newly baptised babies. So although we don’t (yet) applaud sermons and anthems, let’s not deny the organist appreciation for his or her playing. What about an occasional “compulsory”?

On this occasion, Jonathan plays JS Bach’s Chorale Prelude BWV651, the Fantasia on “Komm, heiliger Geist, Herre Gott” (Come, Holy Ghost, Lord God). The words of the German chorale are by Luther based on the Latin hymn “Veni, sancte spiritus”, so most appropriate for Whit Sunday, as is the anthem (see below): the tune is by Johann Walter, and Bach puts this in long notes for the feet, while the hands weave a fantasia above. If fantasia suggests random improvisation, then this is not what you get from Bach, at least on the page. Everything is carefully ordered and the semiquaver arpeggios with which the piece begins are rarely absent and, at times, treated with the precision of a fugue. The genius of Bach is to make this calculated structure sound improvisatory. Do stay and listen.

The responses are our own home-grown version of those by Richard Ayleward, now for five voice parts. The increase from four to five makes more difference than you might expect, and I am a fan of the richer texture. So, I believe, was Orlando Gibbons, and it’s one of his pieces, known only to us for four voices, but which obviously needs a fifth voice, that gives proof that some early music was reduced to fit what became the choral norm of soprano – alto – tenor – bass. Richard Ayleward (1626-1669) is a couple of generations after Gibbons, so not that “early”, but he certainly relished large scale performances. His short career took off at the Restoration with his appointment as organist of Norwich Cathedral. He must have been active during the Commonwealth because he wrote music for the Coronation of Charles II.

Our Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis is the setting in A by Sir William H Harris (1883-1973). Harris was a fine organist from an early age and held appointments in Lichfield and Oxford (New College and then Christ Church) before moving in 1933 to St George’s Windsor where he remained for 28 years. His most famous, and probably best, piece of church music is the anthem “Faire is the heaven”. The canticles in A are constructed from a few simple phrases which are adapted as necessary to new words: the openings of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis illustrate this well. In addition the two Glorias reprise the opening of their respective movements, producing a satisfying structure. In the baroque period, composers (with tongue in cheek?) made the reprise at “as it was in the beginning” (sicut erat in principio). In fact this feature was the major factor in reuniting Handel’s psalm Nisi Dominus with its Gloria from which it had become separated for well over 100 years. We sing the Harris from music contained in a booklet for the Diocesan Choirs Festival held in St Albans Abbey in 1966. There are similar booklets for 1964 in the choir library (containing Harris’ setting in A minor), which suggests that St Mary’s choir took part in these events. Anyone remember?

The anthem is Peter Philips’ “Loquebantur variis linguis”, in Catholic usage the Responsory after the second lesson at Matins of the Feast of Pentecost. The text is based on The Acts of the Apostles (ch2 v4) and can be translated “The Apostles were speaking in different languages of the great works of God as the Holy Spirit gave them utterance. Alleluia”. It’s not easy to put Philips’ life into one sentence, but here goes. A lifelong catholic who had been a chorister at St Paul’s, possibly taught by Byrd, Philips (c1561-1626) fled Reformed England in 1582 for Rome before settling in Antwerp, where he not only lost his new wife in childbirth and their daughter seven years later, causing financial disputes with his late wife’s family, but also spent time in prison having been accused (unfairly, as it turned out) of plotting against the English Queen, and eventually in 1609 became a priest, all the while composing copiously. This work is very much in the style of Palestrina, easy flowing imitative counterpoint for the main text with a more energetic and rhythmically complex “alleluia”.

Damian Cranmer