Download Music Notes 2014 ‒ Trinity Sunday Last week`s notes referred to

Music Notes 2014 – Trinity Sunday
Last week’s notes referred to something called Classical Music. It was done for want
of a better identifier in the context, but with a heavy heart. It is a most inadequate
expression. A predecessor of mine at Edition Peters, the music publishing company
where I work, once produced a series of (rather ugly) wall clocks for music shops to
buy that were emblazoned with our logo and the motto: Classical Music Needs a
Classical Edition. To say that he got it in the neck would be an understatement. Many
people objected that he surely meant a classic edition. A classical edition would surely
mean one produced in Græco-Roman antiquity. And there you have one of the
problems with Classical Music. (Actually, my predecessor was not good at these
things: he once started a marketing campaign for our orchestral music under the
slogan Playing with Peters Parts, and didn’t understand the shocked reaction.)
Until about fifteen years ago in the UK, the Music Publishers Association
differentiated between pop publishers and standard publishers. Not only was classical
radioactive, but the members of the Standard Publishers Committee often published
works not clearly identified as classical. Is the theme for The Archers or Sailing by a
form of classical music, or something else? Of course, Classic FM has long presented
film music of all kinds as classical music, and where the Dr Who Prom leaves us is
difficult to say. Nevertheless, the Standard Publishers Committee eventually defiantly
renamed itself the Classical Publishers Committee, in spite of many objections.
The major German musical organizations differentiate between U-Musik
(Unterhaltungsmusik or entertainment music) and E-Musik (ernste Musik or serious
music). They also speak of F-Musik (funktionale Musik or functional music), which
includes categories such as military marches and, alas, church music. The German
copyright law ducks this by referring to culturally important works and services.
However, the use of these terms is strongly disputed and, actually, klassische Musik is
understood, even if its meaning is as unsatisfactory in German as in English.
A similar problem exists with Renaissance music. The period we refer to as The
Renaissance was characterized by the “rediscovery” of Græco-Roman literature,
philosophy and scientific principle. In the case of music, although a stab was made
at an allusion to the Greek musical modes (or, as we might say today, scales), the
stab was almost completely wrong and half-hearted. There was simply too little
information about Greek music. Renaissance Music is a renaissance of what exactly?
Baroque Music takes its name from a parallel architectural movement, but in what
sense is the music baroque? Arguably, it is the opposite: disciplined, un-flamboyant
and tidily controlled. The period of Mozart and Haydn is referred to as the Classical
Period – and it hardly seems necessary by now to explain why this is just wrong. Are
the Romantic Period composers romantic? The Impressionist composers were perhaps
more appropriately named, while the deeply functional terms Twentieth-century
Music and Contemporary Music are at least accurate.
The human race seems to need to categorize and parcel up information – and indeed
people – into conveniently identifiable units. It is almost as though by labelling
things we can control them and get some order, and hence safety in this world.
Indeed, we attribute this tendency to God, who busily categorizes the items of
creation as they are brought into existence in Genesis. In Isaiah chapter 43 we are
told that God says: Fear not: for I have redeemed thee, I have called thee by thy name; thou
art mine. The identification by name seems important, although whether this is
because it is important to us that God should know us in this way, or because that is
how it matters to God, is a more profound issue. Of course, if one takes the view that
God knows the location of every single particle and energy unit in the entire
universe and is constantly keeping it individually in existence, our categories may
seem a little broad in comparison.
The setting at the Solemn Eucharist – a category of liturgy that is itself a category of
activity – is Missa Benedicta es by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525–1594). In
fact, the composer did not himself call it this: he simply called it Missa. When the
German musicologist Franz Zaver Haberl brought out the first complete publication
of Palestrina’s works, he was unable to identify any other source for this early work,
and named it Missa Sine titulo (Mass without Title).
Wagner – no less – thought that the setting reminded him (he put it no stronger than
this) of a famous motet by Josquin des Prez, Benedicta es, and indeed, the young
Palestrina was heavily influenced by the works of the Flemish composers in general,
and Josquin in particular, so this is scarcely surprising. The motet is a paraphrase of
the plainchant sequence of the same name. (A paraphrase, by the way, just means that
the melody is split up into sections and distributed through the piece, providing
moments of recognition in an otherwise newly composed texture.) Musicologists in
due course realised that Palestrina’s mass has indeed a close connection with the
motet – albeit not quite a straight parody (which would be a setting that quotes a
literal chunk of the earlier work as its inspiration). Once this became clear, the mass
was renamed to refer to the Josquin motet, and the labelling process was complete.
We cannot obviously be sure what Palestrina would have made of all this effort. His
Missa title is not likely to have been an attempt to hide his compositional procedure
– after all, why would he? He undoubtedly had Josquin’s music in his mind as he
wrote the setting, because he clearly alludes to it, but presumably thought the
connection between the earlier work and his own just too remote to influence its title
when it was published. For us, this title raises a slightly perverse issue: the
plainchant on which the motet is based, and indeed, the text of the motet, is from a
sequence of praise to the Virgin Mary. This would, therefore, make it a slightly
eccentric choice for Trinity Sunday. However, Palestrina didn’t identify it with a
Marian theme at all, and evidently thought it a work for general use. So, here we are,
using it to celebrate the Holy and Indivisible Trinity, only slightly foxed by a title
that bespeaks the cleverness of musicologists rather than the composer’s intention.
The voluntary at the end of the Solemn Eucharist might also seem curious for Trinity
Sunday. It is Kyrie, Gott heiliger Geist, BWV 671, by Johann Sebastian Bach, one of the
chorale preludes from the Clavier-Übung. The curious aspect is that the title refers
only to the third Person of the Holy Trinity, an odd thing to do on a Sunday that is
about the entire Trinity. Bach wrote three Preludes in this section, each centred on a
different Person of the Trinity with the chorale melody in the pedal. In this one, he
followed the pattern established by the great Italian composer Frescobaldi with an
unswerving exactness that suggests that he wanted to communicate a firmness and
resolution of faith. Given the mysterious and frankly incomprehensible nature of the
Trinity – at least in terms of really seeing it in one’s mind’s eye – a certain
resoluteness and firmness of approach seems a good approach, making this piece a
good choice for Trinity Sunday in spite of the piece’s name.
The Canticles at Evensong are the Evening Service in A by Sir Charles Villiers
Stanford (1852–1924). The more one looks into his life, the more interesting he seems
to become. Rather like Cristóbal de Morales, who increasingly seems to have been
maligned by being categorized as difficult, Stanford has also had this epithet hung
around his neck lately. It all depends on what one means by difficult. When he died
in 1924, the journal Music & Letters asked a large number of his pupils and
colleagues at the Royal College of Music to contribute memories of him. They
included Sidney Nicholson, Henry Ley, Frank Bridge, Edgar Bainton, Ivor Gurney,
Herbert Howells, George Dyson, Walford Davis, John Ireland, and Ralph Vaughan
Williams. They all agreed that he demanded only the very highest standards and
was exceedingly direct in his commentary on their efforts, dismissing them often
with a phrase such as It’s very ugly. Tear it up, dear boy, it’s no use. He was completely
opposed to redundancy – unnecessary musical waffle and padding – and disliked
modern trends, believing that Brahms represented the most avant garde that anybody
needed to be. Most of his pupils seem to have felt they never actually pleased him.
Nevertheless, re-reading their comments this week, it was striking how much
affectionate respect they had for him. Perhaps some of the reason for this was a
personal generosity and warmth described in the contribution by Samuel Liddle.
Determined to be more radical than his teacher, Liddle endured a painful year of
resistance and criticism. Eventually, tired out and fretful, he exploded at Stanford,
who listened to what he said and then left the room, returning a few minutes later
with an instruction for Liddle to go to the Principal, Sir George Grove. Now terrified
at what he had done, he obeyed, only to be told by Grove that Stanford felt Liddle
was over-tired and needed a holiday by the sea. He then handed him a generous
sum of money on behalf of Stanford, more than enough to make this possible.
Stanford very much obeyed his own precepts about no redundant musical waffle.
He composed nine settings of the Evensong canticles, four of which also have
complete settings for Matins and Communion. The remarkable thing is the freshness
of invention he brought to each: they are remarkably unlike each another. This is one
of the best-known of the nine.
The anthem is I saw the Lord by John Stainer (1840–1901), a contemporary of
Stanford’s. He is chiefly remembered as the composer of The Crucifixion, a work
which, in its day, was virtually compulsory in almost every church in the country at
Passiontide. In due course his kind of music came to be called sentimental and
labelled crushingly as Victorian. Now, Stainer and his contemporaries are being reevaluated, and this label no longer means automatic sniffiness.
Having been a chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral, Stainer eventually returned there as
Organist, having built meantime an enviable reputation as a masterly choir trainer.
The text of this anthem is partly from Isaiah’s vision of the Lord “lifted up” in the
Temple, the seraphim crying to one another Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of Hosts: the
whole earth is full of his glory, while the house was filled with smoke. To this Stainer adds
Ave, colenda Trinitas, an anonymous 11th century hymn of praise to the Holy Trinity.
The work is for eight voices split into two distinct choirs with an adventurous organ
part. It was clearly written with St Paul’s Cathedral in mind. This is very big-scale,
dramatic stuff. The evocation of the temple filling with smoke is extremely vivid and
it is worth coming just to hear this moment! If we were having Benediction or
Solemn Evensong, it would even be possible to demonstrate it for real.
Elgar brings this feast day to a conclusion with his Imperial March. This piece was
written at the request of his publishers, Novello, for Queen Victoria’s Diamond
Jubilee in 1897. It is, consequently, a fairly early piece and its style has a degree of
bombast that declined markedly later in his output. Still, a Diamond Jubilee is a
good reason for celebration, and this was undoubtedly what drove this composition.
It was performed on several occasions during the Jubilee year, and by the end of it,
the Queen must have felt she really knew the music. Incidentally, Elgar’s other
commission for that year was The Banner of St George, an account of the (actually
Palestinian) Saint’s rumoured encounter with a Dragon. It is powerful stuff and
good fun, yet it is hard to imagine any of our current composers could have been
asked to write a work on the same theme for the recent Diamond Jubilee. No doubt
this says something about the rather different way we categorize this kind of thing
now, being more likely to call it jingoism – another example of how a change in what
you decide to call something can make all the difference.