Hymnus Paradisi at 75

‘It is the blaze of a thousand suns in the Sanctus; it is a golden radiance in the penultimate chorus; and at last, to the words requiem sempiternam, it is the light of the dawn.’  So wrote the Times music critic Frank Howes after the première performance in 1950 of Hymnus Paradisi, the great choral and orchestral Requiem, and perhaps the master-work, of Herbert Howells.  This year has been the seventy-fifth anniversary of that first performance, and also the ninetieth of the bereavement which precipitated it: the death, aged only nine, of Howells’ son Michael.

‘Requiem aeternam…’  The second movement of Hymnus Paradisi, given in a memorable Proms performance on the 29th August, 2012, by the combined forces of the BBC Symphony Chorus, the London Philharmonic Choir, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and soloists, conducted by Martyn Brabbins.  The music runs on without a break into the 23rd Psalm.

The story has been much told elsewhere: of the shock of Michael’s death — in the space of only three days, from meningitis, in the middle of a holiday — of the subsequent freezing of Howells’ inspiration, of his daughter Ursula’s suggestion that he write something in Michael’s memory, of the composer’s nevertheless keeping his work private for over a decade, until at last Herbert Sumsion and Ralph Vaughan Williams persuaded him to have this ‘personal, almost secret document’ performed.  He was the conductor at that first performance, at the Three Choirs Festival at Gloucester in 1950, the day after the fifteenth anniversary of Michael’s death.  

‘The sudden loss in 1935 of an only son, a loss essentially profound and, in its very nature, beyond argument, might naturally impel a composer, after a time, to seek release and consolation in language and terms most personal to him,’ acknowledged Howells in a BBC radio talk in 1964.  ‘Music may well have the power beyond any other medium to offer that release and comfort.  It did so in my case, and became a personal, private document.’

This year’s anniversary has been marked by a number of performances, notably in Guildford, Hereford, London and Nottingham.  These have been all the more welcome because they are so rare.  For all that this is not only Howells’ own masterpiece, but arguably one of the most extraordinary works in English music — the journalist Simon Heffer has even called it ‘one of the great works of the whole musical canon, and one that stakes a claim to be the finest piece ever written in the English choral tradition’ — it is performed with vanishing rarity, perhaps because of its technical difficulty and the large forces for which it was written.  It may also suffer because of a slight ambiguity of genre — it is meant really for the rich acoustic of a church or cathedral, not a concert hall, yet is neither liturgical in nature nor an oratorio, but a kind of sacred symphonic cantata.  In any case, to have four in a year is special.

Howells at Gloucester Cathedral on the 7th September,
1950, just before conducting the first performance of
Hymnus Paradisi.  The previous day had been the fifteenth
anniversary of his son Michael’s death.
Royal College of Music, ref. LDRCM.Ph.22.77, retrieved from
http://museumcollections.rcm.ac.uk/collection/Details/collect/5038,
reproduced under CC BY 4.0 licence, cropped and enhanced slightly

I have loved this music since my mid-teens, but before this year had only heard it live once, at the Proms in 2012.  This year, impelled to seize every possible opportunity, I managed to hear it twice: at Guildford — with the Guildford Choral Society and Chichester Singers and Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jonathan Willcocks — and then in Hereford Cathedral as part of the Three Choirs Festival, with the Festival Chorus and Philharmonia Orchestra under Adrian Partington.  The performance at Guildford was magnificent, but it was at Hereford, in a seat hidden away in the south transept, that I experienced the piece, I realised, for the first time as it was really meant to be heard: that is, in a cathedral acoustic, from a distance,  possibly not even in sight of the musicians (as indeed I was not), as if overhearing, achingly anticipating, the choruses of Heaven itself.  In those great soaring spaces of the nave and transepts and chancel, with July twilight lingering in the tracery and the dusk seeping in under the high vaults, the stupendous crescendoes and climaxes had room to expand to their full proportions, to rise and fall and to be only sustained and intensified, as the composer intended, by the bone body of the church.  Only in a place like this could the music expand to its full scale.  It was, I understood at last, inseparable from the setting of a great church.  The church was part of the music, and actually implicit in the score.  Howells had made the entire cathedral his instrument.

Hymnus Paradisi is a work filled with light, the ‘lux aeterna’ of the Requiem Mass, even though this is a choral not a liturgical piece.  As Howells wrote,  ‘Light indeed touches all but one of the six movements… Even the gravest verse of the 23rd Psalm reflects it; and the [Sanctus] blazes with it’.  Crucial to that luminous effect are Howells’ radiant harmonies, and therefore, in turn, the purity of tone that goes to make them.  One thing that in consequence has marred many recordings of Hymnus Paradisi for me has been the vibrato used by the soloists.  They are naturally used to taking a leading role, but Howells uses them more as individual instruments, calling for them to emerge from and retreat into the rich overall tapestry of sound.  I was resigned, this year, for the same.  But both Charlotte Bowden at Guildford and Rebecca Hardwick in Hereford surprised and delighted me with precisely the purity and evenness that I had thought so elusive.  Rebecca Hardwick in particular seemed to convey the clarity and luminosity that was needed — that Howells surely wanted — shining definitely and brilliantly, certainly, but not dominating, and making her vital, plangent contribution to the overall sound without overdoing anything.  Hers was the simple voice of the soul entering the everlasting light.  It was profoundly moving.

I have also been meaning to mention a new arrangement of Hymnus Paradisi by Iain Farrington for the reduced forces of soloists, choir, chamber orchestra and organ.  This was first performed at Yale University in America in February 2024, with David Hill conducting.  This is extraordinary because even in this pared-down version one can hear how richly-woven the music is, how deftly-crafted — one of the wonderful things about it is that with every rendition I hear something new in it, some note or phrase I had not realised was there.  The opening of the final movement, ‘Holy is the True Light’, is particularly astonishing in this regard.  Here, too, Howells’ music resembles the intricacy and craftsmanship of the great cathedrals which, as his daughter recalled, he ‘adored’.  May the whole Howells family enter the light glimpsed in this extraordinary music.

Howells’ Hymnus Paradisi, arr. Iain Farrington, performed by the Yale Schola Cantorum, 17th February 2024, introduced by the conductor, David Hill.

Reference sources:

Christopher Palmer, Herbert Howells: A Study (Sevenoaks: Novello, 1978).

Paul Spicer, Herbert Howells (Bridgend: Seren, 1998).

Simon Heffer, ‘Herbert Howells and Hymnus Paradisi’, programme note, 2024: <https://londonchorus.org.uk/2024/01/08/herbert-howells-and-hymnus-paradisi/>.

A Double Treat for Ruth Gipps’ Birthday

This year there is even more reason than usual to celebrate the birthday of the British composer Ruth Gipps (1921–1999).  Two new records — a third and fourth volume of her orchestral music — are coming out in quick succession, both issued by Chandos Records.  Volume III, which was released last month, includes her First Symphony, which remained unperformed and unrecorded from 1942 until a BBC Radio 3 broadcast on 22nd February last year.  There is also her delightfully optimistic Horn Concerto and a triple helping of orchestral pieces: the Coronation Procession, Ambervalia and Cringlemire Garden.  Volume IV, due for release on April 11th this year, will include her elusive Fifth Symphony, along with her Violin Concerto and Leviathan for double-bassoon.   In both cases we once again have conductor Rumon Gamba and the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra to thank for their musicianship.

It is the prospect of the two symphonies that I find most exciting.  Of the five neglected symphonies of this hitherto-neglected composer, so little seemed to be said of Gipps’ First Symphony that I had imagined it would simply never be heard.  Symphony No. 5 I knew, but only from a scratchy recording of its 1982 première which, shockingly, had been its only performance until, in April 2023, Gipps Revival veterans Adam Stern and the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra stepped up to the plate with the American première.  At the second British performance a month later, I marvelled, for the hundredth time, that such wonderful music could have been so completely sidelined.  I have been waiting for years for a recording.  Now, however, with these new discs, which I have every reason to believe will match the standard of their forerunners, the putting right of a great injustice in British music will, I dare say, be more or less accomplished.  There is now every reason to hope for continued and frequent appearances of Gipps’ music on the radio, which in turn will bring her music to new ears, and hopefully encourage the programming of her music in live concerts.

As I have said before, the Ruth Gipps saga shows us how entirely and visibly an artist holding to his or her integrity may be vindicated in the end — however unlikely it may have seemed, however implacable the prejudices of fashion may have been — and it ought to give heart to all artists, writers and poets who are tempted to despair in the face of disdain or indifference.

Celebrating Ernest Tomlinson’s centenary

Today is the centenary of the birth of Ernest Tomlinson (1924–2015), the prolific Lancastrian composer of light orchestral music.  He deserves to be remembered not only for his own elegantly-crafted and uplifting music, but for his defence of the entire genre of light music when in the 1960s it fell, or was pushed, so emphatically out of fashion.  The story of his rescuing of music scores thrown out wholesale by the BBC as the Corporation of the time rushed headlong to follow new trends, and of his subsequent foundation of the Library of Light Orchestral Music in a barn on his farm at Longridge in Lancashire, contributed to my own decision to train as a professional archivist.  Having steered the Light Music Society through the lean years of the late twentieth century — during which, for some decades, there was no light music at all on BBC radio, despite, or perhaps because of, its former ubiquity — he lived to see something of a revival in its fortunes.  This remains visible not least in the continued thriving of the Light Music Society (whose membership I have enjoyed for nearly a decade), and the Library’s recent move from Longridge to the Victoria Hall in Bolton.

(There are more details of Tomlinson’s battle for light music in this biography, and also this tribute that I wrote shortly after his death in 2015).

His music helped me through the revision for my final university exams, and having written to him to tell him this, I received a very warm letter in reply, which I will treasure always.

On Friday 27th September, BBC Radio 3’s ‘Friday Night is Music Night’ will be a celebration of his music, along with others of a similar style — including Ruth Gipps!  

‘Miranda’, from an adaptation of The Tempest

The Sudden Straight Face

It is strange that one of the saddest songs in the English language should have been written by two comedians.  Michael Flanders and Donald Swann are still best known for their light comic and satirical pieces — ‘The Hippopotamus’, ‘The Gnu’ or ‘The Gas-Man Cometh’ — but when they turned their satirical eye to the Beeching Axe, the mass closure from 1963 of about a third of the British passenger railway network, they produced, in ‘The Slow Train’, for many people the definitive lament for these mostly rural branch lines, and for the way of life that was lost with them.

The song bears all the Flanders and Swann hallmarks — the deft word-play, the affectionate satire, the sense of the ludicrous — but the mood is utterly different from usual.  Seing the damage that Beeching was doing, suddenly they were serious — and indeed, in the live recording, made sixty years ago when it was all actually happening, there is, apart from a few appreciative titters at a pun or a station name, no laughter at all, only rapt silence.

This complete change of key seems to me utterly audacious.  The audience had paid for comedy, after all, yet here suddenly was tragedy, an entirely sincere farewell to a familiar feature of the national landscape, to a distinctive characteristic of our society, destroyed by human folly, with only the word-play providing the thinnest veil of wit.  Audacious, but thoroughly effective: first we are puzzled that we can’t find anything to laugh at, disconcerted to think that we might have missed a joke.  Then the inverse feeling: surprise, in the pit of the stomach, as we realise that we really are being addressed seriously.  There is a sense of having had a narrow escape, as if one has nearly walked giggling into a full and silent church.   (They’re being serious, and we thought it was going to be a joke!).  

And yet it is still satire, for Flanders and Swann had noticed, along with others since, the totally inadvertent poetry of Section 1 Part 3 of Dr. Beeching’s report, the ‘List of Passenger Stations and Halts to be Closed’ (in England, though the destruction in Wales and Scotland was just as wanton).  Buried deep behind the oily bureaucratic euphemism of the report’s title, ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’, is a list that has been called some of the most moving poetry in the language — or are ‘like names on a war memorial’, as the satirist Ian Hislop has said:

Abbey Town

Acrow Halt 

Acton Central 

Addingham 

Adlestrop 

Ainsdale 

Airmyn 

Aldeburgh 

Aldermaston 

Aldridge 

Alford Town (Lincs.) 

Alfreton and South Normanton 

Alresford (Hants.) 

Alrewas 

Altofts and Whitwood 

Alton Towers 

Ambergate 

Andover Town 

Apperley Bridge …

Of course, it is bleakly amusing that those unable to perceive the true value of railways, their marriage of elegance and efficiency, had by their very tin ear betrayed themselves in accidentally producing such moving poetry — fifth on the list is Adlestrop itself! — and Flanders and Swann, simply by transforming it into a serious song, throw this irony into definition.  They are punning away as usual, ‘The sleepers sleep…’ but the music itself has all the pathos of a folk-song.

The British passenger railway network, 1963 (left) and 1984 (right)

The Sudden Straight Face had another strategic advantage in that particular era, and that was the strength it lent to anyone making a point that was easily mocked.  This was the age of the satire boom, satire far more biting than Michael Flanders’. Then, as now, mockery was one of the vandalisers’ chief weapons; anyone who objected to the sweeping away of old things was opening themselves up to a round of scoffing (“Backward!  Nostalgist!  Move with the times!”).  But by proving that they could make an audience laugh, and indeed by laughing at themselves, they could build up a kind of credit with their wit, to be expended in an outbreak of earnestness like ‘The Slow Train’.

The person who knew this as well as Flanders and Swann was, of course, the poet John Betjeman — the man who in some ways ought to have written ‘The Slow Train’.  (In fact, my friend Maolsheachlann justifiably said he was ‘flabbergasted’ I hadn’t mentioned it when I wrote a few years ago about Betjeman’s poem ‘Dilton Marsh Halt’).  Reading A. N. Wilson’s biography of Betjeman reminded me of the occasion in 2018 when I had passed through the Halt, a tiny station of two short platforms on the outskirts of Warminster in Wiltshire.  At the time I wrote that Betjeman’s poem seemed to capture a paradoxical seam that runs through all of his work: irrepressible humour on the one hand hand, and sincere, vulnerable sorrow on the other.  It applied to his life as well: Wilson paints a picture of a man distraught at the ruination of England, acutely conscious of his personal flaws and ‘afraid of being found out’, who nevertheless craved merriment and silliness, and would gleefully assign nicknames to his friends, or throw his table-napkin over his face and howl with glee.  

John Betjeman and Flanders and Swann knew that they were operating in a culture of heavy cynicism.  Sincerity alone, from a standing start, was no good: this was precisely the age in which anyone speaking in defence of old things or high ideals would bring clanging mockery down around his ears.  But the Sudden Straight Face was their secret weapon.  First Betjeman poked fun at this tiny station, answering his own rhetorical question, “Was it worth keeping the Halt open?”…

“…Yes, we said, for in summer the anglers use it,

Two and sometimes three

Will bring their catches of rods and poles and perches

To Westbury, home for tea.”

As many as three passengers for a mile’s journey!  Clearly a vital transport interchange, we chuckle; good old Betjeman, silly old England.  But then in the final stanza comes this outburst: 

And when all the horrible roads are finally done for,

And there’s no more petrol left in the world to burn,

Here to the Halt from Salisbury and from Bristol

Steam trains will return.

Betjeman’s work derives much of its poetic power from this contrast between the gleefully satirical and the ingenuous — in some circles embarrassing — earnestness.  The man is a great jester, as Wilson’s biography shows, but there are some things in this world so serious that they snuff out even the jester’s laughter.  This is why that plangent ‘horrible roads’ and the prophecy of the return of steam, a ripe, irresistible invitation for Sixties mockery, nevertheless withstands that mockery.  The Sixties Modernists stand primed to scoff at anyone avowing a sentimental attachment to this unprofitable station, but the poet has got there first — he has already laughed gently at its ridership of ‘two and sometimes three’ passengers, and has laughed at himself for loving it.  So the love, which is serious, has now been fired by clay; by pre-empting the jeers the poet has hardened his work to withstand and outlast hostility.

I think Betjeman employs this manoeuvre to greatest effect in his poem ‘St. Saviour’s, Aberdeen Park, Highbury, London, N’ (such a Betjemanian touch to give the postal district!).  Here he begins by relating a typical Betjeman church visit, beautifully written as always, but with a hint of self-deprecation of his own style:

With oh such peculiar branching and overreaching of wire

Trolley-bus standards pick their threads from the London sky

Diminishing up the perspective, Highbury-bound retire

Threads and buses and standards with plane trees volleying by

And, more peculiar still, that ever-increasing spire

Bulges over the housetops, polychromatic and high.

Stop the trolley-bus, stop! And here, where the roads unite

Of weariest worn-out London — no cigarettes, no beer,

No repairs undertaken, nothing in stock — alight;

But then the tone changes, and the poem more becomes earnest, and highly personal:

These were the streets they knew; and I, by descent, belong

To these tall neglected houses divided into flats.

Only the church remains, where carriages used to throng

And my mother stepped out in flounces and my father stepped out in spats

To shadowy stained-glass matins or gas-lit evensong

And back in a country quiet with doffing of chimney hats.

Still there is the typical Betjeman detail, the evocation of details of the vanished past.  But now he has made himself vulnerable by writing of his parents, of the deeper, more personal connection that he has to this church.  And then he goes further.  The church is not merely an architectural curiosity, nor even a relic of family history or of a bygone age, but the House of God in which Betjeman is no passing visitor but an invited guest:

Wonder beyond Time’s wonders, that Bread so white and small

Veiled in golden curtains, too mighty for men to see,

Is the Power that sends the shadows up this polychrome wall,

Is God who created the present, the chain-smoking millions and me;

Beyond the throb of the engines is the throbbing heart of all —

Christ, at this Highbury altar, I offer myself to Thee.

So it is that the Sudden Straight Face allows Betjeman to do what I believe he generally struggled with, to write straightforwardly about his faith, in perhaps the most confident proclamation of faith he ever made (and it is nice to think that some of these lines were chosen to accompany his statue at London St. Pancras station in 2007).  By the protective layer of his self-deprecation he pre-empts any mockery or satire of these most personal things, his memories of his parents and his vulnerable faith.  Thus he shows how, even in an age of cynicism, sincerity, once whetted to a blade, cuts cleanly through cynical clinker with a strange and unequalled power.

And we, the audience, cannot deny the sincerity even to ourselves; it is almost as infectious as laughter.  By our uproarious laughter of a moment ago we have proven to each other that we have hearts — at least it has with this open, wholehearted humour of Betjeman and Michael Flanders, as opposed to the sniggering of modern comics.   If we have hearts, we have no need to pretend to be unmoved by sorrow and loss.  So it is, first by laughter and then by sighs, that we find companionship in each other.

More on ‘St. Saviour’s, Aberdeen Park’  from the Rev. Malcolm Guite.

For Ruth Gipps’ birthday…

… (born on this day in 1921 at Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex), the second movement of her piano concerto.  Charles Peebles conducts the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra; the soloist is Murray McLachlan.

I thoroughly enjoyed a performance of her horn concerto at the Cadogan Hall earlier this month (Alexi Watkins the soloist, with the Kensington Symphony Orchestra under Russell Keable).  I have now been able to attend live performances of her horn and clarinet concertos, and her fourth and fifth symphonies: the sign of a real and sustained revival in her fortunes.

Ruth Gipps: Fifth Symphony in the ascendant

The Westminster Philharmonic Orchestra will perform Ruth Gipps’ Fifth Symphony next Saturday, 20th May, at St. John’s Church, Waterloo, London.

In the whole sorry tale of the indifference and disdain shown — in official circles at least — towards the music of Ruth Gipps during her lifetime, it is the episode of her Fifth Symphony that seems to sum up the sheer bone-headedness of it all, the blindness into which fashions and fads can lead even intelligent and cultured people.

Gipps’ fifth symphony, completed in 1981, ought to have been the crowning point of her career.  The successful broadcasts of her second, third and fourth ought to have counted for something, yet Gipps had found each of these progressively more difficult to secure — and now, as she was to tell the music agent Alan Poulton, ‘the BBC promptly rejected the 5th,’ adding, ‘I am still made to submit works as if I were a student.’

In 1982, writing to Malcolm Arnold, she hinted that she had rather expected as much.  Where BBC broadcasts were concerned ‘I wait for years,’ she told him, giving several examples of apparent heel-dragging and long delays even for works approved for recording and broadcasts.  ‘So now I write for what I like,’ she said, which in the case of the fifth was a large force with plenty of winds and percussion.  She programmed the symphony in a 1983 concert given by the London Repertoire Orchestra, which she had set up to offer experience and support to newly-qualified professional players.  A recording exists of this concert which, though fairly scratchy, certainly conveys the quality of the music.  ‘It has a great big first movement,’ she told Arnold —

[…] a little tiddly 5/4 intermezzo, a rather difficult scherzo with a cello solo going up to the B above the treble clef in the trio […] and then a very odd finale – a Missa Brevis for orchestra – no singers, but tunes that fit the Latin words if you did have singers; and two listeners without scores said they could follow it through. I’m not a Catholic, by the way, but was brought up on the B minor [Mass by J. S. Bach] at College.  [1]

I think it is Gipps’ greatest symphony, the magnificent first movement being perhaps my favourite of all her musical utterances.  It has all the Gipps hall-marks — the lyrical mistiness, the angularity and spikiness, the occasional audacity in the treble register — but has less of her usual optimism, being shot through with a particular tang of sorrow, a bittersweetness, which I think adds to its power.  It also contains one of the most beautiful solo passages in all of English music.  And yet, after that first performance, the symphony — inexplicably, bewilderingly, frustratingly — fell into complete neglect and was not performed again.

Until April this year, that is — and once again it is the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra which has ridden to the rescue.  Having given the U.S. premieres of the second and the fourth symphonies, they have now added the first American performance of the fifth to their trophy cabinet.  Their director of music Adam Stern has shown a singular dedication to Ruth Gipps’ music, and in the case of the Fifth it turns out that he had to recopy the whole score and all the orchestral parts, which had been lost.  The six months it took him coincided with the first wave of the Covid pandemic — it is nice to see that something good came from a time that was very difficult for many musicians.

His faith in the music is absolute.  The symphony bears the influences of Malcolm Arnold, Vaughan Williams and William Walton — to whom the work is dedicated — and yet ‘there is nobody else who could have written this symphony but Ruth Gipps,’ he told his players.  ‘It has a new life, and we are giving it life.  We are giving the second performance of this piece — Yes, it’s big, it’s big.’  He also hinted at plans in the pipeline for a studio recording and CD release on the Chandos label, and also mentioned that ‘another orchestra’ needed their parts immediately after the Seattle premiere.

Excitingly for Gipps fans on this side of the Atlantic, the orchestra in question is the Westminster Philharmonic Orchestra, which is performing the symphony in London next Saturday, 20th May, at 7.30 p.m. at St. John’s Church, Waterloo.  This is the first British performance since 1983, and only the third ever.  Further details and tickets are available here.

Many thanks (as I have said so often before!) to the Seattle Philharmonic for their courage in programming Gipps’ music and the fine musicianship audible in the clips below — and to Maestro Stern in particular for his dedication and single-mindedness in promoting this too-long-neglected composer.  Also to whoever digitised and uploaded the recording of the Fifth onto YouTube.  As for the London performance, I cannot wait.

Sources:

[1] Alan Poulton, ‘Malcolm Arnold and Ruth Gipps’, in Beckus (no. 100, Spring 2016), retrieved 13 May 2023 from https://www.malcolmarnoldsociety.co.uk/malcolm-arnold-and-ruth-gipps/

[2] Norman Lebrecht, ‘Ruth Gipps gets a US Premiere’, (Slipped Disc, 15 April 2023), web resource, retrieved 13 May 20223 from https://slippedisc.com/2023/04/ruth-gipps-gets-a-us-premiere/

Theme and Variations for Ruth Gipps’ Birthday

Today is the anniversary of Ruth Gipps, who was born in Bexhill-on-Sea on the 20th February 1921, and whose legacy of melodic, characterful music is now at last enjoying the recognition it deserves.

Here is the second movement, a Theme and Variations, of her Third Symphony (1965), played by the BBC Philharmonic under Rumon Gamba in their superb recent CD release.  The piano reduction of the same movement is also worth a listen.

The next exciting development on the Gipps front will be the United States première of the fine Fifth Symphony (1982), which will be given on April 15th by the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra.  I am hopeful that some way might be found to stream the concert over the Internet for listeners in Gipps’ native country, but in any case, the ‘Seattle Phil’ has excelled itself again.  More information here: https://seattlephil.org/concerts-and-tickets/concert/gipps-fifth/ .

‘Blessed be the time that apple taken was!’

A contribution to a virtual Advent Calendar of art, music and poetry compiled by members of Deo Gratias, a circle of Catholics in their twenties & thirties meeting fortnightly in London to discuss artistic and cultural expressions of the Christian faith.

Adam lay ybounden,
Bounden in a bond;
Four thousand winter
Thought he not too long.

And all was for an apple,
An apple that he took.
As clerkës finden 
Written in their book.

Ne had the apple taken been,
The apple taken been,
Ne had never our ladie
Abeen heav’ne queen.

Blessed be the time
That apple taken was:
Therefore we moun singen
Deo gratias.

This carol is one of several medieval lyrics, sacred and secular, that are preserved in a remarkable and unique fifteenth-century manuscript, possibly originating from Bury St. Edmunds, and now held at the British Library (Sloane MS 2593).  Like many medieval verses it is macaronic, combining Latin and the vernacular, and, as well as offering an aching glimpse into medieval Catholic England, it expresses in a nutshell one of Christianity’s great theological paradoxes, the ‘felix culpa’ or ‘happy fault’ — the realisation that, in so far as Adam’s sin led to our redemption by Christ, we may actually rejoice that the sin occurred, so wonderful is that redemption.  We hear it in the Exsultet at the Easter Vigil: ‘O happy fault; O necessary sin of Adam, which won for us so great a Redeemer!’

Wearing its learning lightly, and with (I think) a particularly English humour, this carol expresses the same idea, but this time with respect to Mary.  The carol begins with Adam ‘bounden in a bond’, an allusion to the medieval idea that he lay in limbo until Christ’s Harrowing of Hell on Holy Saturday.  I love the wry humour of the lines ‘Four thousand winter / Thought he not too long,’ which strike me almost as brotherly teasing; the same with ‘And all was for an apple, / An apple that he took’.  It is an acknowledgement of a kind of solidarity with Adam; an admission that he and we are all in the same pickle.

And yet — the poet says — if the apple had never been taken, if Adam had not sinned, Mary would never have been Queen of Heaven (since, implicitly, we would have had no need for Christ to save us).  Hence, strange to say,  ‘Blessed be the time / That apple taken was!’  This is the ‘felix culpa’, and a (surely deliberate) echo of the Exsultet.  And so, one senses to his own amazement, the catechist declares, ‘Therefore we moun singen [may sing] / Deo gratias.’  It is one of the most marvellous paradoxes of Christianity, and here is expressed concisely and with winsome humour, and also with the Marian devotion for which medieval England was renowned.

Several composers have set the carol to music. The best-known setting is probably Boris Ord’s, which has regular outings at the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge.  Benjamin Britten also included a version in his Ceremony of Carols.  But I think my favourite is the setting by Philip Ledger, with the words ‘Deo Gratias’ as a haunting refrain.

Vaughan Williams 150

A revised version of an article from 2018.

‘And I saw a new heaven and a new earth…’. From Sancta Civitas (1928), the composer’s favourite of his own choral works. 

Today, 12th October 2022, is the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958).  Was he England’s greatest composer?  He has plenty of strong competition of course, and perhaps half the fun is never quite to settle the question — but as far as I am concerned, if anyone is to match Vaughan Williams, then they too will have to draw me, irresistibly, again and again, yet in a different way every time, into a distinctive, great-hearted, masterfully-crafted musical world that is all its own.  He is in first place in my book.

Embed from Getty Images

Vaughan Williams photographed at home (The White Gates, Dorking, Surrey) in January, 1949.

His was a life that, in many ways, took place in reverse.  He emerged as a composer relatively late — not completing his first symphony until he was thirty-five — but from then on never diminished in his  output, even intensifying as he aged.  Those who might have perceived in his fifth symphony (premièred in 1942, his seventieth year) a mellowing in age, or a mood of valediction, would hardly have suspected that this was actually the half-way mark, and that there were four more symphonies to follow.  Throughout his last decade — well into his eighties — he seemed unstoppable, completing his three final symphonies, the opera The Pilgrim’s Progress (a lifetime’s work), concertos for harmonica and tuba and much more, all the while maintaining an energetic social life, both conducting and attending concerts.  And it was not only musically that he was thriving: after the death of his wife Adeline in 1951 after decades of illness, he was rejuvenated by a second marriage to the poet and playwright Ursula Wood (whose poetry he set to music).  So he seems almost to have been cut off in his prime, though he lived to eighty-five.

Music for the film 49th Parallel.

I admire Vaughan Williams in the first place for the most straightforward reason: because the sound of so much of his music appeals to me so directly.  Time and again he wove melodies, harmonies, textures and cadences masterfully together in the service of beauty, beauty for its own sake.  This beauty often seems so self-evident that I would struggle to explain it.  Yet that first appeal, having drawn me in, makes me all the more willing to listen again more carefully for details I have missed, or to brave the composer’s more challenging works.  In that way he has taught me a great deal about the more intellectual side of ‘serious music’: its forms, its structures, and the depth of expression that they make possible.  So, for example, I have found my life enriched both by the tuneful English Folk-song Suite, which I have loved since I was small, and by the Fourth and Sixth Symphonies, which I discovered in my twenties.  Yet in all his works the same personality is discernible: a companion and a teacher and a seer, who may challenge but never disregards the listener.

The third movement (Scherzo) of the London Symphony, played by the Spanish Radio and Television Orchestra and conducted by Carlos Kalmar.

This capacity for both simplicity and complexity is only part of another remarkable aspect of Vaughan Williams: his sheer versatility, or his ‘tremendous range’, as Vernon Handley put it.  He wrote music of so many flavours, for so many purposes, and all so convincingly, that it is sometimes hard to believe that they flowed from a single pen.  Is the same man really responsible for the tranquil Greensleeves Fantasia and the enthralling anguish of the fourth symphony; for the diabolical chortling of Satan’s Dance of Triumph (from his ballet Job) and the tiny jewel of an anthem, O Taste and See?  He went off searching for ideas in all sorts of directions, but always came back to his own distinctive drawing-board: his work always bears, somewhere or other, the hall-mark of one and the same personality.  There is Vaughan Williams the collector of folk songs, Vaughan Williams the scorer of films, Vaughan Williams the compiler of the English Hymnal.  His music might be sacred or secular, it might last for four minutes or four movements, it might summon full chorus and orchestra or call simply for a solo violin and piano.  For his harmonies he drew on everything from Tudor polyphony to thirties dance-band music; he also experimented with sonority, including a wind machine in his Seventh Symphony, a flügelhorn in his Ninth and ‘all the ’phones and ’spiels known to the composer’ in the Eighth.  And then there are the moods that pass over his music, as many and as various as the English weather’s: serene or furious, reserved or exuberant; proliferating with detail or hanging austerely in clear air. 

 One of the best ways of hearing many of these moods is in that eighth symphony — even in its first movement alone, which is constructed entirely around the very first four notes played.  Sir Mark Elder conducts the Hallé Orchestra.

Another characteristic of his music is — I can think of no subtler word — its manliness.  So much of it seems to express some aspect of, and to be so evidently the work of, the heart and spirit of a man.  In other words, there is a particularly masculine warmth, an outward robustness, a heartiness, a full-bloodedness about it all.  That is not to suggest that he did not mean his music for men and women alike, nor to assume that it was conscious or deliberate — it is simply part of the character and colour of his music.  His work is shot through with the vigour, the spirituality, the moods, the quickness, the temper, the restlessness, the passions, the solitary questing of manhood.

The second movement of the Concerto for Violin and Strings (1925; originally Concerto Accademico).   André Previn conducts the London Symphony Orchestra; James Buswell is the soloist.

Then there is his Englishness, the quality of his music which is perhaps most often commented on.  Vaughan Williams is credited with reviving and developing a particularly English style of music, one that was in contrast with the German idiom of Beethoven and Brahms and Mendelssohn that had prevailed before.  Vaughan Williams was interested in Tudor polyphony and traditional folk-song and the music of ordinary people, not for shallow or jealous reasons, but in a search for authenticity, and in a spirit of revival of old forgotten things and celebration of the particular — and it worked: his music sounds like home.  Hear how well it goes with Shakespeare, or with Chesterton; see how his hymns and carols have passed straight into the canon.  And he was keenly aware of the threats that England faced in his own day — war, the destruction of landscape, the decline in spirit.  Indeed, the sheer spiritual exhaustion of the modern world in general, sated with banality to the point of grief, is prefigured in much of his music.  Hear, for instance, the desolate passages that close the first movement of the Ninth Symphony:

Against despair and nihilism, though, Vaughan Williams was the great champion of the human spirit, and the idea of the lone pilgrim persevering against the odds preoccupied him all his life.  His reverence for folk-culture is precisely an example of this.  There is surely much to be said for founding ‘high art’ on traditional, unaffected idioms: familiar, time-worn songs keep high culture rooted in earth, while transfiguring the familiar elevates and enriches the popular culture.  And even as Vaughan Williams broke new ground with his symphonies and cantatas, he was content, I think, to be a servant of his age.  His heavy involvement in the Leith Hill Musical Festival, and his prolific output of hymns and film-scores and ‘practical music’ (notably the Concerto Grosso for musicians of varying accomplishment, or the Household Music written in wartime for whatever instruments were to hand) reveal a profoundly public-spirited man, unashamed of belonging to a particular time and place, and lending his talents to the service of others.  He himself was quite firm about this: ‘The composer must not shut himself up and think about art,’ he declared; ‘he must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole community.’

For all these reasons and more besides, it is Vaughan Williams whom I hero-worship as Britain’s greatest composer.  Other composers may have shared many of the qualities I have described, but it is  only in him that they are all united.  His music, in all its variety, sounds as fresh as ever, and is still working its magic on lovers of beauty in new generations.  May it continue to lighten lives for centuries to come.

Ballad from the Suite for Viola and Orchestra

Six years since World Youth Day in Kraków

Six years ago today I was sitting at my laptop in my student flat, watching the opening Mass of World Youth Day in Kraków, and wishing more with every minute that I were there.  I was struck particularly by the music, which was supplied by a full choir and orchestra and consisted of fine, uplifting hymns and a beautiful Mass setting — full of a kind of joyful stateliness for the occasion, and all with rich, even cinematic orchestration.  

My endeavours to try and find out more, or indeed anything, about it all — what the hymns were called and how to spell them, let alone who had composed them! — sparked an effort to learn Polish pronunciation (which turned out not to be as hard as it looks) and a tentative but continuing attempt to learn the language itself.  And it drew me into the discovery and deepening love of Polish church music and the life that surrounds it — everything from their travelling liturgical music workshops, which draw hundreds of people to make music together, to the enormous outdoor hymn-concerts held every year in the city of Rzeszów.  The discovery of the Dominican Liturgical Centre in Kraków has been a revelation, and last October it was a joy and a privilege to take part in a workshop given by the composer Paweł Bębenek at St. Dominic’s Priory in London, and then to sing music composed by him and his fellow composers in an unforgettable candle-lit vigil.

Today is also, of course, the sixth anniversary of the martyrdom of père Jacques Hamel of Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray, near Rouen.  The mingling of the two events as they reached me from afar — of the joy of World Youth Day and the sharp sorrow of that news — is something else which has fixed that day in my memory.

The Agnus Dei of Henryk Jan Botor’s Missa Ioannis Paoli Secundi, written specially for World Youth Day and sung at its opening Mass at Błonia Park, Kraków, on the 26th July 2016.  This setting has proved popular with our parish Youth Choir in South London.

‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’ at full strength once more

The feast of Corpus Christi was celebrated last Thursday in Poland (where indeed it is a national holiday), and in the south-eastern city of Rzeszów there was the welcome return in its full form of one tradition: ‘Jednego Serca Jednego Ducha’, ‘Of One Heart, Of One Spirit’, the great annual outdoor hymn concert.  (I have written more about these concerts here, and this year’s edition, which I’ve been catching up with, can be watched in full here).  

These past two years the concert has of course been constrained by various pandemic restrictions — though the organisers heroically put together an online concert in time for Corpus Christi in 2020, and then organised two live concerts with reduced audiences in September 2020 and Corpus Christi 2021.  This is the first time that it has been possible to relax a little more about the virus, and to enter more freely into its old mood of joyful, prayerful togetherness — a mood which persisted in spite of a terrific rain-storm whose arrival coincided squarely with the beginning of the concert!  Amid the wind and the rain it was nice to see some by now familiar faces once again: Hubert Kowalski conducting the orchestra, Joachim Mencel playing the hurdy-gurdy, Jan Budziaszek the percussionist and one of the main founders, and the various Pospieszalskis and Posieszalskas: Marcin, Lidia, Barbara…

This has also, of course, been the first edition of the concert since the beginning of the Russian war on Ukraine.  Rzeszów is only fifty or so miles from the western Ukrainian border, and it is this part of Poland which has been at the forefront of the country’s heroic response to the refugee crisis.  And of course, although Russia’s wrath is now mostly concentrated in eastern Ukraine, her forces have proved themselves capable of firing missiles well into the west, with seemingly gratuitous strikes on the city of Lviv and military positions only ten miles from Poland’s border.  So to the musicians and the concert-goers the war will be and remain an immediate and pressing concern.  And it only reinforces a paradox at which I have wondered before: that this hymn-concert, one of the most hopeful, joyful sights in Europe, has grown up in a part of our continent which has seen some of its worst and longest suffering.

It was as right and just as it was to be expected that some Ukrainian musicians were invited to contribute to the music. The band ‘Kana’ are already regulars at the concerts, but there were also some bandura players from Lviv, bringing to the stage a haunting sound that was new to me.  As well as these there were the old favourite of course: a big orchestral number at the beginning followed by Paweł Bębenek’s ‘Dzięki Ci, Panie’ (‘Thank you, Lord’); the exuberant ‘Jezus zwyciężył’, ‘Jesus has triumphed’, which is the cue for the multitude to go wild; and Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus.

The flavour of the concert seems in recent years to have been moving in more of an American-style ‘praise-and-worship’ direction, but what I have always preferred and looked forward to most are the home-grown orchestral arrangements and jazzings-up of favourite Polish hymns.  Several of these seem to appear every year — I’m never sure who is responsible for them but I think usually either Marcin Pospieszalski or Hubert Kowalski are the culprits — and at least one of them always strikes me as a real gem.  This year I was rather taken with a setting of lines from a much-loved poem by the Polish Renaissance poet Jan Kochanowski (1530–1584):

Czego chcesz od nas, Panie, za Twe hojne dary?
Czego za dobrodziejstwa, którym nie masz miary?
Kościół Cię nie ogarnie, wszędy pełno Ciebie:
I w otchłaniach, i w morzu, na ziemi, na niebie.

Tyś Pan wszytkiego świata.  Tyś niebo zbudował
I złotymi gwiazdami ślicznieś uhaftował.
Tyś fundament założył nieobeszłej ziemi
I przykryłeś jej nagość zioły rozlicznemi.

Tobie k woli rozliczne kwiatki Wiosna rodzi,
Tobie k woli w kłosianym wieńcu Lato chodzi,
Wino Jesień i jabłka rozmaite dawa,
Potym do gotowego gnuśna Zima wstawa.

Here is a translation (from StaroPolska.pl,
http://www.staropolska.pl/renesans/jan_kochanowski/czego_chcesz_Panie.html):

What do You want from us, Lord, for Your lavish gifts?
What for the benefactions, which have no limits?
The Church will not contain You; You are everywhere:
On the earth, in the depths, the sea, the open air.

You are the Lord of the whole world, You built the sky,
And embroidered it splendidly with gold stars high.
Of the earth untraversed You lay the foundation
And covered its bareness with rich vegetation.

By Your will Spring brings flowers, in abundance born,
By Your will Summer wears wreaths made from ears of corn.
Autumn gives out wine and apples of various kinds,
Idle Winter rises, when ready meal she finds.

The melody of the song in the concert was composed by Jacek Sykulski (1969–), a beautiful setting which has become a popular hymn —

— but Mateusz Pospieszalski — brother of Marcin, the bass-guitarist and Jednego Serca stalwart — has given it a lavish arrangement, jazzing it up with a syncopated five-time rhythm, a clever lyrical part for strings, a refrain which proves delightfully contrapuntal, and some irresistible ripplings from the harp.  I don’t think they needed to change key halfway through, but otherwise I thought it a very affecting rendition, and loved especially the low, clear, pure tone of the upper voices in the second verse.  By the way, the soloist on the left, Barbara Pospieszalska, is Mateusz’s niece.

So, as I have had occasion to say before, there are plenty of good things going on in Poland.  New music with old roots, spontaneous youngsters dancing the conga, ladies with flowers in their hair, thousands of voices singing hymns in the rain…  Niech żyje Polska!  Long live Poland, and happy Corpus Christi!

Gipps’ Fifth to receive its U.S. première

Now this is very exciting news: on the 15th April 2023, the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra will give the United States première of Ruth Gipps’ Fifth Symphony.  Of her four ‘mature’ symphonies, this is the only one yet to have an outing in the ongoing Gipps Revival, yet it is a work as beautiful as, if not even finer than, any of the others.

In the past few years the Seattle Philharmonic, under its director Adam Stern, have excelled themselves in their dedication to Gipps’ music, putting the American premières of both the Second and Fourth Symphonies to their name.  It is no small risk to perform such large-scale works by a composer whose name until recently has, however unjustly, been so little-known to audiences.  Yet this orchestra has now proven itself bold enough to do so three times — each time bringing the music to new and appreciative listeners — and they surely deserve to be known as Gipps’ foremost champions in America.

The story of the Fifth Symphony offers a perfect example of the frustration and injustice that dogged Gipps’ career.  Completed in 1982, when atonalism still reigned triumphant, its persistence in clear melodies and unveiled romanticism were the final proof, if any were needed, of her refusal to compromise her artistic convictions for the sake of the Zeitgeist.  The symphony’s intricate craftsmanship, imaginative sonority and varied palette of moods counted for nothing, it seemed, against the tide of fashion.  Gipps’ previous symphonies had received at least one broadcast on BBC radio, but this time the composer fought in vain even for that.  In the end, a sole performance was given by the London Repertoire Orchestra, the ensemble founded by Gipps herself for newly-trained musicians.  A scratchy but complete recording of this rendition can be heard on YouTube.

Next year’s concert in Seattle will, then, incredibly, be only the second time that this symphony has ever been heard in the forty years since it was written.  And yet, as I hope can be heard in the extract below, this neglect is no reflection of the quality of the music.  It is, as I have said so often before, intricate, distinctive, at turns characteristically spiky and mellifluous, full-throated and beautifully-crafted music.  Many thanks to all involved in the decision to perform this symphony, and very best wishes for its success.  I have only one question — might there please be the chance of streaming the concert online, or of releasing a recording of it, for those of us who find ourselves on the wrong side of ‘the pond’?

Full information here: 

https://seattlephil.org/concerts-and-tickets/concert/gipps-fifth/

https://visitseattle.org/events/seattle-philharmonic-orchestra-presents-a-major-u-s-premiere-ruth-gipps-fifth/

This article has been updated to reflect a change in the scheduling of this concert from an initial date of September 4th, 2022.

The first movement of the fifth symphony, in which one of the most beautiful clarinet solos ever written develops eventually into a majestic anthem-like summit.  The London Repertoire Orchestra is conducted by the composer.

Bright Music in Mid-January

What a treat, last Thursday evening at the Royal College of Music, to hear Ruth Gipps’ Fourth and Vaughan Williams’ Eighth Symphonies played by the students’ Symphony Orchestra.  In fact, for me it was several treats wrapped up in one: it was the first time I have heard Vaughan Williams’ Eighth played live, the first live performance of a Ruth Gipps symphony I have heard at all, and, more generally, it was a delight to find the future of British music in such safe hands.  And after these past two years it was also a real tonic to drink in the fizz and the liveliness of a university atmosphere.

I already knew and loved these two symphonies, but had not realised what an interesting pairing they would make in concert.  In spite of their contrasting moods, both are adventurous as far as sonority is concerned, making lavish use of the timbres of woodwind and percussion in particular, and producing, in each case, moments of remarkably bright and gleaming sound — just the thing for mid-January.  

But their moods are certainly contrasting.  The Gipps, which was conducted by the great Martyn Brabbins, is overall rather more questioning and unsettled than the Vaughan Williams, even at times agonised, having, as Jill Halstead has put it, ‘an undercurrent of pessimism found in only a handful of her works.’  There is still that weaving together of spiky energy and romantic lyricism that is so characteristic of Gipps, along with melismatic solo, duet or trio passages, but the backdrop against which they are heard is a melancholy and uncertain one of shifting harmonics and rhythms.

“That is a really difficult symphony,” was Martyn Brabbins’ opening to the little ‘mid-amble’ he delivered to the audience after the Gipps, and yet one would hardly have thought, had he not told us, that he and the orchestra had only had two rehearsal sessions together before the performance.  “But that’s how it is in the U. K.: we don’t have much rehearsal time.  So they have to get used to it!” he said.  He was very warm about the musicians.  He also made some observations which put into perspective how remarkable the recent Ruth Gipps Revival has been: even this great British conductor admitted that she had been in his blind spot; he had heard of her name in the seventies, but never met her, and this was only the second piece of hers that he had ever conducted.  She really did seem to have dropped into obscurity.  Yet now, with no small thanks to him, the next generation of young musicians have had the chance to play and hear her music for themselves.

Next came Vaughan Williams’ Symphony no. 8, in which each movement was placed under the baton of a different student conductor (and which resulted in the unusual spectacle of four conductors lining up to take a bow at the end!).   This too was clever programming, because, while the outer movements are famous for using ‘all the ’phones and ’spiels known to the composer’, the second movement uses only the wind sections, and the third only strings.  I rather liked the style of the conductor of the third movement, while the chap who won the jackpot to conduct the tintinnabulous final movement — “it’s just like Christmas,” as Martyn Brabbins put it — was absolutely in his element.  The various solos were carried off masterfully, and the overall blend was testament to rock-solid musicianship.

This is a symphony so full of life and gaiety that it might be a surprise — but if so an instructive one — to find that Vaughan Williams wrote it in his early eighties.  The first movement alone contains almost his entire, and considerable, range of moods: the solemnity, the radiance, the tempestuousness, the serenity.  But the mood is overall joyous and optimistic; only in the thoughtful third movement, the Cavatina, a kind of latter-day Tallis Fantasia, are there pangs of sorrow, or regret, or something like it.  It is full-blooded, lusty music that reminds you that you are alive, and is all wrought together so masterfully: rich and intricate, but never too much.  Martyn Brabbins admitted that he used not to like it when he was young, “but now,” he said, “I can’t do without it;” and nor can I.

How wonderful that this should be done, as Gipps’ centenary year draws to a close, and Vaughan Williams’ begins.  Many thanks to all involved for a wonderful evening.

‘And then he had to face the barbarities’

For Remembrancetide, words of Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry in his Director’s Address to the Royal College of Music on the 24th September, 1917:

I am afraid there is no longer any hope of young Purcell Warren being alive.  He has not been heard of for months.  It is a peculiarly tragic case.  He was one of the gentlest, and most refined and sensitive of boys, and was of that type which attracted people’s love.  He was a very promising violinist, and had also began to show characteristic qualities as a composer which were quite surprising, for there was a subtlety and a dexterity about his compositions which made us look upon him as likely to make a personal mark.  He endured bravely some very uncongenial experiences in the earlier stages of training, and then he had to face the barbarities, and one of humanity’s tenderest possessions was ruthlessly destroyed.

Francis Purcell Warren (1895–1916) was reported missing at Mons, during the Battle of the Somme, on the 3rd July, 1916; his body was never recovered.

(From https://www.warcomposers.co.uk/warren)

The Unbelief, yet Half-Religion, of Herbert Howells (III)

Continued from part 1 here and part 2 here.

Having gone some way, in a fair manner I hope, to work out what Herbert Howells and Vaughan Williams really believed about life and the ultimate things, and how their glorious music fitted into it, there is another question waiting to be answered: where does the unbelief of these church composers — however nuanced, however thoughtful — leave us, their listeners?  

John Skelton’s whimsical ode ‘To Mistress Margaret Hussey’, the middle movement from Howells’ suite ‘In Green Ways’, 1919.  This mood of whimsy disappeared for ever from Howells’ music after the death of his son Michael.

One way to approach this question, of course, is from the national perspective: to ask how, and why, these great Englishmen seem to have anticipated the enormous lapsation in faith that has befallen this country over the course of the past century or so.  There is no question that they were highly attuned to the spirit, character and landscape of England (indeed, both men received commissions for the Queen’s Coronation ceremony in 1953, setting to music prayers for the entire country.)  What change did these men, sensitive as they were, and so well-acquainted with Christian tradition, detect in the air; why did they not find in the old religion the assurances their forefathers found, as so many of our countrymen do not find it now?  An answer to this might take us some way towards working out why the Christian and the English imaginations have, for the moment, so catastrophically lost each other.  But, of course, their own personal reticence about these things — in its very Englishness! — deprives us of a clear answer.  

Howells’ anthem for the Coronation of Elizabeth II: ‘Behold, O God our defender, and look upon the face of thine anointed’.  The opening motif in the strings is echoed, more duskily, more lingeringly, in the final bars.  The most extraordinarily beautiful music.

And what of us as individual listeners?  The writer Boyd Tonkin has recently argued — and I do not disagree — that agnostic listeners should not hesitate to draw spiritual comfort from church music, not least given that this is precisely what its composers, believers and unbelievers alike, were often seeking. [1]  But what about the other way around?  Can believing listeners find valid affirmation of a confessional faith in the sacred music of an unbelieving composer?  Or can an agnostic composer ultimately only ever compose ‘agnostic music’?  If we are uplifted by a Vaughan Williams hymn or a Howells anthem; if, as well as beauty, we find it expressive of truth to which we know they did not assent, are we misleading ourselves in our faith, and doing an injustice to their legacy?  

From the score of the anthem ‘Like as the Hart desireth the waterbrooks’ (Oxford University Press).

The question bites because we are afraid of deceiving ourselves.  Are we dupes?  Doubt, and the fear of mistaken belief, can be at least as contagious as faith, and there is something chilling about those words of Howells, ‘You know there’s nothing’.  Michael White is blunt: ‘Countless churchgoers who find Christian affirmation in the Howells oeuvre are hearing things he did not put there.’ [2]  When I asked a comparable question about the Soviet-Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian, whether his vivid and lyrical music is spoiled by his apparently unswerving loyalty to the Soviet Union, my hope was to be able to distance the music from the composer’s professed ideological fervour, to hold it at arm’s length, so that I could enjoy his music in greater comfort.  But with Howells it is the other way around: his position introduces an unwanted distance that we have neither anticipated nor desired.  By turning aside from the very Christian religion that his music ornamented and beautified, it is he, however unknowingly, however blamelessly, who seems to hold himself away from us.

It is not simply a question of comfort, though.  The fear behind the question is not simplistic; it is not that we are afraid of ambiguity or adventure.  After all, even confirmed and practising composers do not always offer an easy ride: that is not what faith is for; faith is full of mystery.  The difference is that, in the case of a believing composer, we are surer of our ground in approaching the music in the first place; more confident that we will know where to look for its meaning; more assured that we are all entering the world of the music through the same door, side-by-side with the composer.  The difficulty with Howells, then, is not that his music is mysterious — far from it; this is largely what is so appealing about it! — but that we are not quite sure how we are supposed to approach its mysteries.  We are necessarily less sure in our grasp of the inner sense of his work.

The orchestrated version of Howells’ setting of the Te Deum for King’s College, Cambridge (Collegium Regale), sung by the choir and in the chapel for which it was written.

Here are some personal thoughts as to a sensible approach.  Firstly, although faith, truth and authorial intention do matter, and although it would be unjust to brush over the doubts of such thoughtful composers, the simple truth is that both Howells and Vaughan Williams definitely intended their music to enrich Christian worship and belief.  They were not being cynical: they were willing for their work to sustain in others something they did not possess themselves.  Secondly, since the music they wrote was undoubtedly good and beautiful, and since the Church always upholds whatever is truly good and beautiful whatever its source, the right response is very clear: we are to rejoice in it.  Thirdly, we should not fear that in worshipping God in their music we are press-ganging their names onto our team, so to speak, as if we were a political party or a football team.  God exists beyond us and outside us, as well as within us; He is as He is, whatever we might say or do; He does not allow himself to be co-opted into factions or camps.  (In that sense, our religion is not our own possession).  

‘Vouchsafe, O Lord, to keep us this day without sin…’  Hear how differently Howells treats the same words, the final verses of the Te Deum, at the end of his Collegium Regale setting above, and here, in the last bars of the setting for St George’s Chapel, Windsor.

Fourthly, I think this matter has something to teach us about the transcendence of great art, for, without ever coming loose from them, without ever drifting away as mere floatings of authorless ‘discourse’, artistic greatness is nevertheless capable of surpassing its creators, and their troubles or weaknesses, just as it can escape the limits of their circumstances and times.  It may indeed be the case, to repeat Michael White’s phrase, that ‘countless churchgoers who find Christian affirmation in the Howells oeuvre are hearing things he did not put there’ — but this does not mean that they are not there all the same, without him having had to put them there.  Howells may not himself have put the spirit of faith into his music, but I think it may fairly be said that he left room for it, a space where its animating force might nevertheless come to dwell.

Fifthly, I think that such composers’ doubts teach us to be grateful for our own faith, to remember that it is indeed a gift, as is even the desire for faith; and also that the gift of faith is distinct from the gift of spiritual insight through artistic sensitivity, however great a gift this too may be.  True faith, though it can rightly be approached rationally, ultimately belongs to a realm above and beyond reason, one that is mysterious even to believing folk, and one to which the point of assent or unbelief can seldom, if ever, be pinned down.  The doubts of great artists teach us the importance of generosity and humility towards those who, though without the gift of formal faith themselves, might yet have something to tell us about the eternal verities.

There is one particular work of Howells, one of his last, made in the very evening of his life, which I think it is fair to regard as his last testament.  Both the music and the words seem to encompass his whole spirit and artistic endeavour.  Here in one anthem is all that is characteristic of Howells: the radiance of creative ecstasy, the melancholic sensitivity to the fleetingness of earthly things, the ambiguity about God even as the harmonies set His name ablaze, and the adoration of beauty — except that this time the adoration is explicitly and confidently proclaimed, with all the solemnity of a Credo.  The words, by Robert Bridges, run —

I love all beauteous things,

I seek and adore them;

God hath no better praise,

And man in his hasty days

Is honoured for them.

I too will something make

And joy in the making;

Altho’ to-morrow it seem

Like the empty words of a dream

Remembered on waking.

Both Howells and Vaughan Williams were thoughtful and serious men; they were unafraid to contend with the truth about life; they were generous with their talents and our lives are the richer for them.  The Church is bigger and deeper than we know; let us who love their music give grateful thanks for their lives and for the art that they have left to us.

Howells’ setting of Robert Bridges’ poem ‘I love all beauteous things,’ sung by the choir of St. Alban’s Cathedral under Peter Hurford, broadcast on BBC radio on the 25th May 1977.

References

1.  Boyd Tonkin, ‘O come, all ye faithless’, published in UnHerd online magazine, retrieved 13 May 2021 from <https://unherd.com/2020/12/o-come-all-ye-faithless/>

2.  Michael White, ‘The sorrow that sounds like heaven’, the Independent, Saturday 10 October 1992.  Retrieved 13 May 2021 from <https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music-the-sorrow-that-sounds-like-heaven-when-herbert-howells-lost-a-son-the-church-gained-some-immortal-music-michael-white-pays-a-centenary-tribute-1556718.html>.