"The Little Church Around the Corner"
One East 29th Street, New York
MUSIC NOTES:
Lent IV - March 25
The Composers of today's choral music - W.A. Mozart (1756-1791) and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) - present a very different profile from the composer of last Sunday's musical settings, William Byrd (1543-1623). Byrd was steeped in a long and highly sophisticated tradition of liturgical music. He was also a man of deep religious convictions, living at a time of unprecedented upheaval in English Christianity. With Mozart, we have left the world of the Reformation and entered the era of the stage and the theater, the coloratura soloist and the fabulous operatic libretto. Philosophically, the period is often known as "The Enlightenment," and this was not a time of deep religious faith. The distinctions between sacred and secular music in terms of their respective styles had become blurred by Mozart's time, and thus his sacred music shares much of the theatrical quality of his operas and other secular music. The challenge for a church choir today is to present this music in a manner that does not draw the listener's attention away from the liturgy and on to the music itself. The listener also must rise to this challenge, seeing these elaborate choral settings not as musical interludes, but as guideposts marking out principal punctuation points of the rite of the Mass, and elevating the soul to the sacred banquet that is unfolding.
Vaughan Williams is one of the most fascinating and versatile figures in 20th Century English church music. He had a deep love for the language of the Bible and Prayer Book, and a profound appreciation of the literary and musical legacy of the Christian tradition. Nonetheless, he remained an agnostic for most of his adult life, and during his time at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was an avowed atheist. Yet through various twists of fate, he became the general editor of The English Hymnal, which was and remains a monumental achievement in Anglican hymnology. He composed many hymns of outstanding beauty (Sine Nomine [For All the Saints, Who from their Labors Rest], to name but one), and these as well as his equally famous arrangements of many beloved hymns (such as Old 100th) are found throughout the English Hymnal.
Though he never embraced the faith that his music would seem to suggest, Vaughan Williams left a wealth of beautiful and sensitively-composed choral music which blends effortlessly both with the liturgy and with Christian theology. O Taste and See is a fine example of this sensitivity. It is a very short composition, combining the qualities of both antiphonal psalmody and the Elizabethan verse anthem, a kind of dialogue between a solo voice and the full choir.
Vaughan Williams is one of the most fascinating and versatile figures in 20th Century English church music. He had a deep love for the language of the Bible and Prayer Book, and a profound appreciation of the literary and musical legacy of the Christian tradition. Nonetheless, he remained an agnostic for most of his adult life, and during his time at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was an avowed atheist. Yet through various twists of fate, he became the general editor of The English Hymnal, which was and remains a monumental achievement in Anglican hymnology. He composed many hymns of outstanding beauty (Sine Nomine [For All the Saints, Who from their Labors Rest], to name but one), and these as well as his equally famous arrangements of many beloved hymns (such as Old 100th) are found throughout the English Hymnal.
Though he never embraced the faith that his music would seem to suggest, Vaughan Williams left a wealth of beautiful and sensitively-composed choral music which blends effortlessly both with the liturgy and with Christian theology. O Taste and See is a fine example of this sensitivity. It is a very short composition, combining the qualities of both antiphonal psalmody and the Elizabethan verse anthem, a kind of dialogue between a solo voice and the full choir.
