A Voice from Heaven
A cappella Choral Music by
British Composers

Stanford's most powerful influence on later generations came not as a composer but as a teacher. Amongst his more famous pupils were Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav HoIst and Herbert Howells.

The motet, 0 Taste and See, was written by Vaughan Williams for the Queen's Coronation Service in 1953. It is very short, simply constructed and quite exquisite, its very brevity adding to the impact it makes.

Holst considered This have I done for my true love to be his finest part-song. It was written in 1916 for the choir in Thaxted near to where he had a cottage. The fact that it is composed and not an arrangement shows how completely he had absorbed the English folk-song into his style. He would have been drawn to the words as the connection between dancing and mystic ritual appealed to him.

Herbert Howells, like Stanford before him, also taught composition at the Royal College of Music. According to one of his pupils from the 1930' s whom I met recently, he was very strict about the use of the rules of harmony, such as parallel fifths, even if the student was attempting to compose in a modern style.

His masterpiece is usually considered to be the large-scale choral work, Hymnus Paradisi. He wrote it in 1938 as a requiem for his son, Michael, as a way of overcoming grief at his death from spinal meningitis three years earlier. It was not performed until 1950 when his close friend, Vaughan Willians, persuaded him that it should be performed. If that work was to become a public expression of his grief then the Requiem, written in 1936, was to remain private until it was first performed in 1980. Like Brahms in his German Requiem, Howells chose his own words from different sources and this together with its smaller scale, in contrast to the latter work, gives it an intimacy that reflects deeply his feelings at the time. The harmonic language is tonal although the boundaries are continually being stretched. W H. Harris was organist at New College, Oxford, Christ Church Cathedral and later at St. George's Chapel, Windsor. His compositions are firmly rooted in the Anglican tradition. The motet Faire is the Heaven, written in 1925, setting words by Spenser, is rightly considered to be his masterpiece. It is scored for double chorus, and although it is not long it is conceived on a together with its richness of scoring and harmony, take it on to a different level from his other work

By the time that William Walton wrote Set me as a seal upon thine heart in 1938 he had already composed several of the major works upon which his reputation rests. Although he wrote much unaccompanied choral music while he was a choral scholar in Oxford during his teens, which remains unpublished, he actually wrote little as a mature composer. That experience though, reveals itself in the natural and idiomatic feeling for the medium, and it is a cause of some regret that his output remained so smal. The words of the anthem are taken from the Song of Solomon and the piece was written in celebration of a wedding.

John Tavener became converted to the Russian arm of the Orthodox Church in 1977. His music began to assume a more austere and transcendental quality, using simple structures such as cyclic, arch-like or palindromic forms, and revealing his profound love of music of the past on which he seeks to build. There is no musical development In the Western sense, but that of a different kind which operates on a spiritual and metaphysical level. The Two Hymns to the Mother of God and Funeral lkos are typical of this. The first of these was written in memory of his mother, the words reflecting the power of the Mother of God by the Orthodox Church.

The change in his musical style did not happen suddenly, as his setting of Blake's poem , The Lamb , reveals. This was composed in 1976, but he was already employing the devices that were to be central to his new style. The innocence of the poem is fully caught in the musical setting.

Paul Patterson is a versatile composer, able to employ different styles according to his needs. Salvum fac populum tuum Domine is an extended version of a movement from the Te Deum, a large-scale choral work. This piece uses chant and a neo-classical style of harmony with sudden changes of key.

Andrew Carter composed Adam and Eve in response to a commission from the Chapter House Choir to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary, and was first performed at Carols by Candlelight in 1995. It appears deceptively simple with flowing melodic lines but, despite the basically diatonic harmony and use of only the white notes, he achieves enormous contrasts. The piece is typical of his work, where the musical reasons for the challenges he sets himself result directly from his response to the words.

The two anthems by Andrew Bunney are settings of verses from the Psalms. They are both quite short, each based on two contrasting ideas which are treated equally until the climax when one prevails. The composer, like any other, needs an instrument in order to have works performed. It is wonderful to have an ensemble like the Chapter House Choir perform new works, and to hear the spirit of a piece being captured with such commitment.                                          (c) Andrew Bunney