Thoughts on the received Gifts!
Author: Blogger in Residence, Rory Johnston
I was lucky last week to be part of ORA’s Christmas Gift initiative where they rehearsed and recorded 12 carols by 12 different composers all of different ages and places around the UK. It was an incredible pleasure to hear my new carol ‘Hush! my dear, lie still and slumber’ sung by such accomplished singers who so obviously care a great deal about what they do.
We each got about 25 minutes to listen to the rehearsal of our piece, led by the lovely Suzi Digby, and make comments about our vision and intentions – I for one realised I’d accidentally written part of the refrain from Gary Numan’s Cars into part of one of the motifs in my piece… see if you can spot it. The singers were really welcoming and asked helpful questions about the music and what we wanted in terms of character or specifics like breaths or text emphasis.
I thought I’d spend todays blog looking at some of the pieces that I found especially affecting – not to say that the ones I don’t talk about aren’t also very moving (plus also I obviously think mine is the best - you’ve got to back yourself… right?) but I only have so many words before I get sent back to my blogger-cage.
A Winter Bluejay- Jack McCartney
This piece, by the youngest composer picked for Christmas Gift, sets a poem by the same name by the poet Sara Teasdale (which you can find here). It’s a wonderfully evocative poem that is built up so well by McCartney.
The gentle duet at the beginning is wonderfully paced, and the little bit of word painting on ‘our shadows danced’ with one voice imitating the other – like a shadow – and then the two voices finding a lovely sense of to and fro as they musically dance around each other. When we get the tutti as we approach the 1st minute of the piece, it feels warm and homely. The vocal writing reminds me very much of the harmony and part weighting of composers like Howells and Stanford – it especially reminds me of a piece by Howells called ‘The Scribe’, which is a testament to the young composer’s control of the voices. Again, the maturity of the pacing is very impressive, and the build to the climax at ‘In ecstasy we laughed’ is very well managed, both in terms of the textural and temporal build, but also the composure to leave it just till the last ‘in ecstasy’ to lift the voices to the most powerful and bright parts of their tessitura. And what an ending! The humming is wonderfully relaxing, and the harmony here is very reminiscent of a traditional congregational carol. Then we are led into this sotto voce final statement:
‘Oh who can tell the range of joy
Or set the bounds of beauty?’
Set so low it really creeps into your soul and lights a fire inside, and then the inspired choice of final chord just ties it off with a near 7th bow… something I would never myself choose, but that just works so well it really hit me.
I Sing Of A Maiden- Dave Dexter
This deceptively simple setting of the well-known Middle English lyric poem ‘I sing of a maiden’ (or I syng of a mayden’ for the pedants among you) I completely underestimated at first. The more I have listened to it, though, the more I find myself noticing the subtle moments and inflections away from the norm that make it such a little gem.
The piece is unashamedly tonal and that plays into its hand as it sets us up into a gentle flow of chords that, when diverted from, creates pockets of real crystalline beauty. My two favourite moments are, firstly, in the second stanza ‘He came all so still where his mother was’ where we get a diversion from the general homophony as the sopranos take a slight detour before re-joining the rest of the voices – accompanied by a shift into an F major chord, taking us out of our homely D major tonality, this moment lifts us up and implies there will be more surprises to come. Which there are, as my second favourite moment is in the fourth stanza, where the choir do a run-through between ‘where his mother lay’ and ‘as dew in april’ to emphasise a moment of unexpected chromaticism and suspension. Having moved into G minor for this stanza, and singing at a gentle p, I was expecting a more extended change to finish the piece tenderly. But it was all a ruse! The tenderness leads to this beautiful suspension between the sopranos and altos and we are they lifted right back to our home in D major for the final stanza.
Gold and Spices- Alison Willis
Now, many of you may have realised after reading my blogs and perhaps listening to some of my music that I love a bit of rhythm and drive, and this carol by Alison Willis has that in heaps as well as a wonderful control over different material which is effortlessly switched between.
You could say that Gold and Spices utilises a traditional ‘burden’ or refrain in the sense that we get this repeated bit of music we hear at the start, but the different characters of what you would imagine as the ‘verses’ are so disparate that it doesn’t really fall neatly into a carol form, but definitely carol-inspired. The poem is one by the estimable Christina Rossetti and Willis crafts so much brilliant music that wonderfully captures the different moods of the lines, and the ease of which these ideas are switched between is very impressive, it flows very naturally from one idea to the next.
I must say I also just love the word ‘Spices’ being sung, there is something just so simply charming about it!
I would implore you, if you have not already, to listen to all the carols and find moments that you like in them yourself – there is still a ton of brilliant music that I haven’t mentioned from this collection!
Written by Rory Johnston