"The Little Church Around the Corner"
One East 29th Street, New York
MUSIC NOTES:
Pentecost 22 - November 4, 2001
Herbert Howells' (1892-1983) Collegium Regale is one of the few complete settings of The Great Service (the morning canticles [Te Deum and Jubilate], the Communion Service, and the evening canticles [Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis]). The work was commissioned in 1945 by the Dean of York, and was many years in the making; the Communion Service, which is the setting for today's Mass, was not completed until 1956. It is one of the last settings to be written in the grand style of Elgar and Perry, and in this the work shows the influence of Howells' teachers, Villiers Stanford and Charles Wood. Howells remained faithful to this style, and never acquiesced to the avant-garde experimentation going on in Europe and the United States during most of his long life. Nevertheless, there is a remarkable sensitivity to the text that bespeaks the composer's introspection and his deep personal engagement with each of his compositions, suggesting that he has more in common with his later contemporaries than is often thought.
One such contemporary is John Tavener (b. 1944), a composer who represents a significant break from the compositional style of the so-called Second Renaissance. Tavener's music is intensely personal, and in this he typifies the spirit of his age, with its inward-looking tendencies, its preference for the whisperings of the individual soul over the collective voice of a larger body of believers. In 1977, after a tortured spiritual journey in which he grappled with the works of St. John of the Cross and Fyodor Dostoevsky, Tavener joined the Russian Orthodox Church, an event which he describes as his "homecoming." From that time forward, orthodox theology and eastern artistic methods became the ideals from which he drew his inspiration. He rejected the studied, crafted approach of western composers, and sought to replace this with spontaneity, likening the composition of music to the writing of an ikon.
The Lamb was written in 1976 (revised 1985), "for Simon's 3rd birthday." The text is by William Blake, and in its deceptive naïveté, expresses a complex theology. Tavener's written instructions at the outset of the composition are instructive: With extreme tenderness - flexible - always guided by the words.
One such contemporary is John Tavener (b. 1944), a composer who represents a significant break from the compositional style of the so-called Second Renaissance. Tavener's music is intensely personal, and in this he typifies the spirit of his age, with its inward-looking tendencies, its preference for the whisperings of the individual soul over the collective voice of a larger body of believers. In 1977, after a tortured spiritual journey in which he grappled with the works of St. John of the Cross and Fyodor Dostoevsky, Tavener joined the Russian Orthodox Church, an event which he describes as his "homecoming." From that time forward, orthodox theology and eastern artistic methods became the ideals from which he drew his inspiration. He rejected the studied, crafted approach of western composers, and sought to replace this with spontaneity, likening the composition of music to the writing of an ikon.
The Lamb was written in 1976 (revised 1985), "for Simon's 3rd birthday." The text is by William Blake, and in its deceptive naïveté, expresses a complex theology. Tavener's written instructions at the outset of the composition are instructive: With extreme tenderness - flexible - always guided by the words.
