"The Little Church Around the Corner"
One East 29th Street, New York
Music Notes: April 20, 2003
Easter Sunday
"This joyful Eastertide, away with sin and sorrow!" As Charles Wood's graceful melody opens in a perfect arch with this text, the challenge of Woodward's poem can easily escape us as we become lost in the simple beauty of the music itself. The message of Easter, though central to Christian theology, can be difficult to grasp, and even more difficult to celebrate in the face of worldwide turmoil. It is precisely at such times that art can rise wonderfully to our assistance. In this piece, essentially an Easter carol based on a 16th century Dutch melody, music and poetry combine to lift us above the world's and our own difficulties, inviting us to enter into a celebration of the Resurrection that is at once peaceful and joyful, hopeful and confident, collective and individual.
If Easter is a celebration of life, then there can be no better composer than William Mathias (1934-1992) to set the service of Easter Day to music. Mathias was born in Carmarthanshire, South-West Wales, and apart from brief periods in London and Edinburgh, he never left his native country. Mathias' choral music possesses a Celtic consciousness that calls to mind that greatest of Celtic Christian poems, St. Patrick's Breastplate. As one would expect of a musician steeped in Welsh tradition, Mathias' music is marked by fluent melodic lines carried forward by rhythmic vitality and intense harmonies.
Though a prolific composer of instrumental music, Mathias' contribution to the choral repertoire is among the most important of any British composer since Vaughan Williams. Perhaps his most famous choral work is Lux Aeterna, written in 1980 following the death of his mother, and intended as a celebration of her life. Similarly, today's service setting, Missa Aedis Christi, was written in memory of Mathias' friend and fellow-composer William Walton. The work was commissioned by Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and first performed there in 1984. In 1987, Mathias received an honorary doctorate from Westminster Choir College, Princeton, where choir member Brian Zaros is presently studying.
Sir Edward Bairstow (1874-1946) is a distinguished composer whose professional life was spent in the north of England, as organist and choirmaster at York Minster and professor of music at Durham University. VSing Ye to the Lord is an energetic full anthem, its text and music a fine example of the Edwardian approach to Easter, straightforward and unapologetic.
François Couperin (1668-1733) was born into a family of organists, and became himself one of the pre-eminent organists of the period. His two great organ Masses, a l'usage des couvents and a l'usage des paroisses, ("for convent use" and "for parish use") are archetypes of the distinctive style of organ music arising out of French liturgical practice. This organ music, as with the choral music of the period, was heavily influenced by a uniquely French song genre known as the air de court, characterized by short, highly ornamented melodic passages intended for a solo voice with harpsichord accompaniment. The motet Christo Resurgenti, probably written about 1690, is written in this style, with brief meditations on the theme of Easter set off by proclamations of a word that has always been central to the celebration of this feast, Alleluia.
If Easter is a celebration of life, then there can be no better composer than William Mathias (1934-1992) to set the service of Easter Day to music. Mathias was born in Carmarthanshire, South-West Wales, and apart from brief periods in London and Edinburgh, he never left his native country. Mathias' choral music possesses a Celtic consciousness that calls to mind that greatest of Celtic Christian poems, St. Patrick's Breastplate. As one would expect of a musician steeped in Welsh tradition, Mathias' music is marked by fluent melodic lines carried forward by rhythmic vitality and intense harmonies.
Though a prolific composer of instrumental music, Mathias' contribution to the choral repertoire is among the most important of any British composer since Vaughan Williams. Perhaps his most famous choral work is Lux Aeterna, written in 1980 following the death of his mother, and intended as a celebration of her life. Similarly, today's service setting, Missa Aedis Christi, was written in memory of Mathias' friend and fellow-composer William Walton. The work was commissioned by Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and first performed there in 1984. In 1987, Mathias received an honorary doctorate from Westminster Choir College, Princeton, where choir member Brian Zaros is presently studying.
Sir Edward Bairstow (1874-1946) is a distinguished composer whose professional life was spent in the north of England, as organist and choirmaster at York Minster and professor of music at Durham University. VSing Ye to the Lord is an energetic full anthem, its text and music a fine example of the Edwardian approach to Easter, straightforward and unapologetic.
François Couperin (1668-1733) was born into a family of organists, and became himself one of the pre-eminent organists of the period. His two great organ Masses, a l'usage des couvents and a l'usage des paroisses, ("for convent use" and "for parish use") are archetypes of the distinctive style of organ music arising out of French liturgical practice. This organ music, as with the choral music of the period, was heavily influenced by a uniquely French song genre known as the air de court, characterized by short, highly ornamented melodic passages intended for a solo voice with harpsichord accompaniment. The motet Christo Resurgenti, probably written about 1690, is written in this style, with brief meditations on the theme of Easter set off by proclamations of a word that has always been central to the celebration of this feast, Alleluia.
