Music for choir with accompaniment

Composer’s programme note

This piece brings together a number of different elements and inspirations linked to the idea of ‘the harmony of the spheres’, including both stars and planets.

Digitised sounds from stars (converted from their light output) have shown us that in one sense stars really do ‘sing’. Heard in this way each star has its own signature pitch, subject to various kinds of tonal modulation through its varying intensity. At the same time, each star’s life stage in its growth from white dwarf to red giant is reflected in the degree of hiss in the auditory version of its light. I have written into the opening of the piece textures and effects inspired by some of those digitised sounds. The choir is asked to sustain various pitches using sounds akin to multiphonic singing and to use other mouth sound effects.

These lead into a choral setting of the Song of the Stars – a Passamaquoddy poem in Algonquin, collected in Canada in 1822 by Charles Leland and published by him in translation two years later. I have set this to material derived from a 12^th century Latin hymn ‘Naturalis Concordia Vocum cum Planetis’. The opening part of this Latin hymn eventually surfaces in its original plainsong guise in the third movement. It features a decorated cosmic scale in which each of the ‘planets’ known at the time (including the moon and the sun!) is given a different note of the scale.

Orlando Gibbons’ wonderful hymn tune and the associated 19^th century words by John Chadwick ‘Eternal Ruler of the Ceaseless Round’ make their appearance in the fourth movement, with elements of variation technique. The fourth variation combines the distinctive rhythm from Holst’s Mars with the fourth verse of the hymn, before a brief return of the Stars and Planets music to finish. An important recurring element of the sound world of this piece is the solo part for waterphone, which often comes to the fore at linking passages as well as the beginnings and ends of movements.

The piece was commissioned by Saffron Walden Choral Society for their performance with Chameleon Arts Orchestra at the final concert of the Thaxted Festival in its hundredth anniversary year. My use of planetary inspiration and a Renaissance tune is a homage to Holst who began the Festival, and to his great friend Vaughan Williams.

Notes: Magnificat cum Angelis

The work expands the standard text of the Magnificat with three additional angel texts. First comes the Angelus, a Latin prayer sequence including the Ave Maria, sung three times. The other additions are two texts from medieval mystery plays. The first looks ahead to Mary’s own death, where six angels come to lead her to heaven, and the second is Gabriel’s farewell as he departs after the annunciation. Janet Wheeler’s music for these has touches of medieval mysticism, helped by the use of handbells, organ and harp. The first and last movements of the Magnificat proper have the flavour of Jewish dance music.

JW: I pictured Mary after receiving Gabriel’s news. Despite the complications of her situation, I thought she’d be unable to stop herself from dancing for joy as she realises what is happening to her. I’ve added hand drums, tambourine and finger cymbals to the 7/8 dance music!

The Ecce Enim and Sicut locutus sections have a more scientific inspiration. “Where the text refers to succeeding generations, I’ve composed music influenced by the structure of DNA, with its double helix represented in spiralling lines for harp and organ and subtly shifting combinations of harmonies for voices and strings.”

Magnificat cum Angelis was commissioned by Yellow Car Charitable Trust

Notes: Sea Tongue

In Medieval times Dunwich was a great city but, over the years the sea has eaten away at the land and most of the original city is now lost. The most recent of the many churches to crumble into the sea was All Saints, whose abandoned shell, perched high on the crumbling cliff, was painted by Turner. The legend of bells sounding under the sea is commonly found in many areas where the land is retreating, and Dunwich is no exception. This idea forms the basis for Kevin Crossley-Holland’s Sea tongue.The story is structured in fourteen sections, each told in the first person, from the shifting standpoints of humans (the bellwoman, the fisherman, the living, the dead) abstract and supernatural characters (the sea-god, the night-storm, the morning) and concrete entities (the church, the cliff, the boat and crucially the bell).

It was this structure which immediately suggested a vocal setting to me. The language is poetic, yet concise and I wanted the music to illuminate the story without holding up the action unduly on the one hand, or becoming an unmelodic stream of recitative on the other.

Beyond the obvious 14-part structure dictated by the text there is also a kind of ‘patchwork’ structure to the piece, also prompted to a large extent by the text. A prose text tends to provide fewer opportunities than verse for musical repetition but there are in Sea Tongue various strands of ideas and images echoed across different sections. I have taken them up musically to provide points of repetition and unity over a larger scale, rather like leitmotifs. Some of these are obviously pictorial, others represent a musical character.

Notes: MAZE

A cantata with words by Nick Warburton and music by Janet Wheeler

The words maze and labyrinth are often used interchangeably, but in a technical sense they can indicate two different types of what we commonly call mazes. Unlike a maze or puzzle maze (like the hedge maze in the Bridge End Garden in Saffron Walden) a labyrinth has one path all the way through with no junctions or choices (like Saffron Walden’s turf maze). You follow it to the centre and out again.
MAZE presents the journey through both these types in a series of stages. The choir, narrator and baritone soloist lead us through this journey in a mixture of narration and almost recitative-like singing, interspersed with songs and semi-dramatic episodes.

The songs

To make a labyrinth describes the way in which a labyrinth shape can be drawn or plotted, starting with a cross.

Three Ways to Proceed explores three ways in which people moved through a labyrinth. For this the singers are divided. The youth choir races through, the women dance through and the men pray through it. Labyrinths have historically been associated with all three activities.  The colourful names of some ancient labyrinths hint at some of these activities – The Shepherd’s Race was a turf labyrinth near Sneinton, Nottinghamshire (and of course Saffron Walden children can often be seen racing through our labyrinth). Labyrinth designs are commonly found in Greek and Roman remains and there is a link between the labyrinth and the Greek chorus.  The chorus was a body of dancers who performed in the orchestra  – a levelled sand-strewn area on which the patterns of a dance could be marked out like a labyrinth.
In Christian times labyrinths came to be associated with Jerusalem and the fact that they can be found marked out in the black and white floor tiles in some churches and cathedrals (Chartres, Amiens, Ely etc.) reinforces this link. There is a theory that following the tortuous path was a substitute for taking the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and that ‘pilgrims’ would actually crawl round the labyrinth on their knees, praying. The three groups of singers are eventually combined in one journey, running, dancing and praying simultaneously.

There are mazes all around looks at some of the many structures, places and patterns in our lives that are mazes in everything but name.

The Minotaur features two mazes, the one inhabited by the monster but also the figurative moral maze facing Ariadne as she decides whether to help Theseus  destroy her brother the Minotaur or not.

Hampton Court Maze is the setting for an episode from Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat in which all involved get spectacularly lost.

After revisiting all the previous stages of the maze, the final stage is reached – ‘Standing in stillness apart, with home and peace in your heart’.

Janet Wheeler and Nick Warburton have collaborated previously on Orpheus, a musical for BBC School Radio and on two cantatas: Train in the Rain for SWCS’s project Singing on Track (2004) and On the Breath of the Sky for Wingbeats (2007) a joint project between SWCS and RSPB. In composing MAZE Janet Wheeler was very much aware of the challenge of writing for a mixture of amateur choirs and professional orchestra. The marimba was featured in the composing project with SWCHS and Janet decided also to include a marimba part in MAZE, where it has proved very useful for sustaining harmonies under some of the narration.

Notes: Homage to Albright
Duration variable, typically 4’ or 5’The American composer William Albright wrote ‘An Alleluia Super Round’ in which twenty-three musical fragments are sung freely and independently by all the singers in a choir, building in range and dynamic and then gradually subsiding. This homage uses a similar technique but with a generally more modal tone-set and the addition of a through-composed organ part. It also divides the SATB choir spatially with sopranos and tenors singing one set of fragments and altos and basses singing another from a separate space. All singers sing independently at their own speed. The tenors and sopranos start their series of fragments on just two notes, gradually introducing more notes. When they have spanned an octave and risen to forte, they begin to sing through the phrases in reverse order, while the altos and basses join in loudly on their music and then all parts gradually subside. The organ underlines the mode by providing a backwash of various pedal harmonies, interspersed with more arabesques- like phrases.Reviewing the premiere in Saffron Walden in June 2011, David Parry-Smith says: Homage to Albright was especially successful, mixing choral improvisation based on written-out fragments with spatial separation of sections of the choir – a real surround-sound performance!

Text:
May none of God’s wonderful works keep silence, night or morning.
Bright stars, high mountains, the depths of the seas, sources of rushing rivers:
May all these break into song as we sing to Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
May all the angels in the heavens reply: Amen! Amen! Amen!
Power, praise, honour, eternal glory to God, the only Giver of Grace.
Amen! Amen! Amen!