MUSIC NOTES
Sunday, May 5th, 2024
Don’t forget that our final installment of our Music At Trinity series, with the North Carolina Baroque Orchestra, is coming up soon – Saturday May 18! Tickets are onsale now!
This morning, more music from the great Anglican Evensong tradition; music we’ll also present across the pond at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, in August.
In case you missed my little primer on Evensong from last week, here it is:
‘So what is Evensong, anyway? Presbyterians might not be intimately familiar with the genre – it’s similar to what we might call sung Vespers. Evensong is based on the medieval monastic offices of the Roman church (the English Book of Common Prayer combined the multiple hours of observance for the medieval monks into two: matins in the morning and evensong in the evening), and at its simplest level marks the passing of another day.
\Typically sung in the cathedrals and college of England and the Anglican Church, its texts and canticles have provided inspiration over the years for countless musical settings by the finest composers of the English tradition, from Tallis (16th-century) through Michael Finnissy (21st-century).
Since most of the service is sung by the choir on behalf of those present, without much congregational hymn singing, one can approach this service as one likes. There is little requirement for active participation; one may follow along with the prayer of the service, or merely bask in the music and atmosphere. As one writer has it:
“Today, evensong is the most used part of the Book of Common Prayer, largely untouched by the liturgical reforms of the past 40 years. It continues to inspire and support some of our culture’s most sophisticated musical endeavors. The passions surrounding its observance are implicit, but it provides a firm peg on which to hang deeply personal reflections and memories…which linger long after [its end].”
The service itself starts with a set of responses (“O Lord, open our lips; and our mouth shall show forth thy praise”) and continues through a psalm, a set of canticles (the Magnificat and the Nunc Dimittis, the weightiest of the offerings, which we will sing in the coming weeks) and two short readings, further chanted responses and prayers (including the Lord’s Prayer), a choral anthem, and concludes with a set of prayers reflecting current events or concerns.’
Last Sunday, we sang music from a Baroque treatment of the “Mag/Nunc” texts by Henry Purcell. Today, we jump forward two hundred years to the Victorian composer Charles Villiers Stanford’s setting of the same. It’s instructive to hear how the two composers set the same words. Whereas Purcell’s is reserved, elegant and intimate in scope, Stanford’s is sweepingly melodic and full of Romantic drama. Of particular note is the opening to the Nunc, with tenors and basses spinning a long, endlessly flowering melody on the words of benediction and farewell.