Our Next Concert

Here is a small taste of the delights that await you!

Composer’s note:

In the back of my mind were Classical and Baroque “cantata-masses” where each fragment of the text is spun out into a complete movement. I was tempted in this direction, but decided at length to set the text in English (mostly the version in the New Zealand Prayer Book). And as soon as I had made that decision, I felt that I couldn’t repeat each clause indefinitely, treating them as tokens to fill out abstract musical designs, but had to regard the text (or at least larger sections of it) as meaningful wholes.

Then I had an idea. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ Pied Beauty (“Glory be to God for dappled things”) came into my head, which I had attempted without success to set at various times over the last 25 years. I thought of inhabiting this canonical text with other, related texts (“and the birds of the air make their homes in its branches…”).

It occurred to me that one of Hopkins’ Terrible Sonnets , written out of his blackest depression, could make a useful counterpoint to the Agnus Dei sections; then I realised that the second half of his “That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection” could bring about a return to the joyful mood of the whole.

So there is a kind of spiritual drama, a dark night of the soul, in the middle section of the piece. And it may be worth saying that the dynamic of this section – the attempt to soothe and manage dark imaginings in the early hours of the morning by repetition of the Agnus Dei prayer – is, quite literally, something that has been a regular part of my spiritual life. I do believe, somehow, that joy will have the final word; but enacting this remains a difficult musical and emotional problem.