Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
The University of West London
Mass for eight parts
Raised within the Anglican choral tradition, I was composing in a fluent, plausible Baroque idiom at 13 and had mastered fugal exposition in ways that mostly withstand my own adult scrutiny. At school I was rigorously trained in 6-part Palestrina counterpoint. That I may have been among the last to receive such grounding is suggested by music written today for the Anglican Church, where counterpoint is often tentative, episodic, awkward or non-existent.
The Mass leaps ecumenical fences, aligning itself with both English pre-Reformation and continental 16th-century polyphonic tradition. It represents an attempt to quantify how far the mechanisms and guiding principles of 16th-century imitative polyphony can be subsumed into a viable contemporary idiom. Plainly a point is reached where such rules and habits undergo pragmatic transformation in deference to added complexity of both harmonic language and tonal range; but sensitive regulation of such elements and an alert balancing of the pragmatic with the instinctive may lead to something which, if still rooted in the known and familiar, yet discovers new, unexpected meetings of the linear and the vertical without sacrificing imitative, motivic rigour.
Following precedent, the Kyrie alternates tutti outer sections with a 6-part semi-chorus featuring a cantus firmus derived from the movement’s opening upper line. Imitative hocketing informs both Gloria and Sanctus. In deliberate contrast, momentum and texture in the Benedictus allude initially to the Classical tradition of the Mass. The Agnus Dei mirrors the tripartite design of the Kyrie, providing semblances of symphonic recapitulation by reprising and further developing earlier imitative elements. The Mass sits within a modern a cappella tradition embracing Vaughan Williams and Frank Martin, yet admits harmonic and tonal influence from Nielsen. Its Agnus Dei appropriates the opening of his organ work, Commotio, in homage to the eponymous choir who commissioned and recorded the Mass.
