Output details

'Balulalow’ and ‘Lament’ [two separate a cappella choral compositions, 2009 and 2011]

These works represent consecutive stages in an evolving relationship with Oxford University Press. They demonstrate similarities of approach and are also juxtaposed within the Naxos conspectus of Francis Pott choral works, In the Heart of Things, where a phrase from the Wilfrid Wilson Gibson poem, Lament, gives the recording its collective title (the disc includes also the Mass for eight parts).

Balulalow is organised strophically, in the second verse deploying a soprano solo as a loosely imitative elaboration of the uppermost choral line.

Like Balulalow, Lament adopts a strophic form, responding to the two brief stanzas of Gibson’s poem. It reacts to the over-familiar, anachronistic public rhetoric of Binyon’s For the Fallen by positing an alternative which is both more intimate and, because less rooted in its own time, more truly universal. The music is nonetheless a specific response to the death of Staff Sergeant Olaf Schmid in Sangin District, Helmand Province, Afghanistan on 31 October 2009, while attempting to defuse an improvised explosive device. In childhood Schmid had been Head Chorister at Truro Cathedral. He had lived moments from the composer’s home outside Winchester and news of his death brought awareness of having seen his family on a number of previous occasions.

The music seeks to concentrate emotional focus towards and into its peroration. Here, an irresolute first inversion chord gives place first to sustained monotones from a solo soprano and tenor, then finally to a soprano alone, symbolising both individual and universal loss or separation in terms which are deliberately obvious yet also, in context, unexpected.

These two pieces represent an approach consciously different from that of the Mass, exploring choral texture in ways that are generally homophonic, or else polyphonic with only limited recourse to imitative technique.