Music for Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Pentecost

This Sunday, we hear from two British composers whose lives span the last years of the nineteenth century and the tumultuous early decades of the twentieth. Charles Wood (1866–1926), after his early years as a boy chorister at Armagh Cathedral, travelled to London to study at the newly-founded Royal College of Music with Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford. He carried on as an organ scholar at Cambridge, where he went on to teach harmony and composition for many years, whereas Edward Francis Reginald Woolley (1895–1954) worked primarily in the East Midlands of England, holding prominent organist posts in Lincoln and Newark.

The late Victorian world into which Wood and Woolley were born was, musically, a diverse and fascinating one, where converged the currents of German Romanticism with its lush, complex harmonies, the modernist avant-garde with its new sounds, and a deep interest, creative as well as antiquarian, in the music of centuries past. Wood’s Jesu, the very thought is sweet—setting an English version of the hymn (attributed to Bernard of Clairvaux) Jesu dulcis memoria—owes most to the last of these, and its graceful arching melodies, mood of tender ecstasy, and chaste harmonies would—almost—not raise any sixteenth-century eyebrows. There is something quietly inspiring in the fact that correcting reams of counterpoint exercises by his pupils at Cambridge (as he no doubt did) never clouded Wood’s vision of interwoven voices as a vehicle of profound religious feeling; the tradition that he handed down to future generations remained a living one in his hands.

This morning’s prelude, “Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein,” is drawn from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Orgelbüchlein or “Little Organ Book,” a collection of chorale preludes intended to demonstrate the many techniques of presenting and elaborating a hymn tune on the organ. The upper part of this short piece is a textbook in astonishingly beautiful decoration of a simple melody, while the lower parts are pervaded by a pleading motive, insistently repeated and imitated. This hymn’s call for deliverance in the “hour of utmost need” seems to find an appropriate moment as the natural and liturgical years swing toward themes of nightfall and daybreak, watchfulness, and critical times of decision. The same tune under a different text was treated by Bach—reportedly on his deathbed and in the night of his last blindness—in his final organ chorale, “Vor deinen Thron tret ich hiermit.”

– Connor Page, organ scholar

Solemn Mass takes place at St. James’ Anglican Church, Vancouver at 10:30 am every Sunday.