Music Notes for Sunday, November 2, 2025

Music for All Saints’ Sunday

 

Since we are going to indulge in the rich romanticism of Gabriel Faure’s Requiem for the All Souls Day service next Thursday, I chose a dramatic style alternative for our Mass setting this morning. Tomas Luis da Victoria (1548-1611) is acclaimed as one of the giants of Renaissance church music (the other two being Lassus and Palestrina).

Victoria was influenced by the work of his older contemporaries. He was a choirboy in Avila cathedral, and after graduating, travelled to Italy where he held various positions in Rome and was ordained priest. He returned to Spain in 1587, spending the rest of his life as organist and composer under the sponsorship of the Spanish royal family.

His motet O Quam Gloriosum was published in 1572. It is a brief expression of the composer’s talent for drama – albeit pure and appropriately restrained – in the setting of a text for use on All Saints Sunday. The material for this motet was recast as a parody mass of the same title.

The opening chord progression depicts the joyful mystery of transfiguration into the afterlife.  A rather literal and vivid use of text painting is employed on the word sequuntur (“they follow”), as the vocal entries imitate each other in succession, like lambs. The comforting imitation continues as the Saints are led to their eternal home.

Paul wrote the Toccata on SINE NOMINE for Susan in 1983 when she was director of music at St. Philip’s Anglican Church in Dunbar. Paul is retired now and was an architect, artist and amateur composer, singer, pianist and organist.

Brigid Coult

 

/by

Music Notes for Sunday, July 6, 2025

Music for Pentecost 4

 

Today’s musical offerings explore the meaning of the peace Christ bestows on his followers in the Gospel. Before the collective proclamation of the opening hymn, we gather in a moment of inward serenity: a short meditation by Belgian organist Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens, who studied in a lineage of pupils directly descended from Bach. His own students such as Guilmant and Widor would later shape the trends of late-romantic organ music, a category into which Lemmens is often grouped. One hears in “Adoration” a bridge between the classical forms of central Europe and the emotive language of his peers such as César Franck.

The words of the offertory and communion hymns recall the discipleship of peace in Christ: a mission for which Bach and his contemporaries viewed the Holy Ghost as an evangelical conduit, inspiring devotion in the hearts of believers throughout the world. Bach depicts the Spirit’s omnipresence through musical allegory in his third “Kyrie” setting from Clavier-Übung III, heard as today’s postlude. The chorale melody is set in sustained bass notes played by the pedal, over which a musically-perfected counterpoint in four voices evolves using subjects taken from each of the hymn’s verses. This polyphony converges over the pedal’s final note in a fiery conclusion, descending in a striking series of chromaticism and “cross” motives (tritones), connecting the predestination of the Passion to the faith shared by Christ’s disciples.

 Abraham Ross

/by