Music Notes for September 27, 2026

Music for Saint Michael and All Angels

In 1961, when the Duke of Edinburgh entreated Benjamin Britten to write a setting of Psalm 100 for the choir of the chapel at St. George’s Castle, he was in the midst of a rather turbid turn of musical style. His recent operas, Noye’s Floode and Turn of the Screw, embodied a rather more tortured and morose artistic expression than his younger, cheerful works. As he set out to compose and publish the anthem, he remembered his 1934 setting of the Te Deum in C, for which he determined this new work would be a companion. The result is a delightfully concise canticle overbrimming with joy, from the first cascading descent of the melodic theme in the organ part through the many tiered crescendos where the choir seems to embody angel choir singing exultations in never-ending echoing chorus.

Perhaps it is fitting that we sing one of the most “musical” psalms on the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels. Angels are often associated with song or other musical endeavours, depicted as a “heavenly chorus” in renaissance art, with visions of paradise often portraying polychoral angelic consorts of viols, dulcians, and plucked-string instruments.

I would be remiss to forego a mention of the special occasion this Sunday: as we celebrate Fr Matthew Johnson’s tenure as Street Outreach Priest at St. James’, our musical offerings reflect the impact of his presence here. Not only was Fr Matthew’s visible commitment to street outreach one of the things that drew me most to be a part of St. James’ community, but we have built a strong bond over our shared passion for music, art, and spirituality; core interests we believe to be inextricably linked. The choir will sing one of Fr Matthew’s favourite anthems as the motet, and I have prepared organ voluntaries that recall some of the quite moving conversations we have shared. Thank you, Fr Matthew, for your service, advocacy for the sacred arts, and your very special continued presence in our spiritual life.

– Abraham Ross

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

 

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Music Notes for September 20, 2026

Music for Seventeenth Sunday of Pentecost

William Wordsworth, an expert in cloudy and expansive poetry, once wrote about the pleasure he found in the disciplined confines of the fourteen-line sonnet form: just as “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room; / And hermits are contented with their cells,” the poet says, so “for me, / In sundry moods, ’twas pastime to be bound / Within the Sonnet’s scanty plot of ground.”

Perhaps Thomas Tallis, almost three hundred years earlier, felt similarly the liberating constraint of small forms. During his long life, Tallis negotiated the reigns of four monarchs—Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary Tudor, and Elizabeth I—quite different in (among other things!) their musical demands. In the 1530s and ’40s, the rule of the day was clear, intelligible word setting and a simple style. To a composer raised on the florid lines and ample dimensions of older music, this might have seemed like a restricted space in which to work. Tallis, however, found a new beauty and freedom in the concise structures and graceful gestures of his early English-texted anthems, If ye love me chief among them.

As much as musical languages have changed since Tallis’s time, the essential features of this disciplined style (four-part writing and fluent, chordal treatment of text) have had an evergreen appeal. We might think of Tallis as an early cultivator of the small but endlessly fruitful space in which listeners and composers—such as Francis Jackson, York master of music, eminent organist, and composer of today’s Communion Service in G—have exercised creative freedom ever since.

– Connor Page, organ scholar

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

 

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