Missa brevis – Grayston Ives (b. 1948)
Bill Ives has spent his life in choral music—as a singer, conductor, teacher and composer (writing as Grayston Ives). He was a chorister at Ely Cathedral and studied music at Selwyn College, Cambridge, taking composition lessons with Richard Rodney Bennett. After Cambridge he sang in Guildford Cathedral Choir before joining the King’s Singers, with whom he recorded and performed worldwide. For 18 years he directed the Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford. In 2008 his work as a composer and conductor of church music was recognized with the award of a Lambeth DMus and a Fellowship of the Royal School of Church Music.
Grayston Ives’ choral works always express their sentiment clearly and with an ear toward memorable melody and richly coloured harmony. His Missa brevis (1987), this morning’s setting of the Mass Ordinary, is inventive, tuneful, harmonically vibrant, textually illuminating, and (very importantly) short, with a terrific organ accompaniment.
Gerald Harder