Music for Baptism of Our Lord
Today’s mass settings and motet feature the works of Irish composer Charles Wood, who spent most of his life in Cambridge teaching, directing choir, and playing daily services. As a seventeen-year-old, he enrolled in the inaugural class of the Royal School of Music, studying with Ralph Vaughan Williams, who composed the today’s organ prelude. Best known for his canticle settings and anthems, today we hear the composer at his most demure, in a piece he most likely intended for choral services in Cambridge: a brief setting of the mass ordinaries in Phrygian mode and a striking communion motet composed for his college choir and published after his death.
Jesu, the very thought is sweet sets a text translated from a 12th-century devotional poem titled Jesu dulcis memoria, while its musical setting comes from a 1582 Finnish collection of sacred songs titled Piae Cantiones. That Wood should combine a Latin text with a Renaissance melody may seem surprising, yet his careful synthesis of poetic features and harmonic setting reflect his deep understanding of source material and the continuity of a living tradition. Wood’s motet the antique melody of Piae Cantiones with the emotive poignancy native to his own musical idiom, providing a beautiful reflection in music and poetry on the name of Jesus as proclaimed by the voice from heaven for the first time in the Gospel of Matthew.
Dr. Abraham Ross
Solemn Mass takes place at St. James’ Anglican Church, Vancouver at 10:30 am every Sunday.