Music Notes 2014 – Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity

The mass setting at the Solemn Eucharist this Sunday is the Missa Brevis by the

British composer Lennox Berkeley (1903–1989). Berkeley attended the same school as

Benjamin Britten, albeit a decade earlier. In a case of lightning striking several times

in fairly unlikely territory, the poet and playwright Wystan Hugh Auden was also a

pupil there, fitting in between their dates. Not having actually been at the school at

the same time, Britten and Berkeley only met some years later. Berkeley promptly

fell romantically-speaking rather heavily for Britten and pursued him with some

ardour. Although they did share a home for a time, it was a chaste affair, and the

matter was anyway put beyond question when Britten and Peter Pears formed their

remarkable personal as well as professional relationship that lasted for the rest of

their lives. In any case, Berkeley’s life eventually took a quite different turn. In 1946,

by which time he was working at the BBC, he surprised the bachelor friends with

whom he then shared a flat in Pimlico by announcing that he had decided to marry

his secretary, Freda Bernstein.

Dire warnings of future unhappiness if he were to pursue this course proved

ungrounded, and Lennox and Freda formed a very happy household, into which

they eventually welcomed three sons. Berkeley (as was also the case with Britten)

was far from a Bohemian and craved stability and a “normality” that the society of

those days was never going to attribute to any other kind of relationship than

conventional marriage. With Freda he had both. Britten opted to face society down,

with considerable success, but with a perpetual air of anxiety about doing so.

Berkeley, for a variety of reasons, chose to make peace with the demands of his

environment and, especially perhaps, his church. Nevertheless, when his eldest son,

Michael, was born, he asked Britten to be his godfather, an invitation which was

warmly accepted. Britten broke new ground when he was made a life peer a little

before his death in 1976, the first composer to whom this had ever happened.

Michael Berkeley has already followed his godfather’s footsteps in this respect, so

that makes two elevated composers so far. Julian, the middle son, who trained on the

organ and flute at the Royal College of Music, went into burglar alarms in a big way

and founded his own very successful business. The youngest of the sons, Nick, is a

highly successful photographer and film maker, a career that he arrived at via a spell

in what is known technically as a “proto-punk” band.

Berkeley wrote two mass settings, the Mass for Five Verses in 1964 – a piece in which

he explored a more astringent musical language that he had found himself

developing in the years leading up to the mass – and the Missa Brevis in 1960. Both

settings were written for Westminster Cathedral, and the dedication of the earlier

piece is to his sons Michael and Julian Berkeley and the boys of Westminster

Cathedral Choir. Berkeley had become a convinced Roman Catholic in 1928 while

studying in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, and his faith, which remained extremely

important to him throughout his life, imbues the music. One can also hear in this

setting from his use of imitative counterpoint how well he knew his Renaissance

composers and the deep affection he had for their music.

The motet is a setting by one of those Renaissance masters, Orlande de Lassus (1532–

1594), of a text from Psalm 8, Domine Dominus Noster – O Lord, how admirable is thy

name in the whole earth. Lassus divides the six voices he calls for into blocks, and uses

them in contrasting sections, each only a few measures long. So, we start with all six

for one and a half bars, then lose the top and bottom voices for a few bars of four-

part texture, then all six return. The three lowest then sing a brief phrase, answered

by the top three, and so on. There is a constant rearrangement of the parts into little

mini-choirs of just about every available combination. The music is throughout in

blocks of sound, rather than the knitted together individual lines that is typical of so

much music of this period. But Lassus has specific reasons for writing the piece this

way. When he brings all six voices together, they represent the whole of humanity –

the whole earth that admires the name of the Lord. But his idea of humanity is not of a

single undifferentiated block, but rather is made up of endless groups of people,

each with their own characteristics. He illustrates this by the constant switching

between different combinations of voices, each contributing its own distinctive

sound for a moment before the music moves on. It is really a little sermon in a brief

61 bars.

The voluntary at the end of the Solemn Eucharist is the Toccata alla Rumba by Peter

Planyavsky (born 1947). The surname reflects the fact that he is Austrian, coming

from a country with a rich heritage from multiple peoples derived from its days of

empire. Highly influential in Viennese musical circles and in the organ world, he

was organist of the Stephansdom (St Stephen’s Cathedral) in Vienna from 1983 until

1990. He wrote this rather extraordinary piece in 1971, a time when there was a great

deal of experimentation in what could be done to shake up organ music and make it

seem less dusty and – well – formally Lutheran. Ironically, this was at the same time

that organ building across the western world was pointing ever more firmly in a

North German direction with a rediscovery of the drier sound world of the Bach

organ tradition and an abandonment of the romantic organ tradition, but that

deserves a rather longer diatribe on another occasion… This piece certainly goes for

the Rumba idea, but does so in a highly virtuosic way, so no “dumbing down” here.

Meantime, lest one think this a mere piece of frippery, the choral melody for Nunc

danket alle Gott (Now thank we all our God) is prominently contributed by the pedals in

the middle of the piece. It is, above all, really good fun!

The Canticles at Evensong will be the Evening Service in D by Charles Wood (1866–

1926), the Irish composer who contributed so much to both our choral music and

hymnody. This is one of the great settings of the Anglican tradition and flows with

Wood’s characteristic fluency and elegance. There is something remarkably well-

structured about his music, and he knows how to get his effects, both in terms of

texture and harmony. It has to be significant that both Ralph Vaughan Williams and

Herbert Howells were taught by him, benefiting hugely from his urbane command

of compositional technique and harmony. He wrote several settings of the Evening

Canticles, but this is certainly his best known and loved. The anthem is O thou the

Central Orb, also by Wood.

The voluntary at the end of Evensong is the final movement of the Trois Pièces pour

Grande Orgue by Henri Constant Gabriel Pierné (1863–1937). The voluntaries at the

Evensongs of the past two weeks have been the first two movements, and this is the

last part of the suite. It is a Scherzo, an unusual way to end a suite, but Pierné goes

out of his way to give the last section an additional gravitas, contrasting with the

skipping bittiness of the opening section. The result is that it does indeed come to a

rousing conclusion, even if it is hard to see how this will be achieved at the outset.