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Programme Notes
Benedicite
Benedicite is simply the Latin title for 'All the world, praise the Lord'. The English Prayer Book takes thirty-three verses to say so; I chose a few of the old verses and added a sprinkling of new verses to make the following eleven movements:
1. O all ye works of the Lord, praise ye the Lord
A dance of joy to the rhythm of trumpets and drums.
2. Green Things
In a lilting five-four time, the old verse is amplified to include plant forms like 'herbs and heathers'.
3. Sun and Moon
An attempt to capture in sound that sense of silence and eternity, not to say human insignificance, that we feel when looking up into the heavens on a starry night.
4. Badgers and Hedgehogs
In the first of three sections for the younger singers, some of the animals that Noah forgot to mention have a rumbustious time.
5. Ice and Snow
Whilst we sleep, nimble Jack Frost darts round the village with his icicle brush. We shiver in winter's special beauty.
6. Whales and Waters is a drop in the ocean.
Our voices and instruments can only hint at the vast unknown. But in the middle, I transcribe into the strings the plaintive song of the majestic whale, recently captured on tape by the British Antarctic Survey.
7. Butterflies and Moths
The youngsters remind us and themselves that life is fragile and transient, wafted away on the breeze. So we enjoy and give thanks for a myriad of colourful moments.
8. Thunder and Lightning
Over a short repeating bass line, a storm threatens, and the frightening elemental powers give way to the calm waters of:
9. Spirits and Souls
In a brief reference to earlier music, we think of all those absolutely smashing people of our generation who are good to know, and of those of earlier times whose lives can serve as a model. Not least of course:
10. Grannies and Grandads
11. O let the earth bless the Lord
The world has come full circle, and the final hymn of praise recalls the opening fanfares.
© Andrew Carter
Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press
Horizons
i. Where lies the Land – Arthur Hugh Clough
ii. My Soul is awakened – Anne Bronte
iii. Roadways – John Masefield
iv. Exultation – Emily Dickinson
v. The Long Trail – Rudyard Kipling
vi. Now Voyager Depart – Walt Whitman
vii. Crossing the Bar – Alfred Tennyson
I’ve travelled now a hundred years and more,
And yet the thing I seek I cannot find.
This paraphrase from Chaucer’s Pardonner’s Tale sums up for me the nature of our physical and spiritual quest. Hedged around by the hum-drum and trivial, we continue to search for perfection and to reach for the divine. Electron-microscopes reveal new secrets of DNA, and the Hubble space telescope begins to yield the mysteries of Neptune, our farthest planet, and to glimpse infinity through black holes. Measured against space travel our own journeys may seem circumscribed, but they can be real voyages of self discovery.
As members of an island people we are constantly aware of the sea as a physical boundary; we are drawn towards it, and into it, then over it and now, by the modern miracle of Eurostar, underneath it. The shipping forecasts, like the tides, are a twice daily reminder of its ever presence, even to the bedridden of Birmingham. Courtesy of Mr. Beaufort, a severe gale force nine is reported for Fair Isle and Faeroes, Fastnet or Finisterre. Sqally showers buffet Stornaway or Shannon, with storm force winds strengthening on exposed headlands and variable visibility in Dogger or off Dover. The names roll in on us, tolling like bell-buoys from Rockall and Cape Wrath.
I guess that my fascination with the sea began, as for most other Midland landlubbers, on the sands of Skeggy and shingle of Sheringham. Still a landlubber in Captain Cook’s Yorkshire, I head east to Saltburn, Scarborough or Whitby for my fix of the North Sea. However calm it is, I am still scared when I recall returning on a ferry from Denmark in a force 12 gale. We knew we were in for trouble when we saw the crew taking sickness tablets. Psalm 107 became very real: They are carried up to heaven, and down again to the deep,… they reel to and fro and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits’ end.
However, in choosing from the vast wealth of sea poetry my instinct was to avoid the epic narrative and the countless shipwrecks and heartache. As my title suggests, I wanted to raise my eyes from the pavement. Clough invites us to do this with his Where lies the land to which the ship would go? Masefield and rumbustious Rudyard entice us to far distant shores. Whitman and finally Tennyson (a Lincolnshire man) point us even further. I was glad, though, to chance upon two feminine reflections which appeal to my ‘inland’ side: Anne Bronte’s Lines in a wood on a windy day and Emily Dickinson’s Exultation. Any of these are worth reciting if you find yourself waiting in Peterborough bus station.
© Andrew Carter
Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press
Musick’s Jubilee
I am not generally in sympathy with the metaphysical poets, but, when the good songsters of Otley (picture them sitting in their local Chippendale chairs at rehearsal) sent me a poem by the Yorkshireman Andrew Marvell, I settled on it straightway for their Jubilee commission. For after the Wharfe has run broad through the cabinet maker’s town and escaped the beer-swillers of Tadcaster, it meanders gently through the meadows by Nun Appleton Hall (just a few miles from my home) where Marvell lived for a time and wrote some of his stanzas. Inspired by this tenuous link, and wondering if Marvell had been introduced to the Yorkshire custom of cheese with your mince pies, as I was forty years ago in Leeds, I began to explore his vivid dream of how music first began.
One of my first tasks was to find out who Jubal was, since both Marvell and Dryden give him centre stage. He appears very early in the Bible as the first maker of instruments: Genesis 4: 21. The rest of the verses, including Tennyson’s, speak for themselves as indeed I hope the music does.
© Andrew Carter
Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press
Te Deum
Te Deum was commissioned for the 150th anniversary of the Trinity English Lutherian Church, Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA. Its first performance was given on 17 March 1996. The UK première was given by the East Riding Schools Choir and Youth Orchestra, conducted by John Pryce-Jones on 15 July 1997 at City Hall, Hull.
Movements 1, 3, 5 and 7 are a setting of the traditional words of the ‘Te Deum’ and these are linked by three settings of well-known hymns. The work is scored for a four part choir, including children’s chorus and a Soprano soloist in the fifth movement, the orchestration is for a small orchestra plus organ and an array of percussion.
1. We praise thee, O God: we acknowledge thee to be the Lord
2. All creatures of our God and King, Lift up your voice and with us sing. Alleluya!
3. The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee
4. Holy Spirit, truth divine, Dawn upon this soul of mine
5. Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ
6. Christ be with me, Christ within me
7. Day by Day
O Lord save thy people and bless thine heritage
Govern them and lift them up for ever
Day by day we magnify thee;
And we worship thy Name ever world without end.
Te Deum laudamus (We praise thee, O God.)
© Robert Mitchell 1997,
Reproduced with permission of Oxford University Press
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