May 6, 2012 - Easter 5

Symphony in g minor: "Adagio Cantabile"

                                                               - Edwin H. Lemare

Greater Love Hath No Man - John Ireland

My Eyes For Beauty Pine - Herbert Howells

Festival Toccata - Percy Fletcher

Hymns: #296 ENGELBERG, #487 THE CALL, #182 TRURO

For this week’s music I have turned to the English Romantic School. These four composers made important contributions to choir and organ repertoire despite never being regarded as major composers. As is often the case with organist/composers, their output largely remains confined to works for the church or for their own instrument, the organ. This is certainly the case with the virtuoso organist Edwin H. Lemare(1866-1934). Lemare began his life and career in England at the Royal Academy of Music in 1876. Ten years later he obtained his F.R.C.O. and served for a short period as an organ professor and examiner for the Royal School. In 1900 he left for a hundred recital tour of the US and Canada and stayed in the States to make a career as a concert organist. He served as Civic organist for the cities of San Fransisco,CA; Portland, ME; and Chattanooga,TN. His best known composition is his Andantino in Db which gained even greater popularity when Ben Black and Charles N. Daniels added words to the tune and it became known as Moonlight and Roses. The prelude today comes from Lemare’s Opus 35 Symphony in g minor (1899). As is true of most of Lemare’s writing, he makes use of the orchestral resources of the large symphonic organs that he plays. In this piece a very simple but elegant melody is passed between the flute, string and solo diapasons of the organ. He then introduces a countermelody which does the same. The two themes are combined and again passed between hands and stops. The piece ends, in typical Lemare fashion, with the organist “thumbing down” a solo flute note on the Great while holding sustained chords on the strings of the Swell.

The postlude is by the English composer Percy Fletcher (1879-1932). Fletcher is remembered primarily as a composer of “light” music for the theatre. Much of his short career was spent as a music director in London where he served several different theatres before being appointed to the post at Her Majesty’s Theatre in 1915, the post he retained for the rest of his life. Fletcher wrote for all mediums including church music, part-songs, keyboard compositions and perhaps most famously brass bands. In 1913 he was commissioned to write a piece for brass band. Fletcher’s Labour and Love and Epic Symphony set a new and higher standard for brass band compositions that led to works by other major British composers. The Festival Toccata exploits the unique tonal characteristics of the English Romantic organ, making use of the “full Swell” and the solo Tuba. The work goes back and forth between alternating chords between the hands to sweeping scalar gestures to brassy chords on the Swell reeds and the solo Tuba before combing all of these into a grand finale truly befitting a festive occasion. I thought this would be a good piece to kick off the Celebration of the Arts week.

The gradual anthem is Greater Love Hath No Man. This anthem by John Ireland (1879-1962) draws its text from the Song of Solomon and the Gospel of John. The anthem combines the image of Christ laying down His life for us but also makes reference to the idea of laying down your life for another. It is a common motet for times of remembrance. John Ireland was a lifelong bachelor with the exception of a very short marriage from 1926-1928. He was educated at the Royal School of Church Music where he later became a teacher himself. In addition to his teaching responsibilities he served as organist and choirmaster at St. Luke’s Church, Chelsea. This position was likely the reason for much of his sacred output which includes the hymn tune My Song Is Love Unknown as well as several other anthems and a Communion Service in C which is still performed today. He led a quiet and uneventful life and was very critical of his early compositions, most of which he destroyed. John Ireland retired in 1953 and spent the rest of his life living in a converted windmill in Sussex. This year marks the 50^th anniversary of his death.

The communion anthem is My Eyes for Beauty Pine by Herbert Howells(1892-1983). Today the setting will be performed as a solo (it can also be done with SATB choir – primarily in unison). Herbert Howells is primarily remembered for his large output of Anglican Church Music. His life was marked by many challenges and tragedies including a diagnosis of Graves disease while studying at the Royal College of Music and the death of his nine-year-old son Michael from polio. This latter event colored most of Howell’s writing including his Hymnus Paradisi for the 1949 Three Choirs Festival, and his motet Take Him, Earth, for Cherishing, commissioned for the memorial service of John F. Kennedy. The text of My Eyes is by the British poet laureate from 1913-1930 Robert Bridges (1844-1930). Bridges received his education at Eton College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. It was his intent to practice medicine until age forty and then devote his life to poetry. Lung disease, however forced him to retire from medicine two years earlier than planned. He published his first collection of poems in 1873. Bridge’s faith is evident in much of his work as a writer. Unlike his contemporaries, his poetry and literary criticism is filled with restraint, purity and precision. Bridges did not achieve much notoriety until shortly before his death. His contribution to literary analysis of Milton and his hymn texts, along side his Testament of Beauty are his most lasting contributions. This setting by Howells marries Bridges text with a wandering melody which for illustrates the singers longing for the beauty that is then found in the concluding verse of the text.