Nunc Dimittis
The recent celebration of Candlemas started me thinking about the canticle of Nunc Dimittis. The textual structure is a gift to composers as there is a natural growth in intensity as the story in the text develops, but it comes with a number of challenges, among them
How much should the setting be related to the Magnificat?
How should the music be set across S., A., T. and B given it is a personal testament?
Should the Gloria be the same as for the Magnificat?
Should the Gloria continue the musical intensity or be more reflective?
What role should the organ have?
A few years ago, I developed a concert of recorded versions of the Nunc Dimittis for my local church and was very pleasantly surprised by the wide range of musical solutions to the challenges including the setting by Rachmaninov in his Vespers and the beautiful setting by Holst which lay undiscovered for half a century. There is also the very atmospheric setting by Geoffrey Burgon used as the theme music for the 1979 television series Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy.
The very mention of ‘canticle’ immediately brings Herbert Howells into the discussion. Howells wrote twenty settings of the evening canticles, and there is a superb 2007 University of Birmingham MPhil thesis entitled The Style and Development of Herbert Howell’s Evening Canticle Settings 1918-1975. Surprisingly, the author’s name has been omitted from the title page! In fact it is the work of Sophie Cleobury, the daughter of the late Sir Stephen Cleobury. In Chapter 3 she comments extensively on the distinctive style Howells achieved in all 20 sets of evening canticles, and how this style developed through time. This also highlights how quickly Howells, a pupil of Stanford, developed a harmonic and thematic style that was very different to that of his teacher, who was also a composer of evening canticle settings.
This analysis leads to an assessment drawn as to why the settings written between 1945 and 1952 were the most successful, and why the latter settings were (and still are) less accepted. Sophie reviewed cathedral music lists as an element in her research. The top three settings by a substantial margin are those for Collegium Regale, St. Pauls and Gloucester. My favourite is the Gloucester Service. Listening to a performance from St. John’s College, Cambridge whilst watching the score illustrates so well the care with which the organ is used, ending up with a left-hand manual triad that just disappears into space. Without the score you might also miss the tenors and then altos doubling in thirds to create a richer texture just for a few bars in the Gloria when the trebles are singing towards the top of their range.
There is another aspect of Evensong that I’d like to reflect on. Tranquillity, transcendence, and retreat: the transformative practice of listening at Evensong is the title of a 2022 DPhil thesis by Kathryn King at Magdalen College, Oxford. To quote from the abstract “the thesis locates Evensong within the framework of music in everyday life, as a powerful and trusted technology of the self. It argues that emotional and cognitive transformation are central to many people’s experiences of the service, and it demonstrates that the attainment of tranquillity, transcendence, and a sense of retreat are particularly highly valued and frequently reported outcomes. [….] It is proposed that it is the multiplicity of ways of listening that Evensong affords that enables so many ‘sorts and conditions’ of listener to be satisfied by it.
The thesis runs to 408 pages so this short quote most certainly does not do justice to the insights from the research.
The importance of this thesis is that it highlights the role that music plays in shaping the human condition. Those listening to music in the acoustic of a large church may not be there to worship but to find a release from whatever challenges they face at that time. If someone enters the church whilst I am practicing I stop my practice regime and play some reflective music, very conscious of the purpose of the building in which I am playing