A modern composer and the Canticles and the Psalms

Arvo Pärt in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, two years ago

A modern composer and the Canticles and the Psalms:

Anglican Canticles and Arvo Pärt’s Magnifcat, Nunc Dimittis and De Profundis

Patrick Comerford

Introduction:

The Canticles and the Psalms are traditional parts of Anglican spirituality, and the use of the canticles in Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer is a deeply formative part and parcel of Anglican liturgy, Anglican tradition, and Anglican spirituality.

The beauty of the choral tradition that has been built up around the canticles, including, in particular, Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis within Evening Prayer, has attracted many to Anglicanism.

At present, Choral Evensong is being broadcast twice weekly on BBC Radio 3 – live at 4 p.m. on Wednesdays and repeated at 4 p.m. on Sundays. This afternoon [24 February], Choral Evensong is being broadcast from Peterborough Cathedral; and then, over the next three weeks, from Wakefield Cathedral [3 March 2010], King’s College, Cambridge [10 March 2010], and – on Saint Patrick’s Day [17 March 2010] – from Christ Church Cathedral Dublin.

Choral Evensong was first broadcast on Thursday 7 October 1926 live from Westminster Abbey and has been broadcast weekly on BBC Radio ever since. It has been a major attraction to Anglicanism for many.

Some time ago, I was in London with my elder son, and I thought the most important part of his visit might have been the Parthenon Sculptures in the British Museum, Big Ben, the Tower of London, the Millennium Bridge, the Globe Theatre or looking down on London from the dome of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. But it was none of these – it was sitting in the choir in Westminster Abbey for Choral Evensong, complete with the canticles Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis.

Quite often those who have been raised in the Anglican tradition can recite whole canticles and psalms from memory.

You will find this useful in pastoral work, especially when it comes to visiting the sick and the dying, and when they ask you to pray with them.

Praying the psalms or canticles with people who have been raised in and formed spiritually by the traditional Anglican use of the psalms and the canticles can be very comforting for them, and very consoling for you.

Which are your favourite canticles?

[Discussion]

As fewer and fewer people come to Evening Prayer in our parish churches on Sundays, we are in danger of forgetting that Magnificat or the Song of Mary is one of the great traditional canticles for Evensong throughout the Anglican Communion.

According to the music critic Richard Whitehouse, “the coupling of Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis is a procedural ‘given’ in the Evening Service of the Anglican tradition.”

As Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis are sung almost daily at Choral Evensong in many Anglican cathedrals and churches, there is a real need for multiple settings of these canticles. Nearly every composer in the 19th and 20th century Anglican choral tradition composed one or more settings of “Mag” and “Nunc.”

At its extreme, this led composers such as the Dublin-born Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924) to write a Magnificat in every major key. At Choral Evensong in Christ Church Cathedral with Radio 3 on Saint Patrick’s Day, we shall be singing Stanford’s Canticles in A.

Stanford’s other choral works include two oratorios, a Requiem (1896), a Stabat Mater (1907), and many secular works. His church music still holds a central place among Anglican compositions. Particularly popular examples include his Evening Services in B flat, A, G, and C, his Three Latin Motets (Beati quorum via, Justorum animae, and Coelos ascendit hodie), and his anthem For lo, I raise up.

Even if he is going out of fashion in some places today, Stanford’s influence should not be under-estimated: while he was Professor of Music at Cambridge and at the Royal College of Music, his students included Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Herbert Howells.

Herbert Howells (1892-1983), for his part, published 20 settings of Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis during his career.

But in using the canticles, we can be enriched by drawing on other traditions within the Church, and allowing ourselves to be informed by how they use the canticles and have been enriched spiritually by them.

This afternoon, I want to introduce one modern composer and to reflect on how he has used the canticles and psalms, and through his compositions has brought new spiritual insights to many people who would not otherwise be familiar with our Anglican tradition of the canticles and psalms at Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer.

Introducing Arvo Pärt:

Arvo Pärt is an Estonian composer who has become very popular in his own lifetime. Pärt who was born at Paide in Estonia on 11 September 1935, and his musical education began at the age of seven.

By his early teens, he was writing his own compositions. His early influences included Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Bartók and Schoenberg. His Credo (1968) was considered a direct provocation to the Soviet thinking, and when his early works were banned under Soviet rule, Pärt started to study 14th-16th century choral music.

Later, he immersed himself in early music, looking at the roots of western music and studying plainsong, Gregorian chant, and polyphony. During this period, his new compositions included Fratres, Cantus In Memoriam Benjamin Britten, and Tabula Rasa.

In 1980, he was forced to leave Estonia with his wife and their two sons. They first lived in Vienna, and there he finished his De Profundis, which he had first sketched in 1977. There too he became an Austrian citizen. They then moved to Berlin, where he still lives.

Pärt’s music came to attention in the West through the efforts of Manfred Eicher, who started to record several of Pärt’s compositions in 1984.

Later works by Pärt include settings for sacred texts, drawing inspiration from Saint John’s Passion, Te Deum, and the Litany. His choral works from this period include his Magnificat and The Beatitudes.

Two years ago, he was honoured as the featured composer of the RTÉ Living Music Festival in Dublin. The Louth Contemporary Music Society commissioned him to write a new choral setting for Saint Patrick’s Breastplate, called The Deer’s Cry, which had its debut in Drogheda and Dundalk in February 2008. He has reached a more popular audience through scores for over 50 movies, including Promised Land and part of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

Arvo Pärt’s style of composition:

Pärt describes his music as “tintinnabuli” – like the ringing of bells. The music is characterised by simple harmonies, often single unadorned notes, or triad chords. He says his music is like light going through a prism: the music may have a slightly different meaning for each listener, and so it creates a spectrum of musical experience, similar to the rainbow of light.

It is said “his music fulfils a deep human need that has nothing to do with fashion.” But there is a warning: with Pärt, you have to be patient. At first, his work sounds very austere, almost as if it has a respect for silence. Yet it is music that lingers in the memory for a long time. It has been summed up as “mystical minimalism,” or “spiritual minimalism.”

Pärt’s Magnificat:

The canticle Magnifcat echoes several Old Testament passages, especially the Song of Hannah in the First Book of Samuel (I Samuel 2: 1-10). In the Orthodox Church, Magnificat is usually sung at Sunday Matins.

The words of the canticle are from the Gospel according to Saint Luke (Luke 1: 46-55), in the account of the Virgin Mary’s visit to her pregnant cousin Elizabeth. After Mary greets Elizabeth, the child who is to be born, John the Baptist, moves inside Elizabeth’s womb. When Elizabeth praises Mary for her faith, Mary sings Magnificat in response.

The child leaping in the womb can be seen as a haunting prefiguring of those who leap with joy in the depths of death when they hear that Christ is coming to visit them from the tomb. Mary’s words in Magnificat are a harrowing of all the hells in our lives. Wickedness and the misuse and abuse of power are being thrown aside by her son. The greatness of the Lord is proclaimed. He descends to the lowly and with his arm lifts them up. This was the promise made to Abraham and the faithful of the past; it is true for us today; and it is true for the future and for all time.

Arvo Pärt’s Magnificat is probably his most immediately appealing work. But in this Magnificat, which was first performed in Berlin in 1989, he ignores the classical settings for Magnificat from previous centuries.

Instead, he gives us a Magnificat with a strong spiritual aura that is intensely serene as we listen.

[Listening: Magnificat]

For Arvo Pärt’s Magnificat, visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDpUyvELcx8&feature=related.

Arvo Pärt and Nunc Dimittis

Twelve years after writing his Magnificat, Arvo Pärt wrote his setting for Nunc Dimittis in 2001. This was written to a commission from Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Edinburgh and was first heard at the Edinburgh Festival in August 2001.

The words of this Canticle are from the Gospel according to Saint Luke (Luke 2: 29-32) and are set by Pärt with an emphasis on the gentle radiance that these words evoke so directly. The part-writing shifts between degrees of dissonance with a sense of growing intensity, and reaches its brief but fervent climax at the words lumen ad revelationem, with a simple but powerful shift to the major.

[Listening: Nunc Dimittis]

Arvo Pärt and the Psalms:

Arvo Pärt’s setting for Psalm 96, Cantate Domino, was composed in 1977 and revised in 1996. This is a setting for Psalm 96 for four-part chorus and organ.

The simple, chant-like melody is heard in a number of harmonisations and registral combinations, with the sparing organ part adding a subtle degree of colour to the vocal writing.

[Listening: Cantate Domino]

Pärt’s De Profundis (Psalm 130), written in 1980, is a very rich and rewarding composition, with its inter-action between the flickering organ, the tenor and bass voices, the quiet bass drum strokes and the chimes of a singular tubular bell.

[Listening: De Profundis]

Conclusions:

Arvo Pärt – and other composers such as Stanford and Howells – have brought the rich spiritual values of the canticles and the psalms to a public that is so wide that few of them may even be aware of the place that Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis have in the Anglican traditions of spirituality and liturgy.

[Discuss the opportunities arising from the use of Canticles today.]

Canon Patrick Comerford is Director of Spiritual Formation, the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, Dublin. This essay is based on notes for a seminar on 24 February 2010 in the Year III B.Th. course, Spirituality for Today.