the composer hard at work The first stage of composing a new work is (in most cases) research. When writing to a commission, I like to get as much detail about the commissioner’s expectations as I can, so that I’m not endlessly wondering about it while trying to compose.
“What do you want the music to sound like? Give me some examples!”
This is when I get to listen to music for several hours and call it working. It’s pretty fun. The hard part is having to stop and go on to the next stage (actually composing). It’s tempting to just keep ‘researching’ instead…
I’ve been listening to many different ‘Communion Services’ in preparation for writing my own. It’s a whole subgenre of Anglican church music which I’m not heaps familiar with. The idea is to get a feel for musical ‘language’ and conventions of the style – not because I want to write something the same, but because I want to write something that will fit its context, and be understood.
The context is a church service. And the focal point of a Communion Service is Communion, the Eucharist. This is where believers take of the bread and the cup (of wine), just as Jesus told his disciples to do at the Last Supper before his crucifixion.
Everything in the Ordinary of the Mass is designed to lead up to this, as the primary reason for the gathering.* I can see this shape of this in the texts…
“What do you want the music to sound like? Give me some examples!”
This is when I get to listen to music for several hours and call it working. It’s pretty fun. The hard part is having to stop and go on to the next stage (actually composing). It’s tempting to just keep ‘researching’ instead…
I’ve been listening to many different ‘Communion Services’ in preparation for writing my own. It’s a whole subgenre of Anglican church music which I’m not heaps familiar with. The idea is to get a feel for musical ‘language’ and conventions of the style – not because I want to write something the same, but because I want to write something that will fit its context, and be understood.
The context is a church service. And the focal point of a Communion Service is Communion, the Eucharist. This is where believers take of the bread and the cup (of wine), just as Jesus told his disciples to do at the Last Supper before his crucifixion.
Everything in the Ordinary of the Mass is designed to lead up to this, as the primary reason for the gathering.* I can see this shape of this in the texts…
| Kyrie (‘Lord have mercy’) | We come before God humbly, relying on his mercy. |
| Gloria (‘Glory to God in the highest’) | … to worship him for who he is and what he has done… |
| Sanctus (‘Holy, holy, holy’) | … remembering both his transcendence (how far he is above us)… |
| Benedictus (‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’) | … and his immanence (how he has drawn near to us)… |
| Agnus Dei (‘Lamb of God’) | … and remembering that all of this is only possible because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, as the ‘Lamb of God’, to atone for our sin. |
After listening to communion services by Francis Jackson, Harold Darke, Herbert Howells, Charles Villiers Stanford and John Ireland, I’ve begun to get a sense of the kind of ‘thing’ that will do. I’m not making detailed lists of musical conventions or anything like that… I prefer to keep this process as intuitive as possible, so I can simply ‘feel’ my way into the new piece I’m going to write.
I find it curious that many of these composers were not themselves believers. They wrote church music because they wanted to write beautiful music, and the Anglican Church was where that was possible. I think this points to music’s transcendence – that it is able to ‘mean’ something bigger and more real, or true, than the ideas or beliefs of any individual person who writes it.
So, I submit the music I’m composing to God, and ask him to do more with it than I can!
I find it curious that many of these composers were not themselves believers. They wrote church music because they wanted to write beautiful music, and the Anglican Church was where that was possible. I think this points to music’s transcendence – that it is able to ‘mean’ something bigger and more real, or true, than the ideas or beliefs of any individual person who writes it.
So, I submit the music I’m composing to God, and ask him to do more with it than I can!
*This is quite different to my own tradition (Evangelical/Baptist), in which the delivery of the Good News (‘evangelion’), expounded in a sermon, forms the focal point of the service. This isn’t the place to explain the difference; just to point out that I’m sympathetic to both ways of doing things. :)
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