Holy, holy, holy...
The ‘Sanctus’ has always felt to me like the most exciting part of the service. When my Uncle Gary was locum priest at St Mary’s in Adelaide, he would always make sure that the bell in the bell tower was rung at this point of the service!
What’s so exciting? Well, the text comes from Isaiah 6, and it’s an awesome vision of the LORD God himself, holy and glorious and downright terrifying. God’s holiness is good… too good.
How to express holiness in music? There are lots of different approaches, and many of my favourites are quite mystical – I love the ‘Sanctus’ of Harold Darke’s Collegium Regale Communion Service in E, for instance. But, with that church bell in mind, I wanted something with a bit more force and energy – something to wake people up!
“Holy, holy, holy” – as in the Kyrie, there’s an inherent threeness to this text, which can’t help but come out in the music. More nine-bar phrases punctuate the opening…
What’s so exciting? Well, the text comes from Isaiah 6, and it’s an awesome vision of the LORD God himself, holy and glorious and downright terrifying. God’s holiness is good… too good.
How to express holiness in music? There are lots of different approaches, and many of my favourites are quite mystical – I love the ‘Sanctus’ of Harold Darke’s Collegium Regale Communion Service in E, for instance. But, with that church bell in mind, I wanted something with a bit more force and energy – something to wake people up!
“Holy, holy, holy” – as in the Kyrie, there’s an inherent threeness to this text, which can’t help but come out in the music. More nine-bar phrases punctuate the opening…
But the other key number here is seven. It’s a significant biblical number (connoting perfection, completeness), and it’s also the number of notes in a typical scale. So I put an continuously ascending scale in the bass (disguised at first by ‘hiding’ every third note – see above) and let it loop itself over and over.
At first it works against the nine-bar phrases (making for some cool harmonies), but later it comes into its own. There’s no mistaking the endlessly rising scale in this bit...
At first it works against the nine-bar phrases (making for some cool harmonies), but later it comes into its own. There’s no mistaking the endlessly rising scale in this bit...
(I love how the text lets me overlap the word 'glory' like that!)
Eventually it needs to be cut off so that we can go on… but what better way to do this than with an abrupt change of key? A sudden arrival in E-flat major heralds the interruption of the ‘Benedictus’…
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord…
This line comes from Psalm 118:26, and all four Gospel accounts have it explicitly referencing the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem the week before his crucifixion. I’m not the first composer to think that a solo voice here makes for good dramatic effect!
I’ve written the ‘hosannas’ as quiet responses to this, bringing out the poignancy of this moment. ‘Hosanna!’ is a shout of praise, although it literally means ‘Save us!’ – and this, in context, is what Jesus is about to do. But it will take dying on the Cross.
RSS Feed