Composer Blog

I wrote a setting of Psalm 23 for the 28th Sunday in Year A and had hoped that this might have made easier my task. Such hopes were misplaced and a substantial re-write was necessary as this Sunday required different verses and a different refrain.

There are many great settings of this Psalm (eg Inwood and Haugen) but as part of my personal psalm project I decided to compose my own. This same psalm is frequently used during Weddings so I decided on something more upbeat and celebratory. Unhelpfully the text of the third stanza has an additional line in it which forced a change to the verse melody and accompaniment.

A few weeks ago I composed a setting of Psalm 63. Today’s text included a different stanza for the final verse but it seemed to fit with the music I had written for the 21st Sunday in Year A.

This psalm started out as a Refrain with Psalm Tone but here it is revised with clearer indications of the rhythms to be employed.

I had composed a setting of this Psalm back in 1994 and was pleased that the new Abbey texts worked well with the original music!

It is tricky trying to second guess what the text of the revised psalm responses might be. Since we are informed that the response will, in future, be derived from the psalm text itself I chose ‘Ascribe to the Lord glory and power’ which I extended slightly to achieve something longer for the Assembly.

After delighting in so many settings of this psalm by the like of Walker, Gelineau and others I finally bit the bullet and attempted it myself. Conversations with my Cantors determined some of the rhythms for the word ‘Dwell’ in the refrain, some preferring a rhythm and melody which matched the accompaniment. Other challenges included dealing with two 6-line verses followed by two 4-line verses.

This dramatic text demands music which is a little more theatrical than the norm. Standing out from the text is the entreaty to ‘Visit this vine and protect it’ as real a request in these times of Covid-19 as it was in the times of Moses and his people wandering in the desert.

I’ve just completed a setting of Psalm 25 for this Sunday. It wasn’t the easiest one to achieve as the middle (2nd verse) has 6 lines rather than the usual 4! I decided to change the key and musical material for that verse. It is conceived for organ accompaniment with the pedals taking the paired quarter-note (crotchet) figure.

The tricky thing about setting psalm texts from the Abbey Psalms and Canticles is not the psalm text itself but the Response. Currently the responses have not been published but we are told that they will be derived from the psalm itself. The current response for this psalm in USA is ‘The Lord is near to all who call upon him’. The closest lines from the psalm are ‘The Lord is close to all who call him, who call on him in truth’. So I took a risk and considered that the response (when the Lectionary is finally published) might be ‘The Lord is close to all who call on him.’ The next task was to decide on a mood and metre. I went for 3/4 to a kind of smoky-blues-bar feel! I wanted to achieve a feeling of relaxation for the singing of this psalm and this style seemed appropriate.

It took me a while to find an appropriate metre for the refrain but once I’d erased all references to other settings of this psalm I came upon something that seemed to work. This however changed frequently and when it came to recording the finished product for my Cantors I realised that some parts were too low for me and therefore supposed the same for the Cantors and had to slightly alter the end of the refrain accordingly. I was surprised that where I felt I had to change the metre for a measure or two this was not a challenge for the Cantors. who felt that the whole thing sang easily. On the following Saturday I wrote a flute part.

Today there are many opposing voices which beg for our attention. These must be filtered though our purposeful attention to the Word of God. So when I approached composing a setting I wanted to point up the invitation to listen to HIS voice! I managed to keep a 3+3+2 rhythm going for much of the piece but there were a few bits of the text which could not take this! Ironically when it came to the Sunday run-through with Cantors they convinced me to change the refrain a little. The change was something I had already considered and was further endorsed by composer friends, some of whose voices one has to listen to also!

On Wednesday 9 September the School mass will be a Memorial for St Peter Claver. The celebration falls in a week when the US bishops are requesting prayer for racial justice and within a context of increased racial tension in USA and elsewhere. Here in Florida Psalm 1 has been proposed as the psalm for the day. I first wrote this setting in 1984 while I was working as a music teacher at St Ignatius College, London. I further revised it when it was requested in 1991 for the 400th anniversary of the death of St Ignatius of Loyola. The choirs of many Jesuit schools and churches converged on Westminster Cathedral for the occasion. This latest revision was made to accommodate the new text from Abbey Psalms and Canticles. It rarely appears in the Lectionary so it has not had much use and, apart from the 6th Sunday in Year C, it is also recommended for Saints Days.

In planning the music for the 21st Sunday in Year A I realized that I had never composed a setting of this psalm myself, so here it is! The refrain and psalm alternate between major and minor tonalities but each are introduced by the same open 5th chords.

In 1994 I started working at St Marie’s Cathedral as Director of Music for the Diocese and its Cathedral. It was a turbulent time marked by the Bishop removing all three priests from the cathedral and even banishing one from the Diocese! When the new Cathedral Dean was appointed the gossip-mongers had already started on him and remarked that he had done nothing prior to his appointment! On the Sunday when Fr Kevin Thornton arrived at the Cathedral he introduced himself as ‘just a simple priest’. He was one of the wisest priests I ever had the pleasure of working alongside but he was no showman! Months later I wrote ‘Blessed are the Clean of heart’ and dedicated it to him. It is a refrain and verse setting of the Communion antiphon for all Saints with verses from Psalm 126. The piece became very popular in the Cathedral, particularly when its then Bishop John Rawsthorne spoke so frequently of seeking justice. The intention is to have the Assembly sing the refrain, several times and then to add the verses once the refrain is established. We sang this piece at a concert given by the Liturgical Composers Forum in January 2017. I played the piano and Laurence Rosania conducted. Later he was kind enough to make several suggestions about improving the piece. These included adding an introduction and a couple of bars between Refrain and verse. He also suggested re-working the choral texture in the second half of the verse. Previously this had been unison throughout with the men added at the key change in the second half of each verse. Something of this remains but then it opens into four part choral texture. The arrival of the new Abbey Psalms and Canticles has led me to use that translation for the verses and to revise the setting.

In 1996 I wrote a setting of Psalm 67 for the 20th Sunday of Year A. When I arrived in Tampa I had to update it with the text from Today’s Missal. Today I updated it again with the text from the Abbey Psalms and Canticles. It seems that the new text is closer to my original setting of the Grail Inclusive text which is a blessed relief!

During my time at St Marie’s Cathedral, Sheffield UK I created a version of the popular carol Silent Night and each year I improvised a piano accompaniment. The response to this was such that I thought that one day I would find the time to write down the accompaniment. Years passed and during Christmas 2019 a friend from Sheffield visited me in Tampa. She wanted to attend the midnight Mass of Christmas and expressed the hope that I would play the version of Silent Night she always remembered and loved. I agreed and now months later have managed to write a new arrangement which includes the piano part I previously improvised and adds SATB choir for verse 2 and two instrumental parts for verses 2 and 3. The text seems to call for a more dramatic interpretation than the lullaby experience it often receives and the piano part reflects this. The addition of an optional organ part with soft chords and pedal notes provides the harmonic background for the rest of the arrangement.

I composed a setting of Paul’s familiar text which asserts that ‘nothing can ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus’. It has a simple and largely stepwise melody over a strong harmonic rhythm. I see this as a ‘chant’ or refrain which bears repetition and can be used at several liturgical occasions. It is particularly suitable for the 18^th Sunday in Year A which features the text as its second reading. Days after writing it and having listened to some of our Cantors singing it I tweaked it a bit in measures 18 and 19.