Wednesday 13 January 2010

Music and Worship: Composers and Composing, Part 1

Everyone studying GCSE or A level Music these days has to be competent in three activities considered central to the subject – performing, listening, and composing.

All very reasonable, but slightly puzzling if you were brought up to think of composing (literally ‘putting together’) music as beyond the reach of all but a few geniuses.
This article and the next provide a few insights into composers and composing. They’re mostly about church music, but remember that there’s nothing essentially different in composing for church and composing for the theatre, the pop charts or the concert hall.

Look at any music edition of a hymn book, and it usually tells you who composed each tune. For example, the tune for Anglican Hymns Old and New (AH) 6 (‘Abide with me, fast falls the eventide’), appropriately called ‘Eventide’, is by W. H. Monk (1823–1889). Monk, an organist, music teacher, and one of the musical editors of Hymns Ancient and Modern, wrote other well-known tunes, including ‘All things bright and beautiful’ (AH 26), a favourite at baptisms and weddings.

But if we look at AH 4 (‘A new commandment’) things are less straightforward, because we don’t know who composed the tune. Was its composer too modest to acknowledge his work? Was the piece produced by a whole community or by several individuals? Whatever the answer, the music given for AH 4 is arranged by Andrew Moore, who has created a version readily performable with unison voices plus piano, organ and/or guitar(s). Anonymous music is not that rare – think, for example, of the melody for ‘Come, Holy Ghost, our souls inspire’ (AH 123), which, like all plainsong, is centuries old and of obscure origin. The tune of ‘Morning has broken’ (AH 510) is one of several folk melodies sung in church, and as with most folk music we don’t know who composed it.

The tune of AH 244 ‘God is our strength’ is a simplified version of a melody composed by Martin Luther (1483–1546), which originally went to his own German words. But the harmony (the parts added to the tune and played instrumentally and/or sung by altos, tenors and basses) is not Luther’s. It’s in the style of (but probably not actually by) J. S. Bach (1685–1750).

Our church music is largely by modern writers of worship songs such as Graham Kendrick (b. 1950), and by minor ‘classical’ composers like Monk, or J. B. Dykes who wrote ‘Gerontius’ (see a previous article in this series). But we sometimes go further afield, making contact for instance with Bach, George Frideric Handel (1685–1759), Edward Elgar (1857–1934), or Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958). All four have featured in recent [2007] services – for example. Elgar’s ‘Land of hope and glory’ and ‘Nimrod’ were played on 3 June 2007 to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth.

On the other hand we sometimes draw on local resources – for example, the fine tune ‘St Martin in the Wood’ is by John Caldwell, former churchwarden.

But how do composers go about creating music? Is it by picking out melodies on a piano or guitar? By hearing it in their heads? By writing it down, using complicated rules?

No comments:

Post a Comment