Vox Humana

This came up here recently. For the Messe des paroisses, the chants seem to be those here (use the arrows on the right to scroll back and forth). The Messe pour les couvents doesn't seem to be plainsong based and I think the intended chant is uncertain. In the previous thread it was stated that the new edition of the masses due to be published soon by Cantando Musikkforlag will include the plainsongs, the Messe pour les couvents using the plainsong of the Messe de Ste. Cecile by Paul D'Amance.

OOTH, it would be good to hear more about what you have in mind. As John Furse suggests, the first task is to select the text you want to set (or, indeed, whether the piece is going to be wordless) and then decide the general idiom in which you want to set it. Maybe you have a firm idea of the style you want to develop, perhaps not. If you have any ambition of becoming a professional composer, widely known, performed and respected, you will need to find a modern and individual idiom, much as John Furse describes. The modern musical world doesn't have much time for composers who merely imitate existing styles that have already been well served by first rate composers. But at this stage, so what? It doesn't matter. I would resist being pushed into writing music that feels in any way dishonest. When I began to compose in my teens I had no idea what style I wanted to develop. I mucked about with several, including atonality. It took me a few years to come to the rather obvious conclusion (for me) that any artificial agenda was pointless and that I needed to be writing music that was true to myself - music that expressed what I felt I needed to express in whatever way I needed to express it. What resulted is probably far too derivative to earn much respect elsewhere and it's one reason why I don't call myself a composer, but it doesn't bother me. Perhaps I'm being naive, but I'm inclined to think that if a composer really has anything individual to say (which I don't), that individuality will find a way of expressing itself, whatever the composer's style. This has been true throughout musical history and I don't see why it should be any different now. All this is just my personal opinion and it is very likely an exceptional one in that I've never cared less about recognition or self-promotion (with the result that my pieces are not always very practical for average performers). I agree with Zimbelstern that universities are probably best suited to those who wish to be academic musicians. For a talented practical musician there really is no environment more exhilarating than a top conservatoire, simply because of the supreme level of talent in its various forms with which you are surrounded on a daily basis. It really does give you a perspective on music making that you won't get elsewhere to the same degree. Several students at the RCM when I was there went on to become international stars. Which environment would be of more use to a composer I can't say. I would hazard a guess that analysis might feature prominently in a university. For me at the RCM (where composition wasn't my primary study) it didn't that much. I did have a lot of attention paid to honing the grammar of my musical language, but it was all down to the individual teacher.

As I have mentioned before, this was very common at the major London music conservatoires (and quite possibly the minor ones too) when I was a student. For obvious reasons, they all liked to be able to boast "big names" as tutors in their prospectuses, but the bigger the name, the more likely they were to be away on gigs. I would be very surprised if this didn't still occur. My daughter has said exactly this. She recently completed a post-graduate course in landscape architecture at a university, a course with a very high drop-out rate because of its intensity. In her second year the support and guidance she received from her tutor was virtually non-existent and it caused her untold stress. How she ever managed to obtain a 'first' while simultaneously earning a living from self-employment I'll never know; she certainly doesn't believe that she received value for money.

I like Zimbelstern's description very much, although perhaps we must also allow that modern composition may often include random sounds not defined in precise notation by the composer, but merely indicated in some way so that the general effect required is controlled to some degree. This, however, is mere nit-picking. When I was young there was - and may well still be - a movement in modern composition that encouraged self expression by children through performance in which random sounds were fundamental. Are these creations compositions? Just as a conceptual artist might say, "It's art because I say it is," so a composer might say, "It's a composition because I say it is." It's probably not worth arguing the toss. Zimbelstern says, "Great art is never, ever random." I agree. And, as the rest of his post implies, worthwhile music is characterised by craft.

That's very sad indeed, but I wonder whether you were just unfortunate. I think we are probably of the same generation and this was most certainly not my experience. I had encouragement at school and, at the RCM, I was positively encouraged to compose alongside studying the routine stuff, once my harmony and counterpoint teacher (a composition pupil of Vaughan Williams) discovered I could actually do so. I think this was probably far more typical - at least, I hope so.

It's a shame that discussions of traditional methods of composition on the internet so often get bogged down in a narrow focus on forbidden consecutives. It's my fault for mentioning them in the first place, but I did so because they were the most convenient way of illustrating the point I wished to make. This thread also seems to have got bogged down by an assumption that I was somehow recommending OrganistOnTheHill to write in a traditional harmonic idiom. I've no idea whether he does or not; he didn't say. As I wrote in my first reply "As far as I am concerned, the essential starting point for any composer, whatever the idiom they eventually choose to develop, is a solid grounding in, and command of, the rules of traditional four-part harmony" (emphasis added). If anyone is unclear why I think this then I recommend that they re-read my previous posts. Contrary to what has been intimated above, there is no reason at all why a study of what the Americans call the Common Style should in any way hamper or constrain the development of an innovative, personal idiom. The two can be developed in tandem. Colin's point about our perception of consecutive octaves and fifths being perhaps influenced by harmonics is an interesting one. If a piece of standard, four-part harmony that included occasional consecutives were played back without harmonics, i.e. on four pure sine waves, would the gaucheness of these intervals then be neutralised? I suspect not, but I really don't know. It would be interesting to test the suggestion.

I think this is widely understood and accepted, but it remains an inescapable fact that there is no greater compositional skill than learning to write good counterpoint. Feats such as Byrd's Diliges Dominum (an eight-part crab canon in which four of the voices are the other four sung backwards) or Tallis's seven-part Miserere nostri, an awe-inspiringly complex canon that he wove around a single part possibly set for him by Byrd* are testaments to amazing skills that I imagine few, if any, will possess today. I've never regretted escaping the rigour of species counterpoint, but if more of the composers who grace the airwaves today had gone through at least some part of the traditional contrapuntal mill (and I'm thinking of several who don't show any signs of ever having done so), perhaps we might have been spared some of those vacuous offerings that consist of nothing but prettily atmospheric, homophonic chords in a more or less unvaried texture that just drone on interminably. I realise I'm being objectionably opinionated, but I don't apologise. I probably wouldn't have such a vituperatively negative opinion of such pieces if an innovative and initially effective idea hadn't been so much replicated with so little originality. The first hearing of one of these pieces was lovely, but that pleasure very soon became, "Oh God, not again!" The style has been done to death in a comparatively short space of time because it has little to offer. It's also one that doesn't involve any great skill (goodness knows I can do it myself) and therefore it doesn't deliver any profound satisfaction. Homophony certainly has its place - I'd never dismiss any technique - but it will never provide the enduring satisfaction that counterpoint does (I'm using the term loosely to include any textures conceived linearly with some rhythmic variety, such as those in Tchaikovsky or Brahms symphonies). Music incorporating counterpoint inherently has more to invite repeated hearing than a mere succession of chords. If it doesn't there's something seriously wrong with it. I keep mentioning Howells, but he's a great example. Lovers of his music often rave about his beautifully plangent, scrunchy chords, such as the end of A spotless rose or the Nunc of the Gloucester Service, but the most significant factor that gives his music its value is the fact that he was a supreme contrapuntist. In fact he's been called the greatest English contrapuntist of the twentieth century. Whether he really was or not I don't know, but his music does show a supreme marriage of harmony and counterpoint. I feel sure that Zimbelstern will argue that it's not necessary to study academic-style counterpoint in order to write contrapuntally in effective modern idioms. If so I'd have to agree, but to me it says more about the superficiality of currently fashionable modern idioms than about traditional contrapuntal techniques. Honestly, I'm not against modern idioms. I'll assess any new piece on its merits and I'm a great fan of a lot of it. I can listen happily to Boulez, Stockhausen, Ligeti and others, even several composers on the contemporary English church music scene. However, try as I might, I can't convince myself that we have any British composers capable of rivalling the former greats like Elgar, Britten, Tippett, or even Howells. Maybe they will emerge in time - but I bet they'll be contrapuntists. *Both motets are in the Tallis/Byrd Cantiones Sacrae of 1575. In the case of Miserere nostri one partbook attributes the piece to Byrd and all the others attribute it to Tallis. John Milsom examined minutely every surviving partbook of the 1575 print and found very many stop press corrections evidencing assiduous proof reading, presumably by one or both of the composers. One anomaly that was never, ever corrected was the attribution of one of the voices of Miserere nostri to Byrd, raising the possibility that Byrd composed this single voice as a challenge for Tallis, who then supplied the six others parts.

Well, at least I don't disagree with that.

The traditional, essentially nineteenth-century style as practised in the old standard hymn books (e.g. A&M, English Hymnal) and codified in traditional harmony books such as Lovelock's volumes and many others has been honed and refined in order to teach people how to write elegantly. So far as harmony goes, I may be mistaken, but I think the codification is more detailed than anything from previous eras, and I'm not aware of any more recent and alternative systematic approach that trains the ear better, so I still think it is the best foundational training for aural appreciation of harmony. That is not to suggest that earlier practices are inferior. Probably most of us of the older generation who had a higher musical education also had to study Palestrina style counterpoint and I also found that a very useful platform from which to develop an understanding of the individualities of other Renaissance composers - although whether it ever helped me in learning to write fugues I seriously doubt.

This is the "sounds OK to me" argument and would no doubt be the excuse of those people responsible for what Mr Barber bluntly but so accurately described above as "garbage". Therefore the third and most important reason for avoiding consecutives is to train your ears, which, as I have been arguing all along, is the point of studying the conventional style. David's comments are spot on. In my own confections I'm perfectly relaxed about using consecutive fifths when it suits me, even chains of them sometimes, but I believe that I do so in a way that melds effectively with the rest of my harmony. If I'm wrong and they sound out of place, then I haven't adequately learnt the lessons my teachers tried to drum into me.

This, whether it is true or not, is at least plausible and calls to mind a comment that Stanford made to Howells during a composition lesson. Howells had brought Stanford a string quartet movement that contained a particularly rare chord with which Howells was quite pleased. Stanford said, "Do you like to be given a single dose of cod liver oil? Most people find a single spoonful a distasteful experience; but if the dose is repeated regularly over a period of several days, they get used to it, even get to like it." What Stanford meant was that you couldn't use such chords in isolation: you had to use them consistently. It's basically what I was saying above about a composer's idiom having to be coherent. It's true that some people can compose with remarkable fluency and assurance. I envy them. My record to date is a song that took me 20 years to finish.

I am afraid that John Furse is right that our respective approaches are so dissimilar that we are never going to agree. It's useful to have a different view, though. I understand where he is coming from and I don't wish to take direct issue with anything he has written, but I would like to provide some further food for thought. If you are writing in an atonal style then I’m sure it’s reasonable to say that the rules of traditional harmony and counterpoint are not relevant. However, judging from what pops up on the internet, most people writing choral music, however skilled or unskilled, still compose within the traditional tonal framework. They may use more dissonances, but, for all that, their styles remain fundamentally rooted in tradition. Any notion that dissonance automatically renders the traditional rules irrelevant is misconceived. Those rules evolved for very good reasons and composers like Britten, Leighton, Howells and countless others were all well aware of this, even when breaking them or bending them almost out of recognition. To cite just one very common infelicity, I have seen instances where even well-known cathedral organists have ignored the requirement for dominant sevenths to resolve correctly. If I dared to challenge them they would doubtless insist that what they have done sounds OK (otherwise they wouldn’t have done it), but I’m afraid they are just plain wrong. There are harmonic styles in which sevenths and other dissonances do not always need to resolve, but the failure to recognise the instances when they do, and a similar lack of discrimination over the handling of consecutive octaves and fifths, spoils countless compositions. As one of my teachers once said, “If you want to break the rules, you first have to understand them.” Without a solid grounding in conventional harmony, how is a composer to acquire the necessary aural discrimination? No doubt there is some point between mildly modern idioms and the truly avant garde at which the dissonance level becomes so complex that the traditional rules cease to have a part to play, but even then I think I would still argue that adopting such a complex style without having ever studied traditional harmony could be rather like trying to build a house without foundations. I agree with John Furse that such a study won’t help you develop a personal idiom, but it will help you control it and understand better what you are doing. Every composer’s style needs to be consistent. As I was told more than once, “You can’t write in a twentieth-century style and suddenly introduce a bar in the style of Mendelssohn.” But without methodically honing your ear in some way, how are you going to recognise the infelicities? By the way, I am categorically not suggesting that one should complete a thorough study of traditional harmony before ever starting to compose. As I mentioned above, the most important thing for any composer to do is actually to compose.

I will make no secret that I simply don't like the style, but that's irrelevant since taste is a personal, subjective response; it changes with fashion and is therefore unreliable as an indicator of musical quality. I hope my real objection is more objective. I have always taken each song on its musical merit, as it comes. My problem is that they simply don't tend to have much merit. By and large they are just poor compositions (I have ranted about "Shine, Jesus, shine" elsewhere recently). The biggest fault overall is musical illiteracy, both in the melodies and in the arrangements. Stuart Townend's music for "How deep the Father's love for us" actually has a pretty good tune, but in the form I encountered it the arrangement was sadly incompetent. The tune is clearly in a mixture of 3/2 and 2/2 time, yet for some reason (I can only assume ignorance) it was actually barred in 6/4 with the barlines in quite the wrong places. The chordal structure was musically tautologous, aimless and depressing. Barred correctly and reharmonised with more variety, it can be transformed into a perfectly attractive piece. The harmony of worship songs is often constrained by the need to keep them within the unimaginative strumming capabilities of very average guitarists. Perhaps because they were originally dreamt up with a solo performance in mind, a good few of the songs I used to encounter were full of syncopations about which the congregation could never agree and which they could never manage to imitate (and nor were they interested in doing so: they hated the things as much as I did). When it comes to merit, you could fairly point out that a lot of Victorian hymn tunes don't have much merit either. This may be true, but it is also true that time has weeded out the most meretricious. In any case those that have survived have all been composed and arranged competently by people who had the necessary skills (if not the imagination). I was brought up in a deocentric Anglicanism that worshipped God in a spirit of meekness and humility. During the last fifty or sixty years the church has been turning away from the Book of Common Prayer's "miserable sinners" image towards one that is altogether more egocentric, happy and self-fulfilling - and worship songs are one of the products of this new identity. The words tend to be full of "me, me, me", placing more focus on the individual's experience than the worship of God: "Give me joy in my heart"; "God forgave my sin"; the list goes on and on. Half an hour of singing these and you feel as if you've been to the supermarket and filled your trolley full of God's blessings for your very own delectation. That's not my scene. When I was young I used to enjoy dissecting and skinning dead birds. I was unbelievably bad at it, but I did enjoy it. If I now went to my local hospital and offered my surgical services in all my enthusiastic sincerity I'd soon find myself on my way home with a boot mark on my backside. Why do we tolerate similar attitudes in church music? Is there any other field in which the unskilled tyro is embraced as the bees' knees?

Just do it - and keep doing it. I think that's the most important advice for any would-be composer. Like everything else, the more you practise the better you will become. Firstly a health warning to what follows. As a student I did have composition lessons from three different people, all of whom were Doctors of Music - two by examination, the other by a chat over a glass of sherry (so he claimed, though I believe the small matter of a Fantasia for cello and orchestra was also involved). None of them managed to turn me into a composer. I remain at best a hack, but that's entirely my fault, not theirs. Nevertheless they did give me a fair understanding of what is involved and they did manage to sharpen my critical ear quite a lot. How much do you know already? I'm hopelessly out of touch with what goes on these days in schools by way of music lessons. So far as I know (and it was certainly the case when my son was at school), in state schools composition now consists of nothing more rigorous than sitting down at an electronic keyboard and/or computer and producing a recording that "sounds OK to me". The problem with the "sounds OK to me" school of composition is that it doesn't provide students with the necessary critical faculties to judge whether what they have produced actually is OK or not. It's true that there are composers who have managed to make a living out composing despite such a drawback, but they are not very highly regarded amongst more critical musicians. As far as I am concerned, the essential starting point for any composer, whatever the idiom they eventually choose to develop, is a solid grounding in, and command of, the rules of traditional four-part harmony. This alone won't be enough to guarantee that you will write good music, but a lack of it will most certainly guarantee that you write bad music. There are books for this. It's no substitute, but you can pick up some feel for correct harmony (e.g. good chord spacing, part writing, cadences) from traditional, four-part hymn tunes. Avoid more modern worship songs, the arrangements of which can be utterly inept. The main aim of learning the traditional rules is to understand what makes for elegant harmony with a consistent style and to train the ear to hear what is weak or clumsy. It's all very well knowing that, for example, consecutive fifths and octaves are forbidden, but that knowledge isn't going to do you any good until you can understand why those rules exist - in other words until you have trained your ears to hear what is wrong with them. A fundamental requirement for all good composition is consistency of style,. whatever that style might be. Ralph Vaughan Williams deliberately exploited the particular flavour of consecutive fifths, but it was always within an overall harmonic idiom in which they sounded perfectly in style. Do you sing in any of your school's choirs? If not, join and get singing; the experience 'from the inside' will be invaluable. Learn what the different types of voices can and can't do. Learn not only their compasses, but also about tessituras. (It may be reasonable to ask your tenors to sing a top G, but if you ask them to do it continuously for five pages without relief you'll be asking for trouble - and possibly a bodyguard). When you have composed something, make sure each part is singable by singing it to yourself.

Oh, I don't know. Why would they? That passage is perfectly doable in the way the OP describes. I have a wide enough stretch (an octave and a fourth - just) that I can manage it with a straight succession of fingers, but I really should have learnt it using consecutive thumbs for the furthest notes because it is far more comfortable - and I would defy anyone to detect any slight non-legato that might result.

Link to King's College's announcement: http://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/daniel-hyde-appointed-director-of-music.html

It's the famous Schulze at St Bartholomew, Armley.

I could swear that I remember it at Ch Ch, but it was so long ago that's it's quite possible I'm confusing it with somewhere else.

Very true. That programme was far more imaginative.

Ah yes, good old Ps. 104. Very many decades ago I used to play for a choir who did cathedral visits in the summer. This psalm came up more than once and the conductor always asked for a touch of the 32' reed for "and there is that Leviathan". On the old Harrison and Harrison at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford (anyone remember that?) it sounded particularly filthy, but the conductor still seemed to think it OK.

Yes, I wouldn't have minded Cwm Rhondda being just a touch broader. I've never considered taking 'Blaenwern' slowly, but I can see how it might work. As I think I must have mentioned before (probably more than once), I have in the past very occasionally been required by conductors to take hymns at the kind of speeds Vaughan Williams recommended in the English Hymnal. It's fashionable to dismiss these - indeed, ridicule them - as being ludicrously slow. Yet in a big, resonant building with a big congregation (the latter in particular being essential, I think) they can sound very grand indeed. The Tallis and the Rutter were nothing to frighten the horses, but the royal family are not noted for their sophisticated tastes in classical music. Both were very nicely performed though. Incidentally: I saw only twelve boys. Is that all there are? I do hope not.

Am I allowed to plead induced insanity?

Regarding hymn accompaniment may I commend particularly the performance of Cwm Rhondda at today's royal wedding as an object lesson in how to herd a body of 800 people at exactly the right, rock-steady speed (although I could have done without the - admittedly very discreet - word painting in v.2) . The last verse reharmonisation-cum-descant was also a model of its kind: totally logical harmonically, but never over the top and with the interest maintained through to the end. It's at 3:47:18 here.

This rather poor monochrome photograph shows the rather spectacular Mardon Mowbray organ case at Paignton Parish Church, Devon in its original west-end position c.1889. The case was clearly inspired by Baroque Dutch and north German examples and I don't think I've ever seen anything else to match it in this country. When the organ was moved to the east end the two side towers were discarded. The Chair case now faces across the quire over the organist's head while the main case faces west down the south aisle:

For clarification, that's St Philip's Cathedral, not St Chad's. I only mention this because I managed to confuse myself over it.