The utterly impressive London Festival of Contemporary Church Music at St Pancras in London has reached its 10th anniversary year, and I’m honoured to have been asked to become a patron of the festival, as well as being commissioned to write a setting of the Te Deum for this year’s festival. The Te Deum is a compilation of two or more ancient Latin hymns and encompasses in its 29 short verses both heavenly and earthly worship (
Te Deum laudamus), and the story of redemption (
Tu Rex gloriae) – followed by a set of very personal versicles & responses (
Salvum fac populum) which ends with the line traditionally translated “In Thee, O Lord, have I trusted; let me never be confounded!” My
Te Deum setting is in these three distinct sections (which may be performed separately) and in total lasts 10 minutes; I have used the structure of the text with its repetitions of the word “Te” (You or Thee) to create a cyclical feel to the piece (rather like the regular but widely-spaced low gong-sounds of some gamelan, or the isorhythmic patterns of some mediaeval music), and otherwise attempted to convey the text as directly and deeply as possible, while aiming for a neogothic beauty of sound from the five voice-parts (SSATB overall range: bottom E to high B). A study score is available from
http://tonusperegrinus.co.uk/scores/study/TeDeumSTUDY.pdf.
The
Te Deum will be performed at *two* Choral Evensongs during the London Festival of Contemporary Church Music: Sunday 8 May at 6pm, and Wednesday 11 May at 4pm (arrive no later than 3.45pm) which is also being broadcast live on BBC Radio 3’s Choral Evensong (90-93FM in the UK; and on the web at
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/bbc_radio_three). More details about the whole festival at
http://www.lfccm.com/.
*TONUS PEREGRINUS heading back to the studio*
After a refreshing sabbatical, the ensemble founded over two decades ago at New College, Oxford is gearing up for some new musical challenges – the first of which is a recording this summer of music from the Eton Choirbook, including John Browne’s astonishing 6-part
Stabat mater, and the first passion setting by a named composer: Richard Davy’s
St Matthew Passion (or at least the second half of it, as the first part is on pages that are no longer in the manuscript – the Eton Choirbook itself!) This recording should complete our series of milestones of early Western music for Naxos – early organum and the first music in four parts, the first ‘opera’, the first complete mass setting, the first polyphonic passion setting, the musical godfather of the Renaissance John Dunstaple, the first English hymnbook, and so on. After that, we’ll be preparing a double-CD recording of my oratorio
Jerusalem-Yerushalayim... more on that story in due course.
*ROAD TO JERICHO at Aldeburgh*
http://www.aldeburgh.co.uk/node/869
Road to Jericho featured on the cover of a recent issue of Classical Music (12/03/2011,
https://www.escosubs.co.uk/ugc/rhinegold/backissue/1_211.jpg,
https://www.escosubs.co.uk/rhinegold/backissue.asp?title=1) – largely thanks to Ian Dingle’s stunning photography! Towards the end of May the Road to Jericho project moves to Aldeburgh to work with Aldeburgh Young Musicians: “Part of an international concert tour between the UK and the Middle East, Aldeburgh Young Musicians join Fifth Quadrant and Dal’Ouna to explore the relationship between Eastern and Western Classical music, both through improvised and notated work. Centred around the theme of collaboration between art forms, languages and people (composers, performers and audience), and led by violist Drew Balch, violinist Simon Hewitt Jones, and composer Antony Pitts, the young musicians will make use of natural colours and gestures from their own and other cultures to create distinctive new work.” open session: Friday 3 June 4pm
This AYM course follows on from a study day at Snape last month focusing on the first output of the Road to Jericho project, my violin-viola duo
Neighbours? which can be downloaded from iTunes (£1.79 / $2.97 / €1.99 for the three-track EP):
http://itunes.apple.com/gb/album/road-to-jericho-neighbours/id422140854. More info at:
http://www.roadtojericho.com/new-antony-pitts---who-is-my-neighbour.html.
*musicDNA Looking for Developers*
http://www.musicdna.info/join.aspx
Work continues in the machineroom at musicDNA Ltd on the beta interface to the music index, and we’re at a stage where we could do with a significant amount of parallel development. We have some shareholders but no major investors yet, so this is actually one of those potentially golden opportunities to get an early stake in the company in return for development time. This may not be relevant to you, dear Reader, but check out the following link and feel free to pass it on to someone who might be in a position to take advantage:
http://www.musicdna.info/join.aspx (there are other ways of contributing if your programming skills aren’t up-to-date!)
Btw, if you’ve already got
musicGPS (for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch iOS3+), now is a good time to synchronize your account with the
musicDNA server: the recently-added Facebook status update functionality is stable and you can now make status updates direct from the app – more details at:
http://www.musicdna.info/myMusicGPS.aspx.
Next month, Spitalfields and Ramallah...
Thank you for listening,
