CHORAL MUSIC BY JONATHAN DOVE - Abeille Musique

illiantly throws the music into D flat major, from an A
major tonality, after which the movement dances to a
brilliant ending. The Sanctus & Benedictus carries on the
dance in a ‘spirited’ setting. There are some similarities
with Britten’s Missa brevis in the way the organ chords
build up before the choral entry. However, where Britten
leads straight into bell-like writing, Dove begins with a
chordal outburst for the word ‘Sanctus’ and reserves his
bell-like choral writing for the words ‘Dominus Deus
Sabaoth’. The Hosanna at the end brings back the opening
chords of the movement. The Agnus Dei is formed over an
organ pedal point with a held low E and A which moves
only twice during the movement, cleverly ratcheting up the
tension with minimal fuss but maximum effect. After six
bars of organ introduction (a short figure played by the
right hand prepares us for the choral entry) the choir sings
short chordal phrases. The introductory organ material
is reduced to four bars for the next choral entry and the
first pedal point move. After this the organ’s material is
reduced further to two bars and the climactic pedal point
shift to C and G with the choir singing the final ‘Agnus Dei’
strongly before subsiding into a mantra-like repetition of
the words ‘dona nobis pacem’. It is a most beautiful and
effective movement.
One of the methods of development used by contemporary
‘minimalists’ is the use of a motif which is then
repeated again and again with a ‘binding’ feature such
as a melody leading it into different pitches and tonal
areas. Contrast in these pieces is usually provided by the
introduction of a different repeated motif in another mood
and dynamic. This is the pattern for I am the day, an
unaccompanied work setting a brief Advent text from
Revelation chapter 22 describing the promise of the
coming of Jesus. It was a Spitalfields Festival commission,
first performed in December 1999 by the choir of Trinity
College, Cambridge. The key elements are the stillness of
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the opening bars, marked to be sung ‘with mystery’, and
the following scherzo-like music which is ‘dancing and
playful’. The second section maintains the melodic
element of the first section sung by the basses while the
upper voices sing short phrases taken from the Advent
hymn O come, O come Emmanuel. This is highly effective
as it acts almost like a distant memory of the hymn—
something in the mind which one is trying to remember
but, like a folk song learned in the cradle, the whole
melody refuses to yield itself fully. The two contrasting
elements return before a reflective ending has the trebles
and altos gently wafting skywards like rising incense.
Wellcome, all wonders in one sight! was written for
South Wilts A Cappella (a choir from South Wilts Grammar
School) to sing in Salisbury Cathedral. It is an unaccompanied
setting of a section of an extended poem
called ‘An Hymne of the Nativity, sung as by the shepherds’
by the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet Richard
Crashaw. This poem has a chorus of shepherds who
encourage the two principal characters (also shepherds),
Tityrus and Thyrsis, to tell what they saw at Christ’s birth.
Dove uses a very small section of the chorus and part of
a verse when both Tityrus and Thyrsis speak together
(‘We saw thee in thy balmy nest’). Dove has written of
Crashaw’s paradoxical imagery which spoke strongly to
him: ‘Eternity shut up in a span. Summer in winter, day
in night’, which, with remarkable economy, conveys the
power of this miraculous event.
Dove’s setting uses the constant repetition of the words
‘wellcome wonder’ as an accompanimental motif which
rocks like the cradle and perhaps also suggests the hushed
awe of the shepherds. Around this, first the trebles, then
the first basses, and later still the tenors, sing the full text
in beautifully lyrical lines which Dove instructs to be sung
‘with awe’. Coming to the end of the first section, which
returns in the middle and near the end, Dove produces a