Viva Lewes Issue #134 November 2017

ON THIS MONTH: CLASSICAL MUSIC
Lewes Breviary
Long-range missal
On November 18th, at
Priory School Chapel,
The Brighton Early Music
Festival Community
Choir will be performing
music from the Lewes
Breviary Missal. The
latter is a 13th-century
manuscript written by
monks from the Cluniac
Priory in Lewes, containing
the words and
music of the chants they
performed during that period.
Practice aside, this is the first time this music will
have been voiced in this country since it was last
sung by the monks before the destruction of the
Priory, just a few hundred yards away, in 1547.
The project is a pan-European affair. In 2015 the
Brighton-based choir were invited to participate
in a performance with Spanish early music group
Resonet in Santiago de Compostela Cathedral (itself
an institution with strong Cluniac links).
Since then Resonet director Fernando Reyes has
annotated two offices for services from the Lewes
Breviary Missal, including those for St Pancras
and a rare, poetic Nocturne sequence for the night
of the feast of St Thomas à Becket. The choir
performed these chants in the Cluniac priory at La
Charité-sur-Loire in July, in front of an audience of
300 people, and now is bringing the music home.
Naturally choir director Andrew Robinson, a
Lewes resident, is excited by the concert, another
collaboration with Resonet. “It’s a very powerful
and emotional occasion,” he says. “And – thank
god – the music’s not just good, it’s fantastic, which
is what gives it legs.” He goes on to explain that
the arrangement of the chant by Fernando Reyes
is polyphonic – with
two or more vocal lines,
sung in a wide range
of registers by a choir
made up of both sexes,
which adds much depth
to the music. Furthermore,
professional
musicians from Resonet
will be playing period
instruments, “which
makes the sound really
take off” and certain
elements of the concert will be dramatized.
The French concert in July was performed in a
Cluniac priory similar in size, design and date of
foundation to the Great Church at Lewes, before
the latter was destroyed. “What’s left of the Priory
is largely the ruins of its toilet block,” Andrew continues,
“so performing the concert in situ would not
have been feasible for acoustic reasons. The Lewes
Priory School Chapel holds 300 people, is very near
to the original site, and is an interesting building in
its own right.”
The Lewes Breviary is a fascinating document,
which was at some point before the Dissolution
taken to France, which ensured its survival. Considered
to be the most important surviving English
Cluniac liturgical source, it was put up for sale in
1936, and bought by the Fitzwilliam Museum in
Cambridge, where it now resides. “The monks sang
for up to nine hours a day, so their song sheet was
a substantial document, the thickness of a brick.
There’s a lot more in there that won’t have been
performed for over 500 years.” Alex Leith
Lewes Priory Chapel, Sat 18th Nov, 7.30pm, £15 (£10
concessions) children under 12 free, tickets from
lewespriorymusic.com
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