Opening with a setting by Piers Connor Kennedy of former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams's poem Advent Calendar, the main body of the album is built around the interweaving of Hugo Distler's Seven Chorale Variations on traditional German carols with readings by Rowan Williams himself, and Kennedy's Nowel el el, a companion-work to Britten's Ceremony of Carols. The album is rounded out by a selection of meditative Christmas works by Howells, Byrd, Stopford and others.
We spoke to Piers about his works on this album, and about the way composers respond to the pre-Christmas season.
The combination of choir, viol and organ in Advent Calendar is an unusual one - what drew you to this juxtaposition of sounds?
Well, I love viols. There’s a reason they have been known as the closest an instrumental sound can be to the human voice, and there’s a beautiful graininess to a viol that I love. Likewise, there’s a mellow hootiness to a chamber organ which makes it such a lovely pairing with singers. And all the textures together - voices, organ and viol - offer the opportunity to reflect something of the raw, earthiness in Rowan Williams’ poem. It’s something intangible but visceral, something to do with the starkness of the natural world and our exposure to it which creates feelings of immediacy, intimacy, and clarity. Like wrapping up warm against the cold.
There’s a distinct, but very hard to articulate, sound that many contemporary Christmas and Advent choral works share, and for me Advent Calendar falls within that kind of aesthetic - predominantly gentle and tonal but with an edge to it that makes itself felt from time to time. Who have been the main influences on your choral writing?
I’m sure you’re right. There are also a lot of unabashedly cheery Christmas pieces. For me, I think the big influences on my style are people like Leighton, Britten, Warlock, and others - composers who encapsulate that bitter-sweet element. As you say, they have an accessibility of style whilst remaining just beyond reach - perhaps it’s a sense of straddling the real and the mystical, with little glimpses from our reality into the numinous. I think the composers that I love also have a way of revealing joy within sadness and vice-versa.
With Christmas having become in effect a two-month capitalist carnival, do you think Advent is maybe becoming more prominent as an alternative inspiration for composers of religious (or at least spiritual and reflective) music?
Don’t get me started on early Christmasses. Yeah, it’s a particular bugbear for people like me who enjoy wallowing in the darkness of Advent (and Lent) - the payoff of Christmas (and Easter) with all its unadulterated splendour is all the more powerful for the preceding self-reflection and moodiness of Advent, I think. Certainly, it provides fertile ground for interesting ideas and art. I can’t claim to have a finger on the pulse of social feeling, but I shouldn’t be surprised if more people (including composers) are drawn to give more attention to the season of Advent which provides something of a conscious withdrawal from the full-pelt Hallmark tinselised Santa-Claus Oxford Street melee of Christmas. I do love a mince pie though.
When Ensemble Pro Victoria and Cecily Beer commissioned Nowel el el as a counterpart to Britten’s Ceremony of Carols, how much direction did they give you as to the form it would take? Was the idea of echoing Britten’s use of medieval texts, and his mirrored intro and outro, woven into the concept from the beginning?
Luckily, Nowel el el was a piece which I dreamt up myself and then pitched to the group. It spun from my suggestion that it would be rather nice to have a companion piece for the lower voices to sing alongside Ceremony in a concert which EPV gave back in November 2022; Toby agreed, and then once I started writing it emerged that the piece would be much longer than first thought. Certain aspects I decided early on: that I would also use Medieval texts, and that my piece would also be framed by processional plainsong. And the Britten, being a piece I really love, was firmly lodged in my brain. But in the writing process I found so much freedom of expression that I quite forgot about Ceremony and felt neither wedded to it nor distanced from it. I think the result is rather lovely in that Nowel feels like a distant cousin to Ceremony; they’re rather different in many ways and yet seem easy bedfellows.
These medieval texts seem to hold a deep appeal for composers, and especially when it comes to Advent and Christmas music. What do you think is the connection in people’s minds? Is there something about the archaicness and simplicity that more rousing, foursquare carols can’t offer?
Yes, perhaps. There are a few things which I love about these texts: they have subtly different prosody and lexicon to modern English, creating what feel like jaunty lilts in the writing. They nearly always rhyme and have regular rhythmic patterns, giving a distinctly rustic, non-intellectual feel to them. And they are often macaronic, splicing in Latin amongst English, and commonly with a refrain or chorus in between the verses. All these attributes, for me, give access (or at least the feeling of access) to historical traditions of music-making which are lost in modern society: carrolling, wassailing, Mystery Plays and the like. The sorts of communal, ritualistic musics commonplace in Medieval society, but which are extant only in a handful of modern day practices, Christmas carols being one of them. Nowel el el certainly relishes in the inherent rambunctiousness of some of these texts.
Do you see the cycle as ideally needing to be performed as a set, or could the movements work as standalone pieces?
Nowel el el is formed as you would with any programming, with a sort of overarching teleology and some prudent changes of pace movement-to-movement. It probably works best as a whole, but I’m sure many listeners would rather listen to tracks that they like than listen to a full album in order, as indeed I do all the time. The curse of Spotify. If you’ve got half an hour, though, I would suggest giving a full listen-through a go.
You’ve worked closely with Ensemble Pro Victoria - how ‘customised’ is Nowel el el to that group and to the individual voices within it?
I wouldn’t say Nowel el el is customised to the group, but rather that EPV has influenced the nature of the piece. EPV has a fulsome, robust energy to much of their output, and in writing for the group I certainly found that energy to be a feature which shaped my writing, allowing me to explore the more rollicking, silly, and ecstatic elements of my musicality in some movements (as in the title track, VI 'Nowel el el', for instance). The fantastic singers in the group also allowed me to write solo lines which I knew they would sing wonderfully well. At the same time, some movements (X 'This rose is reed of colour bryght', for example) are intentionally small-scale and otherworldly; I’m always led foremost by the text whenever I’m composing. Movement VII 'O sisters too' perhaps expresses this combination of approaches best, with its tender opening, slow burning growth, and terrific climax.
Ensemble Pro Victoria, Toby Ward, The Rt Revd Rowan Williams
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