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For many years I taught in a busy music department – and there was music all around me! A soprano in one practice room, a tuba player in another – an orchestra in the main hall and a rock band in a portacabin outside. And I thought of that music department  when I read the poem by the nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman (pictured), That music always round me, on which this piece is based. It’s a great poem about the power of music, and the joy of communal music-making, and is written in Whitman’s typically forthright way.

If you’ve played in an orchestra or sung in the choir you will know how the music often comes at you in all directions, and I just took a few lines from Whitman’s poem and developed them a little to try and communicate that feeling of being surrounded by music. Whitman’s poem is particularly focused on choral music, and he had nice lines describing the tenors (‘strong, ascending, with glad notes of daybreak’), sopranos (‘sailing buoyantly among the waves’), basses (‘shuddering lustily through the universe’), but nothing for the altos! So I added an alto line (‘warmly blending in richness, with vibrant sonority’).  Then, later, Whitman writes of the voices ‘working, breathing together in harmony’ – and again for my purposes I couldn’t resist adding ‘breathing, thinking together in unison’ and then ‘working together, divisi’! So at the end of the day the music’s direction rather overtook Whitman’s original poem and I hope he’s not seething in his grave…

Music always round me is a movement from my cantata Endless Song, but it’s also available separately. It was originally written with a string quartet/quintet accompaniment but can equally well be accompanied by piano. Endless Song is a five movement cantata about the power of music to overcome sorrow, to comfort the soul, and to transport the heart, and about the joy of making music together. It features poetry by a range of writers from different countries and backgrounds, and was commissioned by the Waltham Singers, director Andrew Fardell in 2022-23.

Here are two recordings of Music always round me with scrolling score: live recording (string accompaniment) digital recording (piano accompaniment)

Here is a live recording of the complete Endless Song

And here’s a link to the purchase details of Music always round me (with a link to the complete score, too)

Last month, a school ordered a copy of my Colchester Suite for their school orchestra, which prompted me to finish editing the typeset parts (having relied upon tattered manuscript copies ever since the first performance in 1983). I’ve already written ‘Pieces of the Week’ about two of the movements, Hilly Fields and Old King Cole, so I’ll say something about another movement, The Hythe.

Hythe means harbour, and The Hythe is (or was) Colchester’s harbour, at the point where the River Colne begins to widen on its way to the North Sea. It has been in existence as a port for over a thousand years, but its heyday was probably the eighteenth century, when it dealt with many European ports as well as UK ones, importing brandy, timber, tiles, iron, coal, tea, and many other goods, and exporting locally produced wheat, malt and barley to London. Alongside the harbour, many industries sprang up, coal-yards, granaries, maltings, brick, lime, and coke ovens, and shipbuilding. In the nineteenth century a boost to the port was given by the building of the railway, with a spur from Hythe station to the docks – but in the twentieth century the port was in serious decline and today the remaining warehouses have been converted into apartments and many new buildings and timberyards overlook the river too – and it’s also home to a very well-stocked Chinese supermarket!

At the time I wrote this piece, 1982, the port was still slightly operational, though it isn’t today. My piece is a picture of the Hythe of the past, and as you listen to it you can perhaps dream of a sailing ship slowly edging down the Colne, reaching the open sea, and heading south past Foulness, Southend, Canvey Island, and into the calmer waters of the Thames approaching the port of London (all in three minutes!).

You can hear it, with some pictures of the Hythe, here, and you can find more details of the complete Colchester Suite here.

A couple of days ago it was Boxing Day – the Feast of Stephen, celebrated in the famous traditional carol ‘Good King Wenceslas’.  Actually, although the tune is traditional, the words were written in the nineteenth century by J. M. Neale.

It was published in the Oxford Book of Carols in 1928 in the hope that it would go away, but nearly a century later, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Here’s a quote from the editors’ footnote: This rather confused narrative owes its popularity to the delightful tune, which is that of a Spring carol. Unfortunately, J. M. Neale substituted for the Spring carol this ‘Good King Wenceslas’, one of his less happy pieces, which E. Duncan goes so far as to call ‘doggerel’, and Bullen condemns as ‘poor and commonplace to the last degree’. The time has not yet come for a comprehensive book to discard it; but we print it not without hope that it may gradually pass into disuse.

I don’t think it will, somehow: and some time ago I wrote this version for a Boxing Day concert, and I thought that at least there was the material here for a little ‘scena’, mixing humour with word-painting. It was written for the wonderful soprano Maria Jette, who has performed a number of my songs over the years, and an equally virtuosic recorder player, John West.

So this nine-minute piece tells the whole story, with dramatic illustrations of the various events: the snow, ‘deep and crisp and even’; the frost, ‘cruel’; the King, ‘Bring me flesh, bring me wine’; the page, ‘Sire, the night is darker now…. I can go no longer’; the King, ‘Mark my footsteps, good my page, tread thou in them boldly’; the page, ‘in his master’s steps he trod…heat was in the very sod’; and lastly the moral, ‘Ye who now will bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing’.

And the tune is all there too – though not necessarily as we usually hear it!

You can hear a recording of the first performance here, together with a scrolling score, and the music is available from Colne Edition here.

Happy New Year!

For many of us, Christmas is the busiest time of the year, and singing is always such an important part of it. I’ve been involved as singer/director in a couple of carol services, and also been to several others, each with their own individual flavour and character. It’s been lovely to be part of the joyful time of Christmas worship and celebration, and wonderful to hear of performances of my music in many parts of the UK and the USA.

Several of my Advent pieces have appeared in my ‘Piece of the Week’ recently, and in this newsletter I thought I would just share a few other performances of my Christmas carols.

Candle Carol – welcoming Christmas through the four candles of Advent and their traditional associations. In ‘Carols for Choirs 6’ (OUP)

Sweet babe, sang she – the words of the traditional ‘Lute Book Lullaby’ turned into a slow and expressive carol for solo soprano and choir (published by Colne Edition)

Angel Alleluias – lively and rhythmic setting of a mediaeval text (OUP)

And all the stars looked down – contrasts the cold world outside with the warmth and hope of the stable (OUP)

What child is this? – the nativity scene – peaceful and calm, but with an exciting hope for the future (GIA Publications)

Shepherds, guarding their flocks – a gentle and flowingly expressive setting of a Victorian text, building up to joyous alleluias (OUP)

Merrily did the shepherds blow – a lively opening and closing section surrounds a peaceful centre in which the shepherds praise and wonder at the birth of Jesus. (Encore Pulications)

Let me give you our very best Christmas wishes, and hopes for a peaceful New Year. I plan to continue the ‘Pieces of the Week’ on my website, resuming in the New Year, and to introduce some new pieces as well as some older ones. And the attached image will give the opportunity for a do-it-yourself carol as well. Happy Christmas!!

A couple of weeks ago my Piece of the Week was a movement from my Advent cantata, O Come Emmanuel – and this is another movement from it.

The fifteenth-century anonymous German text Es is ein Ros ensprungen has given rise to a great many musical settings. It is a paraphrase and development of the Advent text which begins ‘A shoot shall come out of the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots; the spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him…’ (Isaiah chapter 11) and probably the most well-known English translation is ‘There is no rose of such virtue, as is the rose that bare Jesu’ . Settings of this text range from an anonymous 15^th century one to the version in Britten’s ‘Ceremony of Carols’ and a contemporary setting by Howard Skempton – and there are many more.  But there are other translations, with musical settings, too.

There is a rose-tree uses a less well-known and rather beautiful translation by the American author Abbie Farwell Brown (1871-1927), which begins as follows:

There is a rose-tree blooming in winter’s frost and cold;
Its flower comes from Jesse, a sign of peace from old.
It is the Rose of Love…

It is often sung as a separate piece – but in O Come Emmanuel it appears as a movement between the lively ‘Come, thou long expected Jesus’ and the thoughtful ‘Earth grown old’ and it is a moment of calm for the unaccompanied choir singing a three-verse melody which gently climbs to a climax chord in each verse for ‘the rose of love’. I dedicated the setting to the memory of my teacher at the Royal College of Music, Herbert Howells (1892-1983), and, looking back, I think I must have had in my mind his anthem ‘Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks’ which has an unexpected B flat, harmonised as an E flat chord, within the key of E minor – I used a similar effect to depict the word ‘frost’.

The first and third verses have a very simple note-against-note texture, relying on the harmony and musical shaping of the words for interest, but for the first part of the second verse the melody switches to the tenors and basses, with wordless vocalising above. Finally the third verse is extended to encompass the additional words ‘The future of the world’ set in a chorale-like manner.

It is available as a digital offprint here, and the complete O Come Emmanuel is available here.

Here’s a recording of this movement (with scrolling score) by the Selwyn College Chapel Choir (director Sarah MacDonald) for whom it was written. A google search on YouTube will reveal some other performances, too.

The complete text is here

Next week I hope to produce a short Christmas newsletter.

The image for this post is the wonderful Annunciation by Fra Angelico (1395-1455), which shows the Angel Gabriel telling Mary that she would become the mother of Jesus Christ. It is one of many paintings of this message, as told in the Gospel of Luke, and Fra Angelico himself painted several – both frescoes and altar-pieces.  But what I like about this one is that you can see the words that they are speaking, like a sort of comic strip – and apparently, Mary’s words, the second line down, are upside down and right-to-left because they are oriented for God to see and not us.

My anthem, Ave Maria, sets the traditional words (in Latin) that the Angel Gabriel is said to have spoken to Mary, known as the Angelic Salutation: ‘Hail Mary, full of grace…’. There must be hundreds of musical settings of these words, just as there are hundreds of paintings of this episode. So why did I write yet another one?

The reason was that I wanted to provide a flexibly scored setting, to go in a collection called The Oxford Book of Easy Flexible Anthems. The purpose of this book is to provide anthems, old and new, for small church choirs who may not have all four voice parts at their disposal or may have limited rehearsal time. Consequently I wrote my Ave Maria setting so that it could be sung by unison voices, or upper voices in two parts, or mixed voices in three or four parts. Of necessity this means that the musical lines are not too complex, and indeed it seemed to me that the music would benefit from a straightforward and melodious musical language that didn’t get in the way of the importance of the message.

For example, the first section could be sung by everybody, or just the sopranos and altos, or just the tenors and basses, or a solo voice. On the recording below, which is sung in four parts, SATB, this first section is sung by the tenors and basses, with the sopranos and altos taking over at the key-change.  Later on, the music can either be sung in four parts SATB, without accompaniment in places (as in the recording), or in fewer parts with the organ (or piano) playing throughout – and towards the end there is a short optional descant, sung here by the sopranos, while the other voices sing in unison. So the result is a short, relatively easy-to-learn setting, which can be sung by whoever turns up in the choir for that particular morning!

You can hear a recording, with scrolling score, here.

And you can buy The Oxford Book of Easy Flexible Anthems here (also available as spiral-bound).

When I was at school, I found, in the Oxford Book of Carols (1928 edition), a song which confused me. It was headed ‘The Kings’ and appeared to consist of a rather angular melody, with seemingly random piano/organ chords accompanying, usually, just the second half of each phrase. I didn’t understand it at all!

It was only rather later that I realised what a beautiful piece Peter Cornelius’s ‘Three Kings from Persian Lands afar’ actually is – and that those ‘random chords’ were actually the sixteenth-century hymn ‘How brightly beams the morning star’ and were intended to be sung alongside the elegantly twisting and turning baritone solo, telling of the visit of the Magi and ending with the memorable phrase: ‘Offer thy heart!’.

I think that somehow the memory of that Epiphany piece, combining a well-known and appropriate chorale melody with a solo line in faster moving notes, and moving near the end to a beautiful climax as the last line of the chorale melody slowly descends by step, must have been at the back of my mind when I wrote, just over ten years ago, what I felt to be the climax of my cantata ‘O Come Emmanuel’.

My cantata is based on the plainsong hymn ‘Veni Emmanuel’ (‘O Come, o come, Emmanuel’) whose verses take us on a journey through Advent as we wait and watch for the coming of the Lord – and at this point in the cantata, near the end, we hear the melody complete, sung by the lower voices of the choir, while the sopranos sing, above it, in faster moving notes, a setting of a rather beautiful poem by the Victorian poet Dora Greenwell. This poem begins:

And art thou come with us to dwell, Our prince, our guide, our love, our Lord?
And is thy name Emmanuel, God present with the world restored?

As with Cornelius, the high point of the last line of ‘Veni Immanuel’ (Rejoice, rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee) gives the opportunity for the high point of the soprano line too, to the words The world is glad for thee, the heart is glad for thee – finally subsiding to a quiet cadence.  I’ve only realised this week that there is that similarity, reminding me that there is nothing (or very little) that is new under the sun…

The whole cantata was written for Selwyn College Choir, director Sarah MacDonald, and I was delighted that they sung this movement, And art thou come with us to dwell, towards the end of their beautiful Advent service last Sunday, December 1^st, in their wonderfully ornate Victorian chapel. You can watch the whole service here: it is a fine service, full of delights: but if you just wanted to skip to my anthem it’s at 44’10”. Alternatively, you can see and hear a scrolling score here, with the same choir (the 2014 vintage) and conductor. The music is published by Oxford University Press, and the cantata is recorded by Regent Records.

Welcome to my end-of-November Newsletter!

Meet the Composer
Last Saturday I had a most unusual and enjoyable experience – the opportunity to hear performances of almost twenty of my own compositions confidently played by a succession of (mostly) young pupils to an enthusiastic audience! I was at the Maidstone Music Festival, in Kent, to adjudicate the ‘Meet the Composer’ class, in which a composer is invited to write comments on (though, thankfully, not to award marks) on performances of their own music.

I have written a great deal of what might be called ‘educational’ music over the years, and I find this a fascinating area of composition which, for me, is really no different from any other type, and which has the enjoyment of creating music which will say what it has to say in a short space of time and without requiring any unnecessary technical challenges. At this event the pupils played mostly my piano music, but there were also performances of pieces for saxophone, trumpet, and electronic keyboard. Most of the pieces were short, at beginner level or for after a year or two of study, and they all had titles to help suggest the mood that the performer could aim to create, to which many of the players responded really well in their playing.

After they had all played, and I had said something to them about each performance, I told them that I started writing music when I was about 8 or 9 years old and asked them if they had written pieces (or ‘made up tunes’) themselves. Very few of them had, which was rather disappointing, so I tried to encourage them. I told them that it seems to me that when you write your own piece, and try to create a musical picture, you are starting to realise what it is like to get inside the composer’s mind – and in turn that this will help you, when playing pieces by other composers, to understand where they were coming from and to recreate the mood that they were aiming to create in their piece. Even if a piece of music has a rather dull title, I said, it is still helpful to imagine what picture the composer had in their mind.

I concluded by playing a piece of mine with a rather dull title – Prelude no. 9 – which is in the current Grade 7 ABRSM piano syllabus, and asked them to suggest a title that I could have given it. All the suggestions made very good sense – I won’t list them here, because you might like to listen to the piece yourself and see what picture it paints for you.

My experience of Maidstone Music Festival was that it was a very friendly event, aiming to give positive feedback to all performers. It was a wonderful idea to hold this particular class, which they have done for several years now with a wide range of composers – and if nothing else, it shows young people that composers are just people like any other, who happen to enjoy writing music – and that not all composers are just dusty old portraits or serious-looking busts on top of the piano!

Scrolling Scores
I am finding that the ‘scrolling score’ – a video in which the music scrolls by on-screen while the piece is played or sung – is becoming a very useful way of demonstrating music to possible performers and listeners. After quite a lot of practice, I am getting much quicker at making them, too! Recent ones include:

Cyprus Dances (for piano duet) and Cyprus Dances (for string orchestra): four movements based on traditional songs and dances from Cyprus
Calm and Deep Peace (choir and piano) a song which combines an original setting of words by Tennyson with the traditional American Shaker Song, Simple Gifts.
Blessed Assurance and Amazing Grace – two arrangements of popular hymns of the past and present for choir and organ, suitable for small church choirs
For all thy saints – an anthem for choir and organ suitable for All Saint’s Day.
Palace Dances – five movements inspired by Alexandra Palace and its vicinity, for flexibly scored woodwind ensemble. This was originally written for the Palace Band, who rehearse near Alexandra Palace in North London.
Princess Alexandra’s Minuet (clarinet quartet), Princess Alexandra’s Minuet (saxophone quartet), and Princess Alexandra’s Minuet (string quartet). This is a movement from Palace Dances in three differently scored arrangements. Alexandra Palace was named after Princess Alexandra, who later became Queen Alexandra, the wife of Edward VII.

And not a scrolling score, but in this video I am talking about the last two volumes of the Oxford Hymn Settings for Organists, which I co-edited.

Some forthcoming Christmas Performances

Performances of my Christmas Cantatas:
‘O Come Emmanuel ‘- Great Missenden Choral Society, (7 December), and Kenilworth Union Church, Illinois, (8 December),
‘A Light in the Stable’  – Oratorio and Knox Bell Choirs (Barking Ridge, New Jersey, 8 December), and Central Virginia Masterworks Chorale (Richmond, Virginia, December 13^th and Ashland, Virginia, December 15^th), South Chiltern Choral Society (14 December).

Performances of my individual carols include ‘Love came down at Christmas’ in a version for upper voices and harp, (Woldingham School Choir, Westminster Cathedral, 9 December) ‘Lie Still and Slumber’ (first performance, Vivamus Choir, St. Clement Danes Church, London, 12 December), ‘Glory to the Christ-Child’ (Lion Walk URC, Colchester, 15 December)  ‘Sweet babe sang she’ (Phoenix Consort, St. James Sussex Gardens, London, 18 December).

New Colne Edition  publications include:
Palace Dances for flexibly scored woodwind ensemble
Princess Alexandra’s Minuet three versions: Clarinet Quartet, Saxophone Quartet, String Quartet
Spring is Sprung (SATB version)
Blessed Assurance, and Amazing Grace (two easy arrangements for SA(T)B and keyboard in the Colne Prayer and Praise for Choirs series)
Cyprus Dances for piano duet (four hands at one piano) and for string orchestra

Also recently published is an organ postlude based on ‘Praise my soul’ in the collection ‘Sortie Sorted, volume 1’ (Church Organ World) and an arrangement of ‘Infant Holy’ for three-part mixed choir and organ/piano (GIA Publications). A collection of my organ preludes for Lent and Easter will be published by Banks Music Publications early next year.

Finally as we move into Advent, here is a link to one of my Advent anthems, Creator of the Stars of Night. I’m hoping to send out a short letter just before Christmas but if it gets delayed, then may I send you now my best wishes for the festive season!

Alan
www.alanbullard.co.uk

Some years ago, I walked around the circumference of inner London, mainly on footpaths, following the ‘Capital Ring’ walking route.  I had my son Sam for company – he was living in London at the time, and we met up at a train or tube station, walked a few miles, and said farewell at another station, resuming the next stage of the walk a few weeks later. The whole walk is 78 miles and it took us around ten days, spaced over a year, to do the lot. All the days were interesting, often visiting parts of London that were new to me, but one which particularly fascinated us both was the walk along the old railway line from Highgate to Alexandra Palace (which admittedly was a slight diversion from the official route) – not just the spacious views from the Muswell Hill viaduct, but also the inventive graffiti on the walls, the spooky tunnels, and the disused stations!

So it was rather a co-incidence that soon afterwards I had a commission for a new piece, from The Palace Band. Named after Alexandra Palace, this is an ensemble of amateur woodwind players who have commissioned quite a number of pieces in a ‘flexible’ format – four instrumental parts which can be shared between whatever players are available – predominantly flutes and clarinets, but also saxophones, oboes and bassoons.

I wrote five movements, which are all linked in some way with Alexandra Palace and its history.

1. Intrada: a fanfare-like movement which sets the scene
2. Palace Pavane: the slow steps of the pavane rhythm suggests a leisurely train journey to the Palace, crossing the disused Muswell Hill Viaduct (now a footpath), with its broad view over London. There is also an element of nostalgic sadness that the railway trains here are no more, and, perhaps, a hint of some slightly scary graffiti and tunnels.
3. Alley Dance: The Palace was popularly known as ‘Alley Pally’ in the past – but here, ‘Alley’ suggested this slightly disreputable rhythmic dance.
4. Princess Alexandra’s Minuet: Here we move back in time with a stately minuet which is dedicated, not to the present day Princess Alexandra, but to Alexandra of Denmark, married to King Edward VII, and after whom the Palace was named.
5. Palais de Danse: The palace, in its heyday at the turn of the twentieth century, hosts a fast waltz, featuring a couple who arrived on a tandem – ‘a bicycle made for two’ – quoting a popular song of the time, ‘Daisy Bell’.

Palace Dances was commissioned by Caroline Franklyn, Stephanie Reeve, and the Palace Band. The first performance was on 16 November 2008, at Highgate United Reformed Church, London.

Here’s a link to a scrolling score on YouTube

Here’s a link to Soundcloud

The score and parts are available from Sheet Music Plus and Sheet Music Direct.  Please visit this page for details.

An arrangement of the fourth movement, Princess Alexandra’s Minuet, will also soon be available separately for the following quartets: Three Clarinets and Bass Clarinet; Saxophone Quartet; String Quartet.

I first discovered that it was possible to be a composer when visiting Drysdale’s music shop in Woolwich, in South-East London (see image), where I saw little books of blank music manuscript paper, six staves per page, on sale. Aged eight or nine, I couldn’t wait to buy a book or two and fill them up with new music to play on my Schott descant recorder, which had been purchased for me a few months earlier from the same shop.

Until I discovered the piano, and the delights of harmony, I wrote many pieces for the recorder in these little books, which joined my pile of music alongside a recorder tutor by Freda Dinn (what an appropriate name) and lots of little collections of recorder music published by Schotts. I can’t remember the pieces that I wrote now, and have lost my manuscript books (probably just as well) but it started me out on a lifetime of composition.

In the 1950s and 60s, many musicians had hardly woken up to the fact that the recorder could be s serious musical instrument, despite the efforts of the Dolmetsch family and others. In fact, one of the first ‘proper’ concerts that I went to was a recital by Carl Dolmetsch, at the Horniman Museum in South London (renowned for its collection of early wind instruments), which awakened me to the repertoire of the recorder as a solo instrument.

I never forgot the recorder, and forty years later I wrote some more descant recorder pieces, ‘Recipes’. I can’t remember exactly how these pieces came about, but I know that I originally wrote them as unaccompanied pieces for the recorder player John Turner. I think the subject matter must have appealed, and he asked me to write a guitar accompaniment, then a piano accompaniment, and then an accompaniment for string orchestra, all versions of which he performed and/or recorded.

Nowadays I think it is possible that there might be accusations of cultural tourism about these pieces – but that wasn’t really a thing in the last century and I hope the listener can simply enjoy the good humour, and flavour, of some of my favourite recipes! There are five light-hearted movements:

Coffee and Croissants
Barbecue Blues (when the fire goes out)
Prawn Paella
Special Chop Suey
Fish and Chips

They are not particularly easy, and I did have John Turner’s skill and virtuosity in mind when writing them, but they have been played by many young people, and some of the pieces have been set as examination pieces for the higher grades. As the titles suggest, the pieces vary from a blues to a Parisian waltz, a decorative modal study, and from a habanera (including a famous quotation) to a very British fair-ground / seaside scene.

The sheet music is published by Forsyth here.

If you have Spotify, you can hear John Turner and the Royal Ballet Sinfonia, conductor Gavin Sutherland, play them (the last five tracks) on the album English Recorder Music here.

A YouTube search will provide quite a number of performances, and here’s some good ones: here’s three of the movements, and here’s Coffee and Croissants, and here’s Fish and Chips!

So, thank you to Drysdale’s music shop and to Carl Dolmetsch (both now long gone) for starting me on my voyage of recorder discovery. And thank you to John Turner for helping it continue!