I have always been fascinated by the concept of combining a new melody with an already existing one, particularly in such a way that the traditional melody slowly reveals itself after the new melody has been established. This technique goes back for hundreds of years of course – think of many of JS Bach’s chorale preludes for organ, and choral pieces such as Cornelius’ beautiful Three Kings from Persian lands afar.
So when I decided to write a piece for inclusion in The Oxford Book of Flexible Choral Songs which fitted the categories ‘Peace, Reflection, and The Natural World’, I turned to some lines which I’ve actually set before to a different melody, Tennyson’s Calm and Deep Peace (taken from his In Memoriam), words which are suffused with the peacefulness of the natural landscape. It seemed to me that the nostalgic purity of this text was a good match for the well-known American Shaker song attributed to Joseph Brackett – ‘Tis the gift to be simple, tis the gift to be free’. So I devised a melodic line for Tennyson’s poem which would later fit with the slower-moving notes of this tune.
The music divides itself into three sections:
- Calm and Deep Peace
- Calm and Deep Peace plus Simple Gifts
- Simple Gifts
Thus, after the relative complexity of the central section in which some voices sing one song and some the other, we are left, in the final section, with a slow-moving and unsophisticated statement of Simple Gifts, in parallel harmony, accompanied merely by a ‘tolling bell’ in the piano, dying away to nothing.
Simple Gifts ends with the words ‘Till by turning, turning we come round right’. I suppose I have a relatively traditional way of thinking about things, and just as it is normal to round off a sentence with a full stop, I habitually would finish a short piece like this with some kind of reference to the way that it started. But this time I didn’t, and the effect is of one tune taking over the other, with no reference to the opening section. So I wasn’t quite sure whether I’d done the right thing here – but hearing it in performance I think I had, and the music does after all seem to ‘come round right’.
Just a note about the scoring – The Oxford Book of Flexible Choral Songs (click for full details of this wide-ranging collection) contains secular concert works for choirs of many types and sizes, and all the 50+ songs in the book (some new, some old) may be sung by choirs in one, two, or three parts, as well as the standard four-part choir. This particular piece may be sung by upper voices or male voices in two parts, or by mixed voices in three or four parts. On the live recording linked to below, The Oxford Choir, director Benedict Goodall, sing it in four parts, accompanied by pianist Callum Salisbury.
You can hear the recording here, with a scrolling score of the music
And here’s a link to purchase The Oxford Book of Flexible Choral Songs at a discount