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).