The elaboration of chant
Course Director: Richard Smith
Administrators: Peter Wells & Maria Sanger
With guest tutors
Monday 19th – Sunday 25th July 2010
All performances and rehearsals will take place around Salisbury Cathedral.
£245 (£65 deposit upon application, with £180 due on or before 28th May)
Salisbury Cathedral is one of the most remarkable buildings in the United Kingdom. It boasts the tallest surviving pre-1400 tower in the world, on top of which stands the gravity-defying subject of William Golding's The Spire. It has the largest cloister and cathedral close in Britain (80 acres) and houses not only the oldest working clock in the world, but also one of the four surviving copies of the Magna Carta.
We are delighted to have been invited to sing the whole week of services in this magnificent building, culminating in Sunday's Eucharist and Evensong. Throughout the course we will be looking at one of the central themes in church music for the last thirteen hundred years, and one that we have touched on in many previous courses – the elaboration of plainsong. We will be studying examples of chant, simple and complex, and singing plenty of choral music which bases itself on these themes We will look at the practice, started in the ninth century, of troping (adding free sections of chant to existing music). We will sing early examples of cantus firmus compositions (in which chant runs through a polyphonic work in one voice, while others sing elaborate melodies around it) and music containing freer interpretations of the plainsong. We will also survey twentieth-century works building on the traditions of chant elaboration, including works by Maurice Durufle and Arthur Wills.
The course starts in Salisbury on the evening of Monday 19th July with an informal reception & registration (5.00-7.00pm), and a warm up rehearsal finishing around 8.00pm. From Tuesday to Saturday we will sing Evensong at 5.30 and rehearsals will take place during the day starting at around 10.30. Generally speaking evenings will be kept free, although there will be one evening lecture, and a staff concert (both optional). The course will finish on Sunday at approximately 4.00pm, after Evensong.