Another whole repertoire of theological music that this blog has not yet explored is the evening service, the staples of Anglican choral music: settings of the Magnificat and the Nunc dimittis for Evensong. Of so many options for selection setting these well-known texts, with which shall we start?

During the second world war a music teacher based in London moved temporarily to Cambridge; he had been born in Lydney, in Gloucestershire, in 1892, the son of a plumber who had to file for bankruptcy when his son was 12, and it is thanks to a wealthy benefactor that the boy – one Herbert Howells – was able to complete his musical education, which led him to study under C. V. Stanford at the Royal College of Music. Stanford, of course, furnishes several other possible evening services, to which we may well return on future occasions.

Howells, however, although appointed assistant organist at Salisbury Cathedral was unable to continue in that post for long for health reasons; in 1920 he got married and began himself teaching at the Royal College, adding to that position a teaching role at St Paul’s Girls School in 1925.

During World War II, as mentioned above, Howells spend time in Cambridge, where the Dean of Kings College offered the sum of one guinea for the composition of a te Deum. Arising from that challenge, he also set the evening canticles for Collegium Regale, a setting which some have seen as setting the tone for Anglican Church Music since. Eric Milner-White, the commissioning Dean, wrote to Howells some time later: ‘By these last two services of yours, I personally feel that you have opened a wholly new chapter in Service, perhaps in Church, music. Of spiritual moment rather than liturgical. It is so much more than music-making; it is experiencing deep things in the only medium that can do it.’

Of spiritual moment – what might that phrase mean to us, and how does our experience of Church find the ‘deep things’ mentioned, I wonder. Howells himself appears, by all accounts, not to have been an especially religious person himself; his daughter related that he had said he expected death to be the end rather than himself carrying the sure and certain hope of the resurrection, and it is not entirely clear what he himself believed about the texts he was so sensitive in setting. Does that matter for us – as we listen to his music as music; as we experience his music as liturgy?

I am going to quote at some length a musicologist called Phillip Cooke on what was different and striking about the openings of his canticles for Kings College:

‘Howells’s choice of solo trebles for the opening of the Collegium regale shows a very simple but subtle response to the text, and one very different from that often found in Victorian settings – why begin the song of a young woman with loud men’s voices? Gone is the powerful, male-dominated ‘magnify the Lord’, replaced with the treble voices, their purity suggesting the celestial virginity of Mary and the miracle of her conception. The opening five bars of the Magnificat set the mood for the whole work: the plangent modality, slow rate of harmonic change and prominent tritone, and the recitative, chant- like entry of the trebles all feel a long way from pre-Stanford settings. The opening reticence of Mary’s song conjures the most beautiful and atmospheric opening by the composer, responding as much to the perceived ‘feeling’ behind the text as to the words themselves.

Howells responds in a similar fashion in the opening of the Nunc dimittis, the song of Simeon, in which the old man prepares for heaven having seen the infant Christ. Again, simplicity and subtlety are the prominent features: a long, diatonic and conjunct tenor solo gently intones the opening lines of the text. In this solo voice, Howells again stresses the mood and atmosphere behind Simeon’s words – there is a weary yet contented feel to this melody, the simple modal line having a somewhat earthy, human quality to it’

‘It is my opinion that Herbert Howells’s evening canticle settings do represent a ‘wholly new chapter in Service music’; they constitute a quiet revolution in Anglican worship that took church music away from the traditional and orthodox music of the post- Victorian period to something more relevant for the wearied and questioning post- Second World War generation.’