Abstract
In 1950 the Dean of York Minster, Eric Milner-White wrote to Herbert Howells:
“By these last two services of yours [Collegium Regale and Gloucester Service], 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.”
In my essay, I aim to discuss Howells’s Evening Canticle settings – their lineage, their heritage and the impact they had on Anglican music in the twentieth-century. I also aim to show how they were a representation of a passionate yet insecure man who fostered his own religious beliefs on to his compositions for the church and how in doing so he paved the way for a new more spiritual form of church music.
“By these last two services of yours [Collegium Regale and Gloucester Service], 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.”
In my essay, I aim to discuss Howells’s Evening Canticle settings – their lineage, their heritage and the impact they had on Anglican music in the twentieth-century. I also aim to show how they were a representation of a passionate yet insecure man who fostered his own religious beliefs on to his compositions for the church and how in doing so he paved the way for a new more spiritual form of church music.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | The Music of Herbert Howells |
| Editors | Phillip A. Cooke, David Maw |
| Publisher | Boydell & Brewer |
| ISBN (Print) | 9781843838791 |
| Publication status | Published - 18 Oct 2013 |