Stabat Mater : 55' duration score for chorus and string orchestra, complete with recording
- Submitting institution
-
University of St Andrews
- Unit of assessment
- 31 - Theology and Religious Studies
- Output identifier
- 271522274
- Type
- J - Composition
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2015
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
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C - Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This musical composition is an extended and complex work of substantial length (55 minutes).
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Contemporary world-events, especially the migration crisis (captured for many by the shocking image of a drowned Syrian boy washed ashore), the personal experience of grief in losing a granddaughter to illness, prompted the composer to return to the Stabat Mater, a thirteenth-century hymn meditating on the suffering of Mary, the Mother of God, as she stands before her dying son at the foot of the cross. One of the planctus Mariae, the text has been traditionally used as an intimate ‘script for the performance of feeling’ (Sarah McNamer). Setting this dramatized narrative to music intensifies the work’s affective character. It provides a devotional ‘script’ for twenty-first-century listeners, inviting them to participate in a mother’s grief as a pathway to grace. The circumstances of this commission enabled the composer to mentor three young composers, with different backgrounds and religious traditions in writing three further settings of this hymn, included on the 2015 album Spirit Strength and Sorrow: Settings of the Stabat Mater. In the history of classical music, the composer’s work thus inaugurates a compositional return to the Stabat Mater in the twenty-first century. It is divided into four distinct movements, each with its own particular musical character. Various compositional techniques are deployed: the juxtaposition of aggressive, angry dissonances with almost naively innocent melodies; sliding tonalities; cluster chords; jagged, sparring rhythms; and a melding of sung text and orchestral texture. Rhythmic complexity and percussive violence is important and other effects, such as the swarming high violins signifying the hysteria and lamentations at the foot of the cross. There is a palpable rootedness in musical tradition with, for example, the solo violin moments reflecting an ancestry in English pastoral style of Vaughan Williams and others. World premiere 15-10-2016 at the Barbican, London, performed by The Sixteen / Britten Sinfonia / Harry Christophers.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
