Editor's Note: Part of Mark Meynell's 5&1 series on classical music. Taking a different theme for each post, the 5&1 series offers five short pieces followed by one more substantial work. The playlist choices are occasionally not found on YouTube, so alternatives are provided here.
To be honest, I've felt quite ambivalent about nightfall for years.
Most of the time, it brings much needed relief and rest from the rigors of daytime; a chance to catch one's breath and reflect, perhaps to enjoy the company of a few close friends, then eventually, of course, to sleep. However, there are seasons when the hours of darkness represent everything but those joys. On occasion, I have even come to dread them. It is no accident that many of the psalmist's most plangent or urgent cries took place in the early hours. So my fellow insomniacs, Cranmer's weighty prayer for light towards the end of the service of Evening Prayer is therefore precious. For the night's perils and dangers are as likely to be psychological as physical.
As we might expect, then, that ambivalence is richly reflected in music.
To listen to the playlist for this post, follow these links to Apple Music, Spotify, or YouTube.
1. There Will Be Rest (2008)
Frank Ticheli (1958- , American)
Voces8
Voces8 is a British a cappella group, made up of—yep, you guessed it—eight singers. They are internationally celebrated for their diverse repertoire, crystal clear diction, and above all, superhumanly precise harmonization.
In this track, they sing a scrumptious setting of a poem by American poet Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) which powerfully articulates everything we might hope for after an exhausting day. (We first encountered her in playlist #10) Frank Ticheli creates a wonderful sense of serenity out of an opening that seems very slight: essentially a cluster of notes ascending a scale. But it quickly unfurls into a glorious dream, a longing for cosmic stillness to counteract 'my lonely mind.' Ticheli manages to create in sound what Teasdale was desperate for in words. So beautiful.
2. Nocturne No. 10 in Eb (1816)
John Field (1782-1837, Irish)
John O'Conor (piano)
Nocturne No. 20 in C# min (1830, KK IVa/16)
Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849, Polish)
Stephen Hough (piano)
The French word 'nocturne' simply means 'nocturnal' or 'at night'. It was Frédéric Chopin who is most associated with compositions given that name, but he was not in fact the pioneer of the form. That accolade goes to the much lesser known Irishman, John Field, who lived a generation earlier. So it seemed a good idea to place one from each side-by-side.
Both wrote compositions for solo piano and both crafted them as deeply private meditative expressions. They both evoke and create an atmosphere of mellow intimacy, often with a little melancholy. It is easy to imagine a candlelit nineteenth-century living room with the meandering, seemingly improvised, melodies echoing from the piano around a darkened home. Field's nocturnes are gentler and simpler than his musical heir's, but still affecting. Chopin discloses far deeper emotional turmoil in his pieces, but the effect is to ratchet up the poignancy of his aching melodies.
3. La Noche de Los Mayas I
Silvestre Revueltas (1899-1940, Mexican)
Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, Gustavo Dudamel (cond.)
For many, night-time is no more peaceful than day-time, especially if they must work shifts or find themselves embroiled in some emergency. We travel to Mexico now to the score by violinist and composer Silvestre Revueltas for the 1939 historical movie of the same name, about the fall of the Mayan civilisation. Like much cinematic music today, it was later arranged into a suite for concert performance. This is the first movement.
As we might expect, the music captures the mood of film noir melodrama, although I for one would never have guessed its subject matter from listening. But Revueltas does establish the foreboding and anxiety indigenous people felt as the Conquistadors arrived on the continent. Their own perils and dangers in the sixteenth century were all too real.
4. Peace Piece
Bill Evans (1929-1980, American)
Bill Evans (piano)
We're on to jazz now, but here for very good reason. This is a legendary track by a remarkable pianist. Bill Evans played with scores of great musicians, including Miles Davis's band when they recorded the sublime A Kind of Blue. But the origins of this piece are disputed, despite Evans's claim to have completely improvised it in performance. It doesn't really matter how it came to exist because it is glorious.
It is clearly jazz, but in form and mood it has barely left the drawing rooms of Field and Chopin. Musically it is very simple: constant repetitions of the briefest of chord sequences in the left hand, over which the right hand wanders and meanders in ever-evolving ways. And that's it! But there is musical alchemy here; it is so much greater than the sum of its harmonic parts.
5. Still, Glowing (2008)
Judith Weir (1954- , British)
BBC Symphony Orchestra, Dalia Stasevska (cond,)
Dame Judith Weir, to use her full title, became the first woman to be appointed Master of the Queen's/King's Music in 2014. It brings no official duties these days, nor even a salary, only an expectation that you (might) compose something for the odd big event. Perhaps. It's music's equivalent to being made Poet Laureate.
Judith Weir is a prolific composer who has written 11 operas, many orchestral and choral works, as well as all kinds of miniatures for individual instruments. This piece is based on a sequence in one of those operas The Vanishing Bridegroom, and in her own words, her "one and (so far) only attempt writing 'ambient music'." In that respect, it is not representative of her style, but it works partly because of its startling economy. This piece is scored for a reduced orchestra—no brass and only a few keyboard percussion instruments—this creates the feeling of being suspended in time and space. I love the title too. It suggests the still warm embers left from an evening round a fire pit and perhaps alludes to the music's slowly undulating, warming and cooling pulse.
Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 (1899)
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951, Austrian/American)
Isabel Faust (violin), Swedish Radio Symphony, Daniel Harding (cond.)
If you know anything about Arnold Schoenberg then you are almost certainly alarmed by his inclusion in this playlist. He is notorious for being an uncompromising musical theorist early in the twentieth century, pioneering so-called 'atonal' expressionist music. It certainly takes a lot of getting used to, and by general consensus, was quite the musical dead end.
However, this string sextet is one of his earliest works and barely hints at the style he subsequently developed. It is inspired by Richard Dehmel's poem of the same name (meaning 'Transfigured Night'). This describes the forest walk on a moonlit night by a young couple. She comes with a dark secret which she eventually has the courage to share: she carries another man's child. After an agonising wait, the man finally forgives and accepts his lover, and the piece ends in a spirit of exultant but delicate restoration. As you listen to the five m
ovements, try to trace the emotional journey as it unfolds.
BONUS!! Sleep (2000)
Eric Whitacre (1970- , American)
Eric Whitacre Singers, Eric Whitacre (cond.)
After all that turmoil, it's vital to calm nerves and lower heart rates. Otherwise, sleep will forever remain elusive. So we return to the choral world by means of a piece with rather an awkward history. It was originally commissioned as a setting of a Robert Frost poem. But because it was still in copyright and the Frost estate refused to grant publication rights, Whitacre asked his friend, the poet Charles Anthony Silvestri to write an alternative text. He has said that he far prefers this version anyway now, and has no plans to reissue it with Frost's words (now that they have fallen out of copyright).
Here is the perfect vehicle for wafting the listener off to the Land of Nod.
One final note about our starting point. We can't leave Sara Teasdale's gentle but affecting poem without mentioning the fact that, a few years after writing it, she would end up taking her own life. The depression and loneliness that dogged her for years finally became overwhelming. The poem's yearning, therefore, has a darker, more agonising resonance.
But the very fact that Ticheli (as well as several other composers) set it so affectingly for choir, itself the very expression of shared human experience, is a hopeful thing. Someone suffering the worst mental torment might now listen to this and know both that there is beauty in the world and they are not alone. Even in the loneliness of a dark night.
Mark Meynell is the Director (Europe and Caribbean) of Langham Preaching. He was ordained in the Church of England in 1997 serving in several places including 9 years at All Souls Church, Langham Place, London, (during which he also served as a part-time government chaplain). Prior to that, he taught at a small seminary in Kampala, Uganda, for four years. Since 2019, he has helped to bring Hutchmoot to the UK and in 2022 completed a Doctor of Ministry (at Covenant Theological Seminary, St Louis) researching the place of the arts in cultural apologetics. Mark and his wife, Rachel, have two grown-up children, and they live in Maidenhead, Berkshire.