Grayston Ives

Our anthem in church this week is "O Sacrum Convivium" by Grayston Ives. 

Born in 1948 Ives is a modern British composer. Composing as "Grayston", he prefers to be known as Bill - a nickname given him by his brother. Ives has spent his life in choral music, and until 2009 was Director of Music at Magdalen College, Oxford. In this role he also directed the choir in recordings on the Harmonia Mundi label; "With a Merrie Noyse", made with the viol consort Fretwork and featuring the works of the English composer Orlando Gibbons, was nominated for a Grammy in 2004. Paul McCartney's "Ecce Cor Meum" was written especially for Magdalen College Choir and the subsequent EMI recording won the Classical BRIT Award for Album of the Year in 2007. For his contribution to church music, Ives was awarded a Fellowship of the Royal School of Church Music (May 2008) and a Lambeth DMus (July 2008), conferred by Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. He is also an Emeritus Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.

Bill has spent his life in choral music – as a singer, conductor, teacher and composer (writing as Grayston Ives). A chorister at Ely Cathedral he later studied music at Selwyn College, Cambridge where he held a choral scholarship; taking composition lessons with Richard Rodney Bennett. After Cambridge he sang in Guildford Cathedral Choir before joining The King’s Singers, with whom he recorded and performed worldwide.

(A few years back my youngest son was fortunate enough to perform in a post-workshop concert with The Kings Singers. This was my first exposure to the group, now a household name following their "Carols from Kings" performance with the choristers of Kings College, Cambridge this Christmas.) 

"O sacrum convivium" is a Latin text honouring the Blessed Sacrament. It is included as an antiphon to the Magnificat in the vespers of the liturgical office on the feast of Corpus Christi. (The text is likely attributable to Saint Thomas Aquinas.) It expresses the profound affinity of the Eucharistic celebration,  to the Paschal mystery : "O sacred banquet at which Christ is consumed, the memory of his Passion is recalled, our souls are filled with grace, and the pledge of future glory is given to us."

Samuel Sebastian Wesley

Born in London on 14 August 1810, Samuel Sebastian was the son of the celebrated organist and composer Samuel Wesley, grandson of Charles Wesley the hymn writer and great nephew of John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church. (His middle name was given as a sign of his father's lifelong admiration for the music of Bach.) Despite the stigma attached to being illegitimate – a very considerable burden at the turn of the nineteenth century – Samuel Sebastian Wesley was to become the most important English church composer between Purcell and Stanford. 

His father Samuel frequently found himself in debt, burdened by substantial maintenance payments, with an ever-growing family and an inability to live within his means. In 1817 he jumped from a first floor window to escape imagined creditors and for his own safety was placed in a private asylum for close on twelve months. It was then that his seven year old son’s formal musical education began with his acceptance as a Child (chorister) of the Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace, by the Master of the Children, William Hawes. 

Although beginning to make a name for himself in London at the time, Samuel Sebastian accepted an appointment as organist at Hereford Cathedral in 1832. During his career he held appointments at Leeds Parish Church (now Leeds Minster), Winchester Cathedral, Winchester College and Gloucester Cathedral. In 1839 he received both his Bachelor of Music degree and a Doctor of Music degree from Oxford, becoming Professor of Organ at the Royal Academy of Music in 1850. He died at his home in Gloucester on 19 April 1876 aged 65 and is buried next to his daughter in St. Bartholomew's Cemetery in Exeter by the old City Wall. There is a wonderfully full and interesting biography of his life here on The Church Music Society. 

Music

Famous in his lifetime as one of his country's leading organists and choirmasters, he composed almost exclusively for the Church of England, which continues to cherish his memory. Wesley himself considered that his best work was the 1853 collection of Anthems and all of these pieces would become cornerstones of the Anglican Church repertoire. Wesley produced 38 anthems in all, and almost 20 works for the organ. He composed service music in both Latin and English, secular songs, a tiny bit of orchestral music, and a handful of works for the piano. Certainly the originality of Wesley’s work stands out, but rather than blaze a trail he tempered his originality with conservatism as he represented the summit of old traditions of composition, musical technique and organ composition. One notable feature of his career is his aversion to equal temperament, an aversion which he kept for decades after this tuning method had been accepted on the Continent and even in most of England. Despite this he made substantial use of chromaticism in several of his published compositions which would have sounded quite different from a performance on a modern organ. SS Wesley, with Father Willis, can be credited with the invention of the concave and radiating organ pedalboard, this joint idea was adopted as an international standard for organs. 

His better-known anthems include "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace" and "Wash me throughly". He also wrote several rather late examples of verse anthems, which contrast unison and contrapuntal sections with smaller passages for solo voice or voices. Blessed be the God and Father is an example of this and a favourite here. 

Blessed be the God and Father

Wesley composed this piece to be sung at Easter Sunday 1834 in Hereford Cathedral where only a small number of trebles and a solitary bass was available to sing. Rumour persists that the only bass present was in fact the Dean's butler! It sets the verses from I Peter i. 3-5, 15-17, 22-25 in the Bible to music and reminds us of Jesus' final commandment to his disciples at The Last Supper to love one another. I have extremely fond memories of my youngest son singing the treble solo in this wonderful verse anthem three years ago.