A Becket Carol

Description

For the past few years I’ve been involved (very much on the edge) with the Canterbury Medieval Pageant: for a couple of years, students of mine have composed fanfares that have been performed, and St Stephen’s Church Choir took part in the dramatization last year. This year [2020] – of course – was rather different.

Peter Cook, one of the Pageant organisers and a member of St Stephen’s Church Choir asked if the choir had recorded anything that was suitably medieval during lockdown (we’ve been doing virtual choir recordings of hymns, psalms and anthems for the past few months). Everything we had was a little bit too recent, so instead I had the idea of composing something. An internet search for texts about Thomas Becket threw up some fifteenth century carol texts, one of which particularly caught my eye with its mix of middle English and Latin phrases.

Structurally, I wanted to keep the idea of a carol (it’s important to remember that a carol isn’t just for Christmas!) with a full choir refrain and intervening verses sung by contrasting sections of the choir – sometimes upper voices, lower voices or all four parts together.

I was keen to keep a musical link between the medieval and the more contemporary. There are moments of open fifths – even parallel fifths in some places which give an early flavour, but then there are moments in the harmony where there are seventh and ninth chords that in isolation owe far more to jazz. Rhythmically it is fairly syncopated in places with a couple of irregular bars to throw the predictability; it’s probably this that has caused it to be a bit of an ear worm for one or two who recorded it (sorry!).

What was a little pressured was time. The initial idea was floated with Peter on Friday evening, the text selected on Saturday; most of the composition was done on Sunday with a bit of tweaking on Monday. The score was prepared on Tuesday and an appeal for singers put out on my Facebook. I was fortunate that people from all over the place came forward and volunteered to sing: there were cathedral lay clerks from Canterbury, Chichester and St Albans Cathedrals, Royal School of Church Music colleagues from London, colleagues from work, friends from around Canterbury, and of course members of St Stephen’s Choir – not forgetting my mother-in-law! Provided with a backing track to sing along to, they recorded themselves on their laptops and mobile phones, sending me back the results which I then mixed together to provide the final recording – all by Wednesday evening! A simple video was made to go with the sound track, and all was uploaded to YouTube by midnight that evening ready to be included in the online Medieval Pageant which took place on Facebook last Saturday. Not too bad for five days, but I couldn’t have done it without the many singers who volunteered their time and voices.

Hopefully there might be a chance to sing it live at some point, perhaps nearer the end of December, the 850th anniversary of Becket’s murder in Canterbury Cathedral. By then, I hope that we will be able to sing together again.

Stephen Barker
July 2020