Songs Of Farewell
2020
6 hand-painted banners that each contain one of the titles of Charles Hubert Parry’s Songs of Farewell.
Composed during the First World War, for Parry, as for everyone, the appalling events unfolding across the channel were a desperately agonizing time. As Jeremy Dibble says in his definitive biography, Parry experienced ‘an incredulity, combined with a profound sense of betrayal, that a nation of artistic heroes who had taught him everything.....could be capable of such carnage’.
By the time Parry was composing the Songs of Farewell he knew that he had not long to live. Though they are Parry’s own valediction – he died two years after their completion – they can also be seen as his farewell to the rapidly vanishing world of his youth. Common to all the texts are the contrasting themes of the transitory nature of life and the redeeming power of faith. The motets are to a large extent expressions of personal belief rather than orthodox liturgical works; only the final setting has a recognized sacred text (Lord Let Me Know Mine End - Psalm 39).”
By the time he wrote the Songs of Farewell, Parry was in post at the Royal College of Music, teaching composition to the most prominent English composers of the era (if you’re looking for more listening to get an idea of music in this tradition from a similar time, listen to the work of his students George Butterworth, and Ivor Gurney. Interestingly, Gurney, like Parry, suffered with mental health issues and from deep bouts of depression.
The six individual motets are arranged in a carefully organized scheme of developing length and complexity. The first two, for just four vocal parts, are quite short and rhythmically and harmonically relatively straightforward. Here and elsewhere Parry’s liberal use of rests to punctuate phrases and emphasize aspects of the text is both effective and original. Never weather- beaten sail and There is an old belief are in five and six parts respectively, and introduce a degree of counterpoint into the texture. The final pair of motets, At the round earth’s imagined corners and Lord, let me know mine end, are significantly longer and call for seven and eight voice parts. The harmony now becomes much more chromatic, the rhythmic figuration more intricate, and the counterpoint more audacious. This treatment of the set as a single, organic entity gives it an intensity and power considerably greater than the sum of its six individual parts. Not surprisingly, Parry’s Songs of Farewell are widely acknowledged as masterpieces of unaccompanied choral writing.”
notes borrowed from John Bawden & Bradley Gill