Peter Warlock: Bethlehem Down: SATB: Vocal Score

In this fifth volume of Warlock’s Choral works a set of three songs on poetry of Hilaire Belloc have been arranged for Chorus SATB and Piano as well as The Birds a fourth setting of Belloc originally written as a unison song for boys’ Voices. The Rich Cavalcade and The Spring of the Year were written and published in Warlock’s lifetime. Written in his maturity these songs show Warlock’s idiosyncratic Voice influenced by Elizabethan and folk music Delius and the music of his time.Composer writer and musical scholar Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine) was active in the early decades of the twentieth century when he distinguished himself by his rediscovery and transcriptionof early English music his writing on Delius Gesualdo and other many other musicians and for his Choral works and songs among them the carol Bethlehem Down.

The Curlew completed in 1922 is the acknowledged masterpiece of Peter Warlock’s compositional career a work of sensitivity inventiveness and of desolation of spirit appropriate to Yeats’ poetry of unfulfilled love. Although scored in five sections the composer insisted that the work was a chamber piece in one continuous movement. The score includes detailed notes on the motifs and structure of the work most useful for students and performers. There are many demanding moments throughout the work with particular pathos in the exposed Vocal line of the final section.Composer writer and musical scholar Peter Warlock (Philip Heseltine) was active in the early decades ofthe twentieth century when he distinguished himself by his rediscovery and transcription of early English music his writing on Delius Gesualdo and other many other musicians and for his Choral works and songs among them the carol Bethlehem Down.

Remember Bethlehem was conceived after a conversation on the works of the late story-telling songsmith Jake Thackray. Thackray’s sometimes bawdy sometimes satirical and often hilarious lyrics are delivered in a lugubrious baritone and underpinned by a strong Yorkshire accent that led him to be dubbed the “North Country Noel Coward”. In his Remember Bethlehem heshows a more tender side and tells a story devoid of expletives and cutting social commentary of a “shabby little country girl” completely broken by the ardours of her journey arriving in Bethlehem as a distrusted foreigner to give birth to baby boy called Jesus. Whatstruck and moved me most about Thackray’s telling of the Nativity Narrative is the way he normalizes Mary. Rather than retrospectively beatifying her - telling her story full in the knowledge of the extraordinary thing she did (as most nativity stories do) – Thackray’s portrayal of her as young afraid and cold makes her achievement all the more astonishing. Indeed so out-of-the-ordinary is the gift given by this apparently ordinary girl that no one and no thing can ever forget it: “Even the stony old hills […] your shaggy old trees […] the sulky old sun Remembers Bethlehem.” My carol of the same name adapts a similar approach to telling Mary’s story. Musically I have only thinly veiled my affection for Peter Warlock’s miniature masterpiece Bethlehem Down and evidence of this can be seen not only in the choice of key triple metre and strophic setting but also in the resemblance of some of the cadential figures. A final strand of influence comes once more from Yorkshire and specifically Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. My wife is a literature scholar and pointed out to me the parallels between Mary’s plight in Thackray’s story and a scene from the novel in which Jane is lost up on the moors. Through her distrust of man she feels outcast and

Noel! is an exciting collection for mixed voice choirs, selected and edited by David Hill. The contents range from the Renaissance to the present: the polyphony of Victoria and Byrd, via Bach, familiar settings of traditional and lesser known carols through the ages, and works by today's composers including Richard Rodney Bennett, Judith Bingham, John Tavener and Judith Weir. Mixed voice choirs of all levels will find here new arrangements of favourite carols as well as stimulating works for the Christmas season, from the easy to learn to the more challenging and unconventional. / Choeur SATB