SWEMF Workshop for voices with Katy SIlverman.
20th June 2026 – St Cuthbert’s Church, Wells.
A well-balanced group met in St Cuthbert’s, Wells to sing some less well-known English sacred music. The day was led by Katy Silverman in her first visit to SWEMF. An organ scholar of Worcester College, Oxford, she now runs the choir at St Mary’s Putney as well as an occasional group ‘Laus Deo’, and she is already very experienced in all aspects of Renaissance choral repertoire. She brought much enthusiasm to the rehearsals and was hugely encouraging as we struggled with our sight-reading, so that all the works reached a good level of performance by the end.
Just two composers were studied, the first being John Sheppard, who is familiar from his masses and office responds: he had been composing from the 1530’s, but it is likely that some of these works date from Mary’s reign, when he was a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal. Many of his pieces for five or more voices only appear in part-books where one is missing, but as it is the Tenor book that is lost, it has been easy to reconstruct them from the original plainsong. We sang one of the most glorious of these, the respond ‘Verbum caro’ for Christmas Day, a most exultant piece with soaring high g’s from the sopranos. We followed this with the first section of ‘Media Vita’, the full length of which takes more than 20 minutes and was written for the Compline services at the end of Lent. The huge expanse of the phrasing was challenging for breathing, but it was wonderful to have an opportunity to sing at least some of this amazing work.
We also sang through two of his anthems with english texts, ‘Haste thee O God’, and ‘O God be merciful unto us’. The first of these was homophonic until the altos burst through with a rising scale of more than an octave. The second was written in polyphonic style, not unlike Tallis. Both must have been written during Edward VI’s reign, when Sheppard was at Magdalen College in Oxford.
The four Sheppard pieces, along with a beautiful Compline ‘In manus tuas’, were a fine profile of his work. When we moved on fifty years to Edmund Hooper, we find a narrower range of anthems that he prepared for Westminster Abbey, where he was singer, director and organist for forty years until his death in 1621. Like Sheppard, he became a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, and joint organist with Orlando Gibbons.
Hooper’s anthem ‘Behold, it is Christ’ combined numerous false relations with a beautiful and insistent melodic phrase on ‘whosoever believeth in him’. This was for five voices, but we followed it with an ambitious setting of ‘O God of Gods’, for twelve voices and organ. Chris Lovell had found just enough singers to cover this, and we had the excellent services of Simon Pickard to cope with the often awkward independent organ part. An extraordinary work, it is thought to have been written for a secular, court performance when James I took the throne, with hints of the union of the two kingdoms. We sang a later version which changes the reference from James to Charles. The final section lists many instruments, and would be excellent to repeat on another occasion with instruments, including cornetts, sackbuts and curtals.
Many thanks to Chris for organising such an enjoyable day!
Jonathan Tribe