the world to me - the music of simon beattie

I first came across Simon’s music several years ago. I was initially grabbed by a setting of Advent Calendar – a setting of a Rowan Williams text I have always been very fond of – which really spoke to me. It’s an incredibly simple musical setting, but executed in such a skilful and powerful way. There are no cheap tricks or gimmicks, just very well-written vocal lines alongside a distinctive harmonic language which, when combined, communicate something emotive and atmospheric.

Delighted I was to discover that Simon has composed so many other pieces in a similar vein. Though largely comparable in size and concept, each is distinctive. Throughout the process of creating this album I have been struck by the different colours, sound worlds, and dramatic intentions Simon’s music is able to conjure from a choir.

These stand-alone pieces form the backbone of the disc, but I was keen that we should also include the very functional settings of the Mass and Evensong canticles. Functional does not mean boring. How he has been able to write an entire Mass setting using just two upper-voice parts (unaccompanied), is nothing short of extraordinary. It is imaginative from the first bar to the last, despite such incredibly sparse resources. The rich sonorities of the divided lower voices in the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis are the polar opposite, but no less inspired.

One or two of the pieces on this recording are more technically demanding and require a reasonable number of singers to succeed. Many, however, are well within the grasp of an amateur choir, or a church choir looking to expand its core repertoire into more interesting corners of contemporary repertoire. I really hope some (or indeed many) of these pieces end up in the mainstream of the choral repertoire – they deserve to.

Michael Waldron

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Advent Calendar (2006)

This was one of the first pieces I ever wrote. We were expecting our first child and when, quite by chance, I came across Rowan Williams’ poem, I just felt I had to set it. The gradual introduction of voices represents different doors being opened on the calendar. It was first performed by the Damon Singers, under Will Dawes, in Chesham, Buckinghamshire, and two years later was broadcast by the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge, as part of their Advent carol service on BBC Radio 3.

Magi viderunt stellam (2007)

An experiment in using a cantus firmus within a modern musical idiom. The chant itself comes from a setting by the Renaissance composer Pedro de Cristo, which I decided to pair with words from Lancelot Andrewes’ Christmas sermon for 1622. T. S. Eliot used them, too, of course, for the opening of ‘Journey of the Magi’ (many readers probably do not realise that the words at the beginning of the poem are not Eliot’s own, but there is a clue: he puts them in quotation marks). It received its first public performance by the Choir of St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, under Edward Wickham.

The Little One (2009)

I wrote this Christmas piece for the senior choir of a local girls’ school, an ensemble of about 45 voices. I’d heard them perform before, and thought they might enjoy something a little more modern, and in more parts. The words come from Joseph Beaumont’s poem ‘Christmasse Day’.

One day, God walked in (2020)

To Our Lady (2020)

I had been wanting to set these two Rowan Williams poems, ‘Rublev’ and ‘Our Lady of Vladimir’ (both inspired by famous Russian icons), ever since coming across ‘Advent Calendar’ in 2006 led me to read more of his work. In 2019, the Choir of Magdalene College, Cambridge, under Graham Walker, performed Advent Calendar at a concert in London. Rowan Williams, then Master of Magdalene, was there and I got to meet him afterwards. He called it ‘a wonderful setting’ and of all the settings out there the closest in feeling to his original poem. Buoyed by this, I asked if I could set other poems of his and he kindly agreed.

The Angel and the Unicorn (2020)

I have set a number of poems, in my own translations, from Rilke’s Das Marien-Leben, the sequence he wrote in early 1912, just before he started work on what was to become the monumental Duineser Elegien. Drawing heavily on imagery from religious art, the cycle is in many ways an evocation in words of various visual representations of the life of the Virgin Mary. Music adds another ekphrastic layer. The final line in Rilke’s original poem here, on the Annunciation, runs ‘Dann sang der Engel seine Melodie’, but it seemed natural in a musical setting to add what he actually sang and so I end the piece with the initial chant for ‘Ave Maria’. I’ve included some existing musical material at the beginning, too: the first few notes of the Basque carol known as ‘Gabriel’s Message’ in English, in the lower voices. The piece was premiered by the Choir of Selwyn College, Cambridge, under Sarah MacDonald.

Each a sanctum replete (2021)

For this, which sets Rilke’s poem on the Visitation, I decided to include various snippets of chant to embellish the original text: the beginning of the Magnificat (sung by Mary when she visits Elizabeth); ‘videte miraculum’ (‘behold the miracle [of the mother of the Lord]’), from Thomas Tallis’s famous motet; and ‘Benedicta tu in mulieribus et benedictus fructus ventris tui’ (‘Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb’), known from the words of ‘Ave Maria’, of course, but in the Bible spoken to Mary by Elizabeth, not Gabriel.

At Cana (2019)

My first Rilke setting was written for a competition run by St Paul’s Cathedral Choir. It didn’t win, but it did lead me to discover the whole Marien-Leben cycle and thus to translating and setting other Rilke poems.

Missa Sanctae Annae (2021)

This mass setting was one of my first commissions, from Matthew Owens for Belfast Cathedral Choir. Matthew wanted an unaccompanied two-part mass for upper voices, as he felt there was a gap in the repertoire, and one that could ideally even be performed by two solo singers. Belfast Cathedral is dedicated to St Anne and so I chose as the basis for my setting the Byzantine chant used for the Exapostilarion at the Feast of the Conception of the Mother of God by Righteous Anne.

O sacrum convivium (2023)

A companion motet for the Missa Sanctae Annae, using material from the Benedictus, after which it would be sung liturgically, during Communion.

A Remembrance (2017)

I wrote the words here in 2014, for a local poetry competition. A few years later, I decided to set them for a concert I was involved in to mark the centenary of the First World War. It is dedicated to the memory of Sydney Lacey, a local Buckinghamshire man who emigrated to Australia in the early 1910s only to return to Europe in 1915 where he died, along with about 5500 other Australians, on the Western Front, at the Battle of Fromelles. His name is engraved on Chesham war memorial, which I walk past almost every day.

Short Service (2021)

This setting of the evening canticles was inspired by the traditional fauxbourdon services of the Anglican Church. The music for the fuller passages is adapted from an anonymous seventeenth-century Russian Trisagion, and the service is written in memory of Peter Scorer (1942–2020), for many years lecturer in Russian at the University of Exeter and deacon in the Orthodox Church, as well as being a fine Russian bass. It was first performed, during Covid restrictions, by a handful of choral scholars from Portsmouth Cathedral Choir.

With one’s thoughts (2021)

Anna Akhmatova’s untitled poem (the title here is mine), written in 1912, and published two years later in her second collection, Chetki (‘Rosary’), was commended to me by a friend who had read it in another—unrhymed—English translation. Curious, I sought out the Russian original which, as I thought, does rhyme, and so I set about producing a rhymed English version, partly as a challenge to myself, and partly as a gift for my friend. Then the pandemic arrived, and the world changed. I wanted to write a piece in response to being in lockdown, and Akhmatova’s words, which focus on being alone with one’s thoughts, as well as mentioning going for solitary walks, seemed to fit.

Three Heine Love Songs (2009)

These early pieces were written for David Cooke and the Damon Singers. The text for the third song was one of the readings my wife and I chose for our wedding. Having discovered it, I read more of Heine’s work and found two more poems I felt moved to set.

Remember me (2018)

Another piece written for a competition; this time run by The Gesualdo Six. The text is Christina Rossetti’s extraordinary sonnet on grief, ‘Remember’, written in 1849 when she was only 19 but not published until 1862, in Goblin Market and other Poems, her first collection.

The World to me (2017)

I had wanted to set these words for a long time. I first came across Carol Ann Duffy’s poem ‘World’, from her 2005 collection Rapture, when she was made Poet Laureate in 2009. I had never read any of her work and so was pleasantly surprised when I found, on a transatlantic flight, that Juliet Stevenson reading Rapture was among British Airways’ inflight entertainment choices. I was flying to the US for a week, away from home, and the poem resonated—and stayed—with me.