Having heard my setting of Address to the Woodlark in March 2012, Peter Dutton commissioned a work for Escafeld Chorale which was an enormous privilege. Peter and I agreed it was time to have a crack at Hardy’s poem, The Darkling Thrush, which really appealed to me not only because of its beauty, but also because of how sonically descriptive Hardy writes.





The first stanza is full of hard consonants, Ks, Ts and STs, which really create the hardness of the natural world the surrounds the protagonist. Many natural elements are alsom personified; Winter and Frost are both capitalised as if they were names of living breathing entities; I wanted to capture and magnify all of these things in my setting. Peter Dutton describes the work: '[Mark] has, with finesse and originality, combined choir, vocal soloists and a string quartet. In the process he has challenged the choir to sing in stimulating and new ways…’

The Darkling Thrush - Escafeld 6.7.2013

Porphyria is a setting of, and indeed a reaction to, Robert Browing's poem Porphyria's lover. I was challenged, or should I say dared, to compose this setting by an old colleague as she remarked upon the unease of the poem's reader and comparative calm of it's protagonist as it's events unfold. The speaker lives in a cottage in the countryside. His lover comes in out of a storm and proceeds to make a fire and she embraces the speaker, offering him her bare shoulder. He tells us that he does not speak to her. He realises that she “worship[s]” him at this instant and he, in a twisted way, wants to preserve the moment. He wraps her hair around her neck and strangles her. He then toys with her corpse, opening the eyes and propping the body up against his side. He sits with her body this way the entire night, the speaker remarking that God has not yet moved to punish him. My setting tries to convey the disparity between a the reader's own shock, which is conveyed in the piano writing, and the pscyopathic clemency of the protagonist; our diatonic and lackadaisical baritone Jak Laight.

Porphyria's Lover

Christmas Bells was originally written for the Macmillan Cancer Charity Choir for a performance in Christmas 2014. Sadly the choir was disbanded before they were able to perform the piece, so I re-worked it for upper voices to be performed by the Girls' Chorus of Cheadle Hulme School in Cheshire. 

The text is taken from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem of the same name, which can be found here...

http://www.potw.org/archive/potw118.html

It is a simple strophic piece for two upper voices, with the occasional solo. Keen listeners may be able to spot references to a rather famous bell chime, and another famous Christmas melody. The piece was recorded live at the Royal Northern College of Music on December 5th 2016, conducted by the composer and accompanied by the wonderful Tim Kennedy.

Girls' Chorus - Christmas Bells

Mark McCombs
'Songs for Debra'
Debra Finch (soprano), Mark McCombs (piano).

Aptly titled, this song cycle is comprised of 3 English romantic poems
selected by soprano Debra Finch, who will be performing the work. The
music is designed to reflect a culmination of both the composer's and
performer's emotive response to the texts, the amorous tone of which
created a particular harmonic style from the composer.


1. The Cloths of Heaven
William Butler Yeats (1899)

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

2. She walks in beauty, like the night
 Lord Byron (1814)


She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meets in her aspect and her eyes;
Thus mellow'd to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impair'd the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress
Or softly lightens o'er her face,
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek and o'er that brow
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,—
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent.

3. She Tells Her Love While Half Asleep
Robert Graves (c.1920)

She tells her love while half asleep,
In the dark hours,
With half-words whispered low:
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep
And puts out grass and flowers
Despite the snow,
Despite the falling snow.


He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

She tells her love while half asleep

She walks in beauty

ADDRESS TO THE WOODLARK
BY MARK MCCOMBS

Performed by The Steel City Singers & The Sonnen Quartet, with George Nicholson (piano)


The text for this piece is from Robert Burns’ poem of the same name, which I chose to set to depart from the largely sacred texts I have set in recent years.  The poem itself struck me because of its richness and intensity. 

There are two contrasting emotions that are obvious upon my own reading of the text: that of the initial appeal of the bird’s sweet song, and the woe with which the protagonist greets it when he has considered its implications.  This stimulated two distinct melodic responses, one pentatonic implying E Minor, the other featuring a series of tritones to present the protagonists disdain. During its course, some of the more personal fragments of text are carried by solos, while the choir often reiterates utterances, provide harmonic backdrop for those solo lines, or are texturally unified to portray more universal sentiments; pieces of text that may represent audiences response to the same text, such as a united sense of heartbreak or sadness at the protagonist’s misery. 



O stay, sweet warbling woodlark stay, 
Nor quit for me the trembling spray, 
A hapless lover courts thy lay, 
Thy soothing, fond complaining. 

Again, again that tender part, 
That I may catch thy melting art; 
For surely that wad touch her heart 
Wha kills me wi' disdaining. 


Say, was thy little mate unkind, 
And heard thee as the careless wind? 
Oh, nocht but love and sorrow join'd, 
Sic notes o' woe could wauken! 

Thou tells o' never-ending care; 
O'speechless grief, and dark despair:
 For pity's sake, sweet bird, nae mair!
 Or my poor heart is broken!

Address to the woodlark

‘Rex Iudaeorum’

Finalist of the NCEM Composers Award 2012

The NCEM Composers Award is a major national award is presented by the National Centre for Early Music in association with BBC Radio 3 and The Tallis Scholars. Young Composers were invited to write a new piece of approximately 4 minutes' duration specifically with The Tallis Scholars in mind, taking as their starting point the In Nomine theme from John Taverner's Missa Gloria Tibi Trinitas.  This section of the cantus firmus mass, based on the liturgical melody of an antiphon for the second vespers of Trinity Sunday, was transcribed for viols and inspired a polyphonic instrumental form that was indigenous to England and dominated instrumental composition for over 150 years.  In Nomines were always cantus firmus compositions, usually based on that plainsong melody.

Rex Iudaeorum is a motet that uses a Passiontide text from St Luke’s Gospel, chapter 23. It is a very stimulating section of St Luke’s account of the crucifixion; inherently dramatic, it was selected in hope of providing a vivid musical response to the composer’s own reaction to the passage. On this it must be said that the early In Nomines rarely had such intensity, their intention not being to enchant listeners with colour effect but with traceable musical lines. However contemporary audiences may often demand such intensity, and Rex Iudaeorum is stimulating both in this way and in the listeners’ ability to track its lines. Imitation was a key structural determinant in the conception of the piece. 

The motet is also based on that same cantus firmus that was the foundation of the In Nomine (the incongruence of an Eastertide antiphon as a cantus in a Passiontide text perhaps adding to the poignancy), and describes it in two ways: a traditional cantus in breves (or semibreves in modern notations) which does not participate in the polyphony and figure work of the other parts, but continues its way all the same; and with rhythmic control exerted. The former of these can be found in the two longer, imitative sections (bars 21 -40, 65-71), where parts of the Gloria Tibi Trinitas chant are evident in the Soprano 2 and Alto voices. This is true to the early In Nomine form in that the cantus was seldom found in the outer parts, and was not fixed in its position . Its occurrence from bar 65 also makes use of another prominent stylistic feature of the In Nomines of Christopher Tye, who was pivotal in the emergence of the form, with his 21 In Nomines and his great popularity at that time. His In Nomines feature a long, syncopated, dissonant semibreve, the high incidence of which is partly due to the cantus itself being embedded in the texture in equal semibreves.  

The Gloria Tibi Trinitas chant with rhythmic control exerted can be found in the opening seven bars of the motet, and in bars 53-58. Using the melody of the cantus in this way provides scope for syllabic setting, were comprehension of text is of particular importance. This was something Taverner and his contemporaries were not necessarily preoccupied with, working in those decades before Thomas Cranmer’s infamous letter to King Henry VII in 1544, that ‘the song that shall be made thereunto would not be full of notes, but, as near as may be, for every syllable a note; so that it may be sung distinctly and devoutly.’
 
With this post-Reformation principle in mind, the particularly poignant words in this section of St Luke’s Gospel have been set syllabically; the ironic labelling of Christ above his crucifix (b.16-20); the insults of the first criminal (b.41-52), the canonic setting, dense texture and dynamics of which should reverberate around larger acoustics, reiterating that sentiment; the repenting sinners rebuke of his counterparts (b.58-70); and lastly, his striking yet tender statement that Jesus had not transgressed in the same way, but suffered the same fate (b.74-79).  Conversely, parts of the narrative have been set melismatically with ornamentation, which is somewhat tribute to the truly beautiful melisma that permeates Taverner’s own works.  

Imitation was a key structural determinant in the conception of the piece. As it does in the In Nomine, the polyphony grows out of a motif similar to the melodic material of the cantus used. Twelve of Tye’s 21 pieces are monothematic, built around a single point of imitation. In some of these brief contrasting material may appear, such as the syllabic section of Rex Iudaeorum. In this way, the motet has material which is primarily either melodic or harmonic conception, with the polyphonic sections having those traceable musical lines, and the homophonic sections a sense of harmonic word painting with dissonance. The linear sections have a small element of melodic difficulty, which were designed knowing the Tallis Scholars are world leaders in performing a cappella vocal music of renaissance composers far more skilled at the art of imitation and counterpoint than I.

Mark McCombs

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