Jonathan Harvey’s The Annunciation was written for the St John College choir in 2011 during the last year of the composer’s life. He feared it would contain the last notes he would ever write though he did go on to write a few more works before passing away in 2012.
I’ve become somewhat smitten by this work. and I wasn’t expecting to be,. Harvey was a contemporary of Pierre Boulez who wrote a lot of what I like to call, “Beep beep boop music”. It might be that Boulez’s reputation is so gangrenous that my hackles were raised against Harvey just because he happened to inhabit the same century as a man once described as, “serious as cancer”.
Harvey’s The Annunciation is a setting of Edwin Muir’s poem by the same name; a depiction of the angel Gabriel visiting the virgin Mary to tell her she would soon give birth to Jesus. I particularly like the way the poet depicts the mundanity of real life existing alongside the ethereal – the text is liable to make the reader feel as though they’re haunted by some kind of magical realism.
The angel and the girl are met.
Earth was the only meeting place.
For the embodied never yet
Travelled beyond the shore of space.
The eternal spirits in freedom go.
See, they have come together, see,
While the destroying minutes flow,
Each reflects the other’s face
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steady there. He’s come to her
From far beyond the farthest star,
Feathered through time. Immediacy
Of strangest strangeness is the bliss
That from their limbs all movement takes.
Yet the increasing rapture brings
So great a wonder that it makes
Each feather tremble on his wings.
Outside the window footsteps fall
Into the ordinary day
And with the sun along the wall
Pursue their unreturning way.
Sound’s perpetual roundabout
Rolls its numbered octaves out
And hoarsely grinds its battered tune.
But through the endless afternoon
These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break.
Harvey’s setting also captures this feeling, somehow. I think it might be in how he contrasts melodic line that recalls old world chant with angular insistences of Weiss’s, “battered tune”. The last stanza is especially ethereal – closing the piece on a series of shimmering cluster chords pedalled between A’s in the outer voices.
My choir is performing this work alongside a cluster-cabal of wildly disparate works for our annual A Child’s Christmas In Wales concert on December 23rd and 24th. I’m very much looking forward to it!
Chris Sivak | Composer 