Grayston (Bill) Ives, director of music at Magdalen College, Oxford, has also been active as a composer for many years. He's much less well known than other composers working in the English and Anglican choral traditions, but this Requiem mass, for chorus and chamber orchestra with occasional entrancing use of Tibetan hand cymbals, suggests that his music is worth getting to know better. Ives calls his music a melting pot of influences, with Richard Rodney Bennett near the top of the list. His language is tonal, his ...
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Grayston (Bill) Ives, director of music at Magdalen College, Oxford, has also been active as a composer for many years. He's much less well known than other composers working in the English and Anglican choral traditions, but this Requiem mass, for chorus and chamber orchestra with occasional entrancing use of Tibetan hand cymbals, suggests that his music is worth getting to know better. Ives calls his music a melting pot of influences, with Richard Rodney Bennett near the top of the list. His language is tonal, his textures transparent, with the texts emerging naturally from them. It's a choral director's music, friendly to the voices. Yet perhaps what strikes one about Ives' music is a personal quality, not easy to achieve in this long tradition with a basically formal musical language. Consider the opening of the second movement, O Domine, Jesu Christe, with its solo horn circling around middle C as if to anchor the hearer in faith. The mass has a remarkably varied quality even as it remains rooted...
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