Oxford Centre for Spiritual Growth Event – Saturday 28th June 2025
An Afternoon with Richard Pantcheff, the Director of Music at St Michael at the North Gate Church.
Session: 1
Welcome everyone, and welcome Richard Pantcheff.
We will have two talks this afternoon, with a comfort break and refreshments in between.
Speaker’s Handouts for the event can be downloaded using the following link:
https://smng.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/EVENING-CANTICLES.pdf
You can find information for these talks here:
https://www.ocsg.uk.net/event/music-and-the-evening-canticles-in-the-anglican-church/
If you would like to know more about St Michael at the North Gate, please look here: https://smng.org.uk/
our first quiz question this afternoon is who wrote the song Here Comes the Sun here Comes the Song george Harrison george Harrison excellent member of the Beatles we need not sing that this afternoon i’ve been preparing that joke all day very warm welcome everybody oxford Center for uh spirituality uh spiritual growth and thank you so much for being here we hope the church is fairly cool we hope those who are joining us at home you’re fairly cool wherever you may be it is with great pleasure this afternoon that we welcome Richard Panchef uh Richard a long-term international composer of Great Note and works performed across the world and still writing you are still writing still still writing he’s also director of our music here at St michaels and has done wonderful things with the choir over the last year uh Richard knows as we will see a huge amount about Anglican music and the wonderful evening canacles and so without further ado I welcome him for the first half let me just tell you the program we’re going to have one talk then we’re going to have a break for refreshments and then we’re going to have another talk so fairly straightforward this afternoon thank you so much for coming lovely to see you all a round of welcoming applause from Richard [Applause] thank you very much thank you very much indeed everybody and welcome to St michaels um I’d just like to take this opportunity to thank the Oxford Center for Spiritual Growth for the opportunity to address you this afternoon and to talk about the evening in the Church of England and the music that goes with them it’s going to be a combination of uh speech and listening to music so there are going to be a number of musical interludes and I would ask you right at the beginning the interludes are partly to illustrate what I would have been talking about but they are also partly an opportunity for you to absorb some of this wonderful music um and to think more broadly about the role of music in worship because the examples I’ve chosen are all I think very uplifting in their different ways and I shall explain their relevance as we go through but when the musical extracts come please just uh sit back and enjoy them um I suppose the um the uh purpose of the talk in some ways is to try and understand a little bit about um why the evening can have become so prominent in the life of the church of England and secondly in the second part we’ll explore a little bit more about how music has played a role in that and why why we have musical settings but it has become an extraordinarily popular thing even song itself is a very popular service you can go to any one of the college chapels in this city and go to even song and coral even song and hear the most wonderful music all beautifully performed the uh Anglican church throughout the world does this you can go into a church in Johannesburg and hear exactly this and why is that why why have these two canacles in particular caught our imagination we as worshippers as listeners as singers as composers why has this suddenly grasped us so I’m not sure I’m going to be able to answer those questions completely but at least we’re going to have some fun exploring um what might lie behind the extraordinary rise to appearance of these two wonderful canacles uh within the Church of England and explore some of the music that’s gone with them uh there is something very appropriate about addressing this question in this particular building i’m going to come up a little bit later on to talk about time and place but to be talking about these two evening canacles in this church is very appropriate obviously we’re using the book of common prayer as our reference point and you should have in front of you a handout with the words of the magnificatis on it and these are extracted from the book of common prayer and of course as you know this has a particular association with the Book of Common Prayer really in summary for two reasons one because of Cranmer’s incarceration just a few yards away from this building uh prior to his death and secondly because um the Book of Common Prayer is the standard book of worship for this church and we use it not as a kind of holy relic it or a museum piece is used as a continuation of uh how the communion of saints if you like over the years have worshiped and we expect and hope to pass that on and indeed the meaning of the word tradition I think has been slightly changed over the years it’s it’s associated generally now in conversation as harking back to the good old days whereas in fact it is the opposite it’s the handing forward into future generations the things which we have inherited And it is in that sense of tradition that we use the book of common prayer it’s a living breathing thing for us it is not just a memorial so particularly uh poignant and important that we’re using the text from the book of common prayer here in St michael’s and also to address you on this these two particular canacles drawn from it as far as the texts themselves are concerned um I’m going to try and bearing in mind I’ve got no theological training at all um and there are many in the room who have um who no doubt will put me right as as we go through uh this is a personal journey so I’m going to talk from the point of view of my own personal experience here and my own thoughts um you may you may obviously disagree with those and I in many ways hope you do it would be interesting to have a a bit of a conversation at the end and questions at the end um on on different interpretations but uh in some shape or form um I’ve been um associated with these canacles um for virtually my whole life and either as a singer u as an accompanist on the organ as a conductor of choirs or as a composer and through the course of that time these canacles mean more and more to one as one goes on and the question is what why should that be i think they are special in in in various ways and we are going to go into a kind of theological discussion as well because I think there in lies their importance so the magnificat and I should just say at the very beginning when you see these phrases like evening canacles or evening service or magnificatis or shortened even to maggum nug as they often are um it all means the same thing we’re referring to these two canacles that appear as set for evening prayer in the book of common prayer which you have on your sheets both are extracts from the gospel of St luke um we’re going to have the first musical extract it’s the setting of the Magnificatus and the reason I put this right at the beginning is that I would like us to get some sense of the majesty of these words as seen through the eyes of the composer in this particular case who is Samuel Sebastian Wesley wesley wrote this setting for the newly consecrated parish of a church of St peter in Leeds uh which was opened in the mid 19th century uh he wrote this setting in 194 in 1845 for the choir and for the church at Leeds Leeds Parish Church as it’s known or St peter at Leeds um and if you don’t know that building I commend it to you it is a magnificent Victorian building um and it was created through public subscription and Samuel Sebastian Wesley who was one of the most prominent English composers of of the day and organists of the day became its first director of music and he with this setting which is a truly remarkable achievement for the mid-9th century given the dynamism and the extraordinary harmonic lengths he goes to in this piece he was instrumental in making church music in the Anglican church putting it really back on its feet and from there you will you will gather from this setting come all the great settings of the evening catechus that we know so well but I just wanted to play this particular one because it has it is absolutely full of the majesty of these words so please have them open in front of you as we listen to the magnificent in E major the setting of 1845 by Samuel Sebastian Wesley [Music] and my spreior [Music] my spiritjo in myior [Music] [Music] Savior [Music] God [Music] is holy [Music] holy Lord holy [Music] grail [Music] give us [Music] [Applause] [Music] mercy [Music] how Where [Music] the heart was [Music] The star [Music] might trump [Music] and I praise you [Music] we are [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] to [Music] is [Music] glor glor to the father [Music] to the son to the ghost [Music] heat heat [Music] [Music] my [Music] Glory [Music] [Music] christ [Music] [Music] [Music] the glor of My [Music] glory is to the father and to the son and to the Oh [Music] amen amen [Music] hallelujah [Music] [Music] well that gives you a flavor of the majesty of these words written for a great new church uh by a composer who was really breaking new ground um doesn’t sound very radical to us but now but in those days that was quite something like to come on now and look at the texts a bit more and see if we can unpick a little bit more about what makes them so special to us after all I mean firstly um these are only two of many canacles uh we have morning canacles we have even within the book of common prayer for for even song there are alternative canacles that can be used to the magnific and interestingly uh for all the thousands of settings of the magnificant and ductus that there are in music there are virtually none of the alternative canacles a very good set by Henry Persel and very few others now why should that be i think the clue as far as the lurggical aspects of this are concerned lie with the meanings of the canacles firstly I don’t know if it’s strictly true but it just seems to me these are the only that are directly taken from the gospels there are many others that are psalms proverbs prayers in case of the tayam which we sing on a Sunday morning that’s three prayers actually all shunted together to make a single canal but these come the magnificat and come directly from St luke’s gospel the first of course being the Magnificat which is Mary’s response to the enunciation to her that she is to become the mother of God the second is Simeon’s response to the fact that he has now seen the Messiah and he will therefore he feels he can die he was told he would not die until he had seen the Messiah christ is presented to him in the temple he recognizes Christ as the Messiah and he then this can is his response to that which is I can now depart in peace because I have seen the Messiah the principal reason why I think these two can cate and have become so important to us is that they speak of a an event at a particular time but they also speak of the past and the future and I’ll come on to that in a moment and most importantly of all they are both revelatory by nature these two canacles speak of a revelation the first is the revelation to Mary the revelation that she is to become the mother of God the second is the revelation to Simeon that he has seen the Messiah and the Messiah has returned now these are pretty seismic things i was looking around from some for some other examples where what this must have felt like for Mary is somehow represented and I came across a poem by the Austrian poet Ryan Maria Riddka who I know was the subject also of a talk for this group last year died in 1926 he wrote a poem called the enunciation to Mary and um I’m just going to read it it’s very short but it gives you an idea another perspective on what this revelation might have felt like to Mary it’s in English don’t worry it was not that an angel entered Markwell that frightened her as little as others are startled by a sunbeam or the moon at night appearing in their room would she be surprised by the form that angels took she hardly imagined that this would be a strenuous visitation for angels oh if only we could comprehend how innocent she was did not a hind reclining see her once in the woods look on her so intently that the unicorn was conceived in it quite without coupling the creature of light the pure creature it was not just that he had entered but that the angel inclined his youthful face so close to hers that his gaze and the one with which she looked up collided so collided as if the world outside grew suddenly vacant and that which millions saw drove and bore was compressed into them only she and he the seeing and the seeing the eye and the eyes delight nowhere other than in this very place behold this is frightening and it frightened them both then the angel sang his melody so what we have here is a revelation it’s a revelation to Mary and we can only guess and through that poem think about what that must have felt like to be in the position that she was in and to have it revealed to her that she was to become the mother of God and I think the crucial verses in the Magnificat that are one of the reasons why it has become such a popular canacle is the fact is the fact that the revelation is not just for Mary at that time it is firstly a canacle harks back to Jewish and Hebrew history and I shall come to that in a second and secondly it looks forward to this being a revelation for everyone for all time so in what way does it look backwards well apart from the fact that there are references to Abraham and Israel the actual structure of the Magnificat uh is very akin to things that we see structures of poetry we see in proverbs and in the psalms and also in non religious Hebrew texts it is this idea of a proposition being made and there being a response to it the experts call this synonymous parallelism a proposition is made and there is a response to it my soul doth magnify the Lord and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my savior he hath showed strength with his arm he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts he hath put down the mighty from their seat on this side he has exalted the humble and meek on this side he hath filled the hungry with good things on this side and on this side he has sent the rich empty away it’s a proposition and a and a a proposal and a and a response in each case and this is a structure of poetry that goes deep into Hebrew history she is using the tools that she remembers from her childhood in in which she was brought up the revelation to her as it came at that particular time well there can be very little doubt about that and what where does the future piece come in well I think it’s in these last verses as he promised to our forefathers Abraham and his seed forever that is the forward-looking piece this is the bit that’s magic in here but this was not a revelation just to Mary this was a revelation for everyone for all time we are his seed forever abraham’s seed forever that’s us and all the people between us and the Virgin Mary and anybody in the future that’s us so this revelation was not just for that time it was for all time and I think that is what strikes accord so much with with people reading this canacle unlike canacles of praise or prayer all of which are perfectly valid and very good but this is about promises that will be kept into perpetuity the naked is actually similar in nature simeon if you can put you to see if in our in our Christian church we we have seen the Messiah the Messiah has come to us but put yourself in the position of Simeon he he was in brought up in the Jewish faith he was Hebrew his view was the yearning for the coming of the Messiah we find it difficult maybe in the 21st century to know what that really feels like but they were yearning for it it was the thing they most looked forward to in spiritual and in political and in social terms was the return of the Messiah and if you were Simeon and you thought I have seen the Messiah that must come across as something as a revelation of a revelation to you and he uses similar kind of language to Mary and this is why I think these two are juxtaposed they’re both revelatory in nature and they both have these important phrases in them to be a light to light on the Gentiles and to be the glory of thy people Israel if you put those two phrases round the other way to be the glory of thy people Israel and to be a light to lighten the Gentiles are we not saying the same thing as Mary was saying with as he promised to our forefathers Abraham and his sea forever i think we are we’re saying this is the fulfillment in the present of what has been yearned for and it is the promise for the future for everybody else it is not exclusive to time and place and I think these canals are unique in having those promises contained within them and that is one of the reasons why from the point of view of the texts I think that they uh have found their way into our hearts really because they speak of something beyond us something for which we yearn and I believe that strikes a very deep chord in us because of our awareness of our own mortality as much as anything else now it would be very tempting to feel that because these canacles have become such a mainstay of Anglican worship in even song and evening prayer that we we are responsible for them in some kind of way that we’ve invented them so we need to have a look at that whilst it’s perfectly true that they occupy a place in our in our evening liturgy that is a good deal more prominent than might be true of other churches the fact is that along with so much else that we have in the Anglican church uh this we inherited this we did not invent it so where are the antecedants for this then well apart from the fact that the texts are in Luke’s gospel which predates the Anglican church by quite a way um they also feature very prominently in the services of the Roman Catholic Church and the Roman Catholic liturgy and vespers and also in the Greek Orthodox so Eastern and Western Church going back all those centuries were agreed upon the prominence of these canacles the Orthodox Church I believe this features as part of Mattins but nevertheless it is the veneration of the Virgin Mary and her annunciation and the same is definitely true of Vespers within the Roman Catholic Church and it is in that context that uh the recitation of this can have become a daily feature of monastic life so we’re just going to hear a little extract as to what that might have sounded like um long long pre-reformation um where for the first time words and music are put together to sing this canacle let’s just quickly listen to the magnificant [Music] happy [Music] [Music] spirit [Music] [Music] victori we are here [Music] [Music] glory [Music] [Music] [Music] he stands to help us [Music] here mercy for me [Music] [Music] god is here [Music] glory [Music] bless [Music] bey [Music] [Music] so there we have the canacles for the first time that was the magnificant obviously in Latin um for the first time being a juxtaposition of words and music and in the second part of the talk we’re going to talk a bit more about how the music has developed but I think it’s worth just spending a moment on why did this happen why why why was music even brought into the the whole thing I mean nowadays if you’re going to an evening prayer um in a church or or a chapel or wherever It can just as easily be said as some so why have the music well there are a number of reasons why in monastic life the music was brought in partly it was part of the democratization if you like of worship it was the sense in which all the members of the monastery would participate as equals uh in the liturgy and everybody knows that singing things is fun and it’s more interesting than listening to people talking um and so hardly surprisingly whether they were good singers or not and believe me they were not nothing like as good as we’ve just heard on that recording they would nevertheless join in and that would be part of the thing it is the creation of a community of people worshiping and using music as a means of doing it uh where everybody is equal um of course from then historically as music itself began to develop we began to move away from playing chant to harmony somebody somewhere along the line realized that two tunes going on at once is nicer than one tune going on at once you reach then the 21st century where you’ve got pieces by composers where there are so many tunes going on all at once it’s almost impossible to hear them all but that’s where it started eventually early on we got two parts of music two lines of music for the words and then we got three and then we got four and then we got eight and then Thomas Talis does a 40part motet 40 different lines of music for stem in alium one of the greatest pieces ever written so an art was created around the writing of the music you cannot write for 40 different voices if you do not know what you are doing so the music began not to take over the music began to be part of this expression this reaching out into the revelation that the words themselves contain um I’d like to fast forward now to because I just want to cover off um one area which is that as time has gone on and we have begun to appreciate the poetic value of these canacles in other words yes they are worshiped first and foremost they are worshiped they are after all texts from the gospels but they are also poetic we talked earlier about the connections to Hebrew poetry they they are poetic in their way and increasingly over time composers have also treated them in a poetic way so most of the settings of the evening categories that you will hear and most of the ones that we’re going to go on to hear in the second part of the talk are all directed towards the literature they all part of worship at evening prayer but some settings have taken these words purely for poetic value and set them to music and the example I want to share with you is by Gerald Finy now Fininssey an English composer he died in 1956 he lived just down the road just just near Newbury absolutely brilliant man he was an agnostic so from his perspective the idea of the magnificant as a form of worship was not primary in his thinking it wasn’t ignored but it wasn’t primary so he would I think have accepted the value of these words and these canacles as forms of worship even though he himself didn’t use them as such and in 1952 he was commissioned to write a magnificant for two girls college choirs in Massachusetts United States in Christmas 1952 and the interest there are a lot of interesting things about this setting gerald Finy is probably most famous as a composer for his song cycles he wrote a number of song cycles and he’s one of the very few composers generally acknowledged to have successfully set to music the poetry of Thomas Hardy you can imagine how difficult that is hardy’s poetry itself is difficult and finding a musical language that will work with that poetic language is extremely difficult if you listen to any of Fininssey’s song cycles of Thomas Harvey and I thoroughly recommend them to you they are truly magnificent and Fininssey gets generally overlooked i think he’s contemporary of Williams and Elgar people like that so he tends to doesn’t always get the limelight that perhaps he should but he was a remarkable remarkable composer and a wonderful man and he wrote this setting for these two college choirs in Massachusetts in 1952 now when we we’re going to listen to one set one of these this being performed and you’ll notice a number of things and you I’d like you to listen up for the first thing is that on your sheets at the end of each of these candles is printed the gloria glory be to the father and to the son and to the holy ghost because in lurggical context we always sing there is always a gloria included in with the count he does not set the gloria here finty because he’s not writing it for the lurggical purposes so it’s Abraham and his seed forever amen in this setting there is no gloria furthermore the score actually says at the front this magnificat is not intended for liturggical use now it does get used liturggically except you know what the I’m going to say next because you know what the next problem is fire you can put that on the list for your magnificat but where’s your nitus because he didn’t write one so there have been all sorts of possible solutions to that which I won’t go into Gustav Hol wrote only a nuditus roughly contemporary with finy those two are often put together these two are often put together anyway he did not intend for this to be used during the music that he is wring writing is purely a poetic response to the words of the canacle and in particular I’d like you to pay close attention towards the end where it reaches this phrase Abraham and his seed forever and just bear in mind what we were saying earlier about the significance of those words because I think he has picked up on this same point that the importance of this is about looking into the future and a revelation for the future not just for Mary so this setting is for choir and organ it also exists in arrangement for choir and orchestra we’re going to hear choir and organ and uh it’s it’s full of the most wonderful word setting but listen out for Abraham at the end because it’s really quite spectacular [Music] [Music] heat heat hallelujah [Music] [Music] i alonej [Music] you [Music] souljord [Music] [Music] mightest [Music] hallelujah [Music] we are [Music] generation [Music] [Music] my soul [Music] for he It’s worth [Music] [Music] [Music] is [Music] Fore [Music] jesus Praise the Lord [Music] [Music] mighty [Music] God [Music] [Music] [Music] hallelujah [Music] will [Music] [Music] [Music] might [Music] be [Music] Praise [Music] God happy forever forever [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so that was the 1952 setting of the Magnificat by Gerald Finy as you can see lurggical setting but with a full appreciation of the words that extraordinary section at the end there with Abraham at his sea forever and you’ll also noticed as you as as you go through that he was repeating this phrase my soul doth magnify the Lord all the time this this theme recurs so there is a context a non- liturggical context for these same words because of their magnificence and their importance so we’re reading now the end of the first half so we’re going to have a break now so just to summarize really where we’ve got to i think I hope we’ve we’ve shown that we’ve got two very special texts here that are unlike others that they have a backward-looking and a forward-looking aspect to them that they are revelatory in nature and the forwardlooking aspect is the revelation that is as present for us today as it was when they were written musical settings that have come in firstly just in one voice so that people could all join in together then slowly expanded through the art of music to become something magnificent for example the consecration of one of the finest churches in the north of England uh and then also um to a point where the response to these words is sometimes not even considered within the context of the liturgy it’s just valued for its own sake as a thing of beauty in the second half um after we’ve had a bit of a break some refreshments um we’re going to talk a bit more about the way the music developed for these evening canacles and we’ll bring it all to a close at that point um I just wanted to mention those of you that are unaware there is a book sale going on through here in the parish room and you’re very much encouraged both now and at the end of the talk to go and have a browse see if there are some books there that you would like i think we’ve got some refreshments so we’ll break for about 15 minutes and then we’ll reconvene thank you very much thank you so much the refreshments will appear as if by match magic on just about My father was a good friend they swapped apples he was a terrific man
have you been to house just