Soprano Solo and SATB a cappella

Duration: ca 7'00"

This setting was written in 2005 for the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge, then conducted by Dr David Hill, and was a particular pleasure to write as I had served in the Choir of Winchester Cathedral under his inspiring direction from 1991 to 2001. Beginning with a soprano solo which recurs later, the music respects the strophic arrangement of its anonymous mediaeval text, but seeks a kind of ‘halfway house’ by preserving a recognizable rhythmic and textural sense of the recurrent verse and refrain while still clothing them in successive variants of what has gone before. Led by the poem, the music reaches a central climax with the singing of the ‘angels bright’, but withdraws progressively into itself in the latter stages. Throughout, there is a general aim to suggest a line of connection back to actual compositional vocabulary and devotional sensibility as we know them from the Middle Ages, but without crossing a line definitively into the strict application of ancient rules.

© Francis Pott, 2009.

Lullay my Liking has been released by Hyperion Recordings as part of Christmas at St John’s, CDA 67576.

It was published in 2005 by Novello & Co [Music Sales Ltd].