“I wanted to try and capture something close to the mathematical precision which underlies Arvo Pärt’s music. The lines on the painting represent the 9 tracks on the album, each on a sublime piece of musical calculation.”
© Tom Herring
Our work in this area began during the pandemic in 2020 when people were losing loved ones suddenly and often without opportunities to say goodbye. Funerals, memorials or other ceremonies were also severely limited due to the strict regulations at the time. For most people, these bereavement rituals are vital parts of processing the death of a loved one and as the pandemic wore on, the lack of space for shared expressions of loss soon contributed to a crises in complex and unresolved grief.
You can find out more about the impact of covid on grief and bereavement in this report by the National Centre for Social Research.
Singing together is often a central part of ceremonies that celebrate a person’s life and form a key part of the rituals of loss which were so strongly curtailed during the pandemic. We wanted to do something to respond to this crisis and between 2020-2021, we developed our Rite to Grieve pilot project in partnership with Ellie Harrison and The Grief Series with support from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation.
Alongside developing a new community workshop format, we commissioned composer Rebecca Dale to write a new piece for the project. My North was premiered at a commemorative ceremony at the National Covid Memorial Wall in March 2022.
Fast forward to 2024 and we were invited for a Creative Health residency at Britten Pears Arts in Suffolk, where we developed our ideas with a range of practitioners working across music therapy and clinical psychology. You can find out more about the residency here.
The result was Voicing Loss, a new version of our workshop format with an increased focus on the breath as a tool for grounding oneself and helping to calm the onset of strong emotions. Gentle vocal exercises have also been incorporated throughout the workshop to encourage participants to explore using their voices to release tension while also creating a choral soundscape with others in the group, building peer-to-peer connection through sound.
The residency was followed by two pilot sessions at St Elizabeth Hospice and Snape Maltings in September 2024 and we will return to the hospice in March 2025 for a workshop specially designed for the amazing people who work there.
“a thoughtful, moving meditation on sanctuary in a world increasingly in need of safety and security”
“It’s one of those pieces that stays with you once you’ve heard it, and it feels like it’s always spinning away somewhere in my memory.”
Our Artistic Director Tom Herring is taking a sabbatical this Autumn and whilst he’s off we have two London performances which will be led by Ellie.
Find out more about Ellie via her website.
On Thursday 7 November, SANSARA will open the 2024 Joy & Devotion festival of Polish sacred music at St James’ Piccadilly. And on Saturday 14 December, the choir will join forces with United Strings of Europe and oud master Basel Saleh to present our Sanctuary & Solidarity programme at the Barbican’s Milton Court.
Head over to our events page to book your tickets now.
“Music has the unique capacity to hold cultural memory. Our aim with this recording is to capture a moment when the meaning held in these works feels acutely relevant and important. Our hope is that these recordings will inspire future iterations of these pieces, each performance surfacing in sound the deeply felt emotions enshrined within them. ”
Rothko Chapel at Bridgewater Hall - © Charlotte Wellings
Here’s a round up of how it went down…
“⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
a wonderfully subtle and hushed sense of the numinous. This was singing of an extremely high order, and the close-written choral sounds were quite extraordinary, with bell-clear soprano soli.”
Rothko Chapel at Bridgewater Hall - © Charlotte Wellings
“⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
[an] exquisitely moulded performance”
Rothko Chapel at Erholungshaus, Leverkusen
“⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Today’s concert ticked all the boxes for a great show: clever light set-up, a few introductory remarks, seamless transitions, skilled musicians and, naturally, an exciting programme. The ambitious goal to “invite contemplation” and “create a spiritual space” was gloriously accomplished.”
Rothko Chapel at Bridgewater Hall - © Charlotte Wellings
“Pitching from SANSARA is (pardon the pun) simply off the scale... An utterly remarkable, unforgettable concert. In SANSARA, Manchester Collective has surely found an aesthetic twin.”
“a thrillingly mysterious and profound Christmas alternative”
“I’m over the moon to be working with Platoon and can’t wait to build on our existing recordings with three new ambitious projects”
The White Rose resistance stretched far beyond Munich, but at its heart there were six individuals: students Hans Scholl (1918–1943) and his sister Sophie Scholl (1921–1943), Christoph Probst (1919–1943), Alexander Schmorell (1917–1943), Willi Graf (1918–1943), and Professor Kurt Huber (1893–1943).
Between 1942 and 1943 the group wrote and distributed six pamphlets calling on their fellow Germans to mount passive resistance against the Nazi regime. They used a second-hand duplicating machine, and even obtained paper, envelopes, and stamps despite wartime shortages.
They distributed the pamphlets at great personal risk. On 18 February 1943 Hans and Sophie Scholl took copies of the sixth pamphlet to the University of Munich and deposited them around the atrium at the entrance of the main university building. They were spotted by a university caretaker, and were immediately detained by the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo.
Following their subsequent arrests, on 22 February Hans Scholl, Sophie Scholl and Christoph Probst were sentenced to death and executed by guillotine just hours after the conclusion of their trial. Alexander Schmorell, Kurt Huber, and Willi Graf were subsequently arrested, tried, and sentenced to death on 19 April. Schmorell and Huber were executed three months later, on 13 July, and Graf was executed on 12 October 1943.
“Wherever you may be, mount passive resistance – RESISTANCE …Remember that every people deserves the government it is prepared to tolerate.”
Through the White Rose Project, current Oxford University students have provided us with vivid new English translations of the group’s letters, diaries and resistance pamphlets. Alongside their powerful political writings, hearing their private words reveals the human reality behind the groups’ political activism.
“There are times when I dread the war and I’m on the brink of losing all hope. I don’t like to think about it, but soon there won’t be anything but politics, and as long as politics is this confused and evil, turning away from it would be cowardly.”
We’ll be sharing the story of the White Rose in the resistors’ own words, alongside choral music from our latest album Traces.
We know that the members of the White Rose were all highly creative and musical people - they sang in choirs, played instruments and went to concerts together. Professor Kurt Huber was also a musicologist and folk song collector. One of Dr Alex Lloyd’s theories is that their engagement in music, art, and culture might have helped them to imagine a world beyond the Third Reich, which in turn led them to take political action.
“Music softens the heart; it orders its confusion, relaxes its tension, and creates the conditions for the work of the spirit in the soul which had previously knocked in vain at its tightly sealed doors. Yes, quietly and peacefully music opens the doors of the soul…”
As Sophie Scholl writes, music creates the conditions for the work of the spirit. The music in the podcast represents their cultural imagination and embodies their connections to each other - multiple voices working together to express their profound sense of responsibility to speak up and be heard.
Traces of the White Rose Podcast was made with support from the Genesis Foundation Kickstart Fund, the University of Oxford’s Public Engagement with Research Seed Fund, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, and the Higher Education and Innovation Fund.
Etching by Gerard Vandergucht (British Library), Public Domain
The 400th anniversary of Byrd’s death in 2023 has seen a fantastic celebration of his work across the world. The thrilling tale of pieces written for secret services in great houses with priest holes and the ever-present threat of persecution is a fascinating accompaniment to his magnificent music. That the work of a man who gave voice to those in his community who were unable to speak continues to resonate with musicians and audiences alike 400 years later, is an even more compelling reason to celebrate Byrd.
“Byrd was risking not only treason but also heresy if he put a foot wrong. ”
His experience was a unique one. Whilst he enjoyed the patronage and protection of a Catholic aristocratic house in his later years, he spent the heyday of his career in London, not only working for the protestant Elizabeth I, but enjoying her benefaction and favour while writing works that were clearly evoking and sympathising with the plight of Catholics persecuted for their faith. Publishing three settings of the Latin mass in the 1590s under his own name was not only brave and bold, but a defiant act. Unlike Shakespeare, who also got away with a certain amount of artistic license, Byrd was risking not only treason but also heresy if he put a foot wrong.
The opening of the Cantus part from Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices (IMSLP)
Edmund Campion by J.M. Lerch; Antwerp (British Library)
Elizabeth had famously said on her accession that she didn’t desire to ‘make windows of men’s souls’, a sixteenth-century version of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ After two reformations and a reversion to Catholicism in less than 20 years, Elizabeth saw that there was clearly a need for compromise, as long as nobody made a scene. The threat of persecution from a Queen whose religion and politics were so intertwined and changeable can never have been far away though. There are famous examples of those Elizabeth martyred for their faith – Byrd’s friend Edmund Campion for one – though, by and large Elizabeth was much more tolerant than her sister, Bloody Mary.
This tolerance seems to have been based on pragmatism and an ability to adapt and play the game. The first archbishop of her new Anglican church was Matthew Parker, a Protestant who had played a convincing enough part to survive the purges of England under Mary, Elizabeth’s sister. Byrd, whilst a Catholic, knew how to keep his head down in Elizabeth’s protestant England, and therefore enjoyed her support. He worked as a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, and he and his friend and teacher Thomas Tallis were given a monopoly on printing music in England. He was clearly a man, like Tallis, who understood how faith, politics and loyalty intersected.
“There is much that is unspoken in Byrd’s work”
Clearly the great contradiction in Elizabeth’s policy was that through her patronage, she allowed Byrd to open a window into his own soul through his incredible music, giving voice to so many who were in his position. There is much that is unspoken in Byrd’s work in the texts he chose to set, the importance of his rhetoric and the way he highlights the most significant passages. Many of the texts make reference to contemporary Jesuit works, which means that many of these pieces, when heard or performed by Catholic households in domestic settings, would have taken on additional meanings. It’s clear that Byrd is at his best in large-scale, plangeant and nostalgic outpourings like Infelix ego or Ne irascaris, and he manages to give voice to both a personal and communal grief in his style.
In 2022, SANSARA commissioned a piece of music written by Ukrainian composer Natalia Tsupryk. A Quiet Night - Tyhoyi Nochi sets text by renowned Ukrainian poet Serhiy Zhadan and quotations from one of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s many powerful speeches. Like the music of Byrd, Natalia’s piece is a musical expression of solidarity, a vehicle for compassion and reflection and a catalyst for connection. We’ve been overwhelmed and uplifted by the response to Natalia’s beautiful music, and the many communities around the world that have performed the piece and shared their experiences with us.
“after darkness I hope again for light”
The final section of Libera me Domine, et pone me juxta te, one of the pieces we’ll be performing in our upcoming concerts, sets the text ‘after darkness I hope again for light’. This universal and human prayer is at the heart of much of Byrd’s work and still resonates four centuries after his death, giving voice to those who need hope for a new dawn.
- Jonathan Hanley
Matthew Johnson Photography
Mortuos Plango, Vivos Voco (1980) is a seminal work of electronic music, composed by Harvey in his first year at IRCAM, the flagship French electronic music studio. The work displays Harvey’s curious mix of influences: the rigour and strangeness of French serialism, the sonorities of the English cathedral tradition and his idiosyncratic spiritualism.
The piece takes two samples: the great tenor bell of Winchester Cathedral, and the voice of Harvey’s son, Dominic, who was a chorister at Winchester at the time. The bells give the piece its name: inscribed on them is the text ‘Horas avolantes numero, mortuous plango, vivos ad preces voco.’ (I count the fleeing hours, I lament the dead, I call the living to prayer.)
As listeners, the multi-channel speaker system places us inside the bell. The piece transforms its complex tones, modulating in gliding swoops between its layered pitches. Harvey describes himself turning the bell ‘inside out’, making its low notes decay quickly and its high notes linger on. Dominic’s singing is warped too, its consonants and vowels split and manipulated. These effects were at the cutting edge of computer music: a persistent feature of Harvey’s work is the combination of new technology with ancient sources.
This is followed by Josquin des Prez’s stunning motet Inviolata, integra, et casta es Maria à5, introducing the Marian theme that runs through the rest of the programme. The chant melody is presented in canon between the tenor and alto parts with the other voices surrounding these lines in imitative free polyphony. The music ebbs and flows, moving seamlessly between passages of lilting motion and moments of pure stasis such as the tricolon ‘O benigna! O Regina! O Maria!’.
Written for the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge in 2011, The Annunciation is one of Harvey’s last works. Most notable in the context of this programme is the opening phrase of the piece which directly quotes Palestrina’s Stabat Mater. This, along with Harvey’s own arrangement of the Palestrina, show how important this 16th century masterpiece was to him, not only when transposing it into new worlds via electronics, but also in an a cappella setting. The reference to the Stabat Mater is particularly striking given the context in Edwin Muir’s annunciation scene: the innocence of ‘the girl’ is shrouded by Harvey’s musical allusion to Mary’s grief following the crucifixion.
As with The Annunciation, Palestrina’s Stabat Mater was written towards the end of his life around 1589/90. Continuing the syllabic style established in the Missa Papae Marcelli, the antiphonal writing for the two choirs points to Venice and shows Palestrina’s awareness of the fashionable polychoral writing of the time. It is easy to see why Harvey was so moved by this piece, with its impassioned setting of one of the most human of sacred texts.
Joe Bates’ Ceasing was commissioned by SANSARA for the 2019 Sound Unbound festival presented by the Barbican and first performed at St Bartholomew the Great in May 2019. Ceasing considers how we deal with death. It was inspired, in part, by the text of the Stabat Mater and by the writing of Derek Parfit. Parfit emphasises how death is more continuous with life than we may imagine, considering how our memory lives on in the minds of others.
Joe describes his process further:
“To write this piece, I interviewed the singers of SANSARA about their experiences of death. This was a strange and moving process; I’m immensely grateful to the singers for their openness. Their stories have been integrated into the text of the piece, which I have written myself.
The piece starts with specificities of my grandmother's death: I rushed to reach the hospital in a taxi but arrived moments after she died. I consider what I missed: how do lives typically end? The piece then opens out further, integrating the individual stories of the singers, first in a huge texture, then as recorded telephone calls, filtered through electronic static. The electronics blur and magnify the choir, suggesting the mass of similar stories behind them, while the structure of the piece – from coherent counterpoint to blurred fade out – evokes a fading consciousness.”
Punctuating the two large scale choral-electronic pieces in the programme is a contemporary setting of O nata lux by Rhiannon Randle who employs dissonance in striking ways throughout the piece, echoing the false relations in Thomas Tallis’ well-known setting of the same text.
Written some two decades after Mortuos, Harvey’s arrangement of Palestrina’s Stabat Mater (2004), in collaboration with the programmer and composer Gilbert Nuono, explores similar piece to the earlier electronic work. The arrangement combines three versions of the Stabat Mater: one sung live by the choir, one processed live from the microphones, and one pre-recorded by another choir and transposed.
These layers create a kaleidoscopic re-working of Palestrina’s work, as the transposed pre-recordings push the tonality into strange new areas. Yet these new key centres always carefully relate to the original, resulting in surprisingly smooth modulations. The live processing of the vocals varies from atmospheric to apocalyptic, recalling at moments an over-saturated echo and at others a whirling cacophony.
For many years, this piece was not able to be performed due to the obsolescence of its digital components: it was composed using Apple’s PowerPC architecture, which has not been supported since 2011. Nuono painstakingly restored the programme in 2022, with the support of Lammermuir Festival and Faber Music, to whom we are hugely grateful. In September 2022, we gave the piece’s UK premiere at the Lammermuir Festival and we’re thrilled to be giving the London premiere at St Martin’s on Friday 31 March.
- Tom Herring & Joe Bates
“A powerful programme of thought-provoking works, both timely and timeless, the impeccable performances by SANSARA drawing us in and holding us throughout the deeply reflective journey.”
In her wonderfully thoughtful review, Alexandra Coghlan describes how “What sets [Traces] apart are not only some unusual repertoire choices but also the dialogues, musical, textual and thematic, that run through it.”
Here is our performance which we recorded at the Ukrainian Cathedral in London:
To mark the terrible occasion of the one year anniversary of the full scale invasion of Ukraine, we have gathered some words from those who have performed the piece, along with two videos of live performances. As the war rages on, we would like to encourage choirs to perform A Quiet Night and - where possible - to collaborate with and raise funds to support those who have been displaced by conflict in their communities.
The score is available to purchase via the button below with all proceeds from downloads contributing to our fundraising appeal for the Ukrainian Welcome Centre in London.
One of the first choirs to perform the piece was the Sorbonne University Chorus directed by Frédéric Pineau. We love the intensity of their performance and the way the singers on the drone part are spread around the building. Watch it in full below:
In December, the Norwegian choir Sjøbodkoret performed the piece as part of their Christmas concert under the direction of Andreas Stensholt who has shared a few words of their experience of the piece:
I was introduced to this piece by one of my singers this autumn and it moved me from the very beginning. The music itself is beautiful, and of course it becomes even stronger because of the underlying context. For me this became a piece of reflection and a reminder that we must not forget. In Norway we hear about the war on the news, we take in some refugees, but let's be honest: our daily life is not affected that much. So we get back to our daily lives after the first shocking news about war in Europe.
We tried to give ourselves and the audience a reminder about what is still very much a reality every day for the people of Ukraine. It was one of the most emotional openings of a concert I have ever conducted. I wanted to create a room of silence, and also a feeling of distance between us and the audience. The whole concert opened with silence. The singers stood in the center of the church with their backs towards the audience. Then the drone started from the organ gallery. I chose to have the english "drone-words" spoken. The Norwegian audience is quite fluent in English, and I wanted those words to be clearly understood. The next piece was an a cappella version of "Silent Night". For me this completed the message: the meaning of a quiet, or a silent night can be so totally different.
On the same day as the performance in Norway, Mumbles A Cappella performed the piece at St Peter’s Church in Newton, Wales. Their director Phil Orrin has told us of the choir’s determination to support the people of Ukraine at this difficult time, adding:
Our choir thoroughly enjoyed learning the composition and found the whole process very moving - our Ukrainian singers and guests at the concert were equally moved by this thought-provoking and emotional piece of a cappella music.
“I felt a sense of responsibility to do it justice because of its significance and importance. The emotional investment ran strong through the choir that night. It felt as if we sang it for Ukraine.”
Rudolf Mauersberger (1889-1971) was a German conductor and composer best known for his work as the conductor of the Dresdner Kreuzchor from 1930 until his death. Following our recording of his powerful motet Wie liegt die Stadt so wüst, we were pleased to discover Herr, lehre doch mich, a simple yet deeply moving prayer for lower voices with text from Psalm 39, best known in English as ‘Lord, let me know mine end’.
Tenors and basses during the sessions at St Jude’s, Hampstead
Photo © Nick Rutter
