Many of the compositions on Joanna Marsh's recent album Sanctifica Nos, recorded with the choir of Sidney Sussex Cambridge and Fretwork, were influenced by older styles – from Elizabethan music to jazz. In these reflections on three of those pieces, the composer examines the process of writing music that connects with these older works and unpicks some of the ideas she used in the process of writing them.

Many composers seem to be currently writing music ‘influenced’ by older works. Often this is part of the commission brief, with commissioners having programming reasons for creating these connections. They may also harbour the belief that their audience will warmly welcome a new work based on something they already love. But how does a composer work to this brief? Do they set themselves on a compositional collision course with a former piece and hope that the explosion produces something worth listening to? Or sniff around a style and pick-pocket the odd thing, slipping bits in here and there? Or do they become a kind of compositional spirit medium, diving between their own voice and that of a dead composer?

Evening Canticles - St. Paul’s service

My relationship with Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge goes way back to when I was organ scholar there from 1989-1992. I have enjoyed a continuing association with the college which has included organising two madcap tours of the Middle East for them, one of Dubai in 2012 and one of UAE and Jordan in 2017. I was appointed Composer in Residence in 2016 and so the music on this album is a compilation of commissions and works performed on those tours.

Included on the album is the fabulous viol consort Fretwork who came along on the choir's first Dubai tour and accompanied some of the works as there were no organs in public spaces in Dubai at that time. So hence Fretwork is included on the album, performing a number of works including an arrangement of my St Paul’s Service which was commissioned originally for Aurora Nova, the women’s choir at St Paul’s Cathedral in 2010. This Magnificat and Nunc dimittis was my first foray into writing music influenced by older styles, in this case that of the Tudor church composers. I spent a lot of time at university writing 16th century polyphonic exercises and writing this piece felt a bit cathartic as I filtered the older harmonic language through my mind and focussing it like a prism in the directions I wanted to go in, rather than those that were technically ‘right’. I think as a result the piece doesn’t sound like pastiche but has familiar and strange echoes. I remember writing it during a long hot June, feeling very nostalgic for the English choral tradition in my small studio in Dubai.

Martha and Mary

Martha and Mary was the first piece I wrote for the choir of Sidney Sussex as Composer in Residence. The college was founded by a noblewoman of the Tudor era, Lady Frances Sidney of Sussex, but it wasn’t until 1976 that the college threw open its doors to women and my first commission was to write a piece for the 40th anniversary of this event. I duly got stuck into looking for an appropriate text.

I had heard a fascinating sermon by the Dean of Peterborough Cathedral that year offering an interpretation of the New Testament story of Martha and Mary. At the time of the tale (AD 29-30) women were not permitted to be disciples: the word disciple means ‘pupil’, ie the follower of a rabbi. When Martha expressed irritation that Mary wasn’t helping her with the chores and instead was sitting listening to him, Christ took Mary’s side and said she was doing the better thing. One interpretation of this is that Christ encourages women to be disciples and by extrapolation also leaders and teachers. This seemed an apt text for the occasion of this particular anthem.

I was interested in writing a piece that connected musically with Tudor origins of the college, so decided to open the piece with a direct quotation from William Byrd’s song ‘Why do I use my paper, ink and pen?’. I was initially drawn to the poem because of the implications of academia in the title, however it is actually a setting of verses from a poem by Henry Walpole on the martyrdom of Edmund Campion in 1581. On listening to the opening of the song though, I immediately knew it would be the perfect door-opener for my own work. So Martha and Mary begins with a quotation of the first four bars before diverging and maintains a kind of ‘Byrd-plus-plus’ harmonic scheme throughout with the polyphony outlining extended harmonies.

Sanctifica Nos

Sanctifica Nos was written for a celebratory evensong before the ‘Commemoration of the Foundation’ Feast at Sidney Sussex in March 2017. It is a setting of words from Philip Sidney’s poetic realisation of the Psalm 145 from the Sidney Psalter, a volume by poets Sir Philip Sidney and Mary Sidney who turned the well-known biblical psalms into sophisticated verse, selecting or inventing a different stanza form for each one. Sir Philip Sidney was the nephew of Lady Frances Sidney and vv 14-15 of Psalm 145 are the words of the Sidney Sussex College Grace: ‘Oculi Omnium ad te spectant, Domine'. The Grace sits in the middle of the anthem and can be extracted and sung as an independent unaccompanied work. I remember finding it quite a puzzle creating a texture that would pull off this ‘two-for-one’ piece structure.

Sanctifica Nos: choral and instrumental works with the choir of Sidney Sussex College Cambridge (directed by David Skinner), Fretwork and Martin Baker is available now on Resonsus, and reviewed in the latest issue of Gramophone. You can explore the album below, via Apple Music.