Name: Robert Parsons – beyond Ave Maria (SWEMF open workshop)
Start: 2024-11-23T10:00:00+00:00
End: 2024-11-23T16:30:00+00:00
Location: St Peter's Church, Leckhampton

$Robert Parsons \u2013 beyond Ave Maria (SWEMF open workshop)$

A one-day workshop for South West Early Music Forum, near Cheltenham
Works by Robert Parsons:
- Peccantem me quotidie
- Libera me de morte aeterna
- Credo quod redemptor
- Magnificat & Nunc Dimittis in English
- Ave Maria
Advance booking essential:
£20 for EMF members
£25 for non-EMF members
£5 for 18-25 year olds
Details and booking: https://swemf.org.uk/event/11856/
The reputation of Robert Parsons (c.1535–72), today rests almost entirely on the honeyed beauty of his Ave Maria, with its perfect Amen. But his other sacred music is of such high quality, and so little known, that it will be a pleasure to explore it with you.
Parsons was a key influence on Willim Byrd, and one of the greatest composers of the generation which lived through the turbulent decades of the Reformation. His sudden death, by drowning in the frozen waters of the River Trent at Newark, gifted Byrd a place in the Chapel Royal. Robert Dow’s eulogy, written at the time, tells of a composer cut down at the height of his powers:
Qui tantus primo Parsone in flore fuisti, quantus in autumno in morerer flores
(‘Parsons, you who were so great in the springtime of life, how great you would have been in the autumn, had not death intervened.’)

For this workshop we hope to sing Parsons’ three searingly dramatic Latin pieces for Holy Week, along with his rather mellow double-choir canticles for the new Anglican rite. And, of course, we will sing the Ave Maria. Parsons’ music, composed in the turbulent years of the mid-16th century, synthesises long standing English traditions (rich contrapuntal textures and pungent false relations) with modern, perhaps continental, features like dramatic text declamation and emotive word-setting.