The Unaccompanied Choral Works of Richard Rodney Bennett: A Conductor's Guide

Abstract

As one of Great Britain's leading composers, Sir Richard Rodney Bennett (b. 1936) is prolific in a wide range of media, idioms, and genres, including concert and stage music, jazz, and film scores and has to his credit an extensive discography. He excels in solo vocal, instrumental, and chamber music composition and has a significant but lesser known corpus of choral music. A classically trained pianist, Bennett enjoys a parallel performing career as a jazz musician and cabaret singer. He has lived in New York since 1979.Bennett is one of a group of twentieth-century British composers who have cultivated distinctly English styles of composition. Like his near contemporaries Kenneth Leighton (1929-88), William Mathias (1934-92), and Paul Patterson (b. 1947), Bennett borrows from ancient and modern English traditions and from twentieth-century techniques to create an individual style.This study provides an historical context for English choral tradition, traced from its medieval roots through a twentieth-century musical renaissance, then identifies and examines a wide array of eclectic traits in Bennett's unaccompanied choral compositions for mixed voices. A component of the study is a literature survey to aid the choral conductor's preparation of these works for performance.This investigation revealed Bennett's affinity for English poetry and his desire to communicate the emotional content of his chosen texts through musical expression. Salient features of his compositional method are fluent linear part-writing within a contrapuntal texture, skillful textural manipulation, refined rhythmic control, and structural symmetry and balance. Other style traits emerged, including modality, pitch cross-relations, canonic imitation, word-painting, cross-rhythms, metric shifts, harmonic shifts, tone clusters, driving repetitive rhythms, extended vocal techniques, and use of the octatonic scale. Collectively, these suggest the composer was influenced by Tudor polyphony (possibly subconsciously), Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), Francis Poulenc (1899-1963), William Walton (1902-83), Olivier Messiaen (1908-92), and Benjamin Britten (1913-76).