Musicology

Meredith is a musicologist studying British choral music in the twentieth century. Her work focuses on how composers write choral anthologies, incorporating secular and sacred texts alongside liturgical texts. She studies the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells, Elizabeth Maconchy, and Grace Williams.

Research Interests: Ralph Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells, Elizabeth Maconchy, Grace Williams, Gender Studies, Social History, Twentieth-century Music, American music, Contemporary British History, Sacred/Church Music

Dissertation Abstract:

This project critically examines the ways in which British composers wrote large choral works for festival audiences combining liturgical and sacred texts with poetry to expand the meanings of the religious music and texts to present messages that transcended the Church. This process of anthologizing was originally discussed by Kevin Salfen when analyzing Benjamin Britten’s music, but this dissertation tracks the earlier evolution of this poetic practice beginning with Vaughan Williams and how it impacted sacred choral music. Analyzing the use of multiple text sources in their choral music with orchestral accompaniment, this dissertation addresses the moral, gender, and nationalistic values that composers added to their sacred compositions, expanding the traditional understanding of the liturgical and biblical texts. The methods of analysis will focus on the textual and musical choices used by these composers, identifying the sources of poetry and acknowledging the context of that text and its author. This is an analysis of a modern style of sacred choral music in Britain that emphasizes combining religious tradition from a twentieth-century perspective of nationalism, grief, Welsh linguistic history, and feminism.

The text sources in these works draw from other languages, time periods, and textual genres. For example, Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Dona nobis pacem (1936) combines Walt Whitman poetry from Leaves of Grass with liturgical and biblical texts to create an anti-war message. Herbert Howells’s Hymnus Paradisi (1950) expanded the liturgy of the Requiem Mass to include sacred texts to represent the death of his son, Grace Williams added Welsh texts to her Missa Cambrensis (1971) to represent the strength of the Welsh language during a linguistic movement in Wales. Finally, Elizabeth Maconchy wrote a feminist libretto in her dramatic cantata, Héloïse and Abelard (1979), using liturgical texts and sacred hymns to situate the medieval love story in the setting of the cloister at Notre Dame. In analyzing these works, I reveal a pattern of choral composition responding to the religious interests of the Church of England, while acknowledging the secularization of British culture. Through their music, these composers spoke directly to their audiences, presenting the current cultural attitudes and concerns through familiar traditional sacred musical forms.

In order to complete my research including two relatively unknown women composers, I have gathered archival materials from the BBC Written Archives Centre, National Library of Wales, Cardiff University, and St. Hilda’s College, Oxford.