TIME 

Lyric Cantata No. 2 for soprano, baritone, SATB, and small orchestra

Total duration: 42 mins

1. Time's Fell Hand  Shakespeare

2. Flying  Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919)

3. Stillness  Robert Nichols (1893-1944) 

4. Time is  Henry Van Dyke (1852-1933)

5. So Little is our Loss  John Milton (1608-1674)

6. The Wind Ivor Gurney (1890-1937)

7. Solstice Hilary Llewellyn-Williams

8. Let the Harmonious Spheres in Music Roll Jasper Mayne (1604-1672)

Total Duration: 42-45 mins

(Orchestration: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon. 2 horns, 2 trumpets, trombone, bass trombone, timps, strings.

The first performance of Time was given by the Llandaff Cathedral Choral Society (director Simon Lovell-Jones) in Llandaff Cathedral, March 16th  2024.

A separate edition of movement 7 - Solstice -  is also available in a version for choir and organ. 

Conductor's full score and orchestral parts are available to hire - please email for details.

Programme note from the first performance:

Time is Iain James Veitch’s second lyric cantata, and the second to be premiered by LCCS (the first was One World in 2019). In the composer’s own words:

“ ‘For those who love, time is not’ - words from the poem Time by Henry Van Dyke, that also sum up the message behind this Choral Cantata. This is one of eight movements each setting a poem - some well-known, some less so - but all exploring an aspect of time and ultimately how we individually and collectively strive to come to terms with its ramifications: Grief, Joy, Ritual.”

The eight movements of the cantata, rather like Holst’s Planets, are more a well-balanced anthology of moods and scenes than a tautly-knit motivic construction (although listen out for the recurrence, in the final movement, of the very first melody of the piece: it starts with a rising minor sixth followed by a falling semitone).

The first movement, Time’s Fell Hand, sets Shakespeare’s sonnet “When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced”, which delineates how time destroys even the mightiest things. For the speaker, the prospect of losing his lover to Time’s fell hand actually destroys his present happiness too. It’s a lament, not a philosophical acceptance of mutability and of the fact that without change, nothing can live. The music, as befits a verse on the inevitability of decay, is unhurried - it has all the time in the world.

By contrast, the second movement, Flying, is nimble-footed and harmonically restless, always slipping through your hands. Its text is Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s Time and Love. As in the first movement, time is personified as an agent of change rather than its by-product. Interestingly, there is no hint of renewal in time’s operations here. Everything is eventually lost, even though the most faithful and slow to decay is love, but finally love is freely renounced: “when only its regrets remain - let love, too, fly.”

But actually, the poet’s attitude to love is, throughout, not idealised but ambivalent: “I know not if it blest or curst, thy life and mine.” she says in verse one. It was like sweet wine, and then like bitter wine, as damaging but addictive as Cathy and Heathcliff’s mutually corrosive passion. Nevertheless, the opposition between“time flies…and yet love stays” occurs in all three verses, with the last four words deftly highlighted in the setting by giving them to the choir. And the resignation of the last couplet of all is transfigured by the music into actual relief and joy at finally being able to let go.

Having examined Time in two of its aspects, Iain James Veitch turns to the (apparent) absence of time with the third movement, Stillness. The original poem, The Nocturne: Address to the Sunset, is by the war poet Robert Nichols, whose work seems to have been congenial to early twentieth-century composers, including Sorabji, Warlock, Bliss, and Moeran (whose own setting of The Nocturne is a thirteen-minute elegy to the memory of Delius). Stillness is much more concise and, without losing any spaciousness, sustains the thread of the poetry and gathers energy for the moment of take-off with the line “Now, spirit, find out wings and mount to him”, the point at which contemplation briefly becomes action before returning to the exquisite stillness of hanging, “golden as a bee, in the sun’s hair.”

Time itself hangs heavy in the fourth movement, Time is, a setting of Henry Van Dyke’s poem, originally written on a sundial and eventually published in 1904, with the final word now changed from “eternity” to “not”. A clock-like, almost hypnotic repetitiveness dominates the music, as the complete verse comes round again and again, with the phrase “Time is…” preceding every line, not just the first. The lines are distributed seemingly randomly between the solo soprano and the choir, creating the overall impression that each of us experiences these different flavours of time.

After the repetitiveness of Time is comes a complete contrast in So Little is our Loss. Time is rushing on again, and not much of the substantial text, Milton’s On Time, is repeated. To summarise briefly, Milton jeers at Time, who can only devour earthly things, while “our heavn’ly-guided soul” shall attain (assuming it follows the guidance) the beatific vision of God, for ever. No more change, and therefore, no more time.

Ivor Gurney is better known as a composer than a poet. His life was affected by bipolar disorder, as was his work: “The brighter visions brought music, the fainter, verse.” So perhaps we can assume that the text for this sixth movement, The Wind, comes out of his depressed phase, which is certainly reflected in the desolate-sounding setting. And yet, the poem also seems a commentary on his own condition. The first section depicts Time relentlessly stripping away the days of everyone’s lives, leaving only emptiness and despair. But the last quatrain presents the other part of the cycle, where he is not only happy, but newly oblivious of “the wind’s warning”. Time replaces one self with another.

The seventh movement sets Hilary Llewellyn-Williams’ poem Solstice. It celebrates the moment when, etymologically, the sun stands still, and is a turning point, the crest of a sine wave. But the poet seems to see it as something more: the threshold into a season of intense solar activity. The music responds, opening with long, sultry sustained chords out of which the “hot yellow moon” slowly rises in parallel thirds, until the threshold is reached and the music becomes harmonically and rhythmically tumultuous. Eventually there follows a gear-change in the text, when the viewpoint returns from the heavens to a mortal, organic level - the biosphere responds to the new season, and the parallel thirds are back.

Finally, Jasper Mayne’s Time is a Feather’d Thing is carpe diem extended over thirty-odd lines of warning that old age creeps up on us unawares. The theme harks back to the first poem, and the music is accordingly flecked with brief allusions to the opening movement. But this time round, things are different: the melody from the very opening of the cantata is now in the major, and this poet is determined to set the heavens and the harmonious spheres spinning with the energy he and his lover generate by their embraces. Hooray for the first law of thermodynamics.

programme note by Ben Heneghan

Computer-generated mock-up ~ for demo purposes only: