Tag Archives: Arcana

Arcana @ 10… Musical moments: Stanford Magnificat & Nunc Dimittis in G

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Charles Villiers Stanford by William Orpen Image Credit: Trinity College, University of Cambridge

As part of Arcana’s 10th birthday celebrations, we invited our readers to contribute with some of their ‘watershed’ musical moments from the last 10 years.

Celia Lister writes:

“My musical discovery from the last decade is Charles Villiers Stanford’s Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in G.

As an oboist specialising in solo and baroque ensemble performance, I was until recently hugely ignorant of vast swathes of church music. That all changed when my children became old enough to be church choristers, a hobby which my husband (an ex-lay clerk) was keen for them to pursue. As a result, over the last few years, I have been exposed to a huge quantity of music which was new to me, ranging from the early Spanish polyphony of Tomás Luís de Victoria to the anthems of Howard Goodall. A firm favourite genre in our house is liturgical Victoriana – Stanford, Wesley, Parry, Wood and Elgar to name but a few. Choral evensong is a highlight of the calendar, and a one of the most wonderful new pieces was Stanford’s ‘Mag & Nunc’ in G.

My daughters are lucky to have inherited my husband’s dulcet tones rather than my mezzo squawking, and my eldest recently had the pleasure of singing the not inconsiderable soprano solo in this wonderful work, with her siblings and parents on sop 2, alto and tenor respectively. Hearing her voice soaring to the rafters was undeniably special, as a parent and as someone who loves music, and was the culmination of hours of church practises, services and RSCM study sessions. It makes the seemingly endless taxi service I perform to shuttle my daughters to and from innumerable rehearsals worth it.

So in a way, it’s not that Stanford in G is a single piece which I can’t do without; it’s that for me it represents the pinnacle of a genre of music which I’d hitherto largely ignored. Liturgical music – not only, but largely Victorian – now affords me great pleasure for both musical and personal reasons. Now all I need to do is wait a few more years until they are trained up for the Passions…

Published post no.2,429 – Sunday 2 February 2025

Roll out the bunting…Arcana is 10 years old today!

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From Ben Hogwood, Arcana editor:

If you’ll forgive the indulgence…Happy Birthday to us!

Arcana is 10 years old today, a chance to celebrate a decade of sharing great music with our readers. I would like to thank you all for your encouragement and interaction with the site, to thank our guest writers – principally Richard Whitehouse and John Earls – for their excellent contributions and insights in recent years, and to thank my wife Sam Hogwood for her unerring support. This is an enterprise that run outside of working hours, so it is inevitably a balancing act where time is concerned!

As part of our birthday celebrations, we have invited readers to contribute with their ‘watershed’ musical moments from the last 10 years. I’m looking forward to sharing them with you over the next few days; there are some crackers! It’s not too late to share yours either, by contacting me on e-mail (editor@arcana.fm)

In the meantime, here is an appropriate piece of music to mark the occasion – while at the same time giving a clue to what is upcoming on Arcana in the coming months:

Image by Alexander Raths

Published post no.2,428 – Saturday 1 February 2025

Welcome to Team Arcana!

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arcana-purple-25

Welcome to Arcana.fm! It’s great to see you here.

Arcana has been set up to give you the chance to step into classical music with no fear or pressure – just the chance to enjoy and read about good music!

The name Arcana comes from a forward-looking orchestral piece written by the French composer Edgard Varèse in the 1920s. Varèse was a visionary, an early sign of the direction electronic music was to take some fifty years later – and I want to capture something of that sense of discovery and originality in a number of ways through the site.

To do this I am treating all musical styles as equals, enjoying what they take from each other – pop drawing from classical, as in The Borrowers series that will begin with Manfred Mann‘s Joybringer, and vice versa – an example for starters being Philip Glass and his symphonies from the work of David Bowie. If Taylor Swift or Muse suddenly go classical, you’ll be the first to read about it!

There will be an extended look at classical music as used for TV and film in Screen Grab, beginning with the score for the Russell Crowe-led seafaring epic, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, and looking at TV adds and promos, too. What’s the music Channel 4 are using to promote The Jump? You’ll find out here (it’s the Polovtsian Dances from Borodin‘s opera Prince Igor!)

There will be a series of guides for online concerts, which in the case of the BBC iPlayer will then be available for 30 days’ enjoyment. There will be interviews – a couple of whom are tenatively lined up for the next week or two in the shape of Emika and John Tejada. There will be reviews of new relevant recordings, both pop and classical. We will go on a Richard Strauss Odyssey, inspired by the composer’s centenary last year – and fellow centurion Sibelius will follow! Later, in a more ambitious series, we will take music year-by-year from 1700, so we can start with the very best the Baroque period had to offer. There is also Under the Surface, a look at underappreciated composers or works.

What matters most at this or any stage is your feedback and suggestions. Arcana is not just for my enjoyment – I want everyone to get as much as possible out of it. So tell me what you would like to see more / less of on this site, what music you like and dislike, or anything else – through Twitter, Facebook or e-mail.

Let’s enjoy the music!

-Ben Hogwood