O salutaris hostia (2008)
O salutaris hostia (2008)
A setting of St Thomas Aquinas’s O salutaris hostia
5′
SATB
O salutaris hostia (2008) (pdf)
PROGRAMME NOTE
The text of O salutaris hostia has always appealed to me, with particularly good settings by an anonymous Renaissance composer and by Herbert Howells springing to mind. My work is in a florid, polyphonic style with the declamatory homophonic opening contrasting with the more polyphonic later material. The work is bound together by a simple melodic phrase that occurs throughout, often as a characteristic suspension figure.
PAC