O salutaris Hostia (2008)
A setting of St Thomas Aquinas’s O salutaris Hostia
SATB
Duration:
5′
First performance:
3 May 2012
Camerata Silesia, Anna Szostak, Seminary Church, Częstochowa, Poland as part of “Gaude Mater” International Festival of Sacred Music 2012
UK premiere (recording):
10-11 January 2013
Choir of Selwyn College Cambridge, Sarah MacDonald, Selwyn College, Cambridge, UK
UK premiere (concert):
5 December 2015
Northern Spirit Singers, Clare Wills, St Oswald’s Church, Durham, UK
Greek premiere:
27 March 2016
Northern Spirit Singers, Andy King, St Paul’s Anglican Church, Athens, Greece
Score
This score is published by Schott and can be purchased here.
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
