by Paul Matheson

Performed by the Marian Consort, St John’s Kirk, Perth Festival of the Arts.

The tradition of dedicating the month of May to the Blessed Virgin Mary stretches back many centuries. Pope Paul VI praised this ancient custom in his encyclical Mense Maio:

‘We are delighted and consoled by this pious custom associated with the month of May, which pays honour to the Blessed Virgin and brings such rich benefits to the Christian people… the person who encounters Mary cannot help but encounter Christ likewise’.

Every year in May, the Perth Festival of the Arts hosts a performance of sacred choral music in Perth’s historic medieval church of St John the Baptist, which provides a glorious acoustic for sacred choral music, just as its 15th century builders intended. One of the pleasures of this annual concert is that the world class choirs who come to perform will often dedicate some or all of their programme to Marian devotional music. Last year, the Tenebrae choir performed their Queen of Heaven programme of choral compositions devoted to Mary the Mother of God by composers from across the centuries. This year, the appropriately named Marian Consort came to St John’s Kirk to perform their programme A Winged Woman.

The Marian Consort’s nine superb singers performed a selection of Scottish and continental European music of the golden age of polyphony, and the remarkable thing about all seven of the Renaissance pieces they performed is that the compositions are found in Scottish manuscripts. Scholars believe that compositions by continental European composers may have been copied by Scottish monks who are known to have been in France and Flanders and who then returned to Scotland.  (The manuscripts are associated with Dumfries, Dunfermline and St Andrews). As the Marian Consort’s director Rory McCleery explained to us in his introductory remarks, the Scottish Reformation’s systematic destruction of everything related to Roman Catholic worship was so thorough, it is little short of a miracle that those Scottish Catholic musical manuscripts have survived at all.

The concert’s two Scottish renaissance pieces were composed by David Peebles (d. c.1579), a Canon at the Augustinian Priory of St Andrews, whose work dates from 1530 -1576, straddling the Scottish Reformation. The two Peebles pieces were from the start and the end of his career. The later, post-Reformation piece was a fine arrangement of Psalm 3 Quam multi sunt, Domine qui infestant me for use in Scottish churches. Peebles composed this setting in 1576 at the request of Robert Stewart, Earl of March and Commendator of St Andrews. It is described in the source as ’verray grave and dulce’:

Paul Matheson is a diversity officer with the police.