Surrexit Pastor Bonus

This brief, homophonic motet, on one of the classic Good Shepherd texts, is more than half Alleluia – never a bad idea in Eastertide! It is cast in a gently enriched harmonic idiom, with added-note triads, often achieved by roughly parallel chordal movement in some voices, over a fixed note in another part. The meter changes in nearly every bar of the first page, but then settles down into a more-or-less regular common time, until returning, in the closing bars, to the almost chant-like irregularity of the opening. The soprano solo emerges for the first half of the Alleluia; the composer kindly encourages the alternative of a few blended voices sharing this top line, which hovers around E-flat, but slips briefly up to A-flat.
Alan Lewis
The Journal of the Association of Anglican Musicians
January 2011