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1629

Was Ever Love Like Thine?

$2.90

SKU: 1629 Categories: Choral, Lent/Easter 2022, Sheetmusic
  • Composer: Aitken, Paul
  • Music Type: Choral
  • Difficulty: Medium/Difficult
  • Voicing: SATB
  • Accompaniment: a cappella
  • Season: Lent
  • Publication: 2016
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Additional information

Composer

Aitken, Paul

Music Type

Choral

Difficulty

Medium/Difficult

Voicing

SATB

Accompaniment

a cappella

Season

Lent

Publication

2016

  • Description
  • Editorials

Description

Was Ever Love Like Thine?
Paul Aitken

A moving text by Samuel Wesley is the basis for this Lenten/Holy Week anthem. Scored for SATB a cappella, there is mostly homophonic writing with some mild dissonance that underscores the depth of the text.

Aitken sets Samuel Wesley’s dramatic hymn with freely emotive drama.  Even within a conservative four-voice texture, Aitken achieves a large canvas on which he paints the pained images of Wesley’s text.  Punctuating staccato notes and syncopation heighten the immediacy, at times bordering on theatricality.  Aitken nimbly evades a clear indication of key, although the music vacillates most frequently between D minor and F major.  Aitken sets four stanzas of the hymn, and the first stanza reappears in only slightly varied form at the end, effectively marking a recapitulation.  The final cadence, however, increases the tonal ambiguity with a chord that does not lend itself to simple aural interpretation.  This unsettled, inconclusive termination fits the emotional turmoil of the anthem extremely well.
— Jason Overall, The Journal of the Association of Anglican Musicians, January 2018

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