Gabriel Jackson (10/07/1962), an English composer, born in Bermuda. After three years as a chorister at Canterbury Cathedral he studied composition at the Royal College of Music, first in the Junior Department with Richard Blackford and later with John Lambert, gaining his BMus in 1983. While at the College he was awarded the R O Morris Prize for Composition in 1981 and 1983 and in 1981 he also won the Theodore Holland Award. In 1992 he was awarded an Arts Council Bursary. Particularly acclaimed for his choral works, his liturgical pieces are in the repertoires of many of Britain’s leading cathedral and collegiate choirs and in 2003 he won the liturgical category at the inaugural British Composer Awards. Recent premieres include a forty-part motet Sanctum est verum lumen (2005) for the Lichfield Festival, a Piano Sonata (2007) for David Wilde, Aeterna caeli gloria (2007) for the Festival of St Cecilia at Westminster Abbey, Ave, regina caelorum (2008) for choir and electric guitar, commissioned by Tom Kerstens and The Sixteen for the opening of Kings Place in London, The Spacious Firmament for choir, brass and organ, and The Spacious Firmament 2: Yet we who neither burn nor shine for choir and trumpet (both commissioned by the John Armitage Memorial in 2008) and an extended a cappella Requiem (2008) for the Vasari Singers, which combines settings of the Latin Ordinary with funereal texts from other cultures and spiritual traditions.
Requiem
| Period: | 21st century |
| Composed in: | 2008 |
| Musical form: | free |
| Text/libretto: | Latin mass and other ritual texts |
| Duration: | ca. 36' |
| Label(s): | Naxos 8.573049 |
An extended a cappella Requiem (2008), which combines settings of the Latin Ordinary with funereal texts from other cultures and spiritual traditions. Duration: 30'.
It contains:
01. Requiem aeternam I
02. Epitaph
03. Requiem aeternam II
04. Autumn wind of eve
05. Sanctus & Benedictus
06. Peace, my heart
07. Lux aeterna
| Source: | booklet of cd Naxos 8.573049 |
♫ 01. Requiem aeternam I
© Naxos 8.573049
♫ 02. Epitaph
© Naxos 8.573049
♫ 03. Requiem aeternam II
© Naxos 8.573049
♫ 04. Autumn wind of eve
© Naxos 8.573049
♫ 05. Sanctus & Benedictus
© Naxos 8.573049
♫ 06. Peace, my heart
© Naxos 8.573049
♫ 07. Lux aeterna
© Naxos 8.573049
This important Requiem demonstrates Gabriel Jackson's gift for writing mesmerising choral music on a large scale. Combining sections of the traditional Requiem text with poems from other cultures and traditions, Jackson here has created a work which embraces a wide-ranging perspective on human mortality. Each movement is given a different character and musical style, and the result is a unique, sublime work which cannot fail to impress.
The original inspiration for my Requiem was to combine the hieratic, grave objectivity of the great Iberian Requiems with something more personal, intimate even, so as to reflect the individual as well as the universal experience of loss. To this end I have replaced alternate movements of the Latin Mass for the Dead with funereal poems from other cultures and spiritual traditions. The interesting thing about these very different meditations on the meaning of human mortality-by the Buddhist Rabindranath Tagore, the Quaker Walt Whitman, Hojo Ujimasa the Samurai, the Australian Aboriginal poet Kevin Gilbert, and the eighteenth-century Mohican Chief Aupumut-is that ultimately they all express a similar view of death to the European Christian one: that it is not the end, but the gateway to another life. The resulting sequence, full of images of light and the promise of eternal life, is radiantly optimistic; this seems only right to me, as the purpose of any Requiem setting is surely to heal, and to console the living.