It runs from All Saints’ Day to Advent Sunday and incorporates All Souls’ and the Festival of Christ the King. In many countries, it also includes Remembrance Sunday and Remembrance Day, when those who died serving in the two World Wars and subsequent conflicts are honoured and remembered.
It is a solemn time of reflection and can be deeply moving, especially for those grieving the loss of loved ones. During this season, the music of our cathedral choirs speaks to the soul and offers comfort beyond words.
All Saints’ Day
The tradition of remembering the lives of all the saints at the beginning of November stems from the ninth century. It may have had its origins in the British Isles, possibly supplanting an older pagan festival of the dead.
Many Christian traditions, including the Anglican and Roman Catholic Churches, continue to celebrate the day, also known as the Feast of All Hallows, on 1 November. For some (for example, in parts of Germany) it is a national holiday. Some other denominations remember all the saints on different days of the year.
All Saints’ Day has varying significance within different traditions. In the Catholic Church it is a commemoration of the ‘Church Triumphant’. Within the Anglican Communion, it is a day to recall the collective lives of the saints. For other Protestant traditions it is a day to remember all Christians who have died.
Music for All Saints
Both the Anglican and Catholic Churches have specific liturgy for the Feast of All Saints. The day also affords an opportunity to sing the popular hymn ‘For all the Saints,’ by Walsham How, to the tune ‘Sine Nomine’ by Vaughan Williams.
Motets and anthems frequently sung on this day often are settings of texts (such as antiphons) used during Mass or other services. ‘O quam gloriosum’ is one example, which, in the Catholic tradition, is the Magnificat Antiphon at Second Vespers on the Feast of All Saints. This was a popular text during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and was set by composers across Europe including William Byrd (England), Luca Marenzio (Italy), Heinrich Pfender (Germany) and Jacobus Vaet (Belgium). Probably the most famous and dramatic setting is that of the sixteenth-century Spanish composer Tomás Luis de Victoria (who also composed a mass based on the motet). The text translates as ‘O how glorious the kingdom wherein all the saints rejoice with Christ. Clothed in white robes, they follow the Lamb wherever he goes.’
Another All Saints’ text is ‘Justorum animae’, which is the Offertory antiphon for All Saints from the Catholic Mass. There are many settings of this text, including Renaissance examples by Byrd and Lassus, a setting from the early 2oth century by Stanford and a recent setting by Gabriel Jackson. The text translates as: ‘The souls of the just are in the hand of God, and the torment of death shall not touch them. In the sight of the unwise they seemed to die; but they are in peace.’ Gabriel Jackson’s evocative setting of ‘Let us all rejoice in the Lord’ (the Entrance Antiphon for All Saints) and his Mass for All Saints may also feature on this day.
Other music you might hear at services for All Saints include Ernest Bullock’s setting of Isaac Watts’s text ‘Give us the wings of faith,’ or Basil Harwood’s ‘O how glorious is the kingdom’ (an English translation of ‘O quam gloriosum’) with its thrilling organ introduction. William Walton’s masterpiece ‘The Twelve’ sets a text in praise of the apostles by W H Auden. Particularly uplifting is the rhythmically and melodically exciting ending, ‘Let us praise them all with a merry noise.’
All Souls’ Day
The Catholic Church regards it as a day of prayer for of souls in purgatory, where masses for the dead can help them reach heaven. The day has a slightly different role in the Anglican Church, where it is a commemoration of those who have died. It is considered a Lesser Festival in the Anglican Church and is not observed in all churches. Shortly after the Reformation, it disappeared from the calendar altogether, being fused with the Festival of All Saints, but it gained importance with the Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century and was reinstated.
In some cultures, the day is a time for visiting the graves of loved ones and is marked with the baking of special types of bread. For example, Seelen – long, thin bread rolls topped with salt and caraway seeds – were traditionally baked on All Souls’ Day in south west Germany.
Music for All Souls
The musical focus of the Feast of All Souls is often a Requiem Mass which will include the readings of names that had been entered into the place of worship’s Book of Remembrance over the preceding year.
Choral Requiem Masses are a little different from other Masses, in that, alongside the the Ordinary texts (the Kyrie, Sanctus and Benedictus, Agnus Dei), the Mass includes settings of the ‘Proper’ texts as well. These are the Introit, Gradual, Tract, Sequence (Dies irae), Offertory and Communion.
Not all choral Requiem Masses will include settings of all of these texts. Some Requiems (such as Fauré’s) also contain settings of the ‘Libera me’ and ‘In Paradisum’, which are traditionally part of the burial rite that would follow the Requiem in the context of a funeral. Many composers have also chosen to set the ‘Pie Jesu’ (which appears in the final couplet of the ‘Dies irae’) as a separate motet.
If you attend a service of Eucharist at a UK Anglican Cathedral on All Souls’ Day, you may hear a complete Requiem setting or movements from a Requiem by composers such as Fauré, Howells and Duruflé or by contemporary composers such as John Rutter and Eleanor Daley. Settings of Psalm 23 and Psalm 121 are also often performed.
You may also hear the Kontakion for the Departed. A Kontakion is a type of hymn from the Byzantine tradition. The Kontakion for the Departed comes from the Ukrainian Orthodox funeral service. When sung in the UK, it usually is performed in an English translation and is sung to what is known as the ‘Kiev Melody’.
Remembrance Sunday
In the UK, Remembrance Sunday falls on the Sunday closest to Remembrance Day (11th November). A two-minutes’ silence is held at 11am in most churches throughout the land, irrespective of denomination. The day is also marked by the National Service of Remembrance at the Cenotaph in London and ceremonies at local war memorials. At these ceremonies, civic dignitaries, former and current members of the Armed Forces, military cadet forces and youth organisations such as Scouts and Guides come together with members of the public to lay wreaths of poppies in memory of those who died serving their country in the two World Wars and subsequent conflicts. Members of the clergy are often present at Remembrance ceremonies and the ceremonies are sometimes combined with a service of Choral Matins at a local church or cathedral.
A shorter ceremony and another two-minutes’ silence also takes place on Remembrance Day itself. The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month recalls the signing of the Armistice, which ended the First World War.
Music for Remembrance
The Act of Remembrance itself features two traditional bugle calls, which can be played by a lone trumpeter or bugler or by a team. The Last Post is played before the two-minutes’ silence, during which standards and the Union Flag are lowered. The Reveille is played to mark the end of the silence, when the standards and the Union Flag are ‘recovered’. Other suitable music might be performed by military or brass bands during the ceremony.
In the Anglican Church, choral services on Remembrance Sunday will include the usual repertoire for Matins, Eucharist and Evensong. Some services might include hymns and other music provided by a brass or military band. The National Anthem may also be sung.
Hymns you might hear on Remembrance Sunday could include:
O God our help in ages past
Eternal Father strong to save
Abide with me
In Christ there is no east or west
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy
I vow to thee my country
Anthems and motets
Frequently sung are settings of Laurence Binyon’s poem ‘For the Fallen’, such as that by Edward Elgar or Douglas Guest. Herbert Sumsion’s anthem ‘They that go down to the sea in ships’, a setting of verses from Psalm 107 is also sometimes performed.
Hubert Parry’s Songs of Farewell were written during the years of the First World War and express the grief he felt for colleagues and students who lost their lives in that conflict. They were not conceived as liturgical works, but individual movements, such as ‘My soul, there is a country’ and ‘There is an old belief’, are sometimes sung during times of remembrance.
William Harris’s anthem for double choir, ‘Bring us, O Lord God’, is an evocative setting of a beautiful prayer by John Donne, which looks to eternity as a place where there shall be ‘no noise nor silence, but one equal music.’ Another anthem by Harris, ‘Faire is the heaven’, can also be performed on Remembrance Sunday.
John Ireland’s ‘Greater love hath no man’, sets a number of biblical texts, including the words from the Gospel of John, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ It was composed in 1912 as a meditation on Passiontide but resonated with churchgoers during the First World War, when large numbers of people experienced the loss of those they loved.
The Feast of Christ the King
The Season of Remembrance comes to an end on a more triumphal note with the Festival of Christ the King. This is a relatively recent addition to the Christian calendar. It was inaugurated in the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Pius XI in 1925 but moved in 1969 from late October to the very last Sunday of the Church year. It has also been adopted by the Anglican Communion and is celebrated on the same day. The Festival focuses on Christ glorified in heaven.
As the last Sunday before Advent, this day is colloquially known as ‘Stir-up Sunday’, from the words ‘Stir up, O Lord, the wills of your faithful people’, taken from the collect of the day. Traditionally, this was the day when families would make their Christmas pudding, giving it a good month to mature before eating it on Christmas day.
Music for the Festival of Christ the King
Many directors of music aim to choose Mass settings and canticles that have a particularly triumphant ‘ring’ to them, such as Mozart’s Coronation Mass. Alongside will be hymns and anthems that celebrate Christ as King, such as Elgar’s ‘Great is the Lord’ or Vaughan Williams’s glorious ‘Let all the world in every corner sing’ from his ‘Five Mystical Songs’. This sets a poem by the seventeenth-century George Herbert, which is also sometimes sung as a hymn. Roxanna Panufnik set the same text for double choir, which was first performed in 2020 in a ‘virtual’ Evensong service by choral scholars. A more reflective anthem, also using a hymn text is Edward Bairstow’s ‘The King of Love my shepherd is’. The hymn ‘Crown him with many crowns’ is also a popular choice on this day.
Listen to our Season of Remembrance playlist