09 November 2018 - Choral Evensong

This week's webcast includes music by British 20th Century composers Benjamin Britten and Giles Swayne. 

Giles Swayne's Magnificat I owes a great deal to the two months he spent in Southern Senegal and The Gambia in 1981. Swayne writes, 'One of the songs I heard during this trip was a work-song called O Lulum which I recorded in a small village called Badem Karantabaa, about thirty miles south-east of the town of Ziguinchor in the Casamance region of southern Senegal. I used the opening call of this song to begin ; it also returns as a refrain towards the end of the piece. This apart, the music is built up in polyrhythmic layers which owe a great deal to the choral songs of the Ba-Benzele pygmies of the Congo region.'