Composer, Fr Christopher Willcock SJ, has been given a prestigious honour in the United Kingdom, being named a Fellow of The Royal School of Church Music.
Fr Chris accepted the honour at a ceremony at St Albans Cathedral, the oldest site of continuous Christian worship in Britain and the shrine to the first saint of the British Isles.
Fr Chris Willcock SJ has been made a Fellow of the Royal School of Church Music. PHOTO: Jesuits Australia website.
The citation for his award says: “Christopher Willcock is a Jesuit priest who has been a regular supporter of RSCM activities across Australia for the last 50 years and has been an eloquent advocate for the betterment of church music. He has earned an international reputation as a composer of liturgical music, and his psalm settings and service music are used widely across Australia, the US and the UK.”
His own reaction was simple. “I am humbled by this recognition,” he said in an email to his fellow Australian Jesuits.
Fr Chris said his parents were not pianists or musicians and his music education began at school.
“They did love music, but there was no culture of music at home,” he said. “We didn’t even have a gramophone. I was the eldest of five children and my grandmother, Mary Jane Fitzpatrick, not unreasonably, probably had a degree of pity on her daughter who had five kids to look after. She probably thought. ‘Look, I’ll make it a little easier for her if we bundle up Child No. 1 to boarding school. So, I was sent to boarding school, age eight, and I was there for two years. My family lived in Liverpool, NSW, which is not too far from Campbelltown, home to a boarders-only school that was run, extraordinarily, by the Good Samaritan sisters.”
His music education began there and developed further as his schooling progressed.
“Later, I went to the Christian Brothers school at Strathfield, where I received great music training from a Christian Brother called Colin Smith, who was quite well known in the field,” he said. “He was an excellent pianist, but he was great at running choirs and at training voices in choirs. In fact, he was so good that the entire school – more than 1,000 kids overall, primary and secondary – would have singing competitions between all the classes. That was quite extraordinary back in the Fifties.
“Well, I think it’s just the form it takes. There are some people who can’t read music and hence some people who can’t write music. There are probably some composers who said, ‘I can’t compose unless I’m sitting at a piano and playing notes on a keyboard.’ That’s the way Stravinsky composed. He could not compose except when he was at a piano. What I find is that the fingers go the way they’ve gone before because of muscle memory. I’d much rather try mental powers of invention to get it down first. And then I put my ideas down on paper.
“I used to use a fountain pen for my fair copy, but now I use a computer. However, I still use a biro for my initial draft; I’m still faster than a computer at that stage of composition. There are too many parameters on a page of music, although this might not be true in about five years’ time or less. I’m sure computers will beat the human brain in terms of the speed at which first drafts can be prepared,” he said.
“After I’ve done my handwritten draft, I then transfer it from that notation form to the computer. At this stage, you get all the advantages of using a computer, much as you would if you were dealing with text. You can edit, rather than having to do it all again. You can cut and paste, you can do this, you can do that. You have so many options. In the end, my fair scores are done on the computer and I spend a fair bit of time making sure that they look absolutely magnificent.
“I normally write things in response to people’s requests. It’s rare that I’ll sit down and say, ‘I’ve got to write a string quartet today,’ or ‘I must write my next opera’. None of that happens. It’s normally in response to a request from somebody or some group or some organisation. I’ve set a fair bit of non-religious poetry to music. Sometimes people will say ‘It would be great if you could have this done in, say, two months’ time.’ But there has been the odd occasion where they say, ‘Can you possibly have it done by tonight?’ Yes, it’s been known to happen!”
Fr Chris said he thought his grandmother would be proud of his RSCM honour.
“She would probably say, ‘The kid done well’. She wasn’t an overly affectionate woman. I’d say she clearly had strong affections, but they were not always expressed. So I think she’d smile with quiet pride.”
This article is drawn from an article by David McMahon, published on the website of the Australian Jesuits.