Without knowing exactly why I found my eyes running over by William Marsey

A new work for Solem Quartet for their touring programme Industry.

This set of pieces draws on an almost 15-year obsession with hymn and psalm singing. They’re strange things: simple melodies that through repetition, adaption, and inheritance become very loaded with meaning, personal and collective. They so often move people to tears in waves of emotion that seem unrelated to the words; as a church singer I’ve wondered why the same hymns are used for both weddings and funerals. The feelings seem to spring from a well of memory: these melodies string together memories of community, communality, life events shared with friends and family.
 

The title comes from a 1748 description of an audience moved spontaneously to tears by a massed-choir performance of the Old Hundredth (a 1551 hymn tune still sung today in British churches, usually to the words “All people that on earth do dwell”). Britain has a particular and rich history of hymn-writing. Between the auto-didactism of the industrial revolution’s working class, and the community-based church music cobbled together in the musically impoverished ruins of reformation, the church during industrialisation became a nationwide site for grassroots musicmaking. Many of the country’s most popular hymn tunes and psalm settings of the period came from far flung parishes and non-professional musicians.
 

Without knowing is a set of pieces that derive or are related to psalm settings I’ve written for the church over the years. In each I add moments or layers of reflection, mewling responses: murmured, internal thoughts. The music looks to the internality of music, as displayed in the string quartet, a form and ensemble deeply related to intimacy and communication.