motet notes - Howells

British composer Herbert Howells (1892-1983) was a composer, organist and music teacher best known for his Anglican church music. He was influenced by Thomas Tallis and  Ralph Vaughan Williams, who took Howells under his wing as a composition student. Howells enjoyed much success as an English composer throughout his life, and was commissioned to write a motet for the memorial service of John F. Kennedy.
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"A Spotless Rose" is taken from a set of Three Carol Anthems composed between 1918 and 1920.  The most celebrated of the set, this simple setting of an anonymous fifteenth-century poem about the purity of Mary, seems to give Howells the springboard to create something that appears the model of simplicity on the surface, but hides a deeper complexity.

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