motet note - Purcell

"The Funeral Sentences" brings together music composed in 1677, perhaps originally intended for the funeral of Purcell's teacher Matthew Locke, and the music he wrote in 1694 for the Funeral of Queen Mary II. In addition to the choral anthems sung today, Purcell also composed a March and Canzona, both employing brass and drums. The texts, having to do with the transitory nature of earthly life, fear of divine judgment, and hope for divine mercy, are taken from the Book of Common Prayer of 1660 and from Job 14: 1-2.

Man that is born of a woman, holds some of Purcell's most deeply melancholy and expressive music. The composer brings particular tension to the phrase "hath but a short time to live," and the melody rises and falls in imitation of the words "he cometh up and is cast down like a flower." The music is an angular, chromatic  and dissonant cry of anguish.

In the midst of life, also cast in minor, employs sinuous chromaticism and grating dissonance. Note the rather large intervallic distance of a minor ninth between the word “life” and “death,” as well as the extraordinary word painting on "the bitter pains of eternal death."
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"Thou know'st, Lord" is one of two settings of this text by Purcell.  The first is complex and polyphonic, while the second is simple, homophonic and hushed. This resigned anthem for a departing spirit was fittingly repeated at Purcell's own funeral service, held only a few months after the Queen's, in November of 1695.

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