William Mathias (1934-92)

I am not sure that he is a great composer, but he was very good, a solid and productive craftsman, and I always enjoy his music. This “Postlude” (played in today's service) is typical – it is cheerful, to the point, and remains as delightful today as it was when he wrote it fifty-plus years ago – probably on commission from his publisher for their “Album of Postludes” by various composers. It is the only piece from this Album that I still play.

One summer towards the end of his life, Dr. Mathias was the music director for the Montreat Worship and Music Conference. I and about six hundred others in the adult choir sang with him for a week; much of what we did was his own music. We did his most famous choral work, “Let the people praise thee, O God,” which was written for the Royal Wedding (no, not William and Kate; the other one, William's parents in 1981); we sang “As truly as God is our Father,” and quite a few others.

I will also link here to his anthem “The doctrine of wisdom,” which I described in last Sunday's essay.

He was a marvelously prolific composer. In this essay by his daughter Rhiannon (from which the photographs in the YouTube clip are taken), she recounts that he would go to his studio and work every night after supper until the wee hours. One of the photos depicts this: Mathias hard at work, piles of music and papers all around him.

During that week at Montreat, I had only one opportunity to speak to him in a receiving line, and all I could do was stammer a few words of appreciation. I wish I could have found better words to thank him. He had the misfortune to live and work at a time when classical music was supposed to be arcane, dissonant, ugly – and he wrote in a manner that people could readily comprehend, with tunes and common-practice triads and infectiously delightful rhythms. So, I think that many of his academic colleagues misunderstood him and dismissed his work. There are few composers of the 1970's and 80's whose work I would now listen to: Messiaen, Howells, Kenneth Leighton, Mathias – and that is about it. Of the four, Messiaen is certainly the greatest – but Mathias is the most approachable.