A new mass setting for Hampstead Parish Church
As you all know, the Hampstead Church Music Trust helps to support not only the service music at the Parish Church, but also other projects for church music within our defined local area. So the Trustees were pleased to be approached last year by a young choral composer (fortuitously living in Fellows Road at the time) who had found HCMT by googling our website. Intrigued by BBC Music’s description of Ben Ponniah as “a name to watch”, after due enquiries the Trustees commissioned a four-part Mass setting from him suitable for performance at our Eucharists. Now completed, the new Hampstead Mass will be given its first performance at the morning service here on Sunday 19 September.
Geoffrey Webber suggested we might all be interested to hear more about the Mass, so I met Ben in Hampstead this weekend to talk about his music. Ben Ponniah comes from a musical family, and at the early age of six became a chorister at St Mary-le-Tower in Ipswich. There he received an excellent parish church musical training – as rigorous as that delivered in Hampstead by Martindale Sidwell – and also became familiar with a similarly wide-ranging repertoire of Anglican cathedral music. With this musical experience as background Ben shone at Ipswich School, though he was discouraged from taking music as an A level subject – “because,” said his music master, “you can do it all already!” So he did economics instead and went on to read that subject at Nottingham University. But his spare time in Nottingham was filled with music-making, and he also took jazz piano lessons. These were revelatory: Ben already had the enviable ability to play by ear, as well as considerable competence as a pianist, and these accomplishments were now enhanced by experience of jazz’s analytical approach to chord sequences and the colourful added 7ths and 9ths of jazz harmony.
Ben’s persistence with economics however proved its worth. He took school posts teaching economics, which provided him with a livelihood while he became more and more convinced that what he really wanted was to become a choral composer. A turning-point came when he received a generous donation from a benefactor in his home town of Ipswich, who funded a professionally-performed and recorded CD of his compositions. This tangible evidence of Ben’s ability led in two important directions: he was advised to take a PhD in composition with Dr Phillip Cooke at Aberdeen University, and he began receiving commissions for his music – notably from the BBC. It was at this point that he approached HCMT.