From the Organist & Choirmaster
This Sunday’s Offertory anthem is one of the most beloved works of the Anglican Choral tradition: Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks by Herbert Howells. Set to versus from Psalm 42, this anthem captures in sound the soul’s deep longing for God.
Howells composed the piece in 1941, during one of the most painful and creative periods of his life. His only son, Michael, had died suddenly the year before at the age of nine, and this loss shaped nearly all of Howells’ music that followed. Though Like as the hart is not explicitly part of his Requiem or the Hymnus Paradisi (both written in Michael’s memory), it bears the same sense of aching beauty, quiet grief, and hope. The music unfolds with a deep emotion arc, tender, introspective phrases blossom into rich, almost symphonic harmonies before subsiding once again into stillness. The work is quintessentially English in its lyricism and color, but it also conveys a universality of longing and faith.
Herbert Howells himself stands among the giants of twentieth-century Anglican music. Trained at the Royal College of Music under Charles Villiers Stanford and Charles Wood, he absorbed the cathedral tradition at its height and reshaped it with his own distinct harmonic voice which is lush, radiant, and unmistakably personal. His settings of the Evening Canticles (especially the Gloucester, Collegium Regale, and Saint Paul’s services) have become staples of cathedral and parish worship alike. What makes Howells’ music so moving is that it feels both ancient and modern, steeped in chant-like modal melodies and Elizabethan polyphony, yet harmonically adventurous and emotionally charged.
In Like as the hart, Howells gives voice to the psalmist’s yearning not with overt drama, but with inward devotion. The flowing vocal lines mirror the “waterbrooks” of the text, while the harmonic language suggests both restlessness and consolation. It is a prayer more sighed than spoken, the kind of sacred art the invites us to listen no just with the ear, but with the heart.