Fr Laurence was the youngest of a distinguished family of scholars whose roots were in northern France. His father, Clovis Bévenot, was Professor of Romance Languages at Birmingham University, having in his youth served in the ranks as a Papal Zouave against Garibaldi. His crippled eldest brother, Dom Hugh Bevenot, was a monk of Weingarten who was already a leading biblical scholar when he died tragically young at 44. His second brother, Maurice, became a Jesuit and a patristic scholar, the foremost authority on St Cyprian, a peritus at the Second Vatican Council and a noted ecumenist.
Ludovic, the youngest of the family, became a monk of Ampleforth in 1919 taking the monastic name of Laurence. He had come to the school from Mount St Mary's in 1914 and finished as Head Monitor. He was a gifted pianist, organist and musician although apart from instrumental lessons he never had any formal musical training; the climate at Ampleforth in those days was suspicious of the arts and especially of music. After his noviciate and philosophical studies he was sent to St Benet's Hall in Oxford to read mathematics. He delighted to recall with gratitude how Fr Dominic Willson gave up smoking in order to pay his termly subscription to the University Music Club. He completed his theological studies at Ampleforth and was ordained a priest in 1928, having already succeeded Fr Bernard McElligott as Choirmaster and Director of the School Music in 1927. Most of his time, however, was devoted to teaching mathematics.
He was not a natural schoolmaster, and he found the unremitting task of correcting books a burden. His classes could be unconventional - a prep devoted to writing a definition of a wheelbarrow, exercises on taking moments of a ten ton cheese. An end of term report read succinctly: 'His wits evaporated at the sight of the exam paper'. He soldiered on stoically for 25 years, but his heart was in music, and music was regarded as a spare time activity to be fitted in when and where possible. Nor was it expected to cost money, so that he had to spend countless hours making music stands for the school Orchestra and arranging and copying music - special parts for boys of limited ability which he designated HBLO (hard bits left out) or, sometimes, for the more gifted HBPI (hard bits put in). Photocopiers had not been invented, and he became the acknowledged master of the jellypad. In the Church he was choirmaster and organist, a consummate artist in the accompaniment of plainsong. He conducted the boys' choir and wrote memorably beautiful settings for male voices of the Passion Turbae and motets for different seasons and feasts - Quem vidistis, pastores?, Regina Coeli and Oratio Jeremiae Prophetae remain etched in one's memory.
In 1929 he had been one of the co-founders of the Society of St Gregory under Fr Bernard McElligott, and he attended every annual summer school until this year. For many years he taught plainsong accompaniment and one recalls some memorable moments; one nun he named Sister Consecutiva from her propensity for writing consecutive octaves and fifths, and he once chided a would-be accompanist as he reached the climax of the Gloria: 'My dear boy, you can't leave God the Father suspended on a first inversion'. He was also a regular contributor to the pages of Music & Liturgy, writing articles with quirky titles such as 'The Quilisma, its habits and haunts'. He delved into the Paleographie Musicale and transcribed and edited the Christus Vincit and the hauntingly beautiful Invitatory and Genealogy of Christmas Matins from the Worcester Antiphoner. He translated for Solesmes a monograph on The Rhythmic Tradition of the Manuscripts published by Desclée.
In the early 1940's he was greatly influenced by his friendship with Susi Jeans and developed a love for early music and the baroque organ. He became interested, too, in keyboard temperament and was responsible for the development of an organ, now in Alison House, Edinburgh, built by Harrisons' of Durham and designed by Dr A McClure, with a normal keyboard but 19 notes to each octave. For a year this was in the Memorial Chapel, its case decorated by a Yorkshire rose carved by himself, and he used it to accompany the monastic plainsong and later demonstrated it at the Edinburgh Festival. About this time he was the moving force behind the revival of the Hovingham Festivals together with Fr Austin Rennick and Lady Read. He had written articles in the Ampleforth Journal on the original Festivals of the 1890's when the great Joachim came to play there on several occasions. A memorial tablet can still be seen in the Riding School at Hovingham Hall carved in stone by Fr Laurence, the years of Joachim's presence being marked by a comma against the year. Stone carving became a major interest from the early 1940's after what he described as a memorable meeting with Arthur Pollen. Besides lettering many of the headstones in the monks' cemetery he also designed and carved the very lovely reliquary to St Laurence in the north aisle of the Abbey Church, the memorial to Michael Fenwick in the Crypt and a crucifix in the Big Passage.
In 1951 Fr Laurence was sent to serve on the Ampleforth parishes, first as assistant at Workington and later as Parish Priest of Warwick Bridge and from 1964 as assistant at Cardiff. Throughout those years, besides fulfilling punctiliously all his priestly duties, he also found time for music making and stone carving. With Lady Read as his producer he staged and conducted Operas - from Gilbert & Sullivan to Purcell's Dido & Aeneas and Arne's Judith. This latter drew high praise from Sir Jack Westrup who was present and who was at the time Professor of Music at Oxford, and it may well have been the first performance of the work since the composer's death.
After the Second Vatican Council and the adoption of the vernacular in the Liturgy Fr Laurence found himself increasingly in demand as a composer. He wrote a Mass for the opening of the new Liverpool Cathedral and two orchestrated music-dramas, Becket and Seven Branches, to texts by Rachel John which were performed in the Crypt of Canterbury Cathedral in 1970 and 1973 respectively. He was conscious of the need to find music that was fitting - singable but not trite, moving but not sentimental - and he believed strongly that new liturgical music should be based firmly in the context of tradition and the modes. He set the new Roman Breviary to music for the nuns of New Hall and a large proportion of the Ampleforth Divine Office, both with considerable success, enlivened as they are by his piquant and sometimes idiosyncratic harmony.
To the end of his long life Fr Laurence worked with undiminished energy and enthusiasm. Until this summer he was still conducting his 'Torch' choir and giving concerts, still cycling, oblivious of traffic, from one engagement to another round the streets of Cardiff, still editing the Bulletin of the Panel of Monastic Musicians whose last edition appeared after his death together with a Music Supplement the first seven pages of which consist of quintessential LB examples and advice on how to improvise.
Fr Laurence was a gentle, sensitive, lovable man who will be missed by a host of friends. He could sometimes be frustrating to work with because his hypersensitive temperament shrank from confrontation and he was reluctant to face or even to see practical problems. It would be possible, perhaps, for someone reading this obituary who had never known LB (as he was always affectionately known) to conclude that he was an artist and musician who became a monk and a priest. That would be the reverse of the truth because he was a monk and a priest first, a spiritual and prayerful man, steeped in the theology and liturgy of the Church to whose service his life was dedicated.
DOM LUDOVIC LAURENCE BEVENOT 22 October 1990
1901 21 Jun Born Birmingham
1910-14 Educ Mt St Mary's College
1914-19 Educ Ampleforth College
1919 29 Sep Habit Abbot Smith
1920 30 Sep Simple Vows " "
1923 1 Oct Solemn Vows " "
1925 23 Sep Tonsure Abbot Matthews
19 Nov Minor Orders " "
1926 13 May Subdeacon Bishop Shine
1927 10 Aug Deacon " "
1928 29 Jul Priest " "
1921-25 Studied Mathematics at St Benet's Hall, Oxford 1927
Choirmaster at Ampleforth
Teaching Maths & R.I.
1929 Co-founder Society of St Gregory
1947-50 Sub-prior
1951 Apr Assistant at Workington
1955 Sep Parish Priest at Warwick Bridge
1964 Sep Assistant at Cardiff
1985 Musical Director of Latin Torch Choir (Cardiff) 1990
22 Oct Died at Cardiff
Buried at Ampleforth
Publications Latin Mass Chants: Cary 1948; Proper of the Mass (Cary & Co)
1951; Holy Week Settings (English); Psalm tones for the Office and settings
for hymns and antiphons in the Roman Breviary for New Hall convent;
settings of most antiphons for Ampleforth Office. English Compline 1967.
Mass for Liverpool Cathedral 1967. 2 part Mass (St Martins publications)
1968; 15 Psalms (Chester) 1971. 1980+ Editorial work for the Bulletin of the
Panel of Monastic Musicians. 1988 Essay on the correct singing of the salicus
neum.