Healy Willan was a Canadian organist and composer best known for his choral and organ works for the church. He was born in England in 1880, and worked there as a church musician until 1913, when he moved to Canada to take a position as organist and choirmaster at St. Paul’s Church in Toronto. In 1921 he took the same position at St. Mary Magdalene Church, where he worked for the rest of his life. In 1938 he also accepted a position as music professor at the University of Toronto. Much of his church music was written for the choir of St. Mary Magdalene.

Willan was influenced during his early years in England by Wagner, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky, and especially the British composers Elgar, Parry and Stanford, and in writing for the church he often drew from Renaissance music and plainsong. He did not particularly like the music of the mid-twentieth century – “I hear only strange sounds which surprise and disturb me” – and throughout his life continued to rely on traditional styles, especially when writing for St. Mary Magdalene. He was a remarkably prolific composer; he wrote more than 800 works, including operas, chamber music, symphonies, and a variety of instrumental and vocal compositions.

I Beheld Her, Beautiful as a Dove (1928) is the second in a set of three liturgical motets. While Willan claimed to dislike “modern” music, he was unconstrained by such traditional conventions as the bar line. In I Beheld Her, we witness Willan's “escape from the tyranny of the bar line, with gestures that alternate four, three, six, and five quarter notes per phrase. This example also demonstrates Willan's signature modal cadences that resolve with an exquisite lack of musical tension.” The text is taken from a responsory for an eighth-century Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary.