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Gary D. Cannon Professional Conductor Performances Projects William
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Performance Archives This page, taken from the inaugural
program of the Annas
Bay Music Festival in Summer 2006, includes the complete program
notes and related information for the September 2006 concert, "American
Psalms, Motets and Spirituals".
Annas Bay Chamber Choir
INTRODUCTION Once we determined that the choir would have a performance each Sunday afternoon, the programming became obvious: a concert of sacred music. After all, the United States remains one of the most religious societies in the developed world, in large part due to the vast array of spiritual options open to each individual to explore. Selecting music from the sheer number of American religious traditions—especially considering the vast quantity of excellent compositions written for each of those traditions—provided both a challenge and an opportunity. And so, in an attempt to please “all of the people, some of the time,” we present a pan-spiritual survey of America’s sacred traditions, including Protestant hymnody, an Anglican/Catholic Mass setting, the African-American spiritual, and more traditional psalms and motets.
HYMNS The title of this section might arouse expectations of simplicity; in fact, the four pieces in this group are far more elaborate than the typical tune found in the typical hymnal in the typical pew! Each of these composers responds to Protestant hymnody in a different manner. Alice Parker and Ned Rorem call on nineteenth-century American hymn texts, and while Parker also adapts a melody from that era, Rorem creates new music for the old words. The works of Jean Berger and Randall Thompson have hymn-like qualities—most predominantly a texture in which all the parts move together, called homophonic writing—but the parallels to traditional Protestant hymnody essentially end there. Only the first of these four works quotes an actual hymn-tune. In 1967, Alice Parker (born 1925) arranged the melody known as “Invitation,” set to the text Hark, I Hear the Harps Eternal. The tune is heard very clearly at the outset, but more interesting is what Parker does with the tune later in the work. At the first statement of the “Hallelujah” refrain, the sopranos and tenors sing the melody together, while the altos and basses provide a stable, barely moving harmony. By the second refrain, the Hallelujahs have a thicker harmony, as the top altos and baritones split from the stable harmony to sing fragments of the main tune. The third refrain is an even more raucous finale. Parker’s choral output is quite vast, including some three hundred works, ranging from short, unison hymn-settings to multi-movement suites. She first gained fame as assistant to Robert Shaw at the Juilliard School in New York, one of the world’s leading music conservatories, and now lives in the hamlet of Hawley, Massachusetts, nestled in the Berkshires.
The story of Jean Berger (1909–2002) is a remarkable one: born a Jew in Germany, educated at Heidelberg University, was assistant conductor of the Mannheim Opera, relocated to Paris in the conflict-ridden 1930s, toured East Asia and South America as a pianist, taught for a time at the Conservatorio Brasileiro de Musica in Rio de Janeiro, eventually arrived in the US, drafted during World War II to produce broadcasts and USO shows, spent time working in television studios, and finally settled into a life of academia, teaching at institutions as diverse as the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and Colorado Women’s College in Denver. The Eyes of All Wait upon Thee (1959) is only tangentially related to traditional hymnody—while homophonic writing does predominate, the melody isn’t necessarily found in the soprano, and in fact the basses have the most melodic line for the first several measures. Melodiousness is tossed back and forth among the voices, as the work builds chromatically (i.e. using notes which are outside of the key), until finally the sopranos take over and return us to the smooth, jazzy chords of the opening section. The text is from Psalm 145, but the music could belong just as well on Broadway as in church.
Just as Berger’s work is only vaguely reminiscent of true hymnody, Ned Rorem (born 1923) invokes a special genre, half-hymn, half-motet. Rorem’s Sing, My Soul, His Wondrous Love (1955), is one of Three Hymn-Anthems composed early in his career. Like the Berger, the melody has wide leaps, but sounds oddly smooth in context. In any case, it is a melody far removed from the traditional Lutheran chorale so beloved by Bach, which became the foundation for American Protestant hymnody. This jumpy melody is actually heard twice, though the second time it has a new harmony and begins in a different key. The music’s delicacy stems from the gentleness of the text, an Episcopal hymn dating from 1841. Rorem is best known as a composer of art songs—works for solo voice and piano—but his other music is also highly regarded: he received the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for the orchestral Air Music, and last February saw the highly publicized premiere of his opera Our Town, based on the Thornton Wilder play, in Indiana. A resident of New York, Ned Rorem has received commissions from bodies as august as the New York Philharmonic and Chicago Symphony.
The works by Berger and Rorem provide melodies which could, just perhaps, be appropriate for congregational singing, and which are harmonized in a traditional four-part, hymnodic style. Randall Thompson’s Glory to God in the Highest (1958) shares the predominantly homophonic texture of traditional hymns, but the quick speed and overall difficulty make this far removed from any congregational hymnal. You could even think of it as a hymn-like motet. Randall Thompson (1899–1984) has been called the Dean of American Choral Music, and indeed his Alleluia (which will begin Annas Bay’s “Requiem æternam” concert) remains the most frequently performed piece of American choral music in history. Early in his career, Thompson focused on orchestral writing, including three fine symphonies, but by the 1940s he had turned predominantly to choral writing. Thompson’s style is very meticulous—often almost every note on the page has some articulation or other marking—and yet the overall effect is of spontaneous, joyful music-making. The ecstatic opening of Glory to God in the Highest is balanced by a relaxed central section to depict peace on earth.
MOTETS The term motet has been defined and re-defined several times in history, and is one of the oldest of musical genres still extant today. In mid-thirteenth-century France, motet described many types of polyphonic sacred or secular works, and sometimes the different vocal parts would have completely different words. Indeed, the term’s origin is the French mot, meaning word. During the high Renaissance, motets came to be associated only with compositions which were (a) short-ish, (b) in Latin, and (c) set to an occasional text affiliated with the Catholic Mass. However, by the late nineteenth century, that definition had been rendered useless, as Brahms composed motets which were (a) highly ambitious, (b) in German, and (c) not intended for liturgical performance. By twentieth-century America, the term motet came to mean roughly any shorter sacred work, synonymous with the English term anthem. This afternoon you will hear four older motets by Copland, framed by two new works by Northwest composers. The logical starting place to study the American motet is a work which is in fact dedicated “in homage of the Renaissance masters, Orlando di Lasso and Josquin Desprez.” In fact, David Hahn’s (born 1956) training is as much in composition as in historical musicology and lute performance, and De omnibus apostolis (2003) reveals all of these influences. (For more information about David Hahn, see our “Other Voices” program note.) The text comes from a Flemish primer published in 1599 (the same year as Shakespeare’s Hamlet), and the title translates roughly as “Of all the apostles.” It is an exhortation to the apostles—and by proxy to all Christian missionaries—as they travel throughout the world. Hahn’s work is filled with moments of text-painting, when the meaning of the words is depicted in the music itself. For example, note the staid, chordal quality of the opening “Dum steteritis” (“When you stand”), reflecting in music the pride of standing before kings. Also, the choral parts take the text “qualiter respondeatis” (“how to respond”) in turns, as if responding to each other. Perhaps most telling are the many repetitions of “In omnem terram” (“To all the earth”), which reflect how often the apostles would have repeated their message in order to access all the earth. Such moments of text-painting are also called madrigalisms, and were particularly beloved of Hahn’s favorites, Lasso and Josquin, and indeed much of Hahn’s composition would have sounded right at home in the Renaissance.
The music of Aaron Copland (1900–1990) features extensively in Annas Bay’s programming during this festival, a logical and fitting tribute to the central composer of twentieth-century America. His orchestral works, such as Appalachian Spring (see our concert “Martha Graham: An American Legend”), and songs for solo voice (featured in the second and third parts of our “Voices of America” series) have far overshadowed his rather few choral works. In fact, Copland wrote very little music for unaccompanied choir: only these Four Motets (1921), two other miniatures, and the elaborate In the Beginning (performed in our other choral concert, “Other Voices”). The motets are very early works, composed while Copland was a student of the great Nadia Boulanger in Paris, but not published until 1979. They are challenging and at times rather awkward to sing—possibly due to the composer’s inexperience in writing for voices—and pre-date his determination to write in a decidedly American style. As such, they represent a very different side of the composer’s world than Appalachian Spring or the solo songs; in these motets we hear Copland stretching the boundaries of choral writing, as ground-breaking in their own way as the great French masters like Maurice Ravel. As is so often the case in performing works that date from early in a composer’s career, the difference between inexperience and innovation is extremely subtle! The first motet, Help Us, O Lord, is a slow, delicate introduction to Copland’s sound-world at age twenty-one. He begins and ends in the key of E minor, but in the central section seems wary of attachment to any key at all. The overall effect is not one of desperation, as the text may imply, but of constant, vigilant prayer. Thou, O Jehovah, Abideth Forever, initially sounds an automatic shift into a world both more dissonant and chromatic, but is actually also firmly rooted in a key: this time, G minor. Note the many repetitions of the word “forever”, giving one a sense of just how long “forever” really is. The predominantly fast tempo is appropriately offset by the more introspective text, “Wherefore willst Thou forsake us ever?” A slower tempo dominates the third motet, Have Mercy on Us, O My Lord, but be ready for the quicker central section at “Then we shall trust in Thee:” as the basses sing the opening melody, others sing new material; what once was the main tune has become the secondary line, or countermelody. The fourth and final motet, Sing Ye Praises to Our King, is a lively romp. In the first section, Copland juxtaposes a flowing, bouncy soprano line with a “walking bass” line, in which the lowest notes move to a steady rhythm, whereas the central section is offset by more gentle music, scored for four soloists from the choir.
Closing our collection of motets is another recent, Northwest composition, this time by Roupen Shakarian (born 1950). Shakarian is a much beloved and lively part of Seattle’s music scene, having conducted the Seattle Symphony and composed extensively for the superb vocal ensemble Opus 7. His extended work, Other Voices, will also be performed at Annas Bay (see the concert of the same name for more biographical information), but at this afternoon’s concert we will hear a shorter work, O Be Joyful (2004), which we are honored to premiere. Based on Psalm 100, O Be Joyful is a motet as light and bubbly in character as is the composer himself, though there are also two slow sections, for the more contemplative lines “Be ye sure that the Lord he is God…” and “For the Lord is gracious…”; this last section is particularly noteworthy for the manner in which Shakarian allots only portions of the sentence to the sopranos, while the rest of the choir completes the thought. Such expert vocal writing is typical of Shakarian’s several choral works. O be
joyful in the Lord, all ye lands;
A MASS No survey of sacred music would be complete without a nod to that greatest of liturgical texts: the Catholic, or in this case Anglican, Mass. William Albright (1944–1998) gives these ancient words a very modern setting in his 1974 Chichester Mass: gently dissonant, and employing several avant-garde choral techniques. In the very first movement, Kyrie, the central section calls for five solo voices to sing in canon, each singing exactly the same music, but one beat off. This creates an atmospheric wash of sound, in which none of the lines has supremacy. The Gloria also uses solo voices in a slow, chordal texture which occasionally interrupts the staccato (detached) singing of the full ensemble. In Sanctus, Albright invokes a technique known as aleatoric, or chance, music, in which the performers must spontaneously make certain decisions, using the written music simply as the framework. The movement begins with three women’s parts, but each singer is to sing the same part at her own speed, independent of the others, creating a beautiful sonic nebula from which first the high sopranos, then the men, emerge with chant-like melodies. The Benedictus, barely a minute long, includes a virtual cacophony as each part whizzes around vigorously, culminating on a chord in which each part is at the very top of their register—what better way to set the word “highest!” The final movement, Agnus Dei, is a calm peroration, with clashing yet soothing chords which, in the context of the preceding movements, sound outright normal. William Albright taught for many years at the University of Michigan, where he led a revival of interest in ragtime music and was one of the first mainstream composers to incorporate elements of popular music into his classical works. Indeed, Albright’s New York Times obituary identified him as “Composer of Ragtime Music for the Organ”—now there’s a combination you had probably never thought of before! His organ music is particularly noteworthy, but his many choral, orchestral, and chamber works reveal the same craftsmanship and eclecticism one finds in the Chichester Mass. A student of such diverse figures as Ross Lee Finney, a relatively conservative American composer, and Olivier Messiaen, leader of the post-war French avant-garde, Albright fused these various trends into his many works, which were written for a great many occasions. The Chichester Mass, while composed for an English occasion (the nine-hundredth anniversary of Chichester Cathedral), employs techniques which represent some of the most innovative thinking in American choral music of the twentieth century.
Glory
be to God on high, and in earth peace, good will toward men.
Holy,
Holy, Holy Lord God of Hosts,
Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord
O
Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.
PSALMS After the intermission, we come to two psalms settings, which represent the two extremes that formed the boundaries of American music in the early twentieth century. Of course, we have already encountered two compositions based on psalm texts—Jean Berger’s The Eyes of All Wait upon Thee and Roupen Shakarian’s O Be Joyful—but the present Ives and Thompson psalms reflect such different approaches that they merited separation from the preceding panoply of hymns and motets. Charles Ives (1874–1954) was the original “bad boy” of musical composition. Ives’s father was a bandleader during the Civil War, and later at Yale University, where he would invite young Charles to stand in the middle of the field as two bands, playing different marches, in different keys, would approach from different directions, cross each other, and move on. The lore surrounding Ives is substantial: for example, the story that his father made him practice piano by playing the music in one key with his right hand, a different key with his left, and then sing the melody in a third key. It isn’t surprising that Charles Ives would create completely new approaches to harmony, melody, and texture. Aware that his music probably wouldn’t be greeted enthusiastically, he instead turned to the insurance industry, and became a multi-millionaire. (Go figure—a wealthy composer!) Yet the eccentric Ives never ceased composing; that’s what weekends and lunch breaks were for. When finally his music became known, he gained instant fame, including the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 3, composed back in 1904, to which he famously responded: “Prizes are for boys. I’m all grown up.” His setting of The Sixty-Seventh Psalm is also experimental: for the entirety of the work, the men are singing in G minor, and the women in C major, a technique known as bitonality. And yet this work is rather tame by Ivesian standards, having been composed while he was still a student at Yale, playing organ for the local church. God
be merciful unto us, and bless us; O let
all the nations be glad and sing for joy: Then
shall the earth yield her increase; Randall Thompson took a far more traditional approach to the psalms. His 1964 setting of Psalm 23, The Lord Is My Shepherd, is scored for chorus and either piano, organ or harp. These performances will be given with harp, which perfectly conveys the gentle peace of the entire work. The harp is an instrument often associated with the psalms, as their presumed author, the Biblical King David, would have written the words to accompany himself on the lyre, an ancient precursor to the modern harp, while shepherding in the fields as a youth. The history of Psalm 23 itself is actually far more confusing—for example, some scholars believe it is actually an adaptation from an ancient prayer to Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead—but Randall Thompson’s setting is completely devoid of any controversy. Here is calm, inimitably soothing music, intended to ruffle the fewest of feathers, as befits a text so frequently associated with funerals. The
Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
A SACRED SUITE Dominick Argento (born 1927), one of today’s leading choral composers, seems to elate in making unusual connections. His Te Deum combines St. Augustine’s great poem with paraphrases from middle English poetry. His opera A Water Bird Talk (also performed at Annas Bay; see that program note for more biographical details about Argento) calls as sources the writings of both dramatist Chekhov and naturalist Audubon. Argento’s Spirituals and Swedish Chorales (1997) continues in this tradition of juxtaposing texts of diverse sources: in this case, alternating nineteenth-century African-American spirituals with seventeenth-century Swedish hymns. The composer has written that “despite their extremely different music and origins, the texts—as well as the intention: rendering praise to the glory of God—are remarkably similar.” In some respects, Spirituals and Swedish Chorales is a microcosm of the entire concert, incorporating elements of hymns, psalms, spirituals, and motets into one coherent whole. The spiritual arrangements are relatively straightforward, even featuring solos from the choir to give So I’ll Sing with My Voice a more personal identification. That spiritual also makes references to three major Biblical figures: David, King of Israel and alleged author of the psalms, who famously played the lyre (the predecessor to the modern harp) to sooth King Saul; Gabriel, the archangel who, according to the Book of Revelation, will blow the horn announcing the beginning of Judgment Day; and Jubal, the first musician mentioned in the Bible, “the father of all such as handle the harp and organ.” The chorale harmonizations also bear a few words of explanation. Since World War II, Sweden has been a major hotbed of choral activity, producing several of the world’s greatest choirs and choral conductors. Swedish choral music is especially known for incorporating unusual, experimental vocal techniques, and dissonant harmonizations. How appropriate then that Argento should harmonize three seventeenth-century Swedish hymn tunes with dissonant, late-twentieth-century harmonies! 1. So I’ll Sing with My Voice If I
had a harp If I
had a horn If I
had a lyre
3. There’s Singing up in Heaven
There's singin' up in heaven
There's prayin' in the East,
5. What Can That Shadow Be? What
can that shadow be? What
can that shadow be, What
can that shadow be?
SPIRITUALS The slavery of Africans on American plantations is arguably the greatest tragedy in our nation’s history, and yet paradoxically it created some of the most uplifting music. Whether by choice or by force, many African slaves adopted European Christian beliefs, and then adapted their own traditional music accordingly. Many of the tunes then called jubilees—or slave songs, or now spirituals—have origins in African traditions. Tunes such as Steal Away and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, became broadly popularized from 1871 by the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, a group of former slaves who performed as far afield as the court of Queen Victoria. Eventually, African-American composers such as Harry Burleigh, a friend and student of Antonín Dvořák in New York, continued this tradition. Indeed, spirituals formed the basis for most American popular music styles, including blues, jazz, gospel, rock and roll, rap, and hip-hop. Early twentieth-century European-Americans are not historically known for having treated African-American culture respectfully—resorting instead to mockery and parody in the form of Broadway’s black-face minstrels—but by the mid-twentieth century, spirituals had become standard fare among predominantly white choirs. One individual who promoted the spiritual in a reverential manner was Marshall Bartholomew (1885–1978). During the First World War, Bartholomew had organized singing activities for prisoners of war in Germany and Siberia, and was thus well poised to become director of the Yale Glee Club in 1921. Over thirty years he converted them from a rag-tag, casual ensemble, to the internationally renowned choir it remains today, though he eventually retired in 1953. Bartholomew made several fine arrangements of spirituals, including De Animals a-Comin’ in 1936. Many spirituals include a numerical list as a mnemonic device to help the mostly illiterate singers remember details about Bible stories. De Animals a-Comin’ tells the story of Noah’s ark in a fun, even humorous, manner, as the animals come “one by one”, then “two by two”, etc. Bartholomew brings out the humor in the text—note, for example, that the “old fat pig” is assigned to a solo voice, and the choir wails as the basses proclaim that “the old ark blew its whistle” in preparation for departure. A few words about the text seem in order. Collecting folk-songs was a common activity among musicians in the first half of the twentieth century. Urbanization was leading to a quick destruction of traditional rural lifestyles, including the music of those living in the countryside. Many of the world’s leading composers—Béla Bartók and Ralph Vaughan Williams among them—traveled the countryside, inviting older citizens to sing tunes from their childhoods for preservation. Bartholomew is careful to indicate in the score that in his rendition of De Animals a-Comin’, “the tune and text [are] as sung by Maginel Wright Barney, July 8, 1933.” Hence his attempt to convey the dialect as spoken by former slaves. This is generally considered to be a sign of respect to the song’s culture of origin—after all, it would have been very easy for Bartholomew to Anglicize the text by making the spelling and diction more “proper.” The text is given below exactly as it appears in the printed music.
In the late nineteenth century, spirituals were regarded simply as an entertaining form of sacred music. But it is now known that many of these spirituals held socio-cultural significance to the slaves. For example, Steal Away is also a secret message to encourage slaves to run away from their southern plantations to the free northern states. While any overt statement of such sentiment would not have been permitted by the plantation owners, these opinions were often safely hidden in Christian rhetoric. Another example is the spiritual Deep River, presented here in a 1962 arrangement by Norman Luboff (1917–1987). The “deep river” of the title has many possible interpretations: the Potomac or Ohio Rivers, which divided the slave-owning southern states from the free north; the broader river of the Atlantic Ocean, across which the slaves’ ancestors had made their homes; a symbolic river separating those living in pain from those who have found peace in a holy death; or the literal River Jordan, crossed by the Jewish slaves on their way from Egypt into the “promised land” of Palestine. Norman Luboff’s choir was one of the world’s most famous, and this delicate spiritual arrangement testifies to its director’s fine taste. Deep
River, my home is over Jordan In the last twenty years, spirituals have taken on a new, more visceral approach. The great leader of this style of arranging is universally recognized to be Moses Hogan (1957–2003). Born in New Orleans, Hogan arranged dozens of spirituals, and became one of America’s best loved choral composers before his recent death at age forty-five. His dynamic, vigorous 1996 arrangement of The Battle of Jericho opens with a busy-body ostinato (repeating figure) in the men’s voices, followed by the almost soft-shoe melodiousness of the women. There is often a sense of syncopation, when the rhythmic accent isn’t quite on the beat. By the end, it becomes clear that the entire composition was a musical depiction of the battle itself, leading up to the grand finale when, yes, “the walls come tumbalin’ down” in the most dramatic fashion.
Joshua fit the battle of Jericho and the walls come tumbalin’ down.
— Program note by Gary D. Cannon
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