|
PROGRAM NOTES FOR DECEMBER 7 & 9, 2007 ------- We begin with Estonian Arvo Pärt, born in 1935, whose compositional technique has ranged from the neo-Baroque style to the twelve-tone system of the 20th century and back to chant-like music derived from the Middle Ages. He has written symphonies and chamber music, but it is his vocal music that has won him an enthusiastic following in the United States. His sacred music appeals equally to those who love early music and to admirers of contemporary works. Pärt's Magnificat is one of his most frequently performed and recorded pieces. It combines a sense of other-worldly simplicity with a set of self-imposed rules (a "determinist" structure) that govern rhythm, melody, and harmony. The twenty phrases alternate between those using a repeated tone, or "pedal" (actually an inverted pedal, since it is sung by higher voices, not the lower), and those without a pedal. Melodies are often given to the lowest voice. Unlike most composers of vocal music, Pärt appears to have no interesting matching text to music. ("He hath shown strength with his arm" is marked piano.) Pärt has said: "The complex and many-faceted only confuse me. I search for unity. How do I find my way to it? Traces appear in many guises Everything that is unimportant falls away." Gustav Holst was an unconventional but influential British composer, a close friend of Ralph Vaughan Williams and an inspiration to younger composers Britten, Tippett, and Rubbra. When he was only seventeen, Holst conducted village choirs; he earned his living in his twenties as a trombone player and then as a music teacher at a girls' school. When he became an internationally famous composer, he found the trappings of success distasteful; as a teacher, he was unorthodox, spurning textbooks and exams. Nunc Dimittis was written in 1915 for Westminster Cathedral, but after it was sung on Easter Sunday that year, it was forgotten. The original manuscript disappeared. Holst's daughter reconstructed the piece from a copy for a performance in 1974 at the Aldeburgh Festival. Holst uses his eight voices in a great variety of ways. Each enters alone, building from low to high in a mystical, slightly dissonant haze. There are passages in octaves, brief solos, imitative counterpoint, and antiphonal passages for women versus men. At the end he builds a great climax with extended high A's in the sopranos. In 1998 New Amsterdam Singers included Robert Dennis' "Psalm 30" on a program of music by New York City composers. Today we return to Mr. Dennis with a work for women's voices which he wrote in 1988 on Shaker texts. Robert Dennis writes, "I'd like to express my gratitude – twenty years later – to John Morgan and the late Claudia Burghardt Morgan for providing a source of inspiration (both material and emotional) for the piece." Robert Dennis' commissions and performances include pieces composed for the Denver Project, the New York City Opera, I Cantori, Cerddorion, the Jubal Trio, the American Brass Quintet, Calliope, the New York Women's Chorus, and Baird Trio, and the Lincoln Center Institute. His music for orchestra has been performed by the Cleveland, Chicago and Louisville orchestras. Mr. Dennis has also composed extensively for theater and film including scores for productions at (among others) the Arena Stage, the Guthrie Theater and Circle in the Square. Three of his scores composed for Pilobolus were performed on the PBS series "Dance in America." "Man in the Moon," a CD of Mr. Dennis' works composed for the Western Wind Vocal Ensemble, has recently been recorded and released by the group. The Shakers lived in the eastern United States in religious communities from 1774 to 1904. The sect was founded by Ann Lee, a middle-aged mystic raised in Manchester, England, who had been associated with radical English Quakers. She moved to New York City in 1774 and found followers among the evangelical Baptists in New England. Shakers believed in the power of personal revelation, salvation from sin, the equality of men and women, dedication to work, and in celibacy and communal property. The goal of their communities was a "working heaven on earth." They believed that their founder, Mother Ann, was the second embodiment of the Christ spirit. For this six-movement work, Robert Dennis has chosen Shaker hymn texts. The introduction and conclusion are also based on a Shaker tune; the remaining melodies are original. The dance-like fourth movement, "Bow and Bend," provides the title for the whole. Here we see the ecstatic physical manifestation of Shaker belief. The reference to "Mother's wine" was probably metaphorical, although some Shakers did condone alcohol. The four-part women's voices are accompanied by the piano, with lilting ostinato patterns, often shifting between major and minor keys. Fifty years before Dennis wrote "Bow and Bend," his American predecessor Walter Piston wrote "Carnival Song." Here too we find ecstatic texts, but they are not sacred, nor is the wine metaphorical. The poet is Lorenzo de Medici, the most famous of the family prominent in the Italian Renaissance. Lorenzo was a patron of Renaissance artists, including Da Vinci and Michelangelo, and an eminent poet-politician in his own right. Lorenzo's carnival songs were performed in the pre-Lenten feast of Carnival, which had its roots in the Saturnalia of ancient Rome, celebrated in December. Men in masks and costumes pulled floats through the street, with scenes based on mythical characters. The floats were called Triumphs (Trionfi). The text for today's piece is Lorenzo's most famous poem, "The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne." Walter Piston wrote the work for the Harvard Glee Club and eleven brass instruments. He also arranged this version for four-hand piano, which is more often performed. Piston had a long association with Harvard University. After attending school for architectural drawing for four years, he attended Harvard, receiving his degree summa cum laude in 1924. He then studied with Nadia Boulanger and Dukas in France, and returned to teach at Harvard from 1926 to 1960. Among his students were Eliott Carter, Leonard Bernstein, Irving Fine, and Daniel Pinkham. He wrote three important books—Harmony, Counterpoint, and Orchestration. He also wrote eight symphonies and much chamber music, but relatively little choral music. We return to the 1980s and the visionary, sacred world of Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. His music often deals with more than music or faith expressed in music; he has written many major works on the big themes of our times, such as his Threnody (for the victims of Hiroshima) and Dies Irae (for the victims of Auschwitz). Additional works include his St. Luke Passion, Polish Requiem, and the more recent Seven Gates of Jerusalem and Credo, both hour-long compositions presented in the United States in 1998. From a musical point of view, Penderecki has shifted styles markedly, starting as an avant-garde composer, turning toward tradition in 1962, veering toward neo-Romanticism after 1974. He has managed to write music with popular appeal even without much reliance on tonality. Kheruvimskaya Pyesn (Cherubim Song) was written in 1987 "for my dear friend Slava [Mstislav Rostropovich] on his 60th birthday." It is among his more accessible short a cappella works. The text of Kheruvimskaya Pesn is a very familiar part of the Old Church Slavonic-Russian Orthodox liturgy. Penderecki's setting starts and ends on the note F, with that note sustained for long passages in one voice against a moving line. Many textures are employed here, from a sinuous chant-like melody for one part at a time to passages of simple triads to massive clusters of dissonant harmony. The work's climax comes in the middle as the chorus divides into twelve parts in a kind of fantasia in the key of A minor. After A minor is securely established, the composer departs into a harmony so characteristic that it has been called "Penderecki's Chord"; the tenors add a nonharmonic E flat to the minor chord held by the other voices, and their E flat signals the return to a chant-like melody heard alone. Near the end of the piece soft, shimmery clusters of quite beautiful dissonance are built up and then removed, until the piece is pared down to a single note again. Benjamin Britten is the foremost British composer of his time, and probably of all time. His Deus in adjutorium meum, an a cappella setting of Psalm 70, was written in 1945 as introductory music for a play by Ronald Duncan, "This Way to the Tomb," which was staged as a masque and anti-masque. The subject of the masque was the temptation of St. Anthony, a Christian monk and ascetic, and the anti-masque included 1940s pop music. Psalm 70 is a lament, a prayer for deliverance from personal enemies. In the opening section, men's and women's voices echo the melody in a canon, with entrances piling up as the plea becomes more insistent. Britten uses canon again for "Avertantur" and ends with slithery major/minor harmonies depicting the enemies who gloat over the psalmist. The central section of the work is a quiet, radiant song of praise, "Magnificetur." Another plea for God's help follows, and the piece closes with the melody from the first section heard in canon between soprano and tenor, while the alto and bass voices are heard in a repeated ostinato pattern. Boston composer Daniel Pinkham, who died in December 2006, was a prolific composer who wrote four symphonies, cantatas, oratorios, chamber music, electronic music, and scores for television documentaries. He taught for many years at the New England Conservatory of Music, and was music director of King's Chapel in Boston; he was named "composer of the year" for 1990 by the American Guild of Organists. Pinkham's Two Psalm Motets are short a cappella works. The first is a homophonic setting marked "strong and brilliant"; the second is contrapuntal, with voices entering in a sinuous, chromatic canon. "Christmas Eve," a gentle setting of a poem by Robert Hillyer, reminds us of the dark side of Christmas, "A dreadful night to think on them, the homeless and the lost." The Norwegian Trond Kverno is a distinguished composer of church music. While in many countries church music is conservative in style, the situation in Norway is somewhat different. There, church music has spearheaded major new musical development. Kverno has been active at the Norwegian State Academy of Music and in reforming the liturgical books of the Church of Norway. Kverno feels that "absolute music" is a rare occurrence, as most works are generally part of an ideological or aesthetic context. He has written, "I would liken my work to that of a painter of icons, where each icon is a window to a reality other than that which surrounds us." Kverno wrote Ave Maris Stella in 1975 for six voices, mostly divided antiphonally, women against men. The seven verses have great variety, women alone, men alone, canon of women and men, ostinato passages of repetition, and augmentation and diminution of the melody. The vocal ranges are extreme, but the work ends with simple chant. Ruth Watson Henderson is one of Canada's most respected composers. She began her career as a concert pianist, but became interested in choral music when she spent ten years as accompanist to Canada's first professional choir, conducted by Elmer Iseler. She composed Make me a World in 2005, and has written the following: "This work is a setting of 'The Creation' by James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) from his collection of poetic sermons, 'God's Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse.' Published in 1928, 'The Creation' is one of the best-known poems by this gifted poet, who was also a novelist, teacher, diplomat, and civil-rights leader. In it, Johnson celebrates the creativity found in Afro-American religion. He offers an image of a God with human qualities, who speaks in a Southern dialect and decides to 'make himself a world' because he is lonely. "The simple, dramatic style of this poem, with its colorful, expressive language, inspired me to create this musical setting that flows freely through the changing moods. The solo lines, representing the voice of God, are sung by a baritone soloist." |