I Hear America Singing

June 12, 2011: First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia

Bimal Desai, Rachel Haimovich, Ranwa Hammamy, Jen Hayman, Allison Hedges, Michael Johnson, Ken Olin, Jordan Rock, Joy Wiltenburg, Caroline Winschel, and Rick Womer

Long Time Traveler                            Edmund Dumas (1810–1882) arr. Jordan Rock

Euroclydon                                           William Billings (1746–1800)

Four Motets                                           Aaron Copland (1900–1990)

I. Help us, O Lord
II. Thou, O Jehovah, abideth forever
III. Have mercy on us, O Lord
IV. Sing ye praises to our King

Sweet Prospect                                     William Walker (1809–1875) arr. George S. Clinton

Shenandoah                                         Traditional Folksong, c. 1800 arr. James Erb

Landis Settings                                              John B. Hedges (1974–)

I. Amherst Noon
II. March Simile
III. Autobiography

world premiere

selections from A Child of Our Time         Michael Tippett (1905–1998)

Nobody knows
Steal away

A Ballad of Tree-Toads  Lester Jenks [Harvey B. Gaul] (1881–1945)

With a Lily in Your Hand                              Eric Whitacre (1970–)

 Long Time Trav’ling                                        Abbie Betinis (1980–)

We begin with leaving. Then again, most American stories begin with departures of some kind: from Spain, bound for adventure and mercenary glory; from the western coast of Africa, in bondage; from rocky English shores, for salvation. The arrivals are what make the stories famous, but the departures—wrenching and exhilarating, nerve-wracking and hopeful—are what make them stories. 

Grounded in this common tradition of departure, today’s program traces a shared culture of rootlessness and amalgamation, of roadside exchange and perpetually forward motion. It is a concert of reinvention and self-reference, such that some of the singers joked about making a game out of the citations and reprises, Pin-the-Tail-On-What-You’ve-Heard-Before. Our title comes from the poem of the same name by Walt Whitman, which we read not for its sentimental image of discrete voices singing discrete songs but for its reminder that indeed, these voices and songs cannot help but build on one another, just as songbirds riff on inherited tunes to create new cacophony. The process of music-making is necessarily cumulative, but today’s cross-section reveals that the layers of tradition and time are not firmly fixed atop one another: this history is not linear, and these journeys frequently overlap. We set out today alone, but we will meet others along the way.

We open with an explicit demonstration of those meetings given voice: a dual arrangement of Edmund Dumas’ “Long Time Traveler,” which was originally published in the 1859 edition of The Sacred Harp under the title “White.” The title was an homage to Benjamin Franklin White (1800–1879), editor of the first three editions of The Sacred Harp songbook and progenitor of the American traditions of both Sacred Harp and shapenote singing. Although Sacred Harp and shapenote singing are not technically synonymous, they have became nearly so, in large part because of White’s songbook. Shapenote singing, invented in the late eighteenth century as a method to facilitate the teaching of singing and sight-reading, relied upon a system of four shapes—a triangle, a square, an oval, and a diamond—that each represented both a syllable and a musical pitch. Rather than use the seven-syllable do-re-mi solfege that is more familiar to today’s singers, shapenote used just four syllables—fa, sol, la, and mi—to cover all possible notes. The shapes and syllables are firmly linked—a triangle, for instance, is always pronounced “fa”—and their relativity to one another is fixed, such that mi, for instance, is always a half-step lower than fa. The Sacred Harp, first published in 1844, standardized the many competing variations on shapenote, cementing both its reliance on only four notes and its simple harmonic structure, distinct from the more complex music being written contemporaneously in Europe.

Jordan’s rearrangement of “Long Time Traveler” takes its cues from two settings of the hymn: an unadorned three-part arrangement by the Wailin’ Jennys and the traditional, four-part version from the third edition of The Sacred Harp. The arrangement by the Wailin’ Jennys, a Canadian folk trio, serves us especially well as an aural demonstration of the kind of tag-team creativity that this program exemplifies; as additional voices join in and the harmonies build, the very simple tune at the piece’s core grows to something more transcendent.

It is admittedly unorthodox to start a concert with this kind of slow build-up, but the metaphor––of travelers meeting to combine their “varied carols”––is irresistible. So, too, is the reverence inherent in this opening trio: this is by far our most sacred concert this year, and beginning with a single, contemplative voice singing about the promise of heaven locates us carefully alongside the travelers whose steps we shadow. For the nineteenth-century Americans who would have sung simple harmonies like this and learned hymns out of songbooks like The Sacred Harp, departure and uncertainty were familiar and bittersweet parts of life in the United States. Americans of this era certainly knew more itinerancy than their European counterparts, simply because Americans had—and maybe still have—a tendency to move around a lot, whether for gold or for war or for better prospects elsewhere. In leaving, they knew that despite the advantages of efficient railroads and a well-organized postal service, they might not return to the places of their cherished beginnings. The moment of departure thus becomes a moment of reflection, setting out for parts unknown—to sea, to a new town, to an afterlife—while holding close to what sustained them.

The Sacred Harp setting of the hymn honors that same reverence with considerably more gusto. Shapenote singing is traditionally loud, twangy, and brazen in tone, meant for whole communities rather than trained singers alone. Shapenote singings have no consistent conductor; instead, singers take turns leading pieces, with everyone encouraged to mark time with their free hand. A new piece would typically be sung through on syllables alone, as we do here, before the words are added in on the repeat.

The sheer volume of shapenote singing may be unique to that style, but the twangy, rustic harmonies are not. William Billings (1746–1800), largely regarded as the father of American music, employed similar sounds in his prodigious output of hymns and patriotic tunes. Tellingly, Billings’ ultimate downfall as a composer was not his deliberately facile tunes but rather his legions of imitators. Without the benefit of copyright protection for his work, Billings’ most popular pieces—those that would have been the most lucrative for the composer to own—were reprinted, copyright-free, in songbooks like The Sacred Harp. Thus deprived of both the rights to and steady income from his work, Billings died in penury. Billings is not the only artist on this program whose work suffered reappropriation owing to the lack of copyright protection, but happily, most Billings tunes are today recognized as such. “Euroclydon,” named for the Biblical windstorm that causes a shipwreck, couples Billings’ signature harmonies with an affecting narrative of near-disaster, salvation, and homecoming. Betraying his ear for older musical traditions, the composer makes special use of text painting to depict his sailors’ torment, even as the final phrases of the piece sound suspiciously hymn-like.

Although Aaron Copland (1900–1990) is best known for his deliberate reliance on similarly rustic or folksy sounds, his Four Motets evince an unexpected delicacy even as they strum those same open fifths. Composed in 1921 during his studies in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, Four Motets was Copland’s first choral composition; the precipitous key changes suggest that their composer may yet have lacked a full sense of how he wanted his music to sound. As Boulanger wrote to Copland, however, the pieces “sound in the voices in a stunning manner,” and the harmonies that sounded rustic and countrified in earlier works now begin to shimmer.

With William Walker’s “Sweet Prospect” and James Erb’s setting of “Shenandoah,” we see continued use of these traditional sounds. Walker, White’s brother-in-law and collaborator on the first edition of The Sacred Harp, composed “Sweet Prospect” in the early 1830s, and the tune was included in the original printing of The Sacred Harp. By contrast, the text is not original to Walker or The Sacred Harp: Samuel Stennett, an eighteenth-century British minister, penned the verses for a hymn setting of his own. In appropriating Stennett’s text for his own composition, Walker acts as another magpie in this cultural chronology, freely making new use of existing work. “Sweet Prospect,” scored here for women’s voices, returns to themes and sounds we recognize from “Long Time Traveler”: twanging open fifths, communal time-keeping, a relish for the text, and the promise of heaven.

Juxtaposed against the brazen Sacred Harp sounds of “Sweet Prospect,” James Erb’s “Shenandoah” comes as a lovely, soothing reprieve. In setting “Shenandoah,” Erb joins a long line of reinterpreters, not reappropriators: the origins of the song are murky, with most experts agreeing only that was first sung on the East Coast in the early nineteenth century. Because the melody is inherently singable, it was passed on orally through several different communities in the nineteenth century, many of whom added verses or interpretations that are still familiar today. One version frames Shenandoah as a Native American chief whose daughter plans to elope with the singer; another suggests that the song may have been sung by escaped slaves, who traveled through the river so as not to leave a scent trail on land. Erb’s arrangement treats the text quite simply, without wading into additional narrative verses, but the voices are structured so as to bring out the inner movement of the melody: the women sing one verse in canon, and when the men return on the chorus, all voices pulse the nasal consonants of “Shenandoah,” creating a rippling, rhythmic effect that suggests the very sounds of the river itself.

Amid this musical conversation of inheritance and inspiration, it is our joy and our privilege to sing the world premiere of John B Hedges’ Landis Settings, which was composed this winter for the Chestnut Street Singers. Philadelphia is a natural site for this premiere:  after completing his undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania and earning a Master of Music at Westminster Choir College, Hedges returned to postgraduate studies at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he worked with Joan Hutton Landis, now Professor Emerita of Humanities, whose poetry is featured in the work. Hedges’ connection to Philadelphia and the Chestnut Street Singers is not merely academic, as his older sister, Allison, is a dedicated member of our ensemble.

We gave Hedges very few suggestions for the directions his work might take, other than musing that it might be nice to include text by a contemporary female poet. Much to our delight, however, the three movements of Landis Settings fit neatly and evocatively alongside the rest of today’s program, complementing the more traditional pieces with a modern aesthetic all their own. Landis’ poems do similar work, paying homage to familiar traditions and icons—“Amherst Noon,” in particular, is a poignant portrait of Emily Dickinson––with a wry and cosmopolitan sensibility. Landis Settings thus couples tradition and innovation, hearkening to both 1940s jazz and the mid-century motivic atonality made popular by Schoenberg and achieving what Hedges referred to as “a bluesy, juicy jazz harmony vein.” It has been an honor and a pleasure to sing Landis’ texts and Hedges’ music, and we are delighted to premiere this work on today’s program.

Though the modernity of Landis Settings might initially catch us off guard, the underlying blues techniques have a sweet familiarity, like something that we almost recognize but that has been distorted by time. The two selections that follow, from A Child of Our Time, use the same strategy of tweaking well-loved traditions, but these draw from spirituals, the precursor to Hedges’ blues. Michael Tippett, the only non-American composer on today’s program, wrote A Child of Our Time after being inspired by the events leading up to Kristallnacht in 1938; the oratorio, structured to match Handel’s Messiah in shape and grandeur, proclaims both Tippett’s pacifism and his belief in the inherent goodness of all people. Interestingly, although the 1944 premiere was a critical and popular success, many objected to the inclusion of spirituals and jazz elements, denigrating them as improper for performance as classical music. Unsurprisingly, we feel quite the opposite about Tippett’s spirituals: in addition to being beautiful in their own right, we find it very telling that Tippett—a young Englishman wracked with terror and guilt over the emerging fascism in Germany and his own country’s militarism––relied upon African-American spirituals as the most poignant expression of his own despair. Rather than being a niche tradition, bound only to shameful periods of American history, spirituals thus become an eloquent, cosmopolitan genre, universally accessible for expressions of both hope and anguish.

As the musical traditions of spirituals led to blues and, eventually, rock and roll, so too did the same heritage inform the barbershop sounds made popular in the early twentieth century. Lester Jenks’ “A Ballad of Tree-Toads” gives our men a chance to spotlight their facility with both close barbershop harmonies and tongue-twisting lyrics. Lester Jenks was one of many pseudonyms used by Harvey B. Gaul, a prolific composer and arranger and talented organist who lived in Pittsburgh at the turn of the twentieth century. The absurd text of the “Tree-Toads” was originally printed in The Pittsburgh Post, suggesting that Gaul, like his fellows on today’s program, took just as much inspiration from the mundane as from the classical.

We close this evening by pairing two luminaries in contemporary American music, both of whom are celebrated for combining innovative rhythms and voicings with lush choral sounds. Eric Whitacre, who recently made headlines with his YouTube-based Virtual Choir, has cemented his status as the golden boy of American choral music, known especially for his use of dense, unearthly chords. “With a Lily in Your Hand” is thus a bit of a departure from Whitacre’s usual style; although there are plenty of wrenching, electric harmonies, they are interspersed with insistent, jarring rhythms, pitting the poet’s stated intention to return to his lover against the obstructions of space and time. Abbie Betinis, recently named one of NPR’s top hundred composers under forty, creates similar juxtapositions of promises and doubts in “Long Time Trav’ling,” which she specially recommended to us after hearing about this program last fall. Betinis herself has a storied pedigree as an American composer; she is the great-niece of Alfred Burt, whose annual Christmas card carols included such favorites as “O, Hearken Ye” and “Bright Bright the Holly Berries.”

In “Long Time Trav’ling,” Betinis’ reverence for American musical history is evident; the work combines two popular—and by now, familiar to us all—nineteenth-century shapenote hymns with additional text from a third such setting. The interwoven solo lines are sung with gusto, shapenote style, while the rest of the choristers interject as both distant chain gangs and sightreading shapenoters. For all that the text and the core melodies come from the shapenote tradition, however, the work’s complexity goes far beyond the deliberate simplicity of The Sacred Harp, with competing lines seeming to undercut the texts’ optimistic proclamation that “we’ll meet again.” As the piece swells to its final crescendo, it switches feverishly between major and minor modes, indicating that these travelers are well aware of the perils they face in leaving friends behind. In closing our inaugural season with such a work, however, we aim to make our intentions clear: we have cherished your part in this season’s journey, and we dearly hope we’ll meet again in the fall. Indeed, we have reason to be optimistic, for although “Long Time Trav’ling” ends without closure or resolution, it does not leave us without recourse. We can feel that the journey is unfinished, but we know how to find our way home from here.