Sing, Muse!

November 4, 2012: First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia

Christopher Barron, Bimal Desai, Bevin Durant, Ellen Gerdes, Nathan P. Gibney, Ben Guez, Rachel Haimovich, Jen Hayman, Michael Johnson, Elissa Kranzler, Ken Olin, Rebekah Reddi, Jordan Rock, Caroline Winschel

Part I. Seeking Out Wisdom
Williametta Spencer, “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners”
Benjamin Britten, Hymn to St. Cecilia
John Tavener, “The Lamb”

Part II. Struck By Genius
Anton Bruckner, “Os justi”
Eric Whitacre, “Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine”
Olivier Messiaen, “O sacrum convivium!”

Part III. Stumbling On Inspiration
Daniel Goldschmidt, “Haiku By Basho”
Veljo Tormis, “Helletused”
Malcolm Dalglish, “Great Trees”

Notes on the Program
We’ve all heard the arguments: Creativity is an organic process, not to be rushed or forced. Genius can’t be prodded. Inspiration and respiration are etymological siblings, so the one should be as simple and effortless as the other.

This is a dangerous line of thinking. It suggests that the process of creativity should somehow be a smooth one, that an aha! moment will always arrive on schedule and that an artist will then have all the information she needs to move forward.

Today’s program teaches us differently. These visions of the creative process reveal that artists can’t rely solely on unpredictable flashes of inspiration; creativity is a muscle, and it must be exercised. Creative work is hard work—there’s little else as revealing and as nerve-wracking as trying to be innovative by oneself—and it demands regular effort and steely-eyed determination. It often requires stretching. Sometimes it even hurts.

At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners
With that in mind, we begin with a plea for wisdom gone dangerously wrong: Williametta Spencer’s “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners”, using John Donne’s seventh Holy Sonnet as its text, asks God and all the angels to call forth Judgment Day and finally separate the sinners from the saved. The piece begins with the singers deployed as if in a trumpet fanfare, ringing out open fifths to reach the four imagined corners of the world. This brashness is tempered as Donne’s speaker begins to realize the enormity of what he has invoked, with the singers reverting to chant-like simplicity as the implications of the speaker’s request becomes clear.

The startlingly triumphal ending underscores the twist Donne deploys halfway through the poem, when the speaker concludes that what he seeks isn’t the last judgment—it’s redemption for his own sins. Even in that awareness, however, he falls short: in petitioning God for salvation, the speaker realizes that the absolution he wants took place centuries ago on a cross in Calvary, and his own sacrifice pales in comparison.

Hymn to St. Cecilia
That kind of unsought self-awareness strikes even more keenly in Benjamin Britten’s Hymn to St. Cecilia, which also features a plea to the heavens. In this case, however, the plea is directed to St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music, and what she delivers is not universal judgment but intimate critique.

Although Britten’s interest in St. Cecilia follows a rich tradition of English composers writing odes in her honor, he did not use one of the traditional Latin writings on the saint. Instead, his friend and frequent collaborator W. H. Auden wrote a Cecilian text expressly for Britten’s use.

The piece includes a number of the conventions established by earlier St. Cecilia odes: a hymn-like plea to the muse serves as a kind of refrain, and the third movement features invocations of several different musical instruments. But the arc of the poem itself hits a far more personal note. Though couched in imagery of inspiration and music-making, Auden’s text fiercely criticizes the young composer for his seeming unwillingness to accept and nurture his own sexuality along with his creativity. The message failed in its intended effect—Britten never returned Auden’s romantic interest, and their working partnership ended with this piece—but the images of corruption and purity raised in Hymn to St. Cecilia would color Britten’s work for decades to come.

The Lamb
John Tavener’s “The Lamb,” set to the poem of the same name by William Blake, continues this imagery of otherworldly wisdom being delivered to an innocent. Appropriately for such a wholesome piece, “The Lamb” was written in a single afternoon—Tavener has said that the piece came to him “fully grown”—and dedicated to the composer’s nephew for his third birthday.

The ease and simplicity of the piece’s composition are reflected in its structure, which relies heavily on retrograde and inversion to embellish an otherwise-plain melody. “The Lamb” opens simply, but as the poem’s narrator begins unpacking the comparisons between a lamb and the Christ child, the women’s parts invert, moving in different directions but using the same intervals. The effect is eerie, as if the voices were mirror-images of one another—appropriate for a moment when the speaker serves as a mirror for the lamb itself. This mirror-like effect recurs later in the piece when Tavener employs retrograde, causing each choral part to suddenly retrace—backwards—the notes it has just sung.

As the piece unfolds, the singers are kept at a restrained intensity, with each voice part spanning less than an octave in range. The use of unison and the repeated return to a familiar tonality reinforces the lullabye-like simplicity of the poem: an unassuming question with a tremendous answer.

Os justi
It comes as no surprise that so many of these pleas for wisdom and inspiration address the heavens—when mortal efforts fail, where better to look?—but it is interesting that so many of these pleas are met with disquieting or unexpected results. Unlike the Spencer and the Britten, however, Anton Bruckner’s “Os justi” suggests that in some cases, the wisdom of heaven is soothing and reassuring.

Composed in 1879, “Os justi” reflects the conflicting sensibilities present among musicians in nineteenth-century Europe. Bruckner is justly famous for his place in the Romantic pantheon, and he was revered by his contemporaries—Gustav Mahler among them—for his lush, monumental symphonies and his virtuosic organ improvisation. Bruckner’s choral output is less famous but equally significant; he wrote more than thirty motets, each one testifying to his strong Roman Catholic faith and incorporating the long, chant-like phrases of Renaissance composers.

Forward-looking in its use of sweeping melodic lines and sumptuous harmonies, “Os justi” is also anchored in the music of centuries past. Tellingly, Bruckner dedicated the piece to the music director at the school where he taught; the director was an ardent admirer of Palestrina and other early composers, which may explain Bruckner’s inclusion of a plainchant Alleluia at the end of the piece. Given that the psalm Bruckner used speaks of a believer who is steady in his understanding, this final return to such a familiar and accessible musical form seems especially fitting.

Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine
No such comfort is accorded by Eric Whitacre’s “Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine”—where Bruckner’s subject was soothed by his convictions, Whitacre’s depiction of Leonardo da Vinci reveals an inventor tormented as much by his talent as by his curiosity.

Whitacre and his longtime collaborator Charles Anthony Silvestri approached the piece as if writing a short opera, with Silvestri piecing together a libretto from both his own poetry and da Vinci’s writings. The result is a striking and dramatic narrative: we follow da Vinci as his fitful sleep is interrupted by visions of flight (and falling), as he wrestles his ideas into concrete plans, and as he finally ascends the highest tower, completed flying machine in tow, and prepares himself to leap either to his glory or to his death.

Musically, Whitacre begins with the singers deployed as if in a Greek chorus, commenting on the inventor’s anguish without inhabiting it. As the drama grows, however, the choir becomes more integral to da Vinci’s frenzy: we hear the imagined siren call of the winds themselves, beckoning da Vinci to fly; the achingly effortless ascent of the pigeons whose wings da Vinci studies for new ideas; and finally, the whooshing, clacking takeoff of the flying machine itself. Its creation may have been torment—but its creator can fly.

O sacrum convivium!
The tension between the anguish of learning and the wonder of understanding is explored to very different effect in Olivier Messiaen’s “O sacrum convivium!” Messiaen’s deeply held Catholicism comes to the fore in his setting of a liturgical text honoring the Communion ritual; as in Bruckner’s “Os justi”, Messiaen’s choice of text suggests a certain peace and calm that comes with having made a deliberate and personal commitment to a faith.

Unlike Bruckner, however, Messiaen’s setting serves to challenge us as much as to inspire us. The complexity of the harmonic structure reminds us that Messiaen drew from varied and unusual sources for his inspiration; by 1937, when “O sacrum convivium!” was written, he’d become fascinated with Asian musical traditions and electronic music while still making his living as a virtuoso organist. Playing on this duality, “O sacrum convivium!” feels almost jazzy in its harmonies, bringing an unexpected sense of modernity to the sacred Communion ritual.

Haiku By Basho
Of course, many of us don’t ever experience the extremes of anguish or rapture depicted in these visions of heavenly or otherworldly inspiration. Our daily lives are no less thoughtful and creative for the lack of these celestial forces, and we find beauty and inspiration in mindfulness rather than in genius. Such discoveries are often all the sweeter for being so unexpected; seeing or understanding something in a new way is just as transforming as receiving a thunderbolt from the gods.

Daniel Goldschmidt’s “Haiku By Basho” offers just this kind of gentle stimulation, pairing lilting choral lines with texts by Matsuo Basho, who is commonly recognized as the greatest master of haiku. Indeed, the traditional haiku form seems especially appropriate for these musings on quotidian beauty: although many of us remember our elementary-school lessons on haiku’s strict rhythmic structure, these poems are more defined by the ways in which they each juxtapose two competing or seemingly unrelated themes and ideas. Haiku generally also have clear seasonal references, anchoring them in the daily and recognizable life of the writer.

The three used here serve as eloquent exemplars of their poetic form. Basho—who was constantly attuned to the poetry of his daily life, taking his pseudonym from the banana tree outside his hut—offers a wry, mournful depiction of the changing seasons, and Goldschmidt’s settings serve to embellish the unassuming beauty of the text. We are transported even as we recognize Basho and Goldschmidt’s understanding as our own.

Helletused
Veljo Tormis, a contemporary Estonian composer, may be himself the master of the balance between familiarity and otherworldliness. Keenly attentive to the importance of folksong in Estonian culture, Tormis has frequently explained his work by averring, “I do not use folksong. It is folk music that uses me.” He serves as a kind of medium for his country’s folk traditions, channeling the tunes that his people preserved during generations of Soviet occupation into spellbinding modern constructions.

“Helletused,” which means “childhood memory,” bridges that gap precisely. Like many Tormis pieces, it draws simultaneously on several elements of Estonian heritage. The “childhood memory” to which Tormis refers is in fact a national one: in rural Estonia, school-age children share the responsibilities of tending to their families’ livestock, and each family develops an unique call with which to herd their animals. Because the calls differ by family, the children use their calls not just to control cattle and sheep but also to howdy their friends in distant pastures.

Although many in Estonia would recognize this tenet of herding culture, “Helletused” is also keyed to a very particular childhood memory, that of Aino Tamm (1864–1945). Tamm was the first professional singer in Estonia, and like many of her generation, she learned traditional herding calls and folksongs in childhood. The first call in the largely wordless “Helletused”—“alleaa”—is one of Tamm’s own calls from her youth. This motif is particularly famous in Estonian folk music, as it first appeared in “Lauliku lapsepõli,” or “The Singer’s Childhood,” a beloved folksong setting that was composed for Tamm by Miina Harma (1864–1941), the country’s first professional composer. Tormis brings this connection of inspiration and collaboration full circle by quoting the first line of “Lauliku lapsepõli” in “Helletused”; amid the frenzied call-and-response riffing of the two soprano soloists, a quartet interjects with the only text in the piece: “Kui ma olin väiksekene” (“When I was a little one”). As Harma’s piece details how a singer learned songs and words from the natural world around her, we may intuit that Tormis finds similar inspiration not only in his country’s folk traditions but also in the creative work done by his predecessors.

Great Trees
That reverence for the beauty we can find in ourselves and in our own lives serves as the ultimate counterpart to the anguished search for inspiration we saw earlier. Malcolm Dalglish’s “Great Trees,” set to the poem of the same title by Wendell Berry, sums up that contentment nicely. Excerpted from Dalglish’s larger work The Hymnody of Earth, “Great Trees” reveals Dalglish’s appreciation for American musical traditions, using folksy, bright harmonies and nuanced, lilting rhythms.

Although much of The Hymnody of Earth features accompaniment from percussion and hammered dulcimer (Dalglish’s instrument of choice), “Great Trees” is far more hymn-like, paying special attention to Berry’s text. The choir’s sound crescendos in pace with the gentle growth of the trees themselves, and the deliberate pauses within each verse hearken to the green stillness of the untrammeled woods.

Dalglish leaves us in a contemplative, inviting space—perhaps just the atmosphere that might best nourish our own creativity. The prospect seems less daunting, somehow, after witnessing the trials and triumphs on display in this repertoire; knowing that inspiration and invention require just as much sweat as they do genius—thank you, Thomas Edison—makes it easier for us to exercise those underused creative muscles.

If what we create is as much a product of our will and our intellect as of fleeting moments of inspiration, then no, inspiration will never be as effortless as respiration. It shouldn’t be. We sing today of poets and believers, inventors and pioneers, and we recognize that none of these compositions would have been improved by having been easier for their composers.

The last phrase of “Great Trees” speaks to this marriage of genius and effort, bringing invited beauty before an attentive audience: “O light come down to earth, be praised!” In giving voice to this music, we are praising these composers while also taking part in their creative processes; by interacting with their art—either by performing it or by experiencing its performance—we become the final element in this cycle of inspiration and fulfillment. Here, finally, we find a true link between inspiration and respiration: breathe deep, friends. It’s time to sing.