For Cherishing

June 1, 2018: Proclamation Presbyterian Church, Bryn Mawr

June 3, 2018: First Unitarian Church, Philadelphia

Sonja Bontrager, Lucas DeJesus, Conrad Erb, Amy Hochstetler, Michael Johnson, Elissa Kranzler, Nathan Lofton, Cortlandt Matthews, Hank Miller, Rebekah Reddi, Jordan Rock, Rebecca Roy, Lizzy Schwartz, Zachary Sigafoes, Melinda Steffy, Emily Sung, Dan Widyono, Caroline Winschel, Michele Zuckman

Versa est in luctum, Tomás Luis de Victoria (c. 1548–1611)

Introitus from Missa pro Defunctis, Johannes Ockeghem (c. 1410/1425–1497)

Nymphes des bois, Josquin des Prez (c. 1450/1455–1521)

Selig Sind die Toten, Heinrich Schütz (1585–1672)

Songs of Farewell, Charles Hubert Hastings Parry (1848–1918)

1. My soul, there is a country far beyond the stars
2. I know my soul hath power to know all things
3. Never weather-beaten sail
4. There is an old belief

Funeral Ikos, John Tavener (1944–2013)

Take Him, Earth, For Cherishing, Herbert Howells (1892–1983)

The Beautiful Land of Nod, Robert Convery (b. 1954)

Versa est in luctum

“Versa est in luctum” is a six-part motet by the great Spanish renaissance composer Tomás Luis de Victoria. It is one of several pieces that comprise the last publication of Victoria’s life: the Officium Defunctorum, a collection of funereal works that Victoria composed upon the death of his longtime patron, the Dowager Empress Maria, sister to the Spanish king and Holy Roman Emperor Philip II. The text of this motet links two passages from Job: the first making evocative musical reference to the harp and flute, whose voices have been turned to grieving, and the second asking forgiveness before death––“Spare me, O Lord, for my days are as nothing.”

Introitus

Johannes Ockeghem is widely acknowledged as one of the great masters of the early Renaissance. Ockeghem’s fame during his lifetime (as evidenced by Josquin’s memorial to the older composer, “Nymphes des Bois,” next on the program) was a testament not only to his compositional skill but also to his comparatively wide travels. While Ockeghem was born at Saint-Ghislain, in modern-day Belgium, he travelled through the Netherlands, France, and Spain while holding positions in Antwerp, Moulin, and Paris. Ockeghem’s incomplete Missa pro Defunctis, or Requiem, from which this Introitus comes, is believed to have been composed either following the death of France’s King Charles VII in 1461 or that of his son and successor, Louis XI, in 1483. Ockeghem’s Requiem is the earliest surviving polyphonic setting of the Catholic Mass for the dead.

Ockeghem’s Introitus is based on a cantus firmus: a simple melody, often derived from Gregorian chant, around which other voices are added to create polyphony. In this case, the cantus firmus is the plainsong melody that would have been chanted during funeral masses prior to the emergence of polyphony. Ockeghem’s Introitus, set for only three low voices, is simple and austere. This simplicity and austerity allows space for meditation, by both listener and performer, on life, death, and the mysteries of existence.

Nymphes de bois

One of the most famous motets of the Renaissance, “Nymphes des bois” pays homage to Ockeghem, the master composer who was Josquin’s teacher. The text is an elegy by Jean Molinet, which combines figures from classical antiquity with contemporary mourners of Ockeghem’s death––among them Josquin and his peers, the composers Perchon, Brumel, and Compère. The piece is scored for SATB choir atop a tenor cantus firmus singing the Requiem plainchant.

Selig Sind die Toten

Heinrich Schütz is a transitional figure in music history, having lived and worked at a time when the elements that would come to define Baroque music were just beginning to emerge. Schütz was born in central Germany and spent virtually his entire career at the court of the Elector of Saxony in Dresden. While based in Dresden, Schütz was able to travel and spent time in Venice studying with Monteverdi, another key figure in the emergence of Baroque music. Schütz is among the most influential German composers of the early seventeenth century, and his influence can be heard in the music of Buxtehude, Bach, Telemann, and even as late as Brahms and Bruckner. Indeed, the most famous setting of the text “Selig Sind die Toten” is in Brahms’ 1868 Ein deutches Requiem, a setting which itself draws heavily on the influence of Schütz and other early German composers. Schütz’s setting of “Selig Sind die Toten” first appears in the composer’s Geistliche Chormusik, a collection of 29 sacred motets published in 1648. “Selig Sind die Toten,” like much of Schütz’s music, contains many elements of the emergent Baroque style: frequent changes of texture, dynamic, and intensity; alternation between contrapuntal writing, with all six voices moving independently, and homophonic music in which all of the voices sing together; and a clear connection between the meaning of the text and the drama of the music. Nowhere is this last element clearer than in the second section of the piece, where the declamatory music of “Ja, der Geist spricht” is followed by the meditative “Sie ruhen von ihrer Arbeit.”

Songs of Farewell

Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry’s song cycle Songs of Farewell, comprised of six a cappella motets, is widely regarded as one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century English choral music. With its rich harmonies, intricate counterpoint, and evocative setting of English text, the cycle bears all the hallmarks of the English choral renaissance, of which Parry has long been credited as one of the progenitors. Parry composed the cycle between 1913 and 1915, at the height of World War I and just a few years before his death in 1918. The texts and music reflect both a time of unimaginable loss from the war and also perhaps the poignancy of Parry’s personal farewell: by this point the heart trouble which had persisted most of his life had developed into a serious condition, and he may have known that he did not have much time left to live.

The six motets in Songs of Farewell occur in order of increasing complexity, with the first two scored simply for SATB choir and the final and longest motet set for eight voice parts. This program features the first four motets in the cycle. The first motet, “My soul, there is a country far beyond the stars” is probably the best-known piece in the cycle, set for unaccompanied SATB choir to text by the seventeenth-century poet Henry Vaughan (1622–1695). The frequently changing keys and meters do not disturb but rather enhance the lyricism of the text, showcasing Parry’s love for the English language and his skill in bringing it to life through this medium. The second and shortest motet, “I know my soul hath power to know all things,” is a setting of two stanzas from “Nosce Teipsum,” a philosophical poem on human knowledge and the nature of the soul by Sir John Davies (1569–1626). Also scored for four voice parts, this motet is nearly completely homophonic, with each phrase punctuated by dramatic pauses. The third motet, “Never weather-beaten sail,” scored for five voices, begins in homophony but quickly expands into a lush, lyrical polyphonic setting of the eponymous poem by Thomas Campion (1567–1620).

The fourth motet, “There is an old belief,” is a six-voice setting of poetry by John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854). The first half of this motet unfolds through lyrical polyphonic writing very much like the preceding number. On the final sentence of the text, all six parts join in a unison proclamation of the plainsong Credo on the text “That creed I fain would keep” before returning to the lush harmonic writing that closes the piece.

Funeral Ikos

This setting of text from the Orthodox service for the Burial of Priests, here translated into English by Isabel Hapgood, is quintessentially Tavener. The setting, simple and elegant in equal measure, alternates between sparsely harmonized chants and a four-part Alleluia. While this Alleluia is musically unchanged through each iteration, it goes through several significant contextual transformations, being a song of mortal commemoration, heavenly praise, mourning, and comfort––possibly all at the same time.

Take Him, Earth, For Cherishing

Herbert Howells had a long and productive life with a great deal of professional success, including a sixty-year teaching career at the Royal Academy of Music. Howells’s life was also marked by several tragic incidents, however, and chief among them was the sudden death of his nine-year-old son Michael in 1935. Loss and grief are frequent themes in the composer’s music, and rarely are they more overt than in the motet “Take Him, Earth, For Cherishing.” Howells first set portions of Prudentius’s Hymnus circa Exsequias Defunctis as a study for his mammoth 1949 oratorio Hymnus Paradisi. Although the text was not incorporated into the finished oratorio, it remained in Howells’s mind, and the composer recalled it when he was asked to compose a memorial work for President John F. Kennedy in 1964. In “Take Him, Earth, For Cherishing,” Howells sets Prudentius’s poem in an English translation by Helen Waddell. The motet is episodic in its construction and consists of nine continuous sections. The first section begins with a subdued unison chant, reminiscent of plainsong and the Tudor church music Howells studied as a young man. This chant, which might symbolize a mourner’s inner sense of loss and grief, returns in fragments at points throughout the piece as a unifying motif. The second section (“Guard him well, the dead I give thee”) is a more extroverted expression of grief and begins with one of Howells’ signature harmonic devices: the choir sings a B Major chord, but then all of the voices but one move chromatically away from their notes and then back. The sound is akin to an uncontrollable wail. This section and the several that follow are harmonically searching and unstable. They could be heard as moving through stages of grief, from anger to acceptance, searching for some sort of consolation. Eventually we begin to hear the first hints at hope and redemption: “Open are the woods again, that the Serpent lost for men.” The piece finds its resolution, musically as well as dramatically, with an arrival on B Major and the words “Take, O take him, mighty Leader.” Although the harmonic wandering continues through the end of the piece, our “home” of B Major is never far away. The final section of the piece repeats the first lines of the poem, and the work ends quietly with a final repetition of the poem’s first line and title.

The Beautiful Land of Nod

Robert Convery was born in Kansas and raised in California before coming to the East Coast to study at Westminster Choir College, The Juilliard School, and Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music. Although now based in New York, Convery has enjoyed long associations with many Philadelphia musical organizations, including The Crossing and its predecessor, The Bridge Ensemble. The composer writes about “The Beautiful Land of Nod”: “Poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, famous for lines like ‘Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone,’ wrote lyrical and affecting works. Unfortunately, for composers looking for poems rich in musical treasures to be excavated, Ms. Wilcox’s poems are too long to sustain themselves in single musical settings. Therefore, I took Ms. Wilcox’s ‘The Beautiful Land of Nod,’ pretended she approved, hung my head in blasphemous shame and whittled down her long poem into a practical length for a musical setting. I also focused the poem, eliminating tangential strayings. While doing this, I kept in mind the musical form I intended to use for the setting, the simple, sturdy Bar Form (A, A, B, A). I then elongated the form slightly (A, A, B, A, A extension, coda) to accommodate my shortened adaptation of the poem.

“The commission for ‘The Beautiful Land of Nod’ came in 2015 from The Crossing for a project called The Jeff Quartets. Fifteen composers were commissioned to each write a short choral work for this project. All fifteen works were then performed on a single program. Being a short work, I wrote it immediately upon receiving the commission, let the music sit a few months, rewrote it, let it sit for a few more months, rewrote it again, let it sit for a few months more, then copied it out neatly during a third rewrite, before sending it to The Crossing for rehearsal and first performance on July 9, 2016.”