Behind Closed Doors
March 15, 2019: Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
March 17, 2019: St. Mark’s Church
Sam Barge, Sonja Bontrager, Jon Cronin, Lucas DeJesus, Conrad Erb, Julie Frey, Amy Hochstetler, Elissa Kranzler, Nathan Lofton, Cortlandt Matthews, Hank Miller, John Piccolini, Rebekah Reddi, Jordan Rock, Rebecca Roy, Jesse Scheinbart, Lizzy Schwartz, Melinda Steffy, Emily Sung, Kevin Vondrak, Caroline Winschel, Michele Zuckman
Morning Prayers, Philip Moore (b. 1943)
from Three Prayers of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Sibylla Libyca, Orlande de Lassus (1532–1594)
from Prophetiae Sibyllarum
Psalm 67, Charles Ives (1874–1954)
✦
Even When God Is Silent, Michael Horvit (b. 1932)
Prayers in Time of Distress, Philip Moore
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, traditional African American arr. William Dawson (1899–1990)
✦
Sibylla Samia, Orlande de Lassus
Ave Verum Corpus, William Byrd (1538–1623)
Whispers, Steven Stucky (1949–2016)
Sibylla Erythrea, Orlande de Lassus
✦
Evening Prayers, Philip Moore
Sibylla Agrippa, Orlande de Lassus
Steal Away, traditional African American arr. Michael Tippett (1905–1998)
from A Child of Our Time
Behind Closed Doors is a program of music and texts that were originally written for private consumption. The music on this program approaches this theme from a few different directions, incorporating works that were written without a public performance in mind as well as several musical compositions or texts that were truly created in secret.
The program is built around two larger-scale pieces, Three Prayers of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Philip Moore and excerpts from Prophetiae Sibyllarum by Orlande de Lassus. Moore’s 1980 work sets texts by the German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was an opponent of the Nazi regime and spent the last two years of his life in a Nazi prison before being executed. Lassus’s motets, which look forward to the early twentieth century in their explorations of tonality, were composed for private performance in the 1550s but were considered so unusual for the time that they were not published until after the composer’s death, nearly a half-century later. Lassus’s texts, prophetic poems about the coming of Christ, are arranged to respond and comment on Bonhoeffer’s prayers.
The remainder of the program includes nineteenth-century experimental music by Charles Ives; a setting of a poem scrawled on a wall by a Holocaust victim; several arrangements of coded African American spirituals; and a contemporary work combining an illicit Elizabethan Catholic anthem with a poem by Walt Whitman.
Central to the program, though, are the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945) as set by Philip Moore. Bonhoeffer was born to a well-off family in Breslau, Germany, and showed early promise as an academic. After completing a Doctorate in Theology at Berlin University in 1927 (at the age of 21), Bonhoeffer came to the United States for further study at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Bonhoeffer became a prominent critic of the Nazi regime and spent the next several years lecturing, writing, teaching, and resisting Nazi influence within the church. Ultimately, Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Nazis for his involvement with the German resistance and executed in 1945.
Philip Moore (b.1943) is an English organist and composer. Following studies at the Royal College of Music in London, Moore embarked on a forty-year career in church music that included positions at Canterbury Cathedral, Guildford Cathedral, and York Minster. Moore’s music is firmly rooted in the English church music tradition, and the Three Prayers of Dietrich Bonhoeffer draw particular inspiration from the music of Benjamin Britten and Herbert Howells.
The composer writes: “[Dietrich Bonhoeffer] wrote several books, of which one of the most well-known is Letters and Papers from Prison, written in 1943. Amongst the papers are seven poems entitled Prayers for Fellow Prisoners. Even in translation they are vivid, passionate, and intense, and spring from a deep sense of compassion, and a love and understanding of humanity. Although Bonhoeffer’s writings reflect his triumph of hardship and suffering, there is also a depth of despair that is perhaps only fully reflected in his poetry. This is particularly apparent in Morning Prayers and Prayers in Time of Distress. Evening Prayers, however, breathes a spirit of tranquility and acceptance; a spirit by which he was known and through which he gave comfort to his fellow prisoners.
“I first encountered Bonhoeffer’s Prayers for my Fellow Prisoners in 1966, and immediately felt drawn to the idea of setting some of them to music. The opportunity arose in 1980 when a newly formed vocal quartet, Equinox, commissioned me to write a work. The prayers were first performed on September 25, 1981, and the commission was funded by a grant from the South East Arts Association.
“Musically the construction of each Prayer is straightforward. The first two are each dominated by a particular interval––the first by a minor second and the second by an augmented fourth. Bonhoeffer frequently draws parallels between musical counterpoint and life, and because of this the third Prayer is in the form of a fugue. The subject is based on the first two phrases of the chorale Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland [‘Savior of the nations, come’], which Bonhoeffer actually quotes in one of his letters. The complete chorale appears at the very end of the movement at the words ‘into Thy hands I commend my loved ones.’”
Sibylla Libyca
“Sibylla Libyca” is the second movement of Lassus’s Prophetiae Sibyllarum, one of the most enigmatic works by the great Franco-Flemish Renaissance composer. The piece is set in twelve movements, each declaiming the text of one of the ancient Greek oracles, who were believed by some to have foretold the coming of Christ. Though Lassus wrote the work when he was only 28 years old, Prophetiae Sibyllarum constitutes some of the most extreme, inventive, and chromatic music of his entire output: centuries before the arrival of atonal music, Lassus was experimenting with writing in all twelve tones and exploring rapid harmonic movement through chords foreign to the mode. The entire piece is set for four-voice, a cappella choir, and likely would have been sung one- or two-voices on a part during the composer’s time.
Psalm 67
Charles Ives (1874–1954) was born into a musical family in Danbury, Connecticut. The composer’s father, George, had been a bandmaster in the Union Army during the Civil War and following the war made his living as a musician and teacher. Ives inherited not only his father’s interest in music generally but also his interest in musical experimentation. Ives began composing at an early age, eventually going on to study with Horatio Parker at Yale. Following Yale, Ives embarked on a career in the insurance industry, all the while composing music that pushed beyond the niceties of late nineteenth-century music. Working largely for his own enjoyment, Ives was free to write music that was not bound by the expectations of a concert-going public or the technical limitations of performing musicians. Although Ives’s compositional activities largely ceased by the 1920s, his music did not begin to receive regular public performances until the 1930s. Indeed, many of his most significant works were not given their first performances until decades after they were composed.
Ives’s first instrument was the organ, and he worked as a church organist from the ages of 14 to 28. Not surprisingly, church music makes up a large portion of Ives’s early output and the traditions of Protestant church music, particularly hymnody, are a significant influence even on Ives’s later secular music. Ives’s 1898 setting of Psalm 67 is firmly rooted in the traditions of church music, based as it is on homophonic, chordal Anglican chant. The experimental side of Ives’s musical personality is also evident in this setting, however, as Psalm 67 is a study in poly-tonality, in which the women and men of the chorus sing simultaneously in different keys. The technique became a favorite of Igor Stravinsky in ballet scores such as Petrouchka and The Rite of Spring, composed 15 years after Ives’s Psalm setting.
Even When God Is Silent
“Even When God Is Silent” is a setting of a poem found in 1945 on the wall of a basement in Cologne, Germany, by Allied troops. The poem is believed to have been written by someone hiding from the Gestapo. Composed to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Kristallnacht, Horvit sets the text simply in C minor; each voice part declaims the text in turn before joining in homophony. In each phrase, the repetition of the words “I believe” underscores the power of hope even in isolation and darkness.
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot
William Dawson was an African American composer and choir director from Alabama whose arrangements of African American spirituals have cemented his place in the standard repertory for American music for generations. His setting of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot is known for its simple yet rich harmonies and sweeping soprano solo.
Sibylla Samia
“Sibylla Samia” is the fifth movement of Lassus’s Prophetiae Sibyllarum. Though brief, this movement exhibits the same wild inventiveness and extreme chromaticism as the other movements of the larger work. Known for his multilingual fluency in text setting, Lassus was and still is celebrated for his remarkable ability to declaim text with all the power and rhetoric of the spoken word.
Ave Verum Corpus
William Byrd, a student of Thomas Tallis and one of the most prominent English composers during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, is remembered today for his prolific output of Latin church music during a time when English Catholics were subject to harsh persecution for practicing their faith. “Ave Verum Corpus,” an SATB a cappella setting of a text central to Catholic worship, is one of his most well-known motets. It was published in 1605, in Byrd’s first collection of Gradualia. Set in G minor, the text unfurls largely in homophony with the frequent cross-relations and chromatic motion that characterize Byrd’s compositional style.
Whispers
Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Steven Stucky was widely recognized as one of the leading American composers of his generation. Commissioned for Chanticleer’s twenty-fifth anniversary in 2002, his piece “Whispers” juxtaposes Byrd’s “Ave Verum Corpus,” sung by a distant semichorus, with an original setting of lines from Walt Whitman’s “Whispers of Heavenly Death.” In Stucky’s description of the work, he writes, “Thoughts and images of death are so transmuted by the power of great art that the result is not sadness, but instead a kind of mystical exaltation.” Whitman’s text, sung by the main chorus, is set in undulating, chromatic waves that increase gradually in intensity and clarity, and through which snatches of Byrd’s “Ave Verum Corpus” drift, phrase by phrase.
Steal Away
The English composer Sir Michael Tippett (1905–1998) wrote the oratorio A Child of Our Time during the first years of World War II. The oratorio tells the story of a young Jewish refugee who assassinated a Nazi official in 1938 and the resulting government crackdown, famously known as Kristallnacht: the “Night of Broken Glass.” Tippett breaks up the story with settings of African American spirituals, which function much the same way as the Lutheran chorales in Bach’s passion oratorios: providing moments of self-reflection within the narrative arc of the all-too-familiar, all-too-inevitable story. His arrangement of “Steal Away” comes at the end of Part I of the oratorio, one of the darkest moments in the narrative, after the soprano soloist despairs over the state of the world: “How shall I feed my children on so small a wage? How can I comfort them when I am dead?”
Tippett’s setting of “Steal Away,” though very much composed for public performance, brings together several themes that have emerged in this program. Like the pieces by Moore, Horvit, and Byrd, Tippett’s “Steal Away” is a response to religious and political oppression. Like “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” the spiritual “Steal Away” dates from the time of slavery in the United States and is imbued with multiple layers of meaning. Finally, Michael Tippett was gay and a pacifist––two things which were either unpopular or illegal in England for much of his lifetime. Tippett would have understood as well as any other composer on this program what it means to compartmentalize and stifle certain aspects of his own self-expression.