To the Brilliant Sky
April 20, 2024
Sonja Bontrager, Alan Bush, Julie Frey, Walker Gosrich, Matt Hall, Amy Hochstetler, Samantha James, Elissa Kranzler, Hank Miller, Erina Pearlstein, Rebekah Reddi, Julie Reust, Jordan Rock, Adrian Rosas, Lizzy Schwartz, Melinda Steffy, Kevin Vondrak, John Whelchel, Ben Willis, Caroline Winschel, Michele Zuckman
Adolphus Hailstork, “Nocturne”
Saunder Choi, “I came to your Shore as a Wayfaring Stranger”
Renaissance Spain, “Con el Viento”
Timothy Takach, “Mars (Love Asleep and Waiting)” from Helios
Eric Whitacre, “Leonardo Dreams of his Flying Machine”
Jordan Nobles, “Lux Antiqua”
Ted Hearne, “What It Might Say”
Veljo Tormis, “Helletused”
Vanessa Lann, “Shining Still”
Ēriks Ešenvalds, “Stars”
Laura Mvula, “Sing to the Moon”
Notes on the Program
As an ensemble that focuses on live performance, we think often about what it means to be present for one another, both as singers and as listeners. There’s an argument to be made that choral singing relies on proximity: yes, we know about the virtual choirs of the pandemic, and we even launched a few “quarantets” ourselves, but there’s an intimacy we cherish in constructing this instrument together from our collective breath, from literally sharing space and air with each other and with our audience.
We dare not take for granted that simplest, first collaboration of shared presence.
But reveling in what our togetherness can yield also calls us to question what might yet be available if we venture beyond what feels comfortable and sure––and then further still. How far, we wonder, might our wanderings take us? If we reach that place beyond our current understanding, what new truths might come to light? And will anyone be able to hear us, or to reach for us, when we are ready to share?
If you’re wondering if these questions might be metaphors for space exploration, death, building trust across differences, emotional vulnerability, and ___(insert your idea here)___, then yes, they probably are. Seems like there might be something there, wherever we’re headed––and we’re glad you’re with us for the ride.
Nocturne
We take our opening invocation from “Nocturne,” the second of Adolphus Hailstork’s Five Short Choral Works, which invites us to marvel equally at both the immense majesties of the universe and the tiny, perfect details revealed by our imperfect understanding. The text by Reverend Jim Curtis, a contemporary Unitarian Universalist minister, juxtaposes the tactile minutiae of summertime––insects humming, grasses rustling––against the unfathomable potential of countless other universes, perhaps some with wonderers just like us, visible yet unknowable in the distant sky. (If a metaphor about a potential higher power was also on your bingo card, you win this paragraph!) The piece becomes a love song reflecting this duality, as the speaker draws their lover close under the starry skies while offering a kiss to the night itself.
Hailstork offers the choir multiple moods, too, using a recurring aleatoric texture, in which individual voices move independently below a chant-like melody, to create an atmospheric rendition of a warm, still summer evening thick with the hum of insects. As the piece unfolds, the sonic landscape transforms to a more traditional homophonic structure before returning to a final aleatoric section illuminating a solo voice.
I Came to Your Shore as a Wayfaring Stranger
Los Angeles-based Filipino composer Saunder Choi creates a different kind of juxtaposition in this intricately crafted quodlibet, or partner song, balancing the well-known American folk hymn “Poor Wayfaring Stranger” with his own new setting of verses by the renowned Bengali writer Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore’s poetry, from the larger, aphoristic work Stray Birds, offers an evocative counterpart to “Wayfaring Stranger,” with both texts envisioning a chance for rest, peace, and reconnection.
Choi weaves the two themes together with a gently propulsive polyrhythm, with the upper and lower voices swapping between the two melodic lines as well as between contrasting rhythms based in either twos or threes. We particularly appreciate how Choi leans into the open-endedness of the Tagore text: in contrast to “Wayfaring Stranger,” which is straightforward in its goal of “no more to roam,” Choi chooses to emphasize the final three stanzas of Tagore, bringing the choir through a fluid, four-part cascade on the word “love.”
Con el Viento
This Renaissance setting for treble voices from 17th-century Spain might be interpreted to include hints of both Choi’s quest for safety and Hailstork’s marveling at the universe. Though the identity of the composer is lost to time, we are struck by the contrast they describe: they are literally “in the middle of contemplating” the stars above when they fall asleep in the sand along the beach. Are the stars not only fascinating but deeply comforting, such that the watcher feels safe enough to doze off? Or was that moment of reflection a rare respite from an otherwise chaotic period, causing the speaker to fall asleep despite their interest in the heavens? It may be worth noting that Spain was in a period of extraordinary turbulence when this piece was likely composed, ravaged by extreme inequality, plague, political instability and warfare, and natural disasters––not to mention the continuing horrors of the Inquisition and the gradual exploitation of the Americas. The tightly homophonic setting gives no indication of such turmoil, using textual repetitions to create a lulling rhythm. In the middle of contemplating these possible interpretations, we . . .
VII. Mars (Love Asleep and Waiting) from Helios
Though “Con el Viento” allows us only to guess at what dreams might come to that sleeping stargazer, Timothy Takach’s “Mars,” from his concert-length work Helios, offers a precise articulation from contemporary American poet William Reichard. Both based in Minnesota, Takach and Reichard are frequent collaborators, and this text was commissioned specifically for the composition, asking us to re-examine our perceptions of a seemingly-inhospitable (celestial) body named for the Roman god of warfare. Scored for tenors and basses, the music is similarly open-hearted, with a homophonic structure opening to soaring, sonorous declarations of identity and vulnerability in equal measure.
Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine
No such comfort is accorded by Eric Whitacre’s “Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine”—where earlier elements of this program offered glimpses of rest and respite amid wonder, Whitacre’s depiction of Leonardo da Vinci reveals an inventor tormented even in his dreams by his sense of the possible.
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 original 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 in the city, 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; the whooshing, clacking takeoff of the flying machine itself; and finally–only faintly at first–the thrumming, dance-like movement as da Vinci propels himself forward, perhaps with those freed pigeons following in his wake as he soars off into the distance.
Lux Antiqua
Jordan Nobles’ “Lux Antiqua,” composed in 2011, calls us to consider where this restlessness might take us––and in so doing, the piece suggests that we may carry within us our ability to stay connected. Written for “spatialized choir” so that the singers represent pinpricks of light within the night sky, the piece shifts in and out of a structured tempo, making recognizable patterns out of its deliberately unearthly incantations. The text is simply a litany of star names from around the world; as these stars are some of the brightest and most familiar to us, these names are centuries old, having served as inspiration and touchstones for generations.
The piece’s dedication reveals more of the composer’s motivation: “Lux Antiqua” is dedicated to Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan, who met while working with NASA in 1977 to create golden records containing a range of sounds from life on Earth––including the sound of a kiss, greetings in nearly 60 languages, and music from all over the world and throughout history––to include with the Voyager spacecraft, which were designed to document the furthest reaches of our solar system. The records were crafted to be incredibly durable, lasting perhaps a billion years, in case they are someday intercepted by other interstellar travelers capable of listening. Perhaps that extraordinary faith in connection sparked something for Sagan and Druyan, too: they fell in love during the project, announced their engagement days after the first spacecraft was launched, and were married until Sagan’s death in 1996. In the early days of their romance, Druyan even recorded her heartbeat to include on the golden record. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are both still traveling, now far beyond the reaches of our solar system, and continue to carry with them the sounds that are as foundational and familiar here on Earth as our view of the night sky above.
What It Might Say
But most of us don’t have access to golden records containing the sounds of all humanity along with the heartbeat of our beloved. Most of us, in fact, forge connections that are imperfect, and often we find ourselves stymied by the ways in which our communications seem to break down or go awry.
Composer Ted Hearne has structured many of his compositions around systems that have deteriorated or become dysfunctional, first gaining renown in 2007 for Katrina Ballads, an oratorio about the media’s response to Hurricane Katrina. In “What It Might Say,” Hearne brings an intimate focus to text by D. W. Winnicott, a twentieth-century pediatrician and psychoanalyst who, together with his wife and professional collaborator Clare Winnicott, significantly advanced contemporary understanding of children’s developmental psychology.
The Winnicotts’ work suggests that babies and young children only gradually develop their sense of themselves as distinct from their caregivers, sometimes testing those bonds in an unconscious effort to determine the depths of parental love. Building from D. W. Winnicott’s imagined communication from an infant to their mother, Hearne sets the heart-wrenching text straightforwardly and almost casually. The jazzy chords, however, gradually disintegrate, with varying rhythms across the choir’s four voice parts reinforcing that sense of inevitable loss.
Helletused
And yet still we forge ahead in our effort to hear one another. We offer a more literal perspective on this quandary with “Helletused” by the legendary Estonian composer Veljo Tormis, famed for his interpretation of his country’s deep-rooted folk traditions within 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 through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, children shared the responsibilities of tending to their families’ livestock across the woody pastures, with each family developing a unique call with which to herd their animals. Because the calls differed by family, the children used their calls not just to control cattle and sheep but also to howdy their friends in distant fields. With a wordless call-and-response structure between two soprano soloists, we love how “Helletused” invites us to listen, to echo back, and to make something our own, even across the distance of an imaginary pasture or hillside. Despite this pastoral origin, the piece carries a sense of urgency, even ferocity, as soloists and choir together become increasingly fervent amid ever-wilder harmonies and thundering triple-forte crescendos.
Like the Nobles and the Hearne settings, “Helletused” also suggests that our foundational truths and beliefs can carry us far beyond our origins. The title of Tormis’s piece has a double meaning: although many in Estonia would recognize this tenet of herding culture, “Helletused” is also keyed to the actual childhood memories of Aino Tamm (1864–1945), the first professional singer in Estonia. Like many of her generation, Tamm learned traditional herding calls and folksongs in childhood, and the first call in “Helletused”—“alleaa”—is one of her 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 memory and inspiration full circle by quoting the first line of “Lauliku lapsepõli” in “Helletused”, when a quartet interrupts the increasingly untrammeled solos to sing the only text in the piece: “Kui ma olin väiksekene” (“When I was a little one”). Harma’s full piece details how a singer first learned songs and words from the natural world around her, calling us to consider how much of what we each carry in our hearts has come to us from others.
Shining Still
Contemporary American-Dutch composer Vanessa Lann’s “Shining Still” argues that what we cherish can always remain with us, despite the ravages of distance, time, and loss. Commissioned as part of The Crossing’s 2022 “Carols after a Plague” project, Lann writes, “This piece was a response to the paradox in the project title––the power of music, in its simplest sung form, to bring solace after (or maybe during) a global crisis. Of course, pandemics wreak death and destruction, but as Nietzsche famously said, ‘What doesn’t kill [us], makes [us] stronger.’” Lann sets fragments of text adapted from Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, whose poem “Thyrsis” was written to mourn a deceased friend. Lann transforms this valediction into a post-minimalist song about singing, building repeated patterns into looping ostinato figures that reinforce the ardor of the opening phrase.
Stars
And if we leave Lann feeling more assured in our solitude, Ēriks Ešenvalds offers a celestial vision of what might be possible given our place in the universe. A favorite of many contemporary choirs, “Stars” employs tuned water glasses along with text by American poet Sara Teasdale, with a lush, divisi texture complementing the shimmering, fragile tones of the tuned glasses. Favoring changes in texture over large-scale harmonic development, “Stars” is paradoxically static and ever-
moving. Like much of today’s program, that juxtaposition reminds us of gazing at the night sky, recognizing that each unwavering speck of light is in fact a massive, dynamic system in its own right, separated from us by untold distance and yet each as familiar as a friend.
Sing to the Moon
But if the stars dim, or if we can’t hear another voice calling to us across the field, does that leave us alone in the dark? Sometimes, despite our best efforts, that sense of isolation creeps back in, whether because of a pattern learned in earliest infancy or because of a sudden rupture. In those moments, call upon Laura Mvula’s “Sing to the Moon”: originally the title track on her 2013 album, she crafted this choral arrangement in 2022 for the BBC Singers. Just as Tormis re-interpreted a childhood memory of another musician, Mvula’s refrain comes from her interest in jazz singer Adelaide Hall (1901–1993), a major performer in the Harlem Renaissance whose legacy has often been overlooked. In 2013, Mvula recounted that in reading a biography of Hall, she learned that the singer’s father would encourage her by saying, “Sing to the moon and the stars will shine.” The phrase resonated with Mvula, too, and we hope that you might find it similarly powerful.
Notes by Caroline Winschel