Songs to the Midnight Sun

May 6, 2012: First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia

Christopher Barron, Bimal Desai, Ellen Gerdes, Rachel Haimovich, Ranwa Hammamy, Jen Hayman, Michael Johnson, Elissa Kranzler, Ken Olin, Jordan Rock, Dan Widyono, Joy Wiltenburg, Caroline Winschel, Rick Womer

Lähtö, Einojuhani Rautavaara (1928–)

Sommarpsalm, Waldemar Åhlén (1894–1982)

I am the great sun, Jussi Chydenius (1972–)

O nata lux, Thomas Tallis (c. 1505–1585)

O nata lux, Morten Lauridsen (1943–)

Hail, gladdening light, Charles Wood (1866–1926)

Draw on sweet night, John Wilbye (1574–1638)

Syngur sumarregn, Hildigunnur Rúnarsdóttir (1964–)

With a Lily in Your Hand, Eric Whitacre (1957–)

On suuri sun rantas’ autius, traditional Finnish, arr. Matti Hyökki

Sügismaastikud, Veljo Tormis (1930–)

       1. On hilissuvi  

       2. Üle taeva jooksevad pilved  

       3. Kahvatu valgus  

       4. Valusalt punased lehed

       5. Tuul kõnnumaa kohal

       6. Külm sügisöö

       7. Kanarbik

My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land, Edward Elgar (1857–1934)

A confession: when we started working on this program, we didn’t have a clear sense of what we meant by “northern.” Thinking about northern music in itself was difficult—without looking at today’s repertoire, how many northern composers can you name besides Sibelius?—but the idea of building a concert program around such a geographically and linguistically distant region felt audacious. We couldn’t even speak about our cultural impressions of the Far North without relying on what felt like reductive and contradictory stereotypes: reindeer on the tundra, the Muppets’ Swedish Chef, Björk in her swan dress, Ikea.

   In a way, the arc of tonight’s program reflects that early uncertainty. As outsiders, we couldn’t easily parse the Nordic countries’ progression from clans of medieval Vikings to today’s incredibly community-minded social welfare policies, and the shifting intricacies of separate-but-related languages, indigenous cultures, and national loyalties threatened to overwhelm. Stepping outward, we realized that much of our hesitation stemmed from simply feeling daunted by the very alien geography with which we were reckoning: we couldn’t conceive of life in a place that felt so defined by its extreme weather, by its active volcanoes, by its almost-unbroken winter darkness and almost-unceasing summer light.

   By taking those two extremes—winter darkness and summer light—we were able to begin imagining the rhythms of a place that so dramatically diverged from the cycles of our own days. Even as we were reveling in Philadelphia’s early spring, we imagined that the very pace of life—and of change, and of love, and of worship—must feel different during the ever-brighter days of the Far North’s spring and summer, and we knew that the music we sought would reflect this unmoored feeling. We expected, too, that absent the tremendous church-commissioned choral canon of the rest of Europe, the music of the north would feel different in our ears and voices, perhaps bound more to its ancient land than to the relatively recent arrival of the Christian faith. Knowing only that we would be immersing ourselves in foreign and unusual sounds, we started our rehearsals hoping for an adventure—and we weren’t disappointed.

Lähtö

   We begin with Einojuhani Rautavaara’s “Lähtö,” which perfectly captures the venturesome feeling of setting off for places unknown. Like all Finnish composers, Rautavaara works in Jean Sibelius’ long shadow—indeed, he studied and later taught at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki—but here brings in echoes of other musical traditions. In “Lähtö,” we are urged onwards by the constant percussive gallop underlying the melody. The melody itself makes use of a Middle Eastern-sounding alteration between the natural and lowered second, creating a tenuous balance between major and minor tonality and hinting at the exotic and far-off promise of the narrator’s destination.

Sommarpsalm

   “Sommarpsalm,” by contrast, brings us a wonderfully familiar sound and sentiment, celebrating the coming of summer in Waldemar Åhlén’s beautiful setting of a Swedish folk hymn. Although the Nordic countries have been largely Christian since the early middle ages, this kind of conventional-sounding hymn setting is more the exception to their sacred music than the rule. Åhlén, however, an accomplished organist and church music director, resisted the twentieth century’s focus on modern techniques and instead favored the warm, traditional sounds of English-inspired hymnody.

I am the great sun

   Like Åhlén and Rautavaara, Jussi Chydenius’ “I am the great sun” takes inspiration from far-flung traditions: the text, by Cornish poet Charles Causley, was based on a seventeenth-century stone crucifix in Normandy, which was engraved with what became the first line of the poem; and the unearthly drone and eerie overtones with which the piece begin come from the throat-singing practiced by the Tuvans of southern Siberia. For all its exoticism and piety, the piece’s slow build-up is almost reminiscent of a pop song; appropriately enough, Chydenius is perhaps most famous for his work in the Finnish a cappella ensemble Rajaton.

O nata lux

   Chydenius’ unorthodox setting of a sacred text brings us neatly to a trio of non-northern sacred pieces that nonetheless complement the sounds we hear from these northern composers. The use of light as a metaphor for Christ is a familiar trope in all Western cultures, and it becomes all the more powerful when we consider the season-long darkness endured by those in the northernmost latitudes. We turn first to Thomas Tallis’ setting of “O nata lux,” published in 1575 in the Cantiones Sacrae, a joint venture with William Byrd and one of the first sets of sacred music printed in England. Although Tallis and Byrd were both staunch Vikings Catholics, Queen Elizabeth I granted them a twenty-one-year monopoly on polyphony and on printing choral music. Despite this royal dispensation, “O nata lux” makes conservative use of polyphony; its simplicity both reinforces the text’s plea for communion and hearkens to the unembellished clarity of true northern music.

O nata lux

   Morten Lauridsen’s take on “O nata lux,” on the other hand, is thick with individual melodies, with each of the four voice parts spiraling out of one another as they leapfrog through Lauridsen’s signature dense chords. Although Lauridsen’s “O nata lux” is as clearly sacred as Tallis’, the freedom of the tempo allows the piece to feel far more intimate and organic than what we traditionally think of as church music. Some of this may be attributed to Lauridsen’s unusually secluded compositional practice: since 1975, the composer has spent his summers alone on a remote island in the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington State, composing on a fifty-dollar piano inside a rebuilt general store.

Hail, gladdening light

   As we can hear from its warm Anglican sound, Charles Wood’s anthem “Hail, gladdening light” was likely not composed on an uninhabited island or a cheap piano. Indeed, this piece’s polychoral structure hearkens to the late sixteenth century, when Tallis’ contemporaries—many of them working in cathedrals that had multiple discrete choir lofts––refined the antiphonal style of individual choirs singing alternating phrases. For all his reliance on this centuries-old tradition, Wood, an Irish composer and organist, has much in common sonically with his teachers Charles Viliers Stanford and Charles Hastings Parry and his students Ralph Vaughan Williams and Herbert Howells; “Hail, gladdening light,” a traditional evensong hymn, makes use of a broad range of textures and dynamics and two soaring soprano lines to evoke the majesty of god.

Draw on sweet night

   Because “Hail, gladdening light” anticipates the “sun’s hour of rest,” it seems a natural segue to contemplating night as a respite from the northern summer’s near-constant sunlight, and John Wilbye’s “Draw on sweet night,” published in 1609, yearns for nightfall as time of refuge and catharsis. By the time of Wilbye’s flourishing at the turn of the sixteenth century, Tallis and Byrd’s monopoly on polyphony had expired, and we hear Wilbye’s mastery of the new style quite clearly in “Draw on sweet night.” Wilbye is also renowned as one of the best-known English madrigalists, and his keen sense of the text and careful use of “false relations” between major and minor modes are especially evident here.

Syngur sumarregn

   Hildigunnur Rúnarsdóttir, a contemporary Icelandic composer, seems especially well qualified to testify to the soothing qualities of the fleeting summer night, and like Wilbye, Rúnarsdóttir focuses on the intimate calm of nightfall. We hear here one of our favorite attributes of northern music, as the piece doesn’t quite settle on a tonal center; in “Syngur sumarregn,” that quality adds to the organic feeling of listening to a brief summer rainstorm. The repeated dissonant chords in the choral parts evoke the shadow of gathering stormclouds, and the soloist and choir only transition to a cheerful-sounding major chord when the nighttime sun breaks through the gloom in the last verse.

With a Lily in Your Hand

   Eric Whitacre’s “With a Lily in Your Hand” also illuminates an intimate moment in night’s darkness, but this piece has none of the calm reflection we heard in “Draw on sweet night” and “Syngur sumarregn.” In fact, the piece is a bit of a departure even for Whitacre: known especially for his use of dense, luxurious chords, the composer here makes use of insistent, jarring rhythms interspersed with wrenching, electric harmonies. Such anguished chords do well to illustrate the piece’s text, in which the poem’s narrator is determined to return to his lover despite the obstructions of space and time; intrigued as we are by notions of cultures drifting and changing over centuries, the poet’s willingness to admit to such obstructions feels refreshing.

On suuri sun rantas’ autius

   Indeed, the notion of planning a return to a cherished place—or a cherished person—despite a long absence recurs frequently in this northern repertoire. “On suuri sun rantas’ autius” is one of our favorite such folksongs; in this arrangement by Matti Hyökki, we especially like the warmth with which the choral voices envelop the melody line. Like a great deal of northern music, “On suuri sun rantas’ autius” centers around open fifths—rather than the major and minor triads that are more traditional in other European repertoire—and travels through more dissonance than we might expect before settling into its final chords. Despite such surprising  melodic structure, however, this piece speaks to us as viscerally as any Western folksong.

Sügismaastikud

   Veljo Tormis’ Sügismaastikud, or Autumn Landscapes, is a particularly dazzling and heartfelt depiction of the effects of time and distance on a well-loved place. Although less internationally famous than his countryman—and former pupil—Arvo Pärt, Tormis is certainly Estonia’s most famous composer, personally responsible for reviving and preserving the country’s significant culture of folksongs and public singing. Sügismaastikud is the rare Tormis piece that doesn’t contain actual fragments of folksong, but instead—coupled with the poetry of Viivi Luik, written when she was eighteen—it offers a privileged glimpse at the fleeting and ephemeral beauty of the Estonian countryside.

   Tormis’ interest in folksong underlies his tendency to create unadorned and clear choral works: though technically polyphonic, for instance, Sügismaastikud rarely pits one voicepart against another, instead highlighting the moving lines in one part with shimmering sustained chords in the others. As we heard in “Syngur sumarregn,” those chords rarely seem to easily settle into an identifiable tonality, remaining slightly unmoored from what we expect to hear even as they create beautiful and singable melodies. This organic quality pervades most of Tormis’ work, and it is rarely more evident than in “Tuul kõnnumaa kohal,” the fifth movement: the women’s voices move in carefully controlled parallel motion, but their precision culminates in the eerie sound of wind over the barren fields. Such careful use of text painting occurs regularly in Sügismaastikud, and we can hear not only the glissandi of rushing winds but also the atonal staccato of falling autumn leaves and the cascading melody of racing clouds on a windy day.

   Given our own interest in charting the passage of time in these high northern latitudes, we are understandably drawn to Luik’s delicate, frank poetry. Her awareness of loss—noting, for instance, that “this same summer / will ne’er return here”––seems far too knowledgeable for a teenager; one wonders just what a young woman in Soviet-occupied Estonia would have seen and understood to have been so clear-eyed so young. At the same time, we marvel at how eloquently she captures the cyclical nature of time and experience, as when she discovers the controlled burn of moorland heather replacing the glow of late-afternoon autumn sunlight. The piece ends with an unfinished feeling: as the heather blazes in the growing dark, the final chord swells past consonance—employing here strategically deployed sopranos to replicate the natural overtones we heard earlier––and we are reminded that the landscape and our place in it never stop changing.

My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land

   In a more Romantic mood, we conclude with Edward Elgar’s tone poem on the same theme. “My Love Dwelt in a Northern Land” takes its text from Scottish poet Andrew Lang, and the delicacy of Elgar’s setting complements the clarity we heard in Tormis. As with Luik’s text, our awareness here is not simply of the beauty of the northern landscape but also of the perfidy that landscape commits when it does not respond to our own suffering or growth. Although that betrayal—and our own mortality—comes as the concluding shock of the piece, Elgar focuses most of his energies on the unhurried evolution of the “northern land” itself, wistfully underscoring our fleeting presence in comparison with its verdant permanence.

Just as we had hoped, this sun-soaked northern music takes us through an unfamiliar geography, one in which the landscape exerts its pull over us with far more delicate tools than snow and ice. We find an electric, haunting quality in this repertoire, and even as its striking tonality unsettles us, it reels us in. The latitude and the weather and the vowel combinations of the Far North may yet be foreign and unpredictable, but these sounds have become our own.

This Green and Pleasant Land

March 11, 2012: First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia

Christopher Barron, Bimal Desai, Rachel Haimovich, Ranwa Hammamy, Jen Hayman, Michael Johnson, Elissa Kranzler, Ken Olin, Jordan Rock, Joy Wiltenburg, Caroline Winschel, and Rick Womer

The Coolin                                               Samuel Barber (1910–1981) 

O Lady Leave That Silken Thread          Gustav Holst (1874–1934)

Jordan                                                     William Billings (1746–1800)

Yerushalayim Shel Zahav                      Naomi Shemer (1930–2004)

                                                                                       arr. Gil Aldema

Dúlamán                                                     Michael McGlynn (1964–)

The Lake Isle of Innisfree                                Jordan Rock (1982–)

Kasar mie la gaji                                                Alberto Grau (1938–)

Rest                                           Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground             J. David Moore (1962–) 

Locus Iste                                              Anton Bruckner (1824–1896)

The Blue Bird                           Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924)

Silence and Music                   Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958)

Faire is the Heaven                      William Henry Harris (1883–1973)

I Got Shoes         Robert Shaw (1916–1999)

and Alice Parker (1925–)

Lux Antiqua                                                     Jordan Nobles (1969–)

Going Home                                          Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904)

This is a strange time for a concert about paradise. Given the upheaval of the past year—blizzards in October, daffodils in January, vexed farmers muttering about imminent summer drought—it would be easy to feel as though we could no longer rely upon the natural world. Our unease comes from more than the vagaries of our own weather: we have watched from afar as storms and cold and tornadoes rend distant communities, and we have kept silent tallies of the probability that such calamities would strike our lives.

   What helps us face this uncertainty, oddly enough, is history: we are far from the first to have lived through a seemingly unending cycle of natural disasters. The scale of our concerns may be more global, but the mere fact that earlier generations faced the same upheaval is comforting. We might think of early ventures to this country, when fleets of ships carrying whole communities were routinely swallowed by hurricanes; or of the centuries-long process of desertification in northern Africa, which forced untold generations of farmers into wandering and famine; or even of the cholera outbreaks that routinely ravaged nineteenth-century European cities before the advent of proper sanitation. The record of human history is pockmarked with these local tragedies, but the history continues each time regardless.

   In fact, our ancestors did not simply carry on in the aftermath of disaster—they responded. After nursing the injured or rebuilding the bridges, they implored their children to learn from their own misfortune and hubris; in Japan last year after the tsunami, villagers along the coastline uncovered centuries-old stone tablets indicating the high water points of ancient tsunamis, each one engraved with a warning against building on the vulnerable lowlands. As increasingly global communities, we can collectively adapt to new challenges and change our habits—and perhaps most importantly, we can uphold our continued yearning for a safe, verdant space that is somehow insulated from these catastrophes. Our willingness to try again propels us forward from disaster, but it is our perpetual belief in that attainable paradise that inspires our new efforts.

   We take our title today from William Blake, who deplored the pollution and exploitation he saw in eighteenth-century London even as he proposed the “green and pleasant land” of the British Isles as a latter-day Jerusalem. That contradiction seems appropriate for the close of this eerily mild winter. We can respond to the larger concerns in our world without giving up hope entirely, and we know that our salvation—however we may define it—begins with our own efforts. We can make a paradise here.

“The Coolin”

   In that spirit, we begin with Samuel Barber’s “The Coolin,” fully embracing the contradiction of finding lovers’ bliss on a cold, wet hillside. It seems appropriate to begin a place-centered concert with Barber, who was himself a native Philadelphian. Despite those laudable roots, the composer frequently referred to himself as a “throwback Irishman”; “The Coolin” is the last of Barber’s three Reincarnations, composed for the Curtis Institute of Music with text based on traditional Gaelic songs. We can hear echoes of Barber’s Irish inheritance in the Celtic style of “The Coolin,” as his frequently pentatonic melodies scale very large, dramatic ranges in each voice part. The voices thus lilt and sigh along with the wind, and the narrator and his beloved find themselves transported even as darkness falls over the hill.

“O Lady Leave That Silken Thread”

   Gustav Holst’s “O Lady Leave That Silken Thread” also calls upon lovers in nature, but it does so in quite a different key. (Nyuk nyuk.) Here, the outside world is genuinely paradisiacal, wreathed with otherworldly flowers and intoxicating perfume. Although the vocal parts are less sophisticated than those of Holst’s later works, this call-and-response texture—composed when Holst was barely twenty—evokes the raw ardor and joy of the narrator urging his lover outside on a heaven-sent spring day.

“Jordan”

   However trippingly we sing the interwoven lines of Holst’s flirtation, it can never match William Billings’ “Jordan” for sheer exuberance. Indeed, we consistently enjoy Billings for his brazen, earnest sound, and this Sacred Harp tune about an earthly Biblical paradise does not disappoint. In this context, Billings’ forthrightness seems doubly significant: his chosen text—taken from an earlier Protestant hymn—suggests that the singers see clearly (if timorously) the path to paradise before them. Although we tend to think of Billings for his influence on the musical developments that followed his lifetime, it is worth remembering the ways in which he may have been shaped by the politics and religion of his own era; as a citizen of Boston, the self-proclaimed “shining city on a hill,” Billings may well have absorbed early belief in American exceptionalism, suggesting here that inhabitants of his “model city” might be especially able to “stand where Moses stood.”

“Yerushalayim Shel Zahav”

   Following Billings’ eighteenth-century vision of a holy city, we turn to Naomi Shemer’s “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav,” translated as “Jerusalem of Gold.” Written only three weeks before the outbreak of the Six-Day War in 1967, the song immediately became an anthem for the Israeli Defense Forces, celebrating the liberation of eastern Jerusalem and the Old City from the Jordanian occupation. Indeed, unlike Billings’ fairly vague and unattainable paradise, Shemer’s Jerusalem is a habitable, human-scaled place, complete with wells and marketplaces—temporarily inaccessible, perhaps, but not out of reach.

“Dúlamán”

   Michael McGlynn’s “Dúlamán” is similarly earthbound—literally, as the text is extracted from a traditional Irish folksong narrating a nonsense conversation about amorous seaweed. Although the driving rhythms and the lightning speed of the Irish make this great fun to sing, we also like the nationalism embedded behind the silliness: the much-praised lover is repeatedly lauded as Gaelic seaweed, with literal and figurative roots firmly in Irish seabed, and the song itself dates from a period in Irish history when the coastal poor regularly relied upon seaweed as proof against famine. Although the lyrics praise the seaweed for his beret and his fine shoes—suggesting, perhaps, that he’ll be a promising match for the young girl—the song’s history reveals that the idea of the seaweed as salvation is less nonsensical than it might seem. 

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree”

   Pausing in this Irish mood, we’re proud to premiere our dear friend and fellow singer Jordan Rock’s “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” which he composed for us this winter. Yeats’ text—one of our favorites—recalls the small island where the poet summered as a boy; lovely though it may have been, Yeats’ recollection is improved by time, and his imagined Innisfree is more utopian—and blessed with much milder weather—than the actual place. Jordan’s setting reinforces the poet’s real-life presence within his idealized vision, drawing upon a repeated triplet rhythm to mimic the natural cadence of Yeats’ own readings of the poem and changing the piece’s tonal mood as the poet’s thoughts move from utopian Innisfree to real-world Dublin.

“Kasar mie la gaji”

   Earthly though we have been in this first half of the program, neither Barber’s windswept hill nor McGlynn’s nutrient-rich seaweed can compare with the genuine ferocity of Alberto Grau’s “Kasar mie la gaji.” Although Grau himself is Venezuelan, he takes his single line of text, which translates as “The earth is tired,” from a common phrase among the people of the Sahel, a semi-arid belt marking the southern border of the Sahara Desert. The theatrics of Grau’s work—sighs meant to evoke the susurration of wind across the savannas, heavy groans indicating bone-deep fatigue—make plain his environmental consciousness. This piece betrays the fears mentioned earlier; for all that we might strive to repair what we have wrought upon the planet, there can be no denying that the earth is tired.

“Rest”

   We step back from Grau’s fierce invocation of environmental strain for a soothing, calm response in Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Rest.” Here we begin a slow ascent from the very earthly sensuality of the first half of the concert. “Rest,” which uses Christina Rossetti’s poem by the same name, delineates the liminal space between earth and heaven, mortality and afterlife, and sleeping and waking. Vaughan Williams does not describe an eternal contentment, but the sweet yearning of the piece makes it clear that in this in-between moment, the anticipation of paradise is paradise enough.

“There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground”

   J. David Moore’s “There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground” makes use of the same technique—isolating a single moment of thoughtful contentment—in a very different way. Written for the eight hundredth anniversary of the poet Rumi’s birth, the piece’s palindromic structure makes each syllable a meditation on the importance of attentive, intentional living. Taken from a much longer poem on the same theme, this call for thoughtful, deliberate action seems the best response to the crippling fear engendered by our own anxieties about the world.

“Locus Iste”

   Rounding out this set of pieces devoted to single, holy places, Anton Bruckner’s “Locus Iste” brings us the most traditional approach: written for the dedication of a votive chapel in the New Cathedral in Linz, the piece consecrates hallowed ground as touchingly as any spoken blessing. Although Bruckner was widely considered the last great Romantic-era composer, “Locus Iste” feels achingly neoclassical, hearkening to Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus.” The piece is notably low in our collective vocal register, with the basses serving as standard-bearers for each new line of text, and this effect anchors the transcendent text to the earthbound foundation of the chapel and our voices, linking heaven and earth in both music and architecture.

“The Blue Bird”

   Bruckner’s trick of eliding earthly and celestial forces in “Locus Iste” is very much at play in Charles Villiers Stanford’s “The Blue Bird,” too, but here the link is simply a bird, soaring high above the reflective surface of a placid lake. Although much of Stanford’s oeuvre fell out of favor in his declining years, “The Blue Bird” remained consistently popular in the immediate aftermath of World War I, with the quiet rejoicing of the text—“the sky above was blue at last”—made more poignant by the memory of darker days during the war.

“Silence and music”

   “The Blue Bird” has had such perennial appeal that Vaughan Williams turned to it for inspiration in 1953, when he and nine other British composers were commissioned to write new choral pieces celebrating the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Vaughan Williams’ contribution to the “Garland for the Queen” is explicitly dedicated to “the memory of Charles Villiers Stanford and his Blue Bird,” and the piece’s structure—a pure soprano line soaring above the other three voice parts—mimics “The Blue Bird.” The text, written by Vaughan Williams’ second wife, Ursula, picks up on the elision seen in “Locus Iste” and “The Blue Bird,” but with a far more sophisticated tone. The result is a lyrical hymn to the power and depth of music—and silence, music’s necessary counterpart—and to our ability to find the full range of human and divine emotion within the few octaves spanned by our voices.

“Faire is the Heaven”

   Encouraged by Ursula Vaughan Williams’ conviction that divinity is accessible in our music, we turn now to more celestial versions of paradise. William Henry Harris’ “Faire is the Heaven” is by far the most literal and Christian of our selections, but the familiarity of the sentiment is enhanced by Harris’ resonant, joyous setting. Here we make use of the face-to-face antiphonal setup of the English church choirs for whom Harris composed, and we take special pleasure in the segues between the two choral parts, listening for the music to grow more complex as Spenser’s text brings us closer to a confrontation with divinity itself.

“I Got Shoes”

   Where “Faire is the Heaven” proclaims the beauty of heaven by listing the beauties of its inhabitants, “I Got Shoes” takes off from a far simpler notion: if we become angels in heaven, we get wings—and a robe, and a harp, and yes, shoes. The cuteness quotient of Robert Shaw and Alice Parker’s setting of this traditional spiritual makes it easy to forget its harrowing origins; like so many spirituals, “I Got Shoes” reworks the anxieties of enslaved African-Americans for whom even basic needs—like shoes—were inaccessible in this world. The refrain—“ev’rybody talkin’ ‘bout heav’n ain’t a-goin’ there”—hints at widespread hypocrisy within the churchgoing community; in heaven, then, one would find not only justice but true believers.

“Lux Antiqua”

   The trouble with programming a selection of pieces about celestial paradise, however, is that we don’t all identify with the visions sketched in “Faire is the Heaven” and “I Got Shoes.” As a counterpart to Harris, Parker, and Shaw, Jordan Nobles’ “Lux Antiqua,” which premiered this fall in Seattle, offers an exciting and engrossing portrait of the literal heavens. Written for “spatialized choir” so that the singers appear as pinpricks of light and sound within the night sky, “Lux Antiqua” 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; 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 even longer than most religious traditions.

“Going Home”

   Compelling though the far reaches of the heavens may be, few of us are ready to live out the rest of our days there, so we close with something rather more familiar: Antonin Dvořák’s “Going Home.” What is recognizable here is made more remarkable by the fact that Dvořák didn’t actually intend to write a traditional spiritual—in fact, he wasn’t even writing for chorus. The music of “Going Home” was written as the Largo of Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony (“The New World”). William Arms Fisher, an American musician who attended the symphony’s premiere as one of Dvořák’s guests, was so struck by the melody of the Largo movement that he later turned that theme into a traditional spiritual, penning the authentic-sounding lyrics himself.

   In drawing upon Dvořák’s melody and traditional African-American spirituals simultaneously, Fisher demonstrated shrewd resourcefulness, calling upon both his understanding of traditional musical forms and his excitement over the new approaches sketched in the Ninth Symphony. Dvořák, having previously urged American composers to make better use of the great wealth they inherited from their melting pot of musical cultures, was pleased with Fisher’s innovation, seeing the adaptation as a victory for the entire musical community rather than an exploitation of his own work.

         Such ingenuity and generosity characterize much of the history of choral writing––and indeed, of choral singing. As singers, we tend to pay attention to the desires and influences of single actors: we talk about the composer’s wishes or the narrator’s voice or the conductor’s vision, but we rarely talk about the inherent community of choral singing. Today’s program spans a range of individual efforts to pinpoint or cultivate paradise, and the cumulative power of that range is in its diversity. As J. David Moore reminds us in the cascading women’s entrances of his piece, there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground—hundreds of ways to express our devotion to, our appreciation for, and our creativity in our own beloved communities. We sing together each week in tacit understanding of this fact, and we perform today before you all in celebration of the bonds that link us to one another, to the greater Philadelphia community, and to the generations of choral singers and composers whose work we inherit. Yes, we may have also inherited an imperfect world—but together (and with a strong downbeat) we can face it.     

Axis of Medieval

November 6, 2011: First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia

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

Congaudeant Catholici                   Albertus of Paris (fl. 1146–1177)

Jerusalem Luminosa                                         Abbie Betinis (1980–)

Three Psalm Tunes                              Thomas Tallis (c. 1505–1585)

from Nine Psalm Tunes for Archbishop Parker’s Psalter

   First Tune

   Second Tune

   Third Tune

Easter Chorale                                         Samuel Barber (1910–1981)

Tristis est anima mea                           Francis Poulenc (1899­–1963)

from Quatre Motets pour un temps de penitence

Концерт для хора                          Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943)

In Pace                                               William Blitheman (1525–1591)

Quatre motets sur des themes grégoriens Maurice Duruflé (1902–1986)

I. Ubi caritas

    II. Tota pulchra es

III. Tu es Petrus

   IV. Tantum ergo

Two Anonymous Medieval Carols

   Orientis Partibus                                             (c. 1200)

   Agincourt Carol                                              (c. 1415)

Douce Dame Jolie                      Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–1377)

                                                                                   arr. Jordan Rock

Trois Chansons de Charles d’Orléans Claude Debussy (1862–1918)

I. Dieu! qu’il la fait bon regarder

    II. Quant j’ai ouy la tambourin

III. Yver, vous n’estes qu’un vilain

Jézus és a kufárok                                   Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967)

Ave Maria              Franz Biebl (1906–2001)

If we built a time machine and managed to bring Albertus of Paris (fl. 1146– 1177) to the same moment as Abbie Betinis (1980–)—admittedly not everyone’s first goal upon building a working time machine—the meeting might not go very well. Albertus, who served as cantor at Notre Dame in the middle decades of the twelfth century, would certainly be stymied by Betinis’ American English, and he would likely be surprised—if not downright outraged—by her literacy and her independence and her penchant for wearing pants. The awkwardness of the contrived interaction would be our own fault, and our friends would shake their heads disapprovingly. What do they expect? they’d mutter. They don’t even speak the same language. And our friends would be right: the language barrier would surely be insurmountable, and Albertus simply wouldn’t know what to make of Betinis— unless we brought them here today. If they sat with one another for the opening of today’s concert, they would hear Albertus’ “Congaudeant catholici,” the earliest extant example of three-voice polyphony, followed by Betinis’ two-part “Jerusalem Luminosa,” which premiered in 2001 mere blocks from Notre Dame. The pieces have more than Parisian geography in common, and their time-traveling composers might have found that they did, too.

Given that in the mid-twelfth century, polyphony for two voices was still relatively new—the earliest surviving examples date from the early tenth century, and by Albertus’ time polyphony was still controversial within the church— Albertus’ venture into writing music for three independently moving voices would have been a daring exercise. For all that the structure of his piece sounds somewhat familiar—a moving, melismatic melody line atop the droning voices below—we can hear Albertus testing the limits of the expanded polyphonic form, inviting dissonance in the middle voice where we expect only unsophisticated consonance. In our imagined scenario, Albertus might have traveled those centuries with all his twelfth-century prejudices and biases intact, but he would nonetheless be a medieval maverick, willing to seek out innovation and energy in new and unorthodox places. We may therefore imagine that perhaps the performance of his own groundbreaking “Congaudeant catholici” would sufficiently distract Albertus from the surprises of the twenty-first century. Proud of his innovation, he would bask in his unexpected dissonance, and then he would recognize—perhaps with a frisson of surprise—the techniques of his own era in Betinis’ “Jerusalem Luminosa.” The opening monophonic alleluia—all the women in unison on a chant melody—would sound quite familiar, as would the two-voiced reiteration of the same theme, with the altos holding down the drone beneath the sopranos’ chant. The piece then spirals off into an ecstatic game of harmonic leapfrog, but it never loses touch with those medieval cornerstones. Albertus, one of the forefathers of modern music, would feel at home in the first two phrases of Betinis’ twenty-first-century piece, and in that moment, our time travelers would indeed speak the same language.

So much of medieval music history is about language and attempted communication that imagining the meeting of our hypothetical time travelers isn’t a wholly frivolous idea. The advent of polyphony called for new ways to communicate, for as music progressed beyond the monophonic plainchant of the early church, singers could no longer reliably learn everything by ear. The concurrent spread of Christianity added to the problem of faithful transmission; if the liturgy needed to be sung the same way in each of the far corners of Christendom, the musicians would need a consistent way to notate their new pieces.

Medieval music is therefore significant not only for its polyphonic innovations but also for its creation of a system of musical notation. Modern notation was codified in the early eleventh century, and the manuscript for “Congaudeant catholici,” for example, reflects many of the new conventions: Notes are arranged relative to one another on a lined staff, and different voice parts are clearly indicated on different staffs or even in different colors of ink. The handwriting is archaic and the rhythms seem unclear, but this is still recognizably—and singably—music.

For all that Albertus and Betinis might have been able to speak clearly to one another’s polyphony across an eight-hundred-year gulf, theirs was not the only approach for the musicians working within that time span. Indeed, debates about the morality of polyphony raged until the sixteenth century, when extreme factions at the Council of Trent proposed banning polyphonic singing—along with professional musicians and organs—for fear that the independently moving parts would distract from the sacred text. Thomas Tallis (c. 1505–1585), whose homophonic psalm tunes seem quite distinct from the melismas of “Congaudeant catholici,” knew well the shifting loyalties required of early church musicians, and his musical genius was undoubtedly matched by a keen political savvy. Tallis served as a high-ranking church musician under several different—and vastly divergent— English monarchs, tailoring his music to suit the prevailing political and religious trends of each reign and remaining in favor with each successive ruler. A devout Catholic, Tallis was nonetheless a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, whose Anglican reign discouraged the liturgical polyphony that had been popular under Mary I. Tallis’ psalms—written in 1567 as a set of nine for the first Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury—reject entirely the florid Catholic polyphony he had employed during Mary I’s reign, relying instead upon vernacular English and clear, open homophony.

Although the psalm tunes remained obscure for generations after their composition, they have lately enjoyed a renaissance: Ralph Vaughan Williams used the Third Tune as the eponymous theme in his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, providing us with both a handy example of the continued links between early modern and contemporary music and one of our favorite symphonic pieces. Samuel Barber (1910–1981), who shares his birth year with the premiere of Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia, clearly saw no need to embellish on the early modern themes from which Vaughan Williams took inspiration. Instead, his “Easter Chorale,” also titled “Chorale for Ascension Day,” picks up neatly where Tallis left off four centuries earlier. Indeed, the continuity is so seamless that we can segue directly from Tallis’ Third Tune into Barber’s “Easter Chorale,” traversing the centuries in a single page turn. For Barber, the stripped-down homophony that Tallis employed to curry favor with puritanical Anglicans serves here simply to highlight the grandeur and exaltation of the piece’s text and occasion, as the “Easter Chorale” takes its secondary title from its original purpose: Barber composed the work in honor of the April 1965 dedication of the central tower at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. The text, written by Pack Browning (1940–), who was then a graduate student at Berkeley, celebrates both Christ’s resurrection and the natural world’s return to springtime activity. The poem is sufficiently vibrant and evocative as to require very little embellishment from Barber’s music; instead, Barber treats the text reverently, allowing the varying intensity of his music to reflect the moods of the poem. Interestingly, the piece’s inherent exaltation is keyed to one of today’s literal high points: the “Alleluia!” refrain marks the first moment on the program at which our voices reach fortissimo, celebrating a very different but equally valuable kind of ascension.

If Albertus and Betinis illustrate one form of early music and Tallis and Barber build upon another, then Francis Poulenc (1899–1963) neatly straddles both options. His “Tristis est anima mea,” the fourth and final movement of Quatre motets pour un temps de pénitence, merges melismatic flourishes with unadorned chant, resulting in a chillingly dramatic mélange. In contrast to Barber’s “Easter Chorale,” which celebrates the purely triumphant moment of the resurrection, Poulenc’s “Tristis est anima mea” is in a different mode, spotlighting Christ in the moments before his execution. Poulenc makes effective use of text painting to heighten the drama: after the opening soprano solo peals upward in true melismatic fashion, the full choir comes in with hushed urgency, imploring the listener to escape before the executioners arrive. As the narrator gets closer to admitting the dreadful truth of his fate—“You will take flight, and I will go sacrifice myself for you”—the four choral lines become more frantic and disjointed, with dissonant runs trading off between voice parts. Once the terrible pronouncement has been made, however, calm settles, and an objective narration steps in with chant-like simplicity. Nevertheless, this quiet resolution cannot disguise the enormity of the moment, and the piece closes with its complexity intact: the baritones, now serving as the narrator, ascend on uneasy arpeggios while the rest of the choir shimmers on delicately inverted chords. This is resignation, not resolution, made more dramatic by the use of very old techniques to tell an even older story.

To achieve similar dramatic intensity, Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) took a different approach for his Концерт для хора, or “Choral Concerto.” The text here is equally powerful: Rachmaninoff features the Kontakion for the Dormition, the traditional prayer for the feast day commemorating the death—or “falling asleep,” hence “dormition”—resurrection, and ascension to heaven of Mary, the “Theotokos” or “God-bearer.” The prayer seems like an obvious candidate for loud proclamation and exaltation, but Rachmaninoff focuses most of the choir’s energies on more intimate, intensely concentrated gestures. As we saw with Tallis and Barber, this kind of simplicity spotlights the otherwise-subtle nuances of text and voice, allowing the singers to both celebrate and grieve the departed Theotokos. Interestingly, medieval composers were not the only artists who faced censorship from anxious church officials: Rachmaninoff’s “Choral Concerto” was never published in his lifetime, because the slight changes he made to the traditional kontakion caused the piece to be banned by the Russian Orthodox authorities.

An even subtler, gentler form of dormition prayer comes via “In Pace” by William Blitheman (1525–1591). Here, the text is a prayer for the narrator himself; the calm with which the poem invokes the poet’s perpetual slumber is reminiscent of Christina Rossetti’s famous “Rest,” which glorifies a “stillness that is almost Paradise.” Blitheman, however, does not let the mood of the text act as a soporific; instead, he cleverly combines several early musical elements without allowing the junctures between the genres to overwhelm the piece. Although the bulk of the piece is set as a traditional four-part motet, the phrases are interwoven with interjections of plainchant. The chants fill the interstices between the choral phrases, and the piece ends not with the expected motet resolution, but with yet more chant—a reminder, perhaps, that all things must end as they began. In that spirit, the second half of today’s program also begins with chant.

Maurice Duruflé (1902–1986) makes his medieval inspirations clear in his title: Quatre motets sur des thèmes grégoriens are indeed based upon Gregorian themes, with the original chant melodies woven into the choral settings. Such technique is typical of Duruflé, whose Requiem also relies upon familiar liturgical chant, and as a result the four-part choral pieces never stray far from their medieval chant roots. Just as the clear melody lines show the influence of the earliest polyphony, the extended sections of mixed meter clearly stem from the days before bar lines and standardized rhythmic notation.

Our two anonymous medieval carols highlight a different tradition, providing examples of the non-liturgical music of the period. “Orientis Partibus,” a three-part ditty written in France around 1200, is a cheerful mockery of the traditional “O Magnum Mysterium.” Instead of celebrating the “great wonder” of lowly animals being present for the birth of Christ, “Orientis Partibus” simply celebrates a lowly animal: “an ass, handsome and most strong.” The jaunty, interweaving parts are an early example of a profane—that is, non-sacred-––conductus, liturgical versions of which would have been sung while holy texts were being carried to the lectern. “Agincourt Carol,” which dates from 1415, serves an entirely different purpose: in describing King Henry V’s unexpected and bloody victory over the French at Agincourt during the Hundred Years War, it works as a kind of early journalism, narrating the battle and its aftermath for those who remained at home (as long as they could understand the words).

“Douce Dame Jolie,” originally written by Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300– 1377) in the fourteenth century, rounds out our secular medieval programming. Machaut composed prodigiously, and his secular works center almost entirely on the three formes fixes—the ballade, rondeau, and virelai—dictating the rhythmic and rhyming structure of poems and music. “Douce Dame Jolie” is a virelai, a dance-like setting with a pattern of recurring rhymes. Our version, arranged by baritone Jordan Rock, pays homage to the dance origins of the genre in the insistent rhythmic interjections behind Machaut’s melody line. Jordan also provides us with slightly more text painting than Machaut’s original tune had made possible: the narrator, crazed with passion, begs his beloved to let him die rather than suffer further. The tone clusters that build in intensity throughout the third verse suggest that the narrator may be wishing for something other than to end his life, even though he does claim to be “without base thoughts.”

As an heir to the troubadour tradition of poetry and music, Machaut supplied music for many of his poems, but Charles d’Orléans (1394–1465) focused his output solely on poetry. Imprisoned in England after being captured at the battle of Agincourt, d’Orléans wrote most of his poems while in captivity. As a nobleman—indeed, he was heir to the French throne, which contributed to England’s desire to keep him in custody—he was afforded relative comfort during his twenty-four-year captivity, and he became friendly with his captors. Interestingly, all of his poems are in French in the traditional ballade and rondeau forms, suggesting that his learned fluency within the English nobility did not outweigh his French cultural heritage.

Charles Debussy’s (1862–1918) settings of three disparate d’Orléans poems honor their mixed medieval and early modern origins: the hemiolae in “Dieu! qu’il la fait bon regarder” remind us of the rhythmic instability in chant, the thrumming choral pulse in “Quand j’ai ouy la tambourin” serves as a vocal version of the percussive tambourin, and the quartal harmonies prevalent in “Yver, vous n’estes qu’un vilain” hearken back to medieval idealization of the interval of a perfect fourth. Returning to sacred text, Zoltán Kodály’s (1882–1967) “Jézus és a kufárok” relies similarly upon medieval techniques. Like Debussy, Kodály focuses heavily upon the quartal harmonies so revered by medieval composers. Text painting also returns to the fore; as the Biblical text describes the chaos and confusion of the interrupted market scene, the independent voice parts scurry up and down sixteenth-note runs, instigating a kind of call-and-response cacophony.

We close with Franz Biebl’s (1906–2001) “Ave Maria,” an entirely different kind of call-and-response. Biebl takes his cue from the medieval tradition of antiphonal choirs, in which the two choirs would have been arranged spatially along the cruciform arms of the nave of a church, the better to reflect the sacred significance of their music. Like Blitheman, Biebl interjects chant into his polyphony, here using the Angelus—Mary’s encounter with the angel Gabriel—alongside the traditional Ave Maria text. Biebl’s “Ave Maria” has achieved canonical status in contemporary choral repertoire, bringing these medieval echoes to yet another generation of singers.

It is these echoes and traces that make medieval music’s legacy so poignant. Modern music owes its development to the medieval composers who defied their church employers for the sake of writing polyphony; they risked termination—or worse—when they insisted upon integrating their new techniques into the church’s traditions. Ironically, however, the fears of the church elders may yet have been realized: the original efforts to ban polyphony or classify it as demonic music stemmed from a fear that increasingly sophisticated music would distract from the liturgy, gaining primacy over the sacred text. In a way, that’s exactly what has happened: the experiment of polyphony succeeded, and pieces like “Congaudeant catholici” are known and sung now not for their sacred text but for their musical interest. The musical frames that were once vessels for their holy words have become sacred in their own right, venerated by generations of musicians who worship this shared culture of intricacy and enlightenment. The words, as it turns out—and as Albertus and Betinis could have told us—are immaterial. The music is what sustains us.