40 Voices Singing: Masterworks for Massed Choirs

40 Voices Singing: Masterworks for Massed Choirs

March 14 and 15, 2015
featuring the Chestnut Street Singers, The Laughing Bird, and PhilHarmonia
Josh Dearing and Mitos Andaya Hart, conductors

Vaclovas Augustinas, “Anoj pusėj Dunojėlio”
Jordan Nobles, “Lux Antiqua”
Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson, “Heyr, himna smiður”
Thomas Tallis, “Spem in alium”
Ralph Vaughan Williams, Kyrie from Mass in G minor
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Gloria from Missa sine nomine à 4
Igor Stravinsky, “Russian Credo”
William Albright, Sanctus and Benedictus from Chichester Mass
Samuel Barber, “Agnus Dei”

Notes on the Program
Today’s program was designed as a showcase for ensemble-level collaboration: to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the founding of the Chestnut Street Singers, Philadelphia’s only collaborative chamber choir, we are collaborating with other choral groups on works that none of us would be able to perform alone. This performance would not be possible without our dedicated, extraordinary, inspiring partner ensembles, The Laughing Bird and PhilHarmonia. They are a joy to sing with, and we are honored to share this program with them.

Even though this concert is meant to champion choirs and choral singing, today’s program does just as much to spotlight individual voices within the larger texture. The nature of choral singing usually lends itself to thinking of the choir as a faceless wall of sound–not so today. As fifty of the city’s finest choral singers surround the audience, you will hear some voices more than others. You will hear natural differences in tone, timbre, and phrasing, and you will hear individual voices singing independent lines and improvising on common themes.

Choral singers don’t usually encourage anything other than uniform sonic blend, but we find ourselves delighted with the juxtaposition between large-scale masterworks and the richly textured sound of individual singers. The contrast reveals the human scale of this ambitious repertoire: these cathedrals of sound are built on foundations made of little more than the breath and focus of individual singers.

This kind of musical high-wire act testifies to the strength and vitality of the Philadelphia choral community. Partnering to sing this repertoire requires technique and trust in equal measures. We are thrilled to have such resources at our disposal, and we are honored to share them with you.

Anoj pusėj Dunojėlio
We open with a traditional Lithuanian folksong embellished with distinctly non-traditional choral techniques. Composer Vaclovas Augustinas, who learned this tune as a child, preserves the piece’s original melody but instructs the female singers to perform the opening section heterophonically, with each singer entering in her own time and at her own tempo. The result is a complex cloud of sound, grounded by the men’s overtone singing. The heterophonic effect returns as the piece grows towards a climax, with each singer improvising around the same melodic theme.

Lux Antiqua
Jordan Nobles’ “Lux Antiqua” goes even further in exploring an unstructured choral sound. 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; 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 the religious traditions represented elsewhere in the program.

Heyr, himna smiður
We return to a more traditional sound with Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson’s modern setting of a twelfth-century poem by Kolbeinn Tumason (1173–1208). The poem is the oldest surviving religious poem in Scandinavia; local lore holds that Tumason, once one of Iceland’s most powerful chieftains, composed the poem on his deathbed after being injured in battle. The resulting hymn is widely known in Iceland, where it is often sung at funerals, but it came to our attention in a viral YouTube video of Áristíðir, an Icelandic indie-folk band, casually singing in a German train station. The hymn’s simple structure and plaintive harmonies allow our men to make the most of the expressive text.

Spem in alium
Thomas Tallis is generally regarded as one of the greatest English composers, and “Spem in alium,” written for forty singers each performing individual parts, is his masterpiece. The piece was composed around 1570, likely inspired by a similarly complex work by the Italian composer Alessandro Striggio. Some historians even suggest that the piece may have been written to celebrate Queen Elizabeth I’s fortieth birthday in 1573, but Tallis’ motivation for the work remains obscure.

The motet is designed for eight identical quintets of soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, and bass. The piece opens with each quintet singing in turn as the music moves through the eight choirs; the pattern is then reversed, with the music passing from Choir 8 back to Choir 1. In today’s performance, you’ll hear Choir 1 begin the piece from the front left corner of the hall, with the successive choirs standing clockwise around the audience. As the music intensifies, the choirs begin singing in antiphonal pairs—listen for a call-and-response structure moving across the circular choir. Although individual voices imitate earlier patterns, each part is unique. The piece builds to final triumphant crescendo with all forty voices weaving together.

Kyrie
For the second half of today’s program, we present an eclectic mass in which each movement is drawn from a different a cappella setting of the traditional liturgy. We open with the Kyrie from Vaughan Williams’ Mass in G minor. The movement is grounded by a stirring chant line in the alto part, with the altos’ stately phrases bookending more modern harmonies in the choral and solo parts.

Gloria
We return to the late sixteenth century with the Gloria from Palestrina’s Missa sine nomine à 4. Palestrina was a tremendously prolific composer: he wrote more than 200 motets in the last decades of his life and more than 100 masses. Missa sine nomine à 4–literally the “mass without a name for four [voices]”––was written near the end of his life, probably around 1584.

Russian Credo
Stravinsky’s devotion to the Russian Orthodox Church is evident in his Russian Credo, so named to distinguish it from the Credo movement of his full mass. Although the mass, written in the 1940s for choir and orchestra, uses the Roman Catholic liturgy, Stravinsky’s standalone Russian Credo is to be sung in unemphasized, chant-like Russian. The simple, repetitive harmonic structure hearkens to the Russian Orthodox liturgy, with Stravinsky’s stern performance notes––“non forte, non espressivo”–– ensuring that the text retains its meditative feel.

Sanctus and Benedictus
In 1974, American composer William Albright was commissioned to write for the nine hundredth anniversary celebration of the Chichester Cathedral in Sussex, England. The resulting work, Chichester Mass, was premiered by the Cathedral Choir in June 1975.

In the Sanctus, one can hear elements of improvisation and phasing to create what Albright envisions as a holy “cloud-like” atmosphere from which the text emerges in a “veiled and mysterioso” manner. In contrast to the vagueness of this movement, the upper voices proceed to the Benedictus in a quick, psalmodic fashion giving rise to a polychordal exclamation of “Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord.” The traditional Hosanna––set only once at the end of the Benedictus rather than in both movements––blazes in modes of E with lively clips and buzzing fragments leading to the frenzied and ultimate climax.

Agnus Dei
We close with a choral masterpiece that wasn’t originally written for choir: Barber’s “Agnus Dei” began as the second movement of his String Quartet, Op. 11, also known as the Adagio for Strings. The original piece for string quartet was arranged for string orchestra in 1937; Barber re-set the music for choir in 1967, making only very slight changes to the orchestral arrangement. Like the “Russian Credo,” the “Agnus Dei” is a standalone piece rather than an excerpt from a full mass setting. As the close to our eclectic mass, it carries great yearning and power in its relatively simple musical