The Northern Wild

Saturday, November 18 at 8 PM
Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill
8855 Germantown Avenue in Philadelphia

Sunday, November 19 at 5:30 PM
First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia
2125 Chestnut Street in Philadelphia

Concert Program

In programming The Northern Wild, we searched for a musical kernel that would make a concert of a wide range of styles hold together in a compelling way. In that search, we realized that our favorite music by composers like Veljo Tormis, Jean Sibelius, and Eriks Ešenvalds simply sounds like it couldn’t come from anywhere else in the world. This is not to say that all the music we’ll sing sounds the same—far from it. Tormis’ folk roots could not be more different than the cerebral soundscapes of R. Murray Schafer, while Sibelius and Elgar teeter on the threshold between the late romantic and early modern. But despite all the differences, the wild North is the irreplaceable central character in all of the pieces. This music is grounded in visceral explorations of what it’s like to be in the North, to have the wild earth beneath one’s feet and to be in the unwavering watch of the same celestial bodies for months on end.

There is a loneliness in the way much of this music stretches out like the untouched lands and vast skies it evokes. But in regions still dominated by primal forces, there is great joy in making singular human connections—with a neighboring cowherd across acres of pasture, with a lover thought lost over the hillside, or simply with oneself in the stillness of the pines. These connections are why we sing together, and why we’ll be so glad to have you join us.

Mother Tongue:

Kodály’s Hungary

June 3 and 4, 2017

Sonja Bontrager, Conrad Erb, Amy Hochstetler, Nicandro Iannacci, Michael Johnson, Elissa Kranzler, Nathan Lofton, Cortlandt Matthews, Brian Middleton, Hank Miller, John Piccolini, Rebekah Reddi, Jordan Rock, Eddie Rubeiz, Lizzy Schwartz, Melinda Steffy, Emily Sung, Caroline Winschel, Michele Zuckman

Norvég leányok                                          Zoltán Kodály (1882—1967)

Akik mindig elkésnek

Köszöntő



Hymns from the Old South                    Virgil Thomson (1896—1989)

·       My Shepherd Will Supply My Need
·       The Morning Star
·       Green Fields
·       Death ‘Tis a Melancholy Day



Pange lingua                                               Zoltán Kodály (1882—1967)

Pange lingua                                                      György Orban (b. 1947)

 Intermission 

Matrai Kepek                                              Zoltán Kodály (1882—1967)

Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit             arr. William Dawson (1899—1990)

Shenandoah                                                 arr. Steven Sametz (b. 1954)

Elijah Rock                                            arr. Moses Hogan (1957—2003)

Notes on the Program

Zoltán Kodály was a prolific composer, philosopher, linguist, and music educator whose pedagogy remains in use throughout the world. Today, however, we celebrate his legacy as a champion of folk music. With his colleague Béla Bartók, Kodály traveled his native Hungarian countryside cataloguing local folk songs. His work as an ethnomusicologist helped elevate folk music from a peasant genre scorned by classical musicians to a valid and vital source of musical inspiration––not just in Hungary but around the world.

Kodály sought to understand and value his own Hungarian cultural roots through his work, but his legacy gives value to vernacular music in any and every community. He wrote, “What is universally human can be approached by all peoples only through their specific, national characteristics.” Today we approach “what is universally human” not only through Kodály’s own compositions and arrangements of Hungarian folk melodies but also through American musical traditions from the same period. Kodály’s work spotlights the value of music grown organically from the experiences of everyday people.

We begin with a range of Kodály’s Hungarian works treating very distinct themes but each with the composer’s typically evocative melodies. Norvég leányok takes us to faraway Norway, with a heavy undercurrent of melancholy and homesickness. Composed in 1940 with a contemporary text by Hungarian poet Sándor Weöres, the piece has been interpreted as support for the Norwegian people suffering under Nazi occupation. The local girls give their smiles to “a foreign lad,” presumably a sailor, and they are left with no laughter for themselves at home. Kodály’s lilting melodic lines suggest both the girls’ unheard sighs and the ever-present sea breeze; the gentle persistence of raindrops––in both sound and text––throughout the piece situates us completely in this misty fishing village. Akik mindig elkésnek has an even darker feeling, alternating between the tired sadness evoked by the poem and fiery sixteenth-note figures that offer brief glimpses of hope before ultimately flickering out.

Köszöntő is actually Kodály’s arrangement of a well-known Hungarian folksong. Its title means “toast,” and it is traditionally sung as a birthday greeting in Hungary. Kodály takes the traditional tune and embellishes not only with harmony but also with a slightly unsettling counterpoint: listen for the tenors almost echoing the melody, but off by a beat and in a different key.

Kodály’s contemporary in another culture, the American composer Virgil Thomson spent time in Paris, where he studied Satie and befriended Gertrude Stein, later setting her writing to music. Many of his works were avant garde, and he was a critic and something of a cynic––he famously defined music as “that which musicians do.” But his Hymns from the Old South betray his traditional side and his Missouri roots with their loving treatment of American folk hymns. Thomson’s arrangements are simple, honoring the original hymn tunes without much in the way of arranging beyond harmonizing. Both My Shepherd Will Supply My Need and Death, ‘Tis a Melancholy Day have texts by Isaac Watts, who is known as the father of English hymnody. The former’s American pedigree goes even deeper, as it is set to the hymn tune “Resignation” from the 1835 Southern Harmony. Similarly, the text of Green Fields was written by Anglican clergyman John Newton, who is better known as the author of “Amazing Grace.” The Morning Star also uses a text that hails from Europe––it is an English version of the hymn Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern by Phillipp Nicolai, which J. S. Bach used for one of his choral cantatas. But these European texts became distinctly American when they were set to music in Southern Harmony and similar popular hymnals. For the people in the American South who gathered to sing these hymns, they were––and are––as much an expression of community as of religious conviction.

Kodály valued the cultural traditions of sacred music as well as secular folk music. Pange Lingua takes the hymn by St. Thomas Aquinas and expands it with a contrapuntal treatment whose result is evocative despite its simplicity. Like Kodály, Romanian-born Hungarian composer György Orban draws from Renaissance techniques, but in contrast, Orban also draws inspiration from jazz and adds intricate rhythmic elements that are anything but simple.

Kodály’s folk focus is perhaps best encapsulated in Mátrai képek, or Mátra Pictures, a boisterous compilation of folksongs from the Mátra region of Hungary. Composed in 1931, the piece features five folksongs from the mountainous northern region. Kodály’s setting emphasizes the narrative aspect of each tune, with stark emotional and dynamic contrasts: a depiction of the famous outlaw Vidróczki, a nineteenth-century bandit; an exchange between a village boy who yearns for a more cosmopolitan life and his no-nonsense sweetheart; a mournful plaint from one who has left his home—perhaps even the sailor we encountered earlier in Norway; a playful and flirtatious exchange between a young woman working in the fields and a suitor who believes she deserves a gentler vocation; and finally, a rousing vignette of the comic dramas of country life, including uncooperative livestock, unwanted guests, and insufficient wine.

We close the program by returning to our home soil with arrangements of American folk tunes. Although these settings are lively and upbeat, they—like Kodaly’s folksongs—speak to darker elements of our history. Our country’s musical inheritance includes this rich tradition borne out of centuries of oppression and suffering—likely a legacy that would have been familiar to Kodály, given Hungary’s violent political upheaval and occupation during his lifetime. Knowing the cultural significance of these American traditions, we can only imagine what resonance might have once been carried in the mournful tunes about Hungarian bandits or livestock.

Here in the States, enslaved people of African and African-American descent may have used spirituals like these to discreetly pass news or messages­­––Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit features a train that is thought to be a reference to the Underground Railroad. This song and Elijah Rock are representative of spirituals in their Christian content, but they are more than mere hymns: like Thomson’s assertive settings and Kodály’s folk tunes, they testify to a community and a faith that is deeply, viscerally felt and needed.

Local composer Steven Sametz arranged Shenandoah for his choir at Lehigh University. The song’s precise origin is unknown, but it is thought to come from Canadian and American voyageurs: fur trappers and traders who, in the early nineteenth century, were the only people of European descent who ventured west to the Missouri River, where encountered the Oneida Iriquois, perhaps including a chief named Shenandoah. Like many of the melodies we’ve heard today, the piece’s beauty and its melancholy are inextricably linked. This is ultimately the power of the vernacular tunes that Kodály championed: although the people and places depicted in these melodies are far away or long gone, we meet them again in their songs. That is worthy of a toast, indeed.

Divinity Breathed Forth
The Eternal Hildegard

March 25, 2017: Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill 

March 26, 2017: Old St. Joseph’s Church

Sonja Bontrager, Conrad Erb, Amy Hochstetler, Nicandro Iannacci, Michael Johnson, Elissa Kranzler, Nathan Lofton, Cortlandt Matthews, Brian Middleton, Hank Miller, John Piccolini, Rebekah Reddi, Jordan Rock, Eddie Rubeiz, Lizzy Schwartz, Melinda Steffy, Emily Sung, Caroline Winschel, Michele Zuckman

Love bade me welcome                                         Judith Weir (b. 1954)

O frondens virga                              Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179)

O frondens virga                                                    Frank Ferko (b. 1950)

Gitanjali Chants                                        Craig Hella Johnson (b. 1962)

Prayer of St. Teresa of Avila                          Ruth Byrchmore (b. 1966)

Three Themes of Life and Love                          Daniel Elder (b. 1986)

1.     In Your Light
2.     A Breathing Peace
3.     Drumsound Rises

Andy Thierauf, percussion

intermission 

Awed by the beauty                                       John Tavener (1944–2013)

Caritas abundat                                Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179)

Caritas abundat                                               Frank Ferko (b. 1950)

O virtus Sapientiae                   Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179)

O virtus Sapientiae                                                Frank Ferko (b. 1950)

O virtus Sapientiae                                       Karen P. Thomas (b. 1957)

O vis aeternitatis                               Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179)

The Deer’s Cry                                                          Arvo Pärt (b. 1935)

Notes on the Program

At the beginning the story is unremarkable, so ordinary that the details are lost to time and inattention. A young girl is sickly, and her parents are already burdened with many sturdier children and other cares besides. Surely someone else could do more for the child—or surely someone else could lessen the parents’ load. The girl is deposited with the local church, where she can learn to be of use and where her contributions will reflect well on her parents. Her family does not return.

And for untold numbers of children, especially girls, the story ends there. We do not know the destinies of the other young nuns at that church, just as we have long ago lost the names—let alone the stories—of this girl’s older sisters. But her story gleams brightly from the depths of history, because the young girl in question—maybe eight years old, maybe already fourteen—is Hildegard of Bingen. We know what she became: respected abbess and traveling preacher, extraordinary correspondent, the founder of German natural history, the earliest known female composer, and a saint in the Catholic church. At the moment when our story begins, of course, this child does not yet carry such renown. But already, as an 8-or-14-year-old, Hildegard is electrified by visions, aware of a deep resonance between herself and the wider universe. That faith—and the curiosity, love, and longing that she spent a lifetime cultivating—has sustained Hildegard’s legacy since the early 1100s, when this story begins.

Almost a thousand years later, we sing today in celebration of Hildegard’s legacy: not only for the inspired theology and music that burnishes her sainthood but also for the memory of that young girl, sickly and alone, holding tight to a vision of love and abundance. Hildegard understood divinity as a visceral experience, inextricably linked to the five senses and deeply rooted in our physical bodies. This concert intersperses Hildegard’s writings and chants with works by other composers and poets, for though her circumstances will always be extraordinary, her devotion and her humanity have been reflected by seekers and believers of many times and many faiths. Whatever your beliefs, whatever your burden, we hope that Hildegard’s assertions of connection and love take root in your lives today.

“Love bade me welcome,” Judith Weir

We open with an invitation spurned: “Love bade me welcome,” writes George Herbert, a 17th-century Anglican priest and poet, “but my soul drew back, guilty of dust and sin.” The contemporary Scottish composer Judith Weir’s luminous setting of Herbert’s clear-eyed text draws us alongside the hesitant invitee, with Love’s welcome unfolding reassuringly after each discordant protest.

“O frondens virga,” Frank Ferko

As an organist and a liturgical composer, Frank Ferko has long been drawn to two major influences: Hildegard of Bingen and the 20th-century composer Olivier Messiaen. This excerpt from his Six Marian Motets, composed in 1994, reflects both interests: unlike the other movements of the larger work, “O frondens virga,” which is the sixth and final movement, sets one of Hildegard’s sacred poems rather than a traditional liturgical text. The gently swaying tempo feels both medieval and modern at once, blooming from chant-like simplicity to a lilting rhythmic dance.

“Gitanjali Chants,” Craig Hella Johnson

After the invitation of “Love bade me welcome” and the invocation of “O frondens virga,” Craig Hella Johnson’s setting of Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore brings us finally into direct, intentional communion with “the great music of the world.” Johnson combines two non-sequential poems from Tagore’s collection Gitanjali, or “Song Offerings,” with the simple chant structure offering beauty in both song and silence.

“Prayer of St. Teresa of Avila,” Ruth Byrchmore

Although Teresa of Avila lived more than four centuries after Hildegard, their lives have some parallels: Teresa also entered the church at a young age, studying with the nuns at Avila after her mother’s untimely death. Whether from grief or illness, Teresa also suffered from physical weakness—and from ecstatic and visceral visions. At a time when the Catholic church wielded great political and artistic power, Teresa’s visions inspired her to assume a life of deep poverty and pious solitude, and she helped found the religious order known as the Discalced Carmelites, whose asceticism included even going barefoot, or “discalced.” Ruth Byrchmore, a contemporary British composer, sets Teresa’s famous litany with an intentionally eerie sense of conviction, noting that the mood of the piece should be “steady, reflective, [and] intensely calm.”

Three Themes of Life and Love, Daniel Elder

We consider another mystical perspective—or perhaps several perspectives––with the American composer Daniel Elder’s Three Themes of Life and Love, which draw upon Coleman Barks’s contemporary interpretations of the 13th-century Persian poet and Sufi mystic known as Rumi. For Sufis—both in the thirteenth century and today—the divine is also the beloved, as intimate and affirming as a lover. Elder’s settings draw upon this joyous duality of divine and inward love, layering crystalline Western percussion over sweeping melodic lines and repeated, exuberant rhythms.

“Awed by the beauty,” John Tavener

Many of us, regardless of our faith, likely do not experience the world with the kind of ecstasy and devotion for which Hildegard and this program’s other mystics are known. We generally find it easier to grasp such concepts in smaller building blocks, catching glimmers of deeper truths. Thus must we also experience this anthem by the renowned John Tavener: “Awed by the beauty” is a two-minute excerpt from an all-night, seven-hour piece that Tavener referred to as “the supreme achievement of my life and the most important work that I have ever composed.” The piece bears the hallmarks of Tavener’s “holy minimalism”—chant-like simplicity and microtones suggesting Eastern Orthodox liturgy––with a Byzantine text translated by Mother Thekla, Tavener’s spiritual advisor and longtime librettist.

“Caritas abundat” and “O virtus Sapientiae,” Frank Ferko

We return to Frank Ferko with selections from his larger Hildegard Triptych. These works, scored for double choir, again reflect Messiaen’s influence on the composer, with dissonant tone clusters giving way to shimmering harmonies. Growing from an initially disquieting opening in the men’s voices, “Caritas abundat” employs serene chant phrasing passed between the two choirs until the phrase “de imis excellentissima super sidera,” which Ferko translates as “from the depths to the heights of the stars.” Here the two choirs come fully together for the first time, building towards a rich, luminous cluster and opening to warm consonance to “[bestow] the kiss of peace.” A different technique drives “O virtus Sapientiae,” in which the two choirs layer dance-like contrapuntal motifs. Like the three wings of wisdom, the piece’s unfolding texture swoops “to the heights” and “from the earth” before finally “[flying] from all sides.”

“O virtus Sapientiae,” Karen P. Thomas

Our women offer another interpretation of this text thanks to the American composer Karen P. Thomas, from whose Lux Lucis this motet is drawn. In contrast to the formality of Ferko’s setting, Thomas moves seamlessly between warmly unfolding chant and soaring aleatoric, or ad-libbed, phrases. The result evokes both birdsong and prayer, reinforcing the elemental, deeply physical nature of Hildegard’s sacred text.

“The Deer’s Cry,” Arvo Pärt

We close with a different sort of prayer: St. Patrick’s Lorica, which dates to the fourth century. The Latin word “lōrīca” originally meant “armor” or “breastplate”; in the monastic tradition, a lorica is a prayer for protection. The contemporary Estonian composer Arvo Pärt—who cheerfully refuses to be categorized as a mystic––constructs a towering invocation from the prayer’s simple mantra. But as we remember the essential humanity at the heart of our search from the divine—and as we are haunted by our vision of the young girl watching her family depart––we find the silences in Pärt’s prayer as affecting as the ancient text. The composer hints at a darkness that we all––saints and seekers alike––must confront in our lives. And there, if we listen for it with our whole selves, will love bloom.