In the grand scheme of things, the 500 years since Europeans and enslaved Africans began settlement of the Western Hemisphere has been very short. The cultures they brought with them— the art, music, technology, religion, social structure, foods, all of that— reflected many centuries, even millennia, of development on the Eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean. All of the new countries that eventually were constituted on our side of the ocean had to deal, to varying degrees, with the clash, the mixing, of these disparate European and African cultures, and with the indigenous cultures already in place.
Christianity, in many of its manifestations, was a dominant front in this invasion, bringing swift and cataclysmic change. Broadly generalizing: British settlement of the Eastern seaboard brought several versions of protestantism; Spanish and Portuguese settlement of Central and South America, as well French Canada and the southwestern portion of the United States, brought Roman Catholicism. Scandinavians and Germans brought Lutheranism to the Midwest. Africans were not allowed to practice their religions openly, but aspects of their native religious practice informed the development of African American culture as surely as the Christianity which was forced upon them.
Each of these groups brought established musical practice and repertoire from its region of origin. Long before the arrival of refined Western European concert music, the new Americans were making both sacred and secular music, mostly based on the European music with which they were familiar. North American Protestant church music, typically sung by members of the congregation in a variety of European languages, gradually came to be sung in English, which brought it into the mainstream. Roman Catholic music, because it was sung in Latin by smaller, trained choirs, was much slower to adapt to the broader culture. Secular music— what we are likely to call folk music today— quickly adapted to cultural change, developing into something new and less European.
Beginning about mid-twentieth century, composers, arrangers, and conductors, reacting to the predominance of formal Western European art music in American concert life, began to pay serious attention to this “roots” American music, and sought to develop a music that was more reflective of the American experience. Two of the most important people in this movement in the United States were Robert Shaw (1916-1999) and Alice Parker (1925-2023). Together, they discovered and researched hundreds of North American songs, from a variety of sources, and arranged many of them for SATB choir. I heard Mr. Shaw say, in a question and answer session during a Carnegie Hall choral workshop, that Ms. Parker, a talented composer herself, did most of the arranging, remaining scrupulously within the harmonic and melodic framework of the original materials while creating high quality choral works for modern ensembles. Mr. Shaw, a conductor, primarily advised her on what would work with audiences, what would make performances “pop.” Their arrangements, some of them from as early as the late 1940s, continue to be in print, and have sold millions of copies throughout the world, effectively defining the genre. Chorale will sing three of them in our upcoming concerts: Hark, I Hear the Harps Eternal, Wondrous Love, and My God is a Rock. The first two are from the Sacred Harp hymnal of early American hymns; the third is an African American spiritual.
Choral Music in the Americas
The idea for Chorale’s current project, “Choral Music in the Americas” came to me over a year ago, while I was watching the “White Lotus” HBO series. Intrigued by the first season’s Hawaiian background music, much of it arranged for choir, I contacted a friend with ties to the Twin Cities-based group “The Rose Ensemble” (since disbanded), which had performed and recorded the music. She referred me to their recordings and scores. I listened, perused, and decided that these pieces, though appropriate for the series, would not work for Chorale. In the process of working through them, however, it struck me that this music from the Pacific islands was American Choral Music, and that I had never before thought of it in that light. This set me to thinking about the far-flung nations and cultures that should be considered under the umbrella of American choral music— a vastly broader spectrum of choral expression than I had previously considered.
At the same time, Chorale was performing Misatango, by Argentinian composer Martin Palmeri. My background reading about the tango genre impressed upon me the role that synthesis and hybridization have played in the development of American music of all types, from the Atlantic to the Pacific and the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego. These developments have taken shape in fairly recent times, as the result of wave after wave of immigration and conquest, and our musics reflect these waves, and the new cultures that have resulted.
I knew I could touch on only a fraction of all this in a single concert, but I thought I’d take a stab at presenting representative sources, composers, and arrangers, which contribute to the kaleidoscopic whole we call American music.
North Americans are most aware of the British/Scottish/Irish settlement of our east coast, from New England down to Georgia. These settlers brought both sacred and secular music with them, which will be represented in our program by two arrangements from the Sacred Harp hymnal, plus an arrangement of the well-known sea chanty, Shenandoah. These arrangements are as much part of our history as the original source material, demonstrating the interpretations of these European sources by modern, American ears.
I have chosen three contemporary, original compositions from the Caribbean and South America: from Cuba, El juramento, by Miguel Matamoros; Venezuela, O Magnum Mysterium, by Cesar Carrillo; and Haiti, Dominus Vobiscum, by Sydney Guillaume. Turning next to Canada, we will present Vision Chant, an original composition by Cree composer Andrew Balfour, based upon an Indigenous chant style. This will be followed by Brier, a Good Friday motet, composed in 2004 by Jeff Smallman. Following these Canadian compositions, we will sing Let My Love Be Heard, by Minnesota composer Jake Runestad.
Central to our program will be Samuel Barber’s magisterial Agnus Dei, based by the composer on his well-known Adagio for Strings.
We’ll conclude with a set of three African American pieces. The first, My God is a Rock, is arranged by the team of Robert Shaw and Alice Parker. The second, The Word was God, is an original composition by Rosephanye Powell, an African American female composer. The third, Joshua!, is an arrangement of a traditional spiritual by African American composer Stacey Gibbs. They present three very different points of view on this important American genre.
Does this sound like a DMA lecture-recital? It won’t be, I promise you. Each of these pieces is compelling in its own right, and they fit together as an engaging whole. You’ll be proud you live on this side of the Atlantic.
Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms, 1853
Chicago Chorale has performed a lot of music by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) over the course of our history. Our CD, "A Chorale Christmas," features one of his motets, Es ist das Heil uns kommen her; we have presented the two piano/four hands version of his German Requiem; and we have sung various of his motets in combination with works by Bruckner, Mendelssohn, and Rheinberger. But all of that was several years ago; we have focused primarily on twentieth and twenty-first-century music since we last tackled him. This winter, though, we have returned to two of his most beautiful and famous a cappella works, Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Mühseligen? and Ich aber bin elend.
Brahms, like Mendelssohn, was thought by his detractors to be conservative, even reactionary, in his own time. He adhered to time-honored forms and genres— "pure music"—while his contemporaries in the New German School veered in a more rhapsodic, freely expressive direction, often in response to outside, non-musical stimuli. Some critics found his music inexpressive and overly academic. Fortunately, better heads and ears prevailed: Brahms enjoyed a brilliant, highly-productive career, composing for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, voice, and chorus. His works in all these genres are performed regularly; his place on the A-list of historic European composers is secure.
Also, like Mendelssohn, Brahms grew up in a musical environment but on a different social plane. His father was a jobbing musician, playing both winds and strings; his mother was a seamstress. Recognizing his talent, his parents arranged musical training for him and encouraged him to pursue a performing career. He was energetic and independent, and, though he lacked the Rinancial backing and social connections enjoyed by Mendelssohn, he met inRluential people who would help him develop a successful career, as both pianist and composer.
Brahms' family was Lutheran, but he did not practice any religion as an adult. Nonetheless, he was well acquainted with the Bible and set numerous Biblical texts, both in his major German Requiem and in his numerous a cappella motets. As a young man, he studied a number of J.S. Bach's cantatas and often based his own motets on Bach's models. He composed Warum ist das Licht gegeben dem Mühseligen? in 1877 in memory of Hermann Göß, who had died after suffering from a prolonged illness. He reused musical material from an unfinished Latin mass, Missa canonica, which he had begun in 1856. Very much in Bach's style, he structured the motet as a series of three movements— including a fugue and a canon for six voices— followed by a harmonization of Luther's chorale, "Mit Fried und Freud ich fahr dahin."
The second Brahms motet on our program, Ich aber bin elend, consists of a single movement for an eight-part double chorus and is probably the last choral work he composed (1889). Though brief in duration, it expresses the same fears, doubts, and hope for salvation that Brahms explores at greater length in the earlier Warum.
Felix Mendelssohn
Portrait of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy by Eduard Magnus, c. 1846
Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) was recognized early as a child prodigy, compared to the young Mozart by contemporary observers. His father was a well-to-do banker, and the family environment was cultured and intellectual. Felix began taking piano lessons from his mother when he was six and played his first public concert at the age of nine. He began composing early, as well, and his compositions were performed in his parents' home by a private orchestra hired to play at their regular salons.
Mendelssohn's output eventually included symphonies, concertos, piano music, and chamber music, in addition to songs, oratorios, and church music. He is credited with "rediscovering" the music of J.S. Bach and bringing the major works of the hitherto forgotten master to the attention of his contemporaries. His oratorios, Elijah and St. Paul, are modeled more on the examples of Handel and Haydn than on Bach's masses and passions, but he clearly had Bach in mind while composing his many smaller choral motets.
Historian James Garratt writes that from his early career, "the view emerged that Mendelssohn's engagement with early music was a defining aspect of his creativity." In his composing, performing, and teaching, he sought to reinvigorate the musical legacy that had preceded him rather than replace it with new forms and styles.
The Leipzig Conservatory, which Mendelssohn founded in 1843, served as the bastion of conservative, traditional musical values throughout the 19th century. Mendelssohn's radical contemporaries Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz, who constituted the "New German School," regarded the school and its founder as outmoded and unimaginative; Berlioz wrote of him that he had "perhaps studied the music of the dead too closely." Critical opinion of Mendelssohn has undergone revision in the 20th and 21st centuries; he is now universally acknowledged as one of the important figures of the Romantic period.
Mendelssohn composed his a cappella motet Denn er hat seinen Engeln befohlen, MWV B 53, in 1844, in response to an attempted assassination of Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, adapted it, with orchestral accompaniment, as the seventh movement of his oratorio Elijah in 1846.
Frank Martin: Sonorous and Satisfying
Chorale is swimming in deep waters this winter. Felix Mendelssohn, Johannes Brahms, and Frank Martin are giants in the world of Western music; performing their works requires skill, range, and humility. We have been working with them since January 3, and find there are no shortcuts; each speaks a language so distinct, complex, and compelling, that one wonders how we will have time and space to comprehend them.
The least-known of the three, Frank Martin (1890-1974), whose Mass for Double Chorus we will perform, was born in Geneva, Switzerland. His ancestors were French Huguenots who left France in the 16th century, and his father was a Calvinist minister. Primarily a pianist, Martin was largely self-taught as a composer, never attending conservatory. Rather, he attended Latin school and went on to study mathematics and physics at the University of Geneva for two years. Simultaneously he studied piano and composition with composer Joseph Lauber, who also introduced him to instrumental writing. Between 1918 and 1926 he lived in Zurich, Rome and Paris, working on his own, performing on harpsichord and piano, teaching, and searching for a personal musical language. After World War II he moved to the Netherlands, where he remained for the rest of his life.
The early years of the twentieth century were a period of extreme ferment and unrest in Western music. Martin’s unusually prolonged development reflects that turmoil, during which he studied and experimented with music that had preceded him, trying to find a place for himself and his ideas. Early on, he composed in a linear, consciously archaic style, reminiscent of fifteenth and sixteenth century sacred vocal music, restricted to modal melodies and perfect triads. Later in the same decade he enriched his harmonic and rhythmic palette through experimentation with Indian and Bulgarian rhythms and folk music.
In 1932 he became interested in Arnold Schoenberg’s work with 12-tone serialism. He incorporated some elements of this technique into his own musical language, but refused to abandon tonality altogether. Ultimately, he developed a strong personal style, strongly influenced by elements of German music, particularly that of J.S. Bach, and by the harmonic language associated with early twentieth century French composers, particularly Debussy and Ravel.
Martin composed his Mass in 1922, during this period of experimentation. He added the Agnus Dei movement in 1926. Though it precedes his encounter with 12-tone technique, the work clearly demonstrates other compositional ideas with which he was then grappling. Modeled after the liturgical masses of the Renaissance, with five movements corresponding to the five ordinary sections of the liturgy, it utilizes techniques typical of Josquin and his fifteenth century contemporaries, particularly paired imitation, where the words and melody of one segment of the choir are immediately echoed by another segment of the choir. Large chunks of imitative, almost fugato-like writing suggest the sound and texture characteristic of late sixteenth century composers Palestrina and Victoria; the double-choir framework upon which the work is built, where the two choirs are clearly differentiated from and juxtaposed to one anther, hark back to the seventeenth century Venetian style exemplified in the works of Giovanni Gabrieli.
Along with these historically conscious elements, we hear rhythmic and harmonic passages reflecting his awareness of non-western music, especially in the percussive effects produced by the second choir through incessant rhythmic patterns, and the presence of non-triadic harmonies, particularly open fifths and tritones.
Traditionally, musical settings of the Mass ordinary were intended for use during worship; through their evolution as a large musical form, mass settings evolved into concert works, typified at their peak of development by such masterpieces as Bach’s Mass in B Minor, which were not suitable for liturgical use. Martin, however, intended his work to function in neither arena; as he wrote in 1970, “I did not at all desire that the work be performed, believing that it would be judged entirely from an aesthetic point of view. I saw it entirely as an affair between God and me…. the expression of religious sentiments, it seems to me, should remain secret and have nothing to do with public opinion.” Upon completing his Mass, Martin put it away, never intending that it be heard publicly. He finally allowed it to be performed, in 1963, almost forty years after its completion, at the urging of his students. He considered it a youthful attempt on the way to his mature style; but modern audiences find it richly sonorous and emotionally satisfying. It is amazing that Martin refused to let it be published or performed for so long; it is now regarded as one of the pinnacles of the twentieth century choral composition.
It took Frank Martin many years before he was satisfied that he had found a musical idiom he could call his own. But he did achieve the difficult feat of creating a musical world balanced between conservative and avant-garde trends, which feels just right, in hindsight. And though his Mass came early in his development, it doesn’t sound like a work in progress, but stands as a fully-formed statement. I’m tempted to say it just took a long time for him to catch up with himself.
Music Makes Us Human
During orientation week of my first year in college, my classmates and I were required to complete a form called “Strong Interest Blank,” which was designed to help us choose the courses, and ultimately the major, to accomplish our vocational goals. I went in with no major or vocation in mind, but the document figured me out: I scored highest as musician-performer, musician-teacher, and social worker. After many turns and detours along the way, I ended up where that document indicated I belonged: as a singer, a teacher, and a choral conductor. After several summers as a camp counselor, and a couple of winters running a teen recreation center, I found my way to teaching public school music, and later to twenty years teaching voice and conducting choirs on the college/university level. Along the way, I spent any number of years selling my skills as a singer.
These experiences all come together in Chorale’s formation. We are an independent community of people from many backgrounds and disciplines who work together to learn good music in an intense but congenial environment. We care deeply about music of the past, and no less deeply about the composers of the present time. Composers, and their works, are our lifeline to the creative force that runs through all of us, our salvation and inspiration when the world seems overwhelmingly lonely and dark and destructive. Chorale’s singers, each in their own way, find holy release in discovering and reproducing the sounds these composers require of us, and we strive to improve our musical and vocal skills so that we can live up to their dreams and designs, which would otherwise be only dots on paper. We take seriously our obligation to engage deeply with our music, for its own sake, and to present programs which communicate our deep commitment to this art form, and which inspire and entertain our listeners.
Chorale believes that our communal efforts foster a better world, a world lifted and transformed by the greatness of which human beings are capable; a world colored by the purest expression of beauty and grace. We hope, through music, to reach deep within ourselves, and our listeners, to bypass the many distractions that litter our path, to discover the great human gift we all share. As visionary conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt wrote, “Art is not a bonus to life. It is the umbilical cord which connects us to the Divine. It guarantees our being human.”
We will present our next concerts March 23-24. Our repertoire will include Denn Er hat seinen Engeln befohlen by Felix Mendelssohn, Ich aber bin elend and Warum ist das Licht gegeben by Johannes Brahms, and Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Chorus. Fitting music to usher in the Christian Holy Week. We look forward to singing for you, both here in Hyde Park, and in Lincoln Park, on the North Side.
Wrapping up 2023 and Looking Ahead!
Chorale 2023 has drawn to a close. Our librarian, Amy Mantrone, has reshelved our Christmas music; rosters and seating charts have been revised for our next prep period, reflecting the addition of new members and the requirements of our new repertoire. The singers are taking a well-deserved break until January 3, when we reconvene.
Chorale sings a lot of newer music by living or recently deceased composers. We feel it is important that these composers be heard in conscientious, polished public performances and given the opportunity to become better known. Our recent Christmas concerts featured new, little-known music from Hungary, Iceland, England, and a composer right here in Hyde Park. Singers and listeners alike enjoyed and were enriched by music they had never before experienced.
Our Winter repertoire, in contrast, will focus on a small number of pieces by acknowledged masters: motets by Mendelssohn and Brahms and a Mass by their twentieth-century colleague Frank Martin. This Romantic music, most of it for double chorus, is difficult in predictable ways, satisfyingly rich, based on procedures and idioms with which we are all familiar. Chorale’s singers will initially be pleased to work in such familiar territory— only to discover that these composers, who wrote primarily for highly skilled instrumentalists, expect singers to be every bit as fluent musically as symphonic players. We are in for quite a ride! But buoyed up throughout by the classic, unimpeachable beauty of these works.
Our spring concerts will explore music composed in the Americas, featuring choral pieces from Cuba, Venezuela, Haiti, and First Nations Canada, as well as works from the early British settlers, the African American tradition, and established contemporary composers residing in the United States.
All of this is made possible by you, our listeners and supporters. At every step of the way, from renting rehearsal and concert venues, purchasing scores, and paying staff and licensing fees to printing posters and programs and advertising on the radio, we depend on your belief in what we do, on your generosity, and on your understanding that we are all enriched by one another. In these difficult, acrimonious times, when we live surrounded by so much strife and counterfeit emotion, music cuts through to what really matters, expresses our deepest longings, and saves us from ourselves.
Happiest of holidays to all of you, from all of us!
A Chicago Chorale Christmas
Our Chicago Chorale Christmas! concerts are almost upon us. We look forward to singing for you December 9 at St. Michael’s Catholic Church in Old Town, and December 10 at St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church, in Hyde Park. The notes and words are learned; our final rehearsals will be devoted to familiarizing ourselves with the venues, to pacing and continuity, to transitions. Some of our repertoire is familiar and predictable; some of it is new, with rhythmic and harmonic shifts which could catch us by surprise when we experience them in new acoustics, with new sight lines, in front of audiences. The a cappella choral art is very demanding, at times like walking on hot coals, at other times like sailing along on the most delicate of clouds. We are excited about the music we are presenting, and will do our best for you, enhancing your emotional and aesthetic experience during the coming holidays.
Repertoire is the heart and soul of Chicago Chorale’s mission. We present the best music composers have made available to us, drawn from various historical periods and national, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, with particular focus on music of the last 100 years. Chorale has no higher calling than to bring to life the creative products of these composers, to give breath and substance to their dreams and plans Part of my calling, as conductor, is to research, listen, study, make choices-- work that has fueled my blog posts over the past couple of months. The repertoire we sing defines and differentiates us. Our distinctive vocal sound and attention to aesthetic representation are byproducts of this— we strive to present what we believe the composers would want to hear from us. This makes us interesting to our supporters; it also makes it challenging and interesting to sing with us. The best conductors I have experienced and sung under have always made it very clear that we, the performers, have a holy obligation to breathe the most beautiful life we can, into the blueprints left by the composers. It is disrespectful, even blasphemous, to do less.
It was the discovery of repertoire that motivated me as a singer, pushed me to develop my voice in order to do the music, and the words, justice. Chorale exists to extend this privilege to all its members, people who love music and are willing, even compelled, to approach their music making with open ears and hearts, and willingness to do the work with commitment and discipline. We have worked hard this fall, on some beautiful music. We are eager to share the results with you.
Giuseppe Verdi | Ave Maria Antiphon
The Ave Maria antiphon is recited and sung throughout the liturgical year in the Roman Catholic tradition. But it is also more specifically used during the Advent/Christmas season by Christians of all denominations, because it presents Mary’s realization that she is to become the mother of Jesus. Chicago Chorale performs at least one setting of this text every year on our Christmas concerts.
The antiphon’s text is divided into three parts. The first part consists of the Angel Gabriel’s greeting to Mary when he announces to her that she will bear a son: “And the angel came in unto her, and said, Hail, thou that art highly favored, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women” (Luke 1:28). The second part is the greeting of her cousin Elizabeth, whom she has come to visit while pregnant: “And Mary entered into the house of Zacharias, and saluted Elizabeth. And it came to pass, that, when Elizabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and cried out, saying, Blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb” (Luke 1:49-42). The third part, “Holy Mary, Mother f God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death,” is not scriptural, but was added in the 15th century.
This year, Chorale is singing a setting by Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901), who composed it very late in his life (1889), after a career spent composing operas. It was eventually published with three other sacred choruses in Quattro pezzi sacri (Four sacred pieces), Verdi’s last major work, in 1898. Verdi did not want the Ave Maria to be performed with the other pieces, which received their premier in Paris in April 1898; but he relented later on, and the four pieces were presented as a unified work in November of that year.
Verdi was recognized in his own time, and he is in ours, as one of the most important opera composers in music history. His non-operatic compositions are few in number, and the most famous of them, his Requiem, is often referred to as an ecclesiastical opera. But his early musical training and experiences were through his parish church, where he learned to play the organ at a very young age, sang in the choir, and served as an altar boy. At the age of eight, he became the official paid organist. He turned from church music to opera in his later teens, however, and was described by his second wife as being not particularly religious.
Verdi was inspired to compose Ave Maria by the enigmatic scale C – D-flat – E – F-sharp – G-sharp – A-sharp – B – C, which Adolfo Crescentini published in Ricordi's magazine Gazetta musicale di Milano in 1889, inviting composers to harmonize it. Verdi composed a setting for four unaccompanied voices, with the bass singing the scale first, followed by alto, tenor and soprano, the three remaining voices supplying harmonic texture. Though originally intended for a quartet of soloists, the work has, from its first performance, been performed by choirs. The work’s demands are daunting: the chromatic harmonic language makes it very difficult to sing in tune, and the extreme dynamic range is difficult to navigate. I first sang it under the baton of conductor Robert Shaw, and the scores Chorale sings from contain his detailed, precise notations, designed to help the singers stay in tune.
Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming
The version of “Es its ein Ros entsprungen” (Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming) which Chicago Chorale will sing in our December concerts has a noteworthy history.
The anonymous words of this Advent hymn date back to the 14th century. They were first published in 1582 in Gebetbuchlien des Frater Conradus. The rose in the German text is a symbolic reference to the Virgin Mary. The hymn refers to the Old Testament prophecies of Isaiah, which in Christian interpretation foretell the incarnation of Christ, and to the Tree of Jesse, a traditional symbol of the lineage of Jesus. The melody, also anonymous, first appears in the Speierisches Gesangbuch in 1599. German composer Michael Praetorius (1571-1621) published his harmonization of the melody in 1609, in his sixteen-volume collection Musae Sioniae (Zion’s Music). This melody and harmonization have been the familiar, standard version of the hymn, sung through the Christian world, ever since.
Swedish composer Jan Sandström (b.1954) has taken the original , unaltered Praetorius harmonization, for mixed chorus, and composed an additional four-part “soundscape” around it which transforms the listeners’ experience. The resultant work, composed in 1990, has become one of the most performed and recorded “high-end” Advent/Christmas choral pieces of our era.
Sandström grew up in Stockholm, then studied at the School of Music in Piteå, a small city at the northern end of the Gulf of Bothnia. He later returned to Piteå in the 1980s as professor of composition. I studied at that school, myself, about thirty-five years ago, in a program called “Sommarmusik i Piteå;” Sandström was very likely teaching there at the time, though I was unaware of him. I was quite surprised to find such an institution, at what seemed like the end of the world. I don’t think the sun went below the horizon for the duration of my program, but the other participants (all of them Scandinavians) seemed nonplussed by the constant light; they were more concerned about the constant clouds of mosquitoes. I heard, and performed, a lot of wonderful music, with outstanding colleagues and in state of the art facilities. I had gone there because of an interest in Scandinavian vocal music; I returned home hooked on it.
Sandström's compositional output includes music for various ensembles: choir, opera, ballet, radio theater, and orchestra. Like most Swedes, he began his musical career as a chorister, and his work list includes a high percentage of vocal music.
Reviewer Dan Morgan commented on Sandström's setting of “Es ist ein Ros entsprungen”: "From its dark, monastic beginning rising to a radiant, multi-layered crescendo, this is the disc's crowning glory. ... It's an extraordinary fusion of old and new, a minor masterpiece that deserves the widest possible audience." Stefan Schmöe compared the "schwebende Klangflächen" (floating soundscapes) of the added second chorus to an acoustic halo. John Miller describes Sandström's addition as a "timeless, atmospheric, dream-like soundscape of poignantly dissonant polyphonic strands".
Da pacem, Domine
For the most part, I resent electronics and computers, and the fast-moving digitized life of today’s world. Turning the clocks back inspires a helpless, incoherent rage in me. I idealize a back-to -the-land existence, in which we and our community take care of our needs, grow and prepare our own food, make our own compost, develop our own culture, and make our own music. When I was in college, many of my peers shared such an ideal. Mostly, we grew out of it as we aged— but many vestiges of that dream persist in me, and lead to the interests and preoccupations that continue to matter most to me.
One huge exception to this personal Ludditism is my love of YouTube. I spend hours parked in front of my computer screen, watching and listening to musical performances which I would never see or hear otherwise. I become acquainted with individual musicians, conductors, ensembles, styles of interpretation, and repertoire I would never be aware of, without this electronic wizardry. YouTube has become my single most important resource in programming concerts and studying repertoire, especially since I stopped singing, myself. Ones personal library of recordings could never contain all that is available at the simple click of a mouse. I keep a running list of the composers, pieces, and recordings that I run across, often randomly or by accident, and make extensive use of it. I’m hooked. I find it hard to remember how I did this work without YouTube for the greater part of my career.
Among my most important YouTube finds in the past year was a recording of a new piece (2020), a setting of the Da pacem, Domine text (Grant us peace, O Lord, in our days for there is none other who will fight for us) by Hungarian composer Péter Tóth (b.1965). Sung by Cantemus vegyeskar Nyíregyháza, it was recorded in concert October 12, 2022, just one year ago. Numerous other choirs have posted recordings of the motet, all of them Hungarian. I suspect it will soon become better known, and that other postings will appear in the future.
Tóth grew up in Budapest and received his training there, at the Béla Bartók Conservatory and the Liszt Ferenc Academy. He later graduated from the Academy of Drama and Film, and has composed extensively for film and theater. His compositional style, even in this sacred a cappella setting, reflects this interest in theatrical presentation. The indicated dynamics in this piece are extreme and very expressive, and the tessitura (usual range) in the individual voice parts is quite demanding, especially of the women’s voices. His use of dramatic rhythmic ostinato in the lower voices intensifies and graphically illustrates the implied urgency and danger in the text. Effectively, he creates a dramatic scene without ever leaving the conventions of sacred a cappella music.
Tóth is currently Dean of the School of Music at the University of Szeged and is a full member of the Hungarian Academy of Arts.
Remembering Bernie Brown
Bernie Brown, a highly significant figure in the life of Chicago Chorale, died three weeks ago, on October 7. Bernie sang with Chorale for several years early in our existence, until hearing problems forced him to stop. He also served on our board of directors, and, with his wife, Carol Jean, faithfully attended all of our Hyde Park concerts, after-parties, and fund-raising events. When I would turn around to greet the audience, there they were, in about the 6th row, a little stage right of center, smiling and applauding; a reassuring presence, indeed.
I first met Bernie when I joined the Rockefeller Chapel Choir, in 1975. He had a clear baritone voice and good musical skills, and loved the English cathedral music which was the choir’s mainstay repertoire during Richard Vikstrom’s tenure as conductor. He was associate Dean of the Chapel at that time, and was not always available on Sunday mornings to sing with us; but he always sang concerts. We were in the same section, and I sat near him. He was always friendly toward me, appreciative of my Luther College background (most people I met at U Chicago had never heard of Luther), and interested in my other musical activities.
After several year’s hiatus, I returned to the Chapel Choir in 1982, after Bernie had become Dean. We renewed our relationship, and, when I became conductor of the U Chicago choral groups, in 1984, Bernie arranged for us to present our first concert in the Chapel— a big event for the university students. This was the beginning of a fruitful collaboration between the Music Department’s ensembles and the Chapel. A few years later, when the University decided to discontinue the Chapel’s professional choral program, Bernie invited me to start a student/community choir in its place. Ultimately, this led to the creation of a full-time position for me, shared between the Music Department and the Chapel.
The Department chair at the time was Howard Mayer Brown; I called the resulting situation my “Brown Sandwich.” The two Browns were always cordial toward one another, but had very different ideas about my responsibilities toward each half of the sandwich; I often felt stretched to the breaking point by the competing demands of the two entities, which were further complicated by the demands of the president’s office, especially during the University’s centennial year (1990-91). Finally, though, we accomplished what all three of us wanted: a program that served the University and the surrounding community, made use of the resources provided by both, and provided high-quality musical experiences for its audiences and participants. It was with real sadness that I left the University in 1996, at the height of our success.
When I returned to Hyde Park in 2001, Bernie was ready to support my new venture, the independent Chicago Chorale, in every way he could. I came to realize that Bernie’s belief in me, and in the value of community-based music, was an essential ingredient in my being able to tackle such a project, and in the success Chorale has enjoyed.
Rest well, Bernie.
Sigurður Sævarsson
Last week I wrote about a Christmas motet composed by Hyde Park composer Jerome Ramsfield. This week I’d like to write about another unusual addition to the Advent/Christmas repertoire Chorale will perform on our holiday concerts in December.
The Magnificat, or Canticle of Mary, is one of the most important texts in the Christian liturgy. Sung regularly throughout the liturgical year, mostly at Vespers, it is especially featured during Advent. The text, taken from the Gospel of Luke (1:46–55), is spoken by Mary upon the occasion of her visit to her cousin Elizabeth. In the narrative, after Mary greets Elizabeth, who is pregnant with John the Baptist, the latter moves within Elizabeth's womb. Elizabeth praises Mary for her faith, and Mary responds with what is now known as the Magnificat:
My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord,
my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
for he has looked with favor on his lowly servant.
From this day all generations will call me blessed:
the Almighty has done great things for me,
and holy is his Name…
This text has frequently been set to music. Most compositions are intended for liturgical use, especially for Vesper services and celebrations of the Visitation, but some are also performed in concert. I considered a large number of settings when choosing repertoire for our holiday concerts, one of them a recent a cappella setting (2018) by Icelandic composer Sigurður Sævarsson (b. 1963). Chorale sang an Advent piece last year by another Icelandic composer, Þorkell Sigurbjørnsson, which the choir and I really enjoyed, so I gave this one a closer look, and ended up programming it.
Saevarrson’s style is greatly influenced by the spiritual minimalism which has dominated northern European choral composition for the past several decades. Magnificat’s characteristic ostinato texture, with subtle harmonic and rhythmic shifts over the course of the composition, is delicate and mesmerizing, well-suited to the scene he paints. Like all music of this genre, it demands intense concentration and exactitude from the singers, to create an aural image of great simplicity.
Saevarsson studied singing and composition in his native Iceland before enrolling at Boston University, where he was awarded degrees in both disciplines. His principle compositional focus has been opera and choral music, both a cappella and accompanied, and he is clearly gaining a following in the world-wide choral community, judging from the number of performances and recordings in which his music is featured.
I found an interview with Saevarsson online, in which he responds to a comment about the “great spaciousness” in his writing, “Maybe one explanation for this ‘spaciousness’ in my music is the all-encompassing Icelandic nature. Iceland has few and small wooded areas or forests. As one journeys through Iceland, there are views as far as the eye can see. I find it delightful to stand and look out to sea, the distant, majestic mountains, or else study the mosses and tiny flowers. Most of my choral works are written with the acoustics of a large church in mind, where each note can weave around the next, creating a gentle, fine web around the soul.”
Saevarsson’s Magnificat has a unique texture and impact, one I have not previously encountered in settings of this text. I look forward to introducing our audience to this worthy addition to our repertoire.
Love Came Down at Christmas
Chicago Chorale resumed rehearsals, after our summer break, on September 13. Our singer numbers are back to where they were pre-pandemic, and we look forward to a challenging, rewarding 2023-24 season.
Our Christmas concerts, December 9-10, will feature both new music and familiar favorites, complete with our annual audience participation carol singalong. I find that this mixture of unfamiliar new repertoire, with well-loved seasonal favorites, stimulates and satisfies both singers and audience, propelling us into our December celebrations and fortifying us for the winter months to come.
Among the unfamiliar new pieces, one should be of particular interest to our Hyde Park audiences. Several months ago, a former resident of our neighborhood posted on Facebook’s Hyde Park Neighbors page about a piece of sheet music she had discovered among her belongings— “Love Came Down at Christmas”, music by Jerome K. Ramsfield, words by Christina Rossetti. Ramsfield had been the vocal music teacher at Hyde Park High School in the late fifties and early sixties, and had composed several pieces of music for his choirs. Intrigued, I wrote to her, asking to see the music. What she sent me was a revelation— Ramsfield was clearly a gifted composer, and must have had very good choirs, judging from the demands of this piece.
I did an Internet search, and found that Ramsfield (1924-1975) had grown up in Madison, Wisconsin, was of Norwegian Lutheran background (his family name originally was Ramsfjell), had attended American Conservatory and Northwestern University, and began teaching at Hyde Park High in 1953. He also was Director of Music for Youth at the United Church of Hyde Park on 53rd Street. Prior to his Chicago employment, he conducted the Standard Oil Company “Torchlighters” male chorus in Austin, Texas. Many of his former students have written of their admiration for him and their appreciation of the high level of performance he demanded of them. He was known to be one of the most enthusiastic and charismatic teachers at the high school.
Ramsfield’s ambitions went past high school teaching, however. At one point he was awarded a fellowship to study composition with Nadia Boulanger, perhaps the twentieth century’s most influential teacher of composition, in Paris, and a number of his choral works, for a variety of voicings (SATB, TTBB, SSA) continue to be performed by choirs in the U.S. and Canada. Boulanger’s other students included composers Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Roy Harris, Quincy Jones, Virgil Thompson, and Alice Parker, and their kinship with Ramsfield is clear— clarity of structure, careful voicing and counterpoint, transparent texture. One wonders if the community at Hyde Park High was aware of the musical treasure they had in their midst. One also wonders if his early death cut short what could have been a distinguished career as a composer.
Chorale is happy to present what may well be the first Hyde Park performance in over half a century of Jerome Ramsfield’s Christmas motet, “Love Came Down at Christmas.”
Truth and Magic
The British choral tradition is one of the glories of the musical world. The model provided by British composers, conductors, and choirs has influenced choral singing by setting standards not only in regions and nations directly impacted by Britain’s colonial history, but in other countries and cultures, as well. Chorale has devoted concerts to several national and regional traditions over its twenty plus years of singing together. But, beyond a few pieces here and there, we have skirted English music— an enormous omission, relative to the amount of first-rate English repertoire available to us.
The time has come. Chicago Chorale will present The Magic and the Dream, an all-English program, June 10-11, including a selection of a cappella masterpieces from the Elizabethan era (William Byrd), the Restoration (Henry Purcell), the Classic-Romantic period (Robert Pearsall and Charles Stanford), and the modern era, featuring William Walton, Herbert Howells, and the very contemporary female composer Kerensa Briggs. An especially beautiful portion of the program will be devoted to Howell’s Requiem, a work Chorale has performed twice in the past and is thrilled to revive for these concerts.
Chorale leadership had no idea England would be crowning a new king, when we decided on this program. We were aware, certainly, of the lively discussion underway, concerning England’s role in the colonization, misogyny, and exploitation that has dominated world history for the past 500 years; and we had planned to address this in some way, in our programming and commentary. But we had not planned on the degree to which the conservative, traditional character of England’s royal family and ruling class, contrasted with the habits and attitudes of their subjects, would become the subject of wide-ranging discussion and criticism, just as we were preparing our concert. The British choral tradition reflects the heart and soul of English history and civilization; inevitably, it also is the center of intense focus and scrutiny during this time of cultural self-reflection and change.
Almost a year ago, I asked Justin Flosi, a former Chorale member and astute observer of today’s cultural shifts, for help in identifying a theme around which to structure our program. He responded as follows:
“In British-Dominican author Jean Rhys’ novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, the author imagines a haunting and passionate backstory for the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre— Mr. Rochester’s insane first wife, a native woman he brought back from Jamaica and renamed Bertha. In Rhys’ novel, Mrs. Rochester is restored to the humanity of which she was deprived in Brontë’s work. We learn her real name: Antoinette. She is given a past, a narrative, and at last, a voice.
“The novel speaks powerfully to the history of the cruelty and oppression upon which many of the institutions and achievements of the West were built. At one point in Wide Sargasso Sea, Rochester has this brief, shattering epiphany: ‘So I shall never understand why, suddenly, bewilderingly, I was certain that everything I had imagined to be true was false. False. Only the magic and the dream are true— all the rest’s a lie. Let it go. Here is the secret. Here.’ And that's where I think we find a title for your concert: The Magic and the Dream.
“There is much that is ugly, false, and unjust in the world we have inherited from our colonial forebears. But, it has its summits along with its abysses. We can celebrate the perfections of the English choral tradition while simultaneously acknowledging the deeply flawed culture that somehow, paradoxically, gave it life. So while on the surface, The Magic and the Dream may seem to uncritically glorify the culture to which this music belongs, the context of the quote reveals that quite the opposite, in fact, is true.”
Chorale’s concerts will present a sampling of this truth and magic, this dream that is the glory of the British tradition from the Elizabethan period to the present time. In the midst of everything else, the music is true.
Before Palmeri: Guastavino and Piazzolla
In addition to Martín Palmeri’s MisaTango, Chicago Chorale’s March concerts will present smaller works by two of Palmeri’s important predecessors: Carlos Guastavino (1912-2000) and Astor Piazzolla (1921-1992).
Guastavino, sometimes called “the Schubert of the Pampas,” was born into an artistic family. When his musical talent expressed itself, he was encouraged to pursue it, becoming an accomplished pianist while studying composition. He rejected the radicalism of such contemporaries as Alberto Ginastera and Mauricio Kagel, whose music he dismissed as “nastiness” and “falsification”— being drawn instead to the romantic harmonies and melodies of European composers Albeniz, Granados, Rachmaninoff, and Debussy. His style was conservative, tonal, and accessible. He wrote at one point, “I love melody. I love to sing. I refuse to compose music only to be discovered and understood by future generations.” And though he expressed interest in “native” Argentinian music, tango, with its strong, distinctive rhythms, influenced him very little. He staked out a position at the conservative, Eurocentric end of the South American cultural spectrum; his gracious, well-crafted music continues to be successful, growing in popularity as it becomes more widely available.
I was rehearsing a series of concerts with Robert Shaw in June of 1998 when an Argentinian auditor approached Mr. Shaw during a break and presented him with a folder of Guastavino’s choral pieces, asking him to consider them for future performance. Mr. Shaw asked me to take the packet and look through it, to see if I thought Guastavino’s music was “worthy.” We never reconnected about this— Shaw never saw the music, and died just a few months later. Had he seen it and liked it, Guastavino’s popularity in the United States might have been jump-started several years earlier.
Carlos Guastavino wrote over 150 songs for voice and piano, plus numerous piano solo pieces, choral works, large orchestral works, and intimate pieces for guitar. The song Chorale will sing, “La Rosa y el Sauce” (1942), displays the delicacy, tunefulness, and combination of melancholy and good nature which characterize his works.
Piazzolla’s story is very different.
Born in Argentina to immigrant Italian parents, Piazzolla spent most of his childhood with his family in New York City. While there, he learned to play the bandoneon, a type of concertina developed in Europe and brought by German and Italian immigrants to Argentina, where it became a basic instrument of the tango genre. He quickly rose to the status of child prodigy, and when his family returned to Argentina in 1937, he began playing in tango clubs, attracting widespread attention. The pianist Arthur Rubinstein (then living in Buenos Aires) advised him to study with Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera. This introduced him to the world of modern classical music, and he gave up tango.
In 1954 he won a grant from the French government to study in Paris with the legendary French composition teacher Nadia Boulanger. Thinking that his future lay in classical music, Piazzolla played her a number of his classically inspired compositions, but it was not until he played his tango, "Triunfal," that she congratulated him and encouraged him to pursue his career in tango. With her guidance he began his groundbreaking work of transforming the traditional tango into a new style termed nuevo tango, incorporating elements of jazz, extended harmonies and dissonance, counterpoint, and extended compositional forms.
Piazzolla returned to Argentina in 1955, formed the Octeto Buenos Aires to play tangos, and never looked back. Today he is recognized not only as the most important tango composer of the twentieth century, but as an Argentinian national treasure. His works are performed by the world’s major symphony orchestras, chamber ensembles, jazz combos, and soloists. Biographers estimate that Piazzolla wrote at least 3,000 pieces and recorded around 500.
Chorale will perform “Reminiscence,” composed in 1974 and arranged for choir by Oscar Escalada. A small piece, it nonetheless encapsulates much of what makes Piazzolla’s work distinctive, particularly in its use of the passacaglia procedure of circulating bass line and harmonic sequence, utilized frequently in seventeenth and eighteenth century baroque music and also common in jazz.
Martín Palmeri's Misa Tango
Chicago Chorale’s big project this winter is learning and presenting Misa a Buenos Aires, also called Misa Tango. Argentine composer Martín Palmeri (b.1965) composed the work between September 1995 and April 1996; the first performance was given on August 17, 1996 at Teatro Broadway in Buenos Aires by the Orquesta Sinfonica Nacional de Cuba, the Choir of the Law Faculty of the University of Buenos Aires, and the Polyphonic Choir of the City of Vicente López (choirs to which the work is dedicated).
Misa Tango is a Latin choral mass utilizing the harmonies, syncopated rhythms, and sensual qualities of tango, the national music and dance of Argentina. Structurally, Misa Tango consists of the same movements as the traditional Latin mass— Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus/Benedictus, and Agnus Dei. But the composer introduces the emblematic instrument of tango, the bandoneon, along with a string orchestra (violins, viola, cello and double bass) and piano. A mezzo-soprano solo part punctuates the work, the bulk of which is sung by a mixed choir.
Palmeri’s Misa was relatively unknown until 2013, when it was performed in Rome, at the Church of St. Ignatius of Loyola, during the International Festival of Music and Sacred Art in the Vatican. The organizers chose Misa Tango specifically to pay tribute to the elevation of the former cardinal of Buenos Aires, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who became Pope Francis in 2013. The composer writes, ”This work was written with the intention of offering my choirs a choral symphonic work that could bring us closer to the tango repertoire. Indeed, working with my choirs, I have found how difficult and complex the interpretation of traditional tangos by choirs is. This work is therefore a tribute to choirs and tango as well as to its creators. But it is also the result of a spontaneous production, the fruit of my experience as a choir director, pianist and tango arranger.”
The seeds of tango originated in present-day Angola, in Southwest Africa; they were taken to South America during the 17th and 18th centuries by people who had been sold as slaves, mainly by Portuguese slave traders. The same people who practiced “Candombe”, the musical-religious dance expression that became an essential component in the genesis of Argentine tango, colonized Brazil, Cuba, and the Río de la Plata region of Argentina. Over time, elements of music and dance from Europe, especially Italy, Spain, and Portugal, as well as from the native indigenous peoples, fused with this African music, particularly in the lower-class districts of Buenos Aires and Montevideo. The tango as we know it today evolved about 1880 in dance halls and perhaps brothels in Buenos Aires, where it initially had a disreputable reputation, as a crude, socially unsettling, sexually suggestive expression of the lower classes. By the early 1900s, however, the tango had become socially acceptable, and moved back across the Atlantic Ocean; by the outbreak of WWI, it was a craze in fashionable, upper-class European circles. The first tango music by known composers was published in 1910.
Beginning in the 1950s, composers and dancers of tango began experimenting with new styles, harmonic practices, and instrumentation. Most important among these musicians was Astor Piazzolla (1933-92), who incorporated elements from jazz and classical music in his compositions, shattering the glass ceiling that had been forcing tango into a tighter, more stylized, less creative and improvisatory mode, both musically and in terms of dance performance. With the support and collaboration of other tango musicians, Piazzolla brought the art of tango music to the forefront, opening the door for, among others, Martín Palmeri, to incorporate the special and unique elements of tango into other genres.
Chorale is having a fabulous time working on Misa Tango. We have never attempted anything like this before, and we find the challenge exhilarating and rewarding. This is immensely attractive music; but more than that, it bridges the gap between “popular” music and “classical” music without drawing attention to the gap. Palmeri has accomplished a wonderful thing.
Reflections on our 2022-23 season
Martín Palmeri
The Advent-Christmas season is a major hot spot on Chicago Chorale’s calendar. Summer is generally relaxed and devoted to family activities and vacations; but by September the days shorten, the weather turns colder, students return to school, and workplaces turn up the pressure. And choirs, which have largely been on hiatus over the summer, begin rehearsing. Beginning in September, Chorale devotes about ten weeks to preparing a program; and the culmination of those ten weeks places us squarely in the middle of the much-needed holiday season. The covid pandemic wreaked havoc with much of what performers and audiences take for granted, but it did not do away with this basic calendar: the Christmas break still happens, and we still observe it with music. Singers and listeners are cautious about infection being passed in the close quarters that characterize live performance, but this caution doesn’t keep them away; Chorale’s numbers are back almost to pre-pandemic levels, and audiences for our Christmas concerts were the largest we have ever enjoyed for these annual events, in these venues.
Chorale’s Christmas repertoire consisted of numerous smaller pieces, from many traditions, in several languages, composed any time between the sixteenth century and the present. The seasonal theme determines the repertoire, chosen and organized with the goal of creating a unified arc, much as a composer plans the movements of a major work to create a single, satisfying experience.
The remaining concerts of our 2022-23 season are organized very differently. The first, to be presented March 25-26, is a single work, Misa a Buenos Aires, or Misatango, by Martín Palmeri, premiered in 1996. A setting of the ordinary of the Roman Catholic Mass, the five- movement work is composed in the tango nuevo style developed and popularized by Astor Piazzola (1921-1992). The genre, with the characteristic tango orchestra of piano, bandoneon, bass, and strings, has proved to be very popular with Chicago audiences, though the only local performance of this particular work was back in 2017, in Naperville. An exhaustive search of the Chicago region did not turn up a qualified bandeon player, so we are bringing in Charles Gorczynski, an expert in this field; we are also bringing in Argentinian mezzo soprano Raquel Winnica as soloist, who understands the idiom and can project the music and text authentically. As is true whenever we step outside of our customary a cappella idiom, this concert will cost us a lot of money to produce, necessitating energetic fund-raising on our part. But, as always, Chorale is committed to doing justice to this brilliant, colorful, attractive work. Our major challenge is to attract you, our audience, to come and hear it! This isn’t the sort of music you are accustomed to expecting from us; but I promise you a first-rate performance, and I’m confident you will love it.
Our third set of concerts, scheduled for June 10-11, is organized in another way entirely. We plan a program of British choral music beginning with the such foundational composers as William Byrd and Henry Purcell, before reaching into the 20th and 21st centuries to explore contemporary takes on this celebrated tradition, by such non-traditional composers as Kerensa Briggs, Judith Weir, and Roderick Williams. In addition to presenting these shorter motets, Chorale will sing Herbert Howells' Requiem, a perennial favorite with singers and audiences alike.
An ambitious season, staking out new territory for us. Would you expect anything less of Chicago Chorale?
Singing in Icelandic
My search for new and interesting Advent Christmas music, last summer, yielded a lovely carol from Iceland: Immanuel oss í nátt, which first appeared in a collection of songs, Hymnodia Sacra, in 1742. Both text and melody are thought to be the work of Gudmundur Högnason; we are singing an arrangement for SATB choir by contemporary Icelandic composer Thorkell Sigurbjörnsson. Neither I nor any member of the Chorale entered this project with any experience with the Icelandic language; and the pronunciation guide included with the music, while helpful as far as it goes, is general and simplified, omitting much of what makes the language interesting and challenging.
We found a couple of recordings on Youtube, one by a professional Swedish choir, the other by an amateur Icelandic choir. The latter is very clear and precise; the former is very beautiful, but lacks the linguistic precision we as Americans need to have modeled for us. Using both of them proved to be the best thing. Our accompanist, Kit Bridges, who has taught singers’ diction at DePaul University for many years, was able to come up with a detailed IPA version of the text, which he taught to the singers sound by sound, word by word. And finally, Slava Gorbachov, a linguist who has been an enormous help to us over the years in learning Church Slavonic, and who has done work in Old Icelandic, came to one of our rehearsals and helped us refine some particularly troublesome vowels. He also pointed us toward some particularly good demonstrations and explanations of the language on YouTube. It turns out Icelandic is known to be a knotty language, presenting challenges that don’t exist in the other Scandinavian languages and requiring lots of drilling.
Why bother? The “singing translation” included in our music would suffice, and make the carol easily accessible to our listeners. Learning the Icelandic has taken an inordinate amount of time away from rehearsing other music, as well as a good deal of at-home drilling and repetition.
We do this because that is how Chorale rolls. The challenge energizes us. Our singers understand and are intrigued by this work, and aren’t afraid of it. Working in numerous languages makes us citizens of the world. And we know that vocal music is special, set apart from purely instrumental music, because of the words, which, in good repertoire, are as important as the music, and inform the decisions made by the composer and the performers. This marriage of words and notes is what grabs us and makes us singers. Undertaking the challenge of learning Icelandic is what makes us Chorale.
Repertoire for the Advent/Christmas Season, Part 2
Continuing last week’s discussion, about programming music only tangentially related to the Advent/Christmas season: we will sing The Deer’s Cry by Arvo Pärt on our coming concerts. Of all the modern composers whose output is included under the rubric “Holy Minimalism,” he intrigues me the most. Chorale has sung many of his pieces, from throughout his career, and I have wanted to add this one (composed in 2007) since I first became aware of it. It looks straightforward when first encountered; but Pärt orders his materials in a transformative way that eludes description. The more we work on the piece, the more profound, and difficult, it becomes.
Pärt begins with the familiar “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” prayer of protection, or “lorica,” thought to have originated in the early eighth century, and traditionally attributed to St. Patrick. The original prayer has ten verses; Pärt sets only two of them. In modern English, they read:
8. Christ with me, Christ before me,
Christ behind me, Christ within me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ at my right, Christ at my left,
9. Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks to me,
Christ in the eye of every man that sees me,
Christ in the ear of every man that hears me.
The prayer's title is given as Faeth Fiada in the 11th-century Liber Hymnorum that records the text. This has been translated as “The Deer's Cry" by Middle Irish popular etymology, but it is more likely a term for a "spell of concealment." A later version of the Liber Hymnorum (1898) describes the prayer like this:
Saint Patrick sang this when an ambush was laid against his coming by Loegaire, that he might not go to Tara to sow the faith. And then it appeared before those lying in ambush that they (Saint Patrick and his monks) were wild deer with a fawn following them.
I imagine Pärt banking on the familiarity of the text in its well-known Anglican version, when he composed his setting of the text (in English). His listeners would expect the upbeat, uncomplicated melody to which they were accustomed. What a surprise, instead, to hear a dark, foreboding exposition of the text, with many moments of silence and a furtive, secretive, endangered quality, eerily mirroring the Liber’s description. This setting pictures the endangered Christ of the flight to Egypt, rather than a triumphant king—and by extension, a frightening, threatening world, in which it is an act of profound faith to trust in the words of the prayer.
Most of the composers on our program picture the savior of the world as small, weak, and vulnerable. Pärt succeeds through his setting in suggesting that the subjects of the prayer, the ones doing the praying, embody that vulnerability. Like Bach, he is both composer and theologian.