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.”