BCG Lectures: Pipes and Drums

In his notes director Sanford Dole talked about the evolution of tonight’s rather eclectic program and described the selections as “all over the map.” He meant that more in a musical, rather than geographical sense. By birthplace, most of our composers hail from the UK and the US, except for German J.S. Bach and Estonian Arvo Pärt.

The music, however, encompasses quite a range—and takes us far from our namesake “baroque.” One of the things that the Baroque Choral Guild is most proud of is our adventuresome programming. It has been a defining characteristic of this chorus from the very beginning. After our debut concert in December 1979, Paul Hertelendy of the San Jose Mercury News said of us in his review “its repertory is highly distinguished. Instead of peeling off the usual ‘Messiah,’ the BCG offered up an ambitious German and Latin program of the polyphonic masters of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries ...”

When we were finding our niche over twenty years ago, we knew there already were larger, established choruses that were serving the community by performing the familiar grand-scale choral masterpieces. We decided that we would bring to the community—to YOU—choral music that wasn’t on the all-time “top-40” list, wonderful music that deserves to be heard. Yes we will still perform a St. Matthew Passion, as we did last spring, or a B Minor Mass, as we’ll do in our 2003–2004 season; but you can count on us to bring you performances of works by relatively unknown composers as well as rarely-heard music by famous composers.

Tonight’s concert is very special for us. Although we have performed with organ and percussion before, this is the first time that we have put together a program that features these instruments. Choosing the works and learning them, were big adventures for us; and what a thrill it was to finally come together in dress rehearsal and hear what the pieces sound like with all players participating.

Several of these composers were unfamiliar to us and it was interesting to learn about them as well as learn their music. Here’s a little background on each of them. I’ll proceed chronologically.

J.S. Bach (1685–1750) is such a biggie I could do an entire lecture on just him alone. As a matter of fact, I did. Because Herr Bach shares tonight’s program with a half-dozen other composers I will not dwell on him. If you want to read a great biography, I suggest Otto Bettman’s “Johann Sebastian Bach, As His World Knew Him.” If you want a 2000-word synopsis, you can read my June 1997 lecture notes on our website.

For tonight I will just tell you that to us Johann Sebastian Bach is famous, celebrated—the first of the three B’s—one of the greatest composers (if not The greatest) of the Baroque period. Yet in his time, his situation was not that different from what a lot of employees experience today: too much work for not enough pay; too much emphasis on quantity (output and bottom lines) rather than quality (excellence); and the struggle for freedom or autonomy against company politics. In his lifetime, Bach moved from job to job, looking for a better situation—from Weimar to Arnstadt to Mülhausen, back to Weimar to Cöthen, and finally to Leipzig. He had an enormous work load in Leipzig—he had to compose one cantata a week. It is no wonder that he adapted and re-used material—his own and from other composers.

The chorus from tonight’s Cantata 29 Wir danken dir is essentially the same music as the Gratias agimus tibi of the B minor Mass. The text is about the same too—Wir danken dir/Gratias agimus tibi = we thank you/we give you thanks. This is one example of Bach’s recycling skills. And for fun, like Bach who wrote his pieces for the instruments that he had available to him at a given time, Sanford has arranged the opening sinfonia so that it can be played by organ and percussion.

On the serious side, we spotlight our accompanist Paul Rosas who will play Bach’s grand Prelude and Fugue in C minor. Instead of the little portative instrument that we bring in to play continuo in our concerts, we will get to hear the beautiful instrument which resides in this sanctuary. How can a group named Baroque Choral Guild do a concert featuring ORGAN without including a significant work by The great organ master.

Hubert Parry (1848–1918), or Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry, is not a household name and is unfortunately a mostly overlooked English Romantic who really deserves more recognition because he was instrumental in bringing about the late 19th century English musical renaissance. He was director of the Royal College of Music and Professor of Music at Oxford, but his name and reputation stand in the shadow of his more famous students Ralph Vaughan Williams, Gustav Holst, and Herbert Howells. A great lover of Brahms and Wagner, Parry also brought a distinctly English quality to western music.

The uplifting “I was glad” is an exemplary work of this great Romantic whose compositions are exceedingly beautiful and emotionally powerful. As stated in the program notes, this piece was written 100 years ago and has been sung at every British coronation since then. Although she is cannot be with us tonight, to honor Queen Elizabeth on the eve of her 50th Jubilee, we are including the optional “Long Live the Queen” section. For a chorus which has been so conscientious in the correct pronunciation of foreign languages, believe me it was a challenge to remember that it is “Vivat regina Elizabetha.” In keeping with our faithfulness to original sources, we learned to sing the Latin in proper English fashion.

Charles Ives (1874–1954)—I guess it’s fitting that Charles Ives would be the hardest person for me to talk about, because his music was the hardest piece for us to learn for this concert. Of all the works on tonight’s program, Psalm 90 is the one that sounds the most “modern.” Ives’s early musical training, mainly from his father, included heavy doses of classics but also ear- and mind-stretching polytonal works. He became the most advanced U.S. composer of his day, experimenting with polytonality, polyrhythms, quarter-tones, chord clusters, spacial presentation ... ideas which other composers would “discover” years later. His music was largely neglected and misunderstood during his lifetime, and was not widely performed until after his death. Today he is recognized as the most original and significant American composer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a pioneer of modern music in all its progressive aspects.

Psalm 90 is a fine example of Ives’s combining of classical and modern elements. The text, a prayer attributed to Moses, describes the struggles of man and ends with a petition for mercy. Trouble, toil, suffering, fear and anger are depicted with music that is dissonant, grating, unresolved, explosive at times. The appeal for mercy and confession of faith in the Lord’s beauty are reflected in music that is peacefully harmonic. When we were slogging through the initial learning of this piece one of the choristers commented to me “well, the ending is really nice.” And my response was “that’s the whole point of the beginning.”

Gerald Finzi (1901–1956) is another relative unknown. London-born to a prosperous family, his father was a successful shipbroker. Of Italian Jewish ancestry, he never acknowledged his heritage and became a most English composer, spending his life in the same landscape and countryside beloved by the likes of his more well-known peers Elgar, Howells, and Vaughan Williams. The death of his father and brothers early in his life affected him deeply—the transience of life became one of the major themes of his music, which is generally described as “elegiac” and sad. The work “God is Gone Up” on tonight’s program is uncharacteristically celebratory, although there is a distant, angelic interlude where the resounding triumph of God’s ascendancy is briefly interrupted by perhaps the praiser’s vision of his own death “Methinks I see heaven’s sparkling courtiers fly ...”

Sanford’s notes mention that, among other things, on his farm Finzi assembled a library. He actually did far more than collect books. Finzi’s literary interests were profound: he amassed a huge library of English literature covering poetry, philosophy, and prose. The text of “God is Gone Up” is taken from a collection of meditations by 18th century Puritan minister Edward Taylor. Taylor did not intend his writings for publication but as meditation aids. If you think the text in this piece is a little unusual (heart-cramping notes), try reading some of Taylor’s other meditations wherein he talks of the “bowels of heaven” overflowing as a result of a physick (enema), God grinding Christ up into grain, God opening his veins to wash away sin. No doubt Finzi was fascinated by these poems when they were first published in 1930.

Benjamin Britten (1913–1976), as Sanford says, was born on St. Cecilia’s Day, November 22, and William H. Auden wrote the poem “Anthem for St. Cecilia’s Day” especially for him. The men, both British, were close friends—in the early ’40s they even lived in the same house which they shared with Britten’s longtime partner, tenor Peter Pears. The men were gay, at a time when there was far less acceptance of homosexuality than exists today, even among writers and musicians. You will find, in the poetry and the treatment of the poetry, sensuous passages, references to lost innocence, and a number of double ententres. The Hymn consists of three sections, each one ending with an invocation which recognizes Cecilia as the patroness of music and asks her to bridge the finite and the infinite with musical inspiration. The piece ends on a note of optimism, with the help of music we can transcend our ills and turn pain into beauty. Auden knew all too well Britten’s lifelong depression and struggles with guilt and self-acceptance.

I cannot leave this “Hymn to Saint Cecilia” without telling you the story of St. Cecilia and why she is the patron saint of music. Briefly, Cecilia was a good Christian girl who was a sworn virgin. Her clueless patrician parents betrothed her to a pagan noble name Valerius. She prayed for her husband’s conversion and they lived together in purity. The Romans martyred Valerius and supposedly she played the organ and sang while she awaited her own martyrdom. I say “supposedly” because the Acts of Saint Cecilia, (the earliest document that mentions her, dating from 500AD) say:

Cecilia’s artistic reputation was probably the result of a bad translation. The Latin word organis, which means “musical instruments,” was translated as “organ.” The phrase became “while playing the organ, she sang” ... and Cecilia became the patroness of music, with the organ being the instrument most closely associated with her.

William Mathias (1934–1992) was the only child of a father who was deputy headmaster of the local grammar school and a mother who was a piano teacher and organist. Little surprise, then, that he turned out to be a musician and scholar, beginning composing at a very early age. He excelled in his studies, first at the University College of Wales and then at the Royal Academy of Music in London. He received numerous honorary degrees, prizes and awards, and held many distinguished positions on councils and committees. Most of his professional life was spent in Wales. From 1961 he was a house composer with Oxford University Press, with a wide range of compositions including symphonies, string quartets, and concertos for piano, flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, violin, harp, harpsichord, and organ. His contributions to the choral repertoire are considered among the most important of any British composer since Vaughan Williams and cover the range from major choral and orchestral works to liturgical pieces. He also composed an opera and works to celebrate royal occasions including the famous anthem composed for the 1981 marriage of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer.

Although “Ceremony After a Fire Raid” is a setting of Dylan Thomas’s poem describing the bombing of London during the second world war, Mathias claimed that the poem’s meaning for him was reflected in events closer to his own time. The work is dated 1973: the time of not just Viet Nam but also bloody coups in the Third World, conflicts in the Mideast, terrorism at the 1972 Munich Olympics. So the performance of this work, for us, reflects events closer to our own time.

Arvo Pärt (b. 1935) grew up in Talinn, Estonia, where he began studies at the Talinn Music Middle School. He was tapped for military duty and fulfilled his National Service obligation as an oboist and side-drummer for the army band. He returned to the Middle School and soon after advanced to the Talinn Conservatory where he studied composition. From 1958–1967, while he was a student, he composed music for stage, film, and television for Estonian Radio, where he also served as recording director. By the time he graduated from the Conservatory in 1963 he was already considered a professional composer. In the late ’60s and into the ’70s, Pärt chose to enter several periods of contemplative silence, actually periods of intense musical study, which resulted in the evolution of his own compositional style. Frustration with the constraints of Soviet officialdom led him to emigrate in 1980. He and his family settled first in Vienna, and a year later moved to Berlin where they live today.

Up until the ’90s Pärt was better known in Europe than in the United States. The discovery that his music is accessible, beautiful, and inspiring rapidly brought his name to prominence here. He was honored in 1997 by being elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The “Beatitudes,” like much of Part’s choral music, appears relatively easy to perform—simple melodic lines, uncomplicated rhythms, a lot of repetition, words set syllabically. The challenge was not in learning the notes but communicating this message of comfort by maintaining a continuous, expressive flow of music.

Russell Peck was born in Detroit in 1945, attended the University of Michigan where he received his bachelor’s, Master and Doctoral degrees, studying composition. He has earned many honors—the Koussevitsky Prize, two Ford Foundation Fellowships, grants from the NEA, ASCAP awards. Commissions from major symphonies, guest conducting, artist residencies, faculty appointments ... Mr. Peck is a very busy man. Besides his composing activities, he also performs extensively as narrator of his own orchestral works for young audiences. This is from www.russellpeck.com: “A well-known American contributor in the symphony field to both the classical and educator/family repertoire, Peck has had well over 2,000 performances by more than 200 orchestras worldwide from Shanghai and Singapore to Kiev and Barcelona.”

Russell Peck has not written any music for chorus, but because we are privileged to have with us three of the Bay Area’s best percussionists, we have included “Lift Off!” on tonight’s program. Our thrill at presenting this work is only matched by the thrill of our percussionists to be able to perform it. Do not be astonished when the players walk out on stage for this piece. No, they were not playing strip poker while waiting backstage. The composer has specified that Lift Off! be performed shirtless—because he wanted audience members to see just how much of a workout it is to bang on nine bass drums!

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Cantabile Choral Guild
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