Peace and Love

June 4-6, 2010

The Fabric of Peace—An Interview with Sanford Dole

The Fabric of Peace by Sanford Dole was commissioned by the Oakland Symphony Chorus—Lynne Morrow, Music Director—for the celebration of their 50th anniversary. The piece was completed in October 2008. The Oakland Symphony Chorus and pianist Susan Soehner gave the premiere performance at an anniversary gala concert on January 31, 2009, in the Regents’ Theatre at Holy Names University in Oakland. For the Bay Choral Guild concerts in June 2010, Mr. Dole revised the accompaniment to be for two pianists instead of just one. Mary Holzer, the BCG publicist and a member of the chorus, interviewed the composer midway through the rehearsal period about the genesis of the music.

Holzer: How did the commission for The Fabric of Peace come about?

Dole: In planning their 50th anniversary gala concert, the Oakland Symphony Chorus decided to commission a piece. Somewhere along the way I gleaned from conversations that I was not the first person they asked. They also asked some big nationally-known names. When I asked Lynne Morrow directly about this, though, she told me that she had always lobbied for me. Anyway, it started with an email from Lynne asking if I would be interested in such a project.

Holzer: How did you choose the texts?

Dole: Lynne and I met at a cafe in Rohnert Park, where she lives, each armed with large bags of poetry books. She had told me earlier about her goal for this piece and its place in the gala anniversary context. The piece was to put forward the themes of community, spirituality, and what is sacred, so we pored over the various books and read lots of poems to each other, looking for texts to illustrate the themes. This made sense to me, as I see that choral singing is largely about community, spirituality, and the sacred. In celebrating a long-lived choral organization what better way to honor it than to acknowledge the core components of a successful choir. We come together as a community, not only making music together but supporting each other emotionally as well. In large measure we sing sacred music. And whatever our religious beliefs, I suspect that all would agree there is something spiritual about making music, especially in a group. To celebrate these aspects of singing in a choir made complete sense as part of the anniversary celebration.

Holzer: The texts come from quite varied sources. Why is that?

Dole: Actually I was hoping to find one longer poem that could be broken up into separate movements, but that proved to be impossible for this project. Instead, Lynne and I finally chose three texts, one for each of the three themes that she wanted included. We decided that “Let Us Be United” clearly represented the community theme, as did “Song of the Spirit” for spirituality, and “Glory to God for All Things” worked quite well for the sacred theme. That is how an ancient Hindu text, a modern American poem, and an Eastern Orthodox litany ended up in the same composition.

Holzer: The modern poem is by a Bay Area poet, Elisabeth Eliassen. Was that a factor in choosing “Song of the Spirit”?

Dole: The local angle was certainly one of the reasons we chose it. Elisabeth lives in Alameda, and somehow including a local, living poet seemed fitting for this celebration of a local chorus.

Holzer: Was the initial “Pange lingua” text part of the poem or did you add that?

Dole: Elisabeth did preface her poem with that quote from St. Thomas Aquinas, so on the page it is part of the poem, but she doesn’t think of it as really being part and was surprised that I chose to set it, too. One reason why I did that is that I was quite pleased with my harmonization of the “Ave Maria” Gregorian chant a year ago, and including the Aquinas quote gave me an opportunity to harmonize the “Pange lingua” chant melody in the piano introduction to that movement. Also, having the choir speak instead of sing in the introduction adds to the variety of the piece.

Holzer: Did you already know Elisabeth Eliassen?

Dole: She was an acquaintance of mine, and I was quite familiar with her poetry. She sings in Lynne Morrow’s other group, Pacific Mozart Ensemble. I’m a fan of that chorus, and at one of their concerts that featured a setting of another of Elisabeth’s poems, I was so taken with the poem that I ordered the book as soon as I got home. That’s how it was that Songs of a Soul Journey was one of the volumes I packed up for my visit with Lynne. Since “Song of the Spirit” is the text that later provided the title for the whole piece, I’m especially glad about it.

Holzer: So the title didn’t come first?

Dole: No, it came late in the process when the composition was well along. I was nearing completion, in fact, and still hadn’t come up with a title. So I sent the texts to a friend who is a professional book editor for her input. She was the one that homed in on the text from Elisabeth’s poem and came up with the “Fabric of Peace” title, knowing that I like to sew and understanding the intended themes of the whole piece. She offered some other suggestions, too, but this was my immediate favorite.

Holzer: You’ve described where three of the texts come from. What about the William Byrd text?

Dole: It was after I was already composing that I decided to include that as the third movement. There are two reasons why. The practical reason was that I had completed “Let Us Be United,” which is only 5 minutes, and Lynne wanted the whole piece to be 30 minutes. Adding another text would help me create a large-scale work. But also, during the composition process something reminded me of the Byrd text. I love it and have been familiar with it for many, many years. It had long been in the back of my mind that one day I would set it to music. It comes from the preface to one of Byrd’s published collections of anthems, and you’ll often find framed copies of the text on the walls of chorus rehearsal rooms or in the offices of choral directors. My voice teacher has it on his wall, too, and so I look at it every week. Something just triggered, and I realized that it would fit as part of this larger composition. This one text does touch on all three of the stated themes, and we were celebrating singing in a chorus after all!

Holzer: Is that movement unaccompanied because Byrd’s music is mostly a cappella?

Dole: Partly, but it also helps provide variety within the larger framework. And I intended the movement to be excerptable, so that it could be sung on an unaccompanied program. After they got to know and love the piece, some of the OSC singers suggested that they sing “The Exercise of Singing” regularly as a sort of theme song. I don’t think it has happened yet, but something of that nature was my hope.

Holzer: Is the passage in Latin near the end meant to sound like Byrd?

Dole: It is Byrd’s music. It’s the opening of his Mass in Four Voices, except that I substituted the words “Omnis spiritus laudet Dominum” from the preface to his volume of anthems.

Holzer: Is the fourth movement for piano alone to balance the third movement’s being for chorus alone?

Dole: Yes. I thought it might be a good idea after that longish a-cappella movement to give the singers a rest before the finale, which I knew would be the biggest and longest movement. My main intent, though, in the fourth movement was to showcase the piano. When I was first commissioned, I was told that they wanted to feature their fabulous accompanist, Susan Soehner. When I attended a rehearsal of the OSC to get an idea of what their sound is like and what kinds of music they can handle well, I spoke with Susan, and she specifically asked that I write a challenging showpiece for her. In fact, she said quite directly that her vision for the piece would be a piano sonata with chorus thrown in. Lynne had already told me not to worry about making the piano part hard because Susan really has amazing “chops.” This was a huge relief for me. I could freely let my creative vision go wherever it might lead without constantly thinking about how playable it might be, and the solo movement came to me in rather short order.

Holzer: How much time did you have to compose the whole piece?

Dole: The initial conversations on the text took place in the middle of May 2008, and they planned to start rehearsing in October for the anniversary concert on January 31, 2009. So I had four months to write 30 minutes of music. A tall challenge.

Holzer: Is this the largest piece you’ve written?

Dole: It was certainly the largest project I had ever taken on that had a deadline attached. I was very intimidated as to how I was going to come up with 30 minutes of music when I began. As it turned out, though, the whole piece runs a little longer than that, about 35 minutes.

Holzer: Where did you start?

Dole: I remembered some advice I had received from Conrad Susa, with whom I had briefly studied orchestration in the 1990s. When I asked about his process for writing operas and other long works, he said he would start at the beginning and keep working until it was finished. So I decided to follow that model. “Let Us Be United” is sort of an introit, and when I finished that movement, it seemed to flow into the next without much effort. This just kept happening. In fact, I feel that the work gets stronger as it goes along, more confident.

Holzer: Each movement seems quite different. Are there any common figures across the whole piece?

Dole: I didn’t have a sense of musical themes traveling from one movement to the next, though themes often do recur within a movement. The key facet in the overall structure of the music for me is the ebb and flow of the movements. In a work of this size there have to be highs and lows, so the five-part structure has three big movements separated by quieter movements. “Let Us Be United” is a grand opening movement. Then “Song of the Spirit” is calmer and more lyrical. Next, we come out of the gate bigger and more exclamatory in “The Exercise of Singing.” The following “Reverie” for the piano is intentionally a quiet moment of repose before the big closing, “Glory to God for All Things,” with its driving rhythms and rich harmonies.

Holzer: This didn’t start as a work for four-hand piano. How did the new version come about?

Dole: The four-hands idea didn’t come up until after the OSC premiere. I extracted the final movement to perform on a Sanford Dole Ensemble concert in May last year. One night, when I and several of the SDE singers were backstage getting ready to perform in a Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra concert, we were discussing my piece. Bruce Lamott, the PBO chorus director, asked if he could look at the score. He noted the difficulty of the piano writing and suggested that if I were to rewrite the piano part for four hands the likelihood of the piece getting performed by more groups would rise dramatically. This was a very pragmatic suggestion and stuck with me.

I was already planning that the BCG concerts this June would pair up my new piece with Brahms’ first set of Liebeslieder, plus the final song, “Zum Schluß,” from his second cycle of love-song waltzes. Since we were going to have two pianists on board for the Brahms, it made sense to tackle the adaptation to piano four-hands for the BCG concert set. I’m not sure how much easier I’ve made it for the pianists overall, but at least I’ve been able to address some of the sections that even Susan Soehner had a little trouble negotiating. And by doubling octaves here and there, I was able to make the big parts sound even bigger, which is fun.

Holzer: Did you modify the voice parts as well as the piano part?

Dole: Only minor fixes. There were some little problems with word accents falling on unstressed beats that I corrected in the first movement, and I codified a few changes in the final movement that Lynne made in rehearsal with OSC and that I also employed in the SDE concert. Now that I’m rehearsing the whole piece myself, I’ve spotted a few more edits that I’ll make before I try to get the work published commercially, such as writing in the rests I added in our rehearsals.

Holzer: What difference do you think it makes to have the four-hand accompaniment?

Dole: We haven’t heard it all put together yet, so I’m not sure. I’m hoping that the accompaniment will still balance the singers. In the bigger moments the piano sound will be a good deal fuller than it was before. This adds some flash and should heighten the contrast with the smaller, quieter moments. If this new version is successful enough, I may even orchestrate the piece someday.

Holzer: Did you have a clear idea at the start about what you were aiming to achieve? Or did that evolve over time?

Dole: My initial goals were simply to write a full-length cantata that kept the listener’s interest throughout, that satisfied the clients, both Lynne’s thematic ideas and Susan’s piano-centric desires, and that could be successfully sung by a good community choir. And, naturally, I also wanted to express my own musical vision. It’s no surprise really, but my musical language was a real stretch for OSC. They struggled at first, but Lynne believed in the piece from the beginning and was a true advocate. She still tells me repeatedly how much she loves it. The chorus rose to the occasion admirably, delivering a fine premiere performance. And most of the choristers grew to like the music a lot.

Holzer: Now and then in rehearsal, I find myself thinking that some of the rich harmonies in The Fabric of Peace feel like those in Invitation to a Voyage, which BCG premiered a few years ago.

Dole: Well, to use a term that singers in my church choir have coined, the two pieces are both in the Dolean mode. What more can I say?