Joy to the World

Welcome to tonight’s concert. As we begin our twenty-third season, the chorus and I extend hearty greetings to our loyal subscribers and regular attendees and offer a special welcome to any first-timers among our audience. Presenting concerts in the community is what we are about, and including more people in the great experience that is live music-making only increases the fun for everyone. All aboard for this shared event!

Each work presented tonight was created in the twentieth century, but that doesn’t mean this is a program of "modern" music. Rather, we’ve tried to balance the familiar and adventurous repertoire, the accompanied and unaccompanied, the men’s and women’s, the older and newer. Interestingly, all these twentieth-century composers chose texts with medieval or Renaissance sources.

We begin with a rarely performed work by a well-known American composer of choral music, Daniel Pinkham. He is a lifelong Bostonian and for many years was on the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music. His early scores from the late 1950s are neoclassical, modeled after the polychoral motets of Gabrieli and Schütz, and are harmonically very accessible. Two of the larger works from this period, the Christmas Cantata and Wedding Cantata, have become his most popular and enduring pieces. But Pinkham’s music, like that of any great artist, has evolved over the years. He experimented with twelve-tone melodies over tonal harmonies in the ’60s and with electronic music in the ’70s. His later scores have become more chromatic and dissonant as he synthesizes all of the currents in contemporary music.

The Advent Cantata, commissioned in 1991, is a case in point. Its seven movements set the great "O" antiphons, so called because each one begins with the word "O," which are assigned to preface the Magnificat at Vespers, one each day in the week leading up to Christmas. These fervent appeals for the Messiah’s coming proclaim His divine titles and missions. The choral writing is almost entirely homophonic, whether in unison or in harmony, except for the central movement, in which the four voices sing an extended melody in canon. The work exists in a tonal world all its own. It is quite stark and edgy at times in its dissonant sonorities yet, at other times, is sweetly melodic and lyrical. Overall, I find the music expressively evokes the meaning of the text. Along the way we hear echoes of serialism’s twelve-tone rows as well as plenty of traditional common-practice chords, such as the grand C-major conclusion.

The more conversant I become with this work’s harmonic language, the more I respect the genius of its creation. I predict that this achingly beautiful music will be regarded as one of Pinkham’s more formidable works.

Francis Poulenc’s harmonies are simply lush and ravishing. They support his exquisite melodies in ways unexpected and yet completely right. His is music that only he could have written, perhaps because Poulenc was, for the most part, self-taught. Although influenced by Stravinsky and Satie, as all French composers of the period were, he kept his style unique.

He composed the Four Little Prayers of Saint Francis in 1948, at a time just after the war when he was establishing his place in the newly-evolving musical world of Paris, carving himself a niche somewhere between the classicism of Stravinsky and the religious ecstasy of Messiaen. These brief little gems, comprising only a single iteration of the text, are completely homophonic and proceed, as is typical of Poulenc’s choral music, in short, self-contained phrases. The total effect, however, adds up to far more than the simplicity of means implies. Imagine the power these motets would have when sung in a gothic cathedral by a group of Franciscan monks.

Every year from 1980 to 1992, I would sing the medieval plainchant hymn Of the Father’s Love Begotten at Christmas as a member of the Grace Cathedral Choir of Men and Boys. I have always loved this beautiful melody and over the years had imagined different possibilities for harmonizing it. Finally, as a gift to the cathedral’s music program, I created this arrangement, which premiered at the choir’s annual Christmas concert in 1995.

The hymn’s six stanzas are arranged as a set of variations on the basic melody, which is intoned first. After that, we hear the tune in organum, that is, in parallel fifths, then in close harmony, in pop stylings, in canon, and finally as the cantus firmus of a grand polyphonic etude. Passing easily from the irreverent to the sublime, this arrangement may give you a peek at how my musical mind works.

I love the music of Benjamin Britten, justifiably one of England’s most celebrated composers. That he also wrote music for students is commendable. I am awed by his versatility and range as a composer equally deft at instrumental and vocal music and who has had a lasting impact in many genres. Britten’s orchestral and chamber pieces are performed regularly; his operas set the standard for the revival of contemporary music drama; he contributed magnificently to the English song and choral repertoire; and his large works for orchestra and chorus, most notably, the War Requiem, are true landmarks.

A Ceremony of Carols certainly ranks among Britten’s most cherished and most often performed works. Conceived for boys’ choir and harp, the piece is often heard today in a version for mixed voices rather than trebles. Believing the balance and interplay with the harp works best with voices in treble range, I have chosen the original version to showcase our sopranos and altos.

This setting of old English verse is a marvel of direct communication through simple means. And I love the story of its creation. In 1939, as war was heating up in England, Britten, a lifelong pacifist, and his partner, the tenor Peter Pears, chose to follow their friend W. H. Auden and emigrate to the United States. After a couple of unhappy years, the pair returned to their native country, in spite of world events. It was on the eight-day steamer trip back to England that Britten composed not only A Ceremony of Carols, but also his Hymn to Saint Cecilia, a setting for five-part mixed chorus of the poem by Auden. In a nice piece of symmetry, the Guild Chorus and I, on our cruise through the season, will perform the Hymn to Saint Cecilia at our June concerts.

We close tonight’s program with what might be termed an extended Christmas carol by Ottorino Respighi. Born in Bologna, Respighi settled in 1913 in Rome, where he taught composition and later became director of the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia. In 1926, he resigned to devote his time to composing. Until his death in 1936, however, he continued to teach, to accompany singers, and to conduct his music on both sides of the Atlantic.

Critics often decry his preoccupation with vivid orchestral colors and his eager appropriation of the more decorative elements in predecessors’ styles, but apparently these limitations merely expressed a childlike nature, which, according to the biography his wife penned, Respighi maintained throughout life. While the sparkle and sheen of The Fountains of Rome, perhaps his most celebrated work, can be heard in many of his other works, it was soon after he wrote Fountains in 1916 that he deliberately began to let archaic elements enter his music. Gregorian motifs and other aspects of early music can be found in his later scores.

The radiantly charming Laud to the Nativity, composed in 1930, is a perfect embodiment of the archaizing principles Respighi adopted. Listen for the suggestions of Monteverdian arioso, sixteenth-century madrigals, and other pre-Classical music.

We hope you leave tonight feeling not only entertained, but also uplifted, for nothing has more power in difficult times than music. Hopefully, you will have experienced its healing and soothing and can carry this out into the world. As you do, please join me in praying for peace.

Happy holidays!

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Cantabile Choral Guild
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