Program Notes for Singet!

by Sanford Dole

The chorus and I extend a hearty welcome to our audience, especially our regular subscribers and those of you attending a Baroque Choral Guild concert for the first time. You are in for a treat! Since our concerts in December, we have been hard at work preparing our annual a cappella program, honing our skills for this most exposed and telling form of choral music.

"A cappella" literally means, in Italian, "as in chapel." Thought to originate from the sixteenth-century practice of singing without instruments in the Sistine Chapel, the term originally referred only to sacred music. But since the nineteenth century, it has come to mean any music sung without instrumental accompaniment.

While there has been a grand tradition of writing choral church music intended to be unaccompanied, the term "a cappella" is somewhat misleading. It is likely that during the Renaissance, an organ often doubled the voices. And certainly, plenty of church music includes instrumental parts. In fact, our concerts in June present one of the greatest of all sacred works, J.S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion, with not one, but two orchestras, as well as a double chorus, soloists, and a children's chorus.

It is true, however, that throughout history music written for liturgical use has been the greatest source of unaccompanied choral music. Tonight we trace this history as it pertains to a single region, Germany and Austria, which has produced many of the world's most beloved composers. Our concert tonight outlines the progression of styles in German a cappella music from the Middle Ages all the way to the present, a span of some nine hundred years, primarily with works first performed in church services.

We begin with a prelude of sorts. The Abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was a great mystic and one of history's most influential women. After taking the veil at age fifteen, she became famous for her prophetic, symbolic visions. Popes, emperors, kings, and archbishops throughout Europe would consult her on matters of state. She also wrote books on natural history and medicine. But what she is known for today is the lyrical poetry she began writing in her forties, almost all of it set to music in simple plainchant.

"O viridissima virga," one of her many poems about the Virgin Mary, demonstrates the brilliant imagery of her verse. Originally, a soloist or the nuns of the abbey in unison would have performed the single line of chant over a drone from a hurdy-gurdy or some other instrument. In my arrangement, I have tried to recreate that effect, while passing around the text to the various sections of the choir.

Following this echo from the Middle Ages, we skip ahead several centuries to perform the first of three settings of the text "Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied" ("Sing to the Lord a new song"). Appearing at the beginning, middle, and end of the concert, these three settings, by Schütz, Bach, and Distler, act as supporting columns to the structure of the program, hence its title "Singet!" The forms that the three composers employ vary, and so, interestingly, do their texts, despite the common title. Schütz sets all of Psalm 98 while Distler selects only six verses. Bach goes in an entirely different direction, starting with a part of Psalm 149 that also begins "Singet dem Herrn" and ending with two verses from Psalm 150.

Heinrich Schütz, Germany's greatest seventeenth-century composer and its first to achieve international stature, was a beloved and talented student of Giovanni Gabrieli in Venice. One of his first jobs upon returning to Germany was in Dresden as Kapellmeister for Elector Johann Georg I of Saxony. In 1617, shortly after employing Schütz, Johann Georg ordered four concerted compositions at each of three services marking the centenary of Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation. With sixteen singers and even more instrumentalists at his disposal, Schütz was able to produce music on the grand scale required, and it is likely that his "Singet dem Herrn" was first performed on that occasion. Scored for double chorus, the work alternates between passages of eight-part polyphony and more homophonic sections in which the choruses alternate, singing phrases antiphonally. After coming to a full stop, the composer tacks on the customary doxology "Glory be to the Father," reprising music from the opening of the piece.

Hans Leo Hassler was born a generation before Schütz and died in 1612 while under the employ of the same Johann Georg of Saxony whom Schütz would later serve. Earlier in his career, while director of music for the town of Nuremberg, Hassler composed his main work for the Lutheran Church, a collection entitled Psalmen und christliche Gesänge. These four-part sacred songs, of which "Dixit Maria" is a prime example, are surprisingly conservative in character. Hassler seems to have adhered to the compositional norms of 1550. The textures are wholly linear, with motifs derived from cantus firmus that are treated imitatively in all parts.

Jacob Handl, on the other hand, had no such reservations. Also dating from the period just before Schütz, this master of counterpoint is known for a fusion of styles and techniques in music that displays a distinctly Netherlandic imprint. Using motifs derived from chant and other borrowed sources, Handl deftly exploits all possibilities in working out those materials. In particular, he subtly varies rhythms to lend a dancelike quality to the music and manages the rhythmic relationships between words and notes with a lightness and ease, avoiding dense textures that obscure the words. All of these qualities are evident in his "Pater noster." Note especially the brilliant polyphonic writing of the final "Amen." Here, each of the eight parts enters in canon a half beat apart. The effect is breathtaking!

In a little aside, I have always admired the pragmatism of Handl. Born in Slovenia, he may have originally have been named Petelin, which means "rooster," but depending on where he was living at the time, he used either the name Handl, a German diminutive for "rooster," or Gallus, the Latin equivalent.

Of Johann Sebastian Bach's six a cappella motets, "Motet I, Singet dem Herrn," first heard in 1727, is the most beloved by singers and audiences alike. It is set in the fast-slow-fast form of the instrumental concerto with unabashedly bright and bubbly outer sections. Like much of his choral music, the vocal writing is virtuosic and instrumental in feel. On the special occasions for which he composed these motets, Bach had at his disposal more than the usual school choristers and thus was able to write in five parts, or even eight, as in "Singet dem Herrn," which is a prime example of double-chorus writing.

At the very outset, one chorus provides a chordal foundation while the other introduces the melodic material, first in the sopranos. The tenors, and then the altos, closely imitate this theme. After the extended first phrase, we hear the theme again, this time in the dominant key with the choruses swapping foundation and melodic roles. This interplay between the choruses, which recurs throughout the work, continues until, quite unprepared, the sopranos introduce the fugue theme ("Die Kinder Zion") that provides the basis for the rest of the long opening section.

The slower middle section has, in fact, two separate pieces running simultaneously. One chorus sings a homophonic chorale ("Wie sich ein Vater erbarmet"), and as each phrase of the chorale concludes, the other chorus interrupts with lines from a more polyphonic aria ("Gott, nimm dich ferner"). In the last section, Bach again trades phrases back and forth between choruses until finally the two coalesce into a single ecstatic whole in a grand triple-meter climax ("Alles, was Odem hat").

After intermission we leave behind the world of early music and step into the heart of the Romantic period, but not without hearing a connection between the two. Unaccompanied choral music fell out of favor from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. Very few Mozart or Beethoven works, for instance, are truly a cappella. So for the generation of Mendelssohn and Schumann, a cappella music was both a new experience and an expression of individuality.

Johannes Brahms, at the beginning of his career, encountered the climax of this new movement in choral music. Although familiar with such great choral works of his century as Mendelssohn's Elijah and Beethoven's Choral Fantasy, he was more taken by the study of strict counterpoint from the early Baroque. Contrapuntal structure supplied the impulse for his many a cappella works.

"Schaffe in mir, Gott," the second of thirteen motets, dates from 1864. Although Brahms arranged it in clearly defined sections, much like the Bach motet heard earlier, the harmonic language is very much that of his own era. The tightly constructed fugue in the middle section ("Verwirf mich nicht"), however, does hearken back to the earlier time, and Brahms employs to great effect all of the principles of counterpoint, such as canon, inversion, and augmentation.

Anton Bruckner, a native of Austria, spent his life in various parts of the country. Known today more for the large-scale symphonies and masses from his later years in Vienna, he had another particularly fertile period in his thirties while a church organist and piano teacher in Linz. A lover of choral music, Bruckner sang in, and later conducted, the principal choral society there. From Linz, he also undertook an arduous correspondence course in strict harmony and counterpoint from a professor at the Vienna Conservatory, one of whose rules was that students refrain entirely from free composition while studying theory.

Bruckner wrote his "Ave Maria" in the first year after this five-year ban and filled it with variety and melody but, interestingly, not with the contrapuntal devices recently mastered. Unlike most of his works, which he painted in very broad strokes, this lovely a cappella piece is compact and intense, foreshadowing his Mass in D minor.

Max Reger is considered the most important organ composer after Bach, in part, because of the sheer number of works he composed for what he saw as "a concert instrument of the very first class." In fact, during his twenty-six-year career, the prolific Reger produced music in all genres except opera. Particularly fond of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, he could not help but also be influenced by Wagner and the other leading composers of his day.

Reger composed "O Tod, wie bitter bist du" in 1912. Mahler had died the year before, and Strauss was already enjoying the success of his early operas. Extremes of chromaticism, the hallmark of late-Romantic harmonic language, are heard in this wrenching motet for eight-part chorus. The text "O death, how bitter you are" is spiked with dissonance and thick textures aptly illustrating this sentiment. Three quarters of the way through the piece, however, the harmonies smooth out and "sweeten," if you will. What better way to portray the change from the bitterness of the opening lines to the last verse, "O death, how sweet you are for the needy person who is weak and old"?

While unable to find much biographical data on the composer Siegfried Strohbach, I can tell you that he was born in 1929 and was, for a time, a professor in Hannover, Germany. An Internet search revealed that after many years as a Jehovah's Witness, he left the sect, denouncing them in a scathing letter. Also, his works are quite popular with German choirs, evidently, as many of their web sites list them among their repertoire.

The motets "Jesus heilt einen Gelähmten" and "Jesus, der Retter im Seesturm," from a set of six anthems on Gospel texts that Strohbach wrote in 1957, display a delightful style that is constantly illuminating the text. The harmonies are modern, yet rooted in traditional language. Listen for the simple devices Strohbach uses to illustrate the words. In both pieces, the usual four-part texture is replaced, whenever Jesus speaks, with richer six-part harmonies, and it often reduces to a unison on such explanatory texts as "He said to them." In the first motet, as the scribes fret among themselves, the music also becomes agitated. Similarly, the second motet conjures up a windstorm with sixteenth notes whipping back and forth, and then, when the water wells up, the music rises up in octave leaps.

We conclude tonight's program with one of my favorite modern works from the German a cappella repertoire, Hugo Distler's "Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied." A piece written in 1934 should perhaps not be called modern, and yet its style, full of syncopated rhythms, stark contrasts, and harmonic boldness within a tonal milieu, seems as fresh today as it must have almost seventy years ago. Distler composed this motet and others collected in his Geistliche Chormusik during a particularly fruitful time while organist and choirmaster at a church in Lübeck. He crafted these motets after the style of Schütz, employing the Baroque master's highly effective sense of word painting, but the music goes beyond its models in rhythmic and harmonic freedom, creating a distinctive style. Unfortunately, this unique expression was destined to be limited.

After taking a professorship in Stuttgart in 1940, early in World War II, Distler found himself increasingly burdened. Aerial attacks, friends' deaths, professional strain, and, in particular, the hostility of the authorities, who denounced his work as "degenerate art," led him into a profound depression. The threat of being drafted into Hitler's army prompted him to take his own life at the age of thirty-four.

Tonight's concert merely sketches the riches found in German music. We hope you enjoy listening to these works and are inspired to learn more about these composers and their music. And we look forward to seeing you in June, when we perform more music by, arguably, the greatest of all composers, Johann Sebastian Bach.

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