A Musical Journey

Program Notes by Sanford Dole

Tonight’s program was designed to prepare us for our upcoming tour in Italy. While the tour program will be shorter than tonight’s program and will include a few pieces from our English program in March, most of what you hear tonight was selected for its suitability on tour.

The typical tour program is a mixed bag of repertoire chosen to offer something for everyone and to show off the choir in a variety of styles. For an American group traveling in Italy, it is important to include some Italian music and perhaps even more important to include some American music. Foreign audiences are familiar with their own composers and are gratified when outsiders do the music well, but they are keenly interested in hearing the sounds of a touring group’s native land. I believe that the concerns raised above have been sufficiently met to create a satisfying tour concert.

My concept for the first half of tonight’s program was to take the Grand Tour around Europe, starting in Italy, making stops in several other countries, and completing the circuit with a return to Italy before the intermission. As we hop about the continent, we also travel back and forth through the centuries. In the second half, we will come home to the here and now with music of America today.

We begin with the Jubilate Deo of Giovanni Gabrieli (1557–1613). I am excited that we will have a chance to perform the work during Mass in Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice, the church where it had its premiere a little more than 400 years ago and where the composer spent the last 27 years of his life. As you listen to the eight parts, four to the left and four to the right, try to imagine the sound coming from opposite balconies in Basilica San Marco. This work is typical of the festive music Gabrieli composed for the large forces available to him on the major holidays of the Venetian state.

Including a German Baroque piece is a no-brainer for us, and what could be better than the music of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750)! Bach wrote his six motets for special occasions when he had more than the school choristers at his disposal and could indulge in five- and eight-part writing. All the motets are in a style more instrumental than vocal and are markedly polyphonic with unifying motives, as is evident in the three sections of Motet 2, “Der Geist hilft”: the concerto-like opening movement, the double fugue (“Der aber die Herzen forschet”), and the homophonic chorale.

From the German Baroque, we move on to Austria and skip forward two centuries. Anton Bruckner (1824–1896), most famous today for his vast, sprawling symphonies, was famous in his own day as an organist with an astonishing ability to improvise at the keyboard. Mastery as a composer did not come until his forties when he settled in Vienna to stay, but it was Wagner, not the Viennese greats of the past, who most influenced his great symphonies. In Vienna he also wrote some sacred works, including three graduals. The last of the three, Christus factus est, suggests the grand style of his orchestral work and displays the wide dynamic contrasts and rich harmonies we associate with Bruckner.

We jump next to 1902, a few decades later, in Russia and then drop back to the early 1800s. Only in recent years have American audiences begun to hear Russian sacred music. Many great composers who contributed to that music’s great flowering in the last two hundred years are still virtually unknown here. As I find this luscious music to be especially moving, I felt compelled to include two settings from the divine liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church on tonight’s program.

Alexandre Gretchaninoff (1864–1956) was born in Moscow and studied with Rimsky-Korsakov at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He divided his career between the two cities until he emigrated to Paris shortly after the Russian Revolution. Otche nash (Our Father) is traditionally set as recitative chant on a few chordal patterns, but in the second of his four liturgies, Gretchaninoff took a highly innovative approach, employing a melodic style and giving the Lord’s Prayer a larger scope than in any previous setting. As such, it is probably more suitable for a concert performance than a church service.

Dmitry Bortniansky (1751–1825) was to influence all who came after him. The emperor, after promoting Bortniansky to music director at the imperial chapel in St. Petersburg, decreed that only his music and that of composers of whom he approved be sung in church. Ever since then, the composer’s numerous sacred works have been fixtures in Russian Orthodox repertoire, prominent among them his seventh and last setting of The Cherubic Hymn for mixed chorus. It is Bortniansky’s reverence for the liturgy and sensitivity to the bounds of good taste that make this music eminently enjoyable for performers and listeners alike.

From 19th-century St. Petersburg we move on to 20th-century Paris and the music of Francis Poulenc (1899–1963). The best known of his religious choral works are the grand-scale Gloria and Stabat mater for chorus and orchestra with their quirky repeated motifs and unusual, rich harmonies, but his short motets offer similar delights. Exultate Deo opens in the manner of a Renaissance motet, similar to the Palestrina setting of the same text you will hear immediately following, but Poulenc’s hallmarks soon appear, the clipped phrases, often as short as a single word, and sweeping chord progressions with “blue” notes that color the harmonies as distinctively French.

We return to the Italian Renaissance with Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525–1594) from the generation before Giovanni Gabrieli. Palestrina, the leading composer of the Roman school, was maestro di cappella at Saint Peter’s in Rome from 1571 until his death. He composed 104 masses, most published posthumously, but was better known during his lifetime for his motets, of which 375 are extant today. Most are written in a five-voice texture, which Palestrina preferred for the diversity of imitative and voice-grouping techniques thus provided. His Exultate Deo with which we close the first part of the program is a prime example.

The second half of our program showcases living American composers and the music of our own time and place. We perform a song cycle by Kirke Mechem that the San Francisco Chamber Singers premiered in 1998 and a song by David Conte premiered in 1993 by the most famous local chorus, Chanticleer. Then we ourselves sing premieres of pieces by three East Bay composers: Paul Crabtree, Kurt Erickson, and myself. Finally, we close out the American half with two traditional hymns, Amazing Grace arranged by North Bay composer Doug Bowes and Hark, I Hear the Harps Eternal in an arrangement by Alice Parker, a composer based in western Massachusetts.

We have invited the six Bay Area composers to tell you something about their own pieces.

Regarding Winging Wildly, Kirke Mechem said, “There is a progression of sorts in this cycle from joy to dark horror and back to joy again, and the three pieces are closely interconnected by both poetic and musical ideas.

“From a compositional point of view, the first piece is like a prelude to the other two; musical motifs which will be developed later are introduced. One could say the poem is about beauty being cut short by death. (Sara Teasdale committed suicide.) The piece tries to portray birds at dusk in the way that the poem does and to contrast the beauty of evening with the darkness of the night (death) which is coming. I wasn’t quite sure I could bring off the middle poem musically. The strophic form helped, but mostly I was helped by the great power of this poem about enslavement from the great 19th-century African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar. The last poem, on the other hand, has a kind of extravagance of ecstasy, joy beyond words, as World War I ended. The line “and the song was wordless’ was all the excuse I needed to dispense with words now and then.

“All three poems use bird metaphors—and are also about singing in some way. In the outer poems, singing is a metaphor for freedom and joy; in “The Caged Bird’ it is a plea for freedom. What could be a better subject for a chorus?”

David Conte wrote about Charm Me Asleep, “Based on 17th-century poet Robert Herrick’s “To Music—To Becalm His Fever,’ the tone and character of the music reflect the speaker’s various states of mind as he entreats Music to calm his fever, to lull him to sleep, and finally to guide his flight to heaven.”

Paul Crabtree’s When I Was on Horseback, the first of the three premieres on the program, sets an Irish folk tune that may be more familiar in its American guise, “The Streets of Laredo.” The composer wrote, “This is a crowd scene where the onlookers to the passing parade are jostling for good positions. Once the parade arrives in full force, the folk-song material is intentionally “buried’ to reflect the experience of most people who did not reserve front-row seats. These people are carried along in waves of energy and enthusiasm, joining in the drumming, imitating the trumpets, but never able to get an unrestricted view of the reason for the celebration.”

In our second premiere, the two texts Kurt Erickson selected are stanzas from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A. H. H.” He says, “I wrote Two Tennyson Settings for the Baroque Choral Guild in appreciation for their fine performances of my ballet Angels: Fallen and Otherwise in its premiere last fall with the Lawrence Pech Dance Company. The first setting deals explicitly with grief; the poet’s inward expression closely mirrors my own response to loss. In contrast to the first, the second setting is lively, rhythmically extroverted, and joyful. Both works were written to mark the passing of composer Lou Harrison. While the first setting is an expression of his loss, the second is analogous to the unrestrained joy with which he lived his life.”

The third of the premieres is my own Dance Steps, which has fulfilled a desire I have had, ever since I became BCG’s music director, three years ago, to write a piece for the group. I had decided early on that I wanted to set a secular text, and while I was casting about for a specific poem that felt right, Carol Handelman, one of the Guild’s directors, suggested that I try the poetry of her old college roommate, Susan Kinsolving. I promptly bought Susan’s award-winning collection Dailies and Rushes and read through the entire volume, noting how well her imagery and sensitivity of feeling would lend themselves to musical composition.

After living with my favorites for a few weeks, I settled on “Dance Steps.” Although the poem is longer than I would typically select for a short piece, I was taken by its delightful images as well as the timeliness of the sentiment. My setting is largely homophonic in order to manage the text’s length and keep the diction clear. To provide a unifying structure, the music of the opening stanza with its ostinato on “eccentric solutions” repeats at “international opinion favored further whims...Romantic love gained new respect” and then once more at the very end. Along the way, listen for familiar musical motives that relate to particular words in the text.

Doug Bowes wrote, “In arranging Amazing Grace, I was trying to create a piece that, without abandoning the traditional strophic structure of the original hymn, nonetheless had a perceivable arch to it; hence the key changes and the return to the opening idea at the end. While John Newton’s words are much beloved, and deservedly so, I specifically wanted to honor a dear friend of mine who was dying of cancer at the time. I therefore took the liberty of writing my own third verse.”

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Cantabile Choral Guild
953 Industrial Avenue, Suite 118, Palo Alto CA 94303
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