BCG Program Notes: Pipes and Drums: June 2002

The plans for this program began with a selfish desire on my part. We always perform in these beautiful churches with large pipe organs, and I wanted to hear what they sound like. Besides that, I have been starved lately of the grand church anthems with organ that were part of my life before I became the music director at Saint Gregory’s on Potrero Hill. Our liturgy there is designed to be highly participatory, and one way in which we accomplish this is to have the congregation always sing a cappella. While the experience is wonderful, one I wouldn’t give up for the world, it does mean that the building has no organ and that I therefore can’t program anthems for the choir that employ the mighty “king of instruments.” Yet another reason I’m excited about these concerts with organ is that we can feature one of our accompanists, Paul Rosas, who is a talented organist.

The idea for including percussion as well came during a meeting of the board of directors as we were tossing around ideas for repertoire. A board member recalled having performed—and loved!—William Mathias’ Ceremony After a Fire Raid years ago. That prompted another to recall a performance of Russell Peck’s Lift-Off! I immediately thought of Charles Ives’ Psalm 90. And a program was born.

As concepts go, “Pipes and Drums” has made for quite an eclectic program. With musical selections all over the map, I chose not to present them in chronological order or in some thematically linked fashion, preferring to juxtapose pieces that set each other off. I think you will enjoy how each work relates to and comments on those around it.

Each half of tonight’s program begins with a musical tribute. C. Hubert H. Parry composed I Was Glad When They Said Unto Me for the coronation of Edward VII in 1902, and it has been sung at every subsequent British coronation. We open with this grand example of Edwardian splendor in honor of Queen Elizabeth’s fiftieth anniversary, being celebrated this month. One of the few pieces by Parry still in the active repertoire, the anthem has an optional central section, “Vivat regina” (“Long live the queen”), meant to be performed only when the monarch is present. The score indicates, in fact, that it be sung by the Queen’s Scholars, her private chapel choir. Even so, in this country, one is apt to hear the section included. After all, as has been jokingly pointed out, there’s sure to be at least one queen in the audience.

It’s always a shock to be reminded Charles Ives was composing at the same time as Parry, Mahler, and Debussy. His music couldn’t be more different or more radically postmodern, although firmly grounded in musical tradition. His Psalm 90 freely mixes ordinary melodic and harmonic devices with chromatic and whole-tone scales, polytonalities, and unusual rhythmic permutations, always in service to the text.

After resigning his post as organist at Central Presbyterian Church in New York, Ives generously, if naively, left Psalm 90 and other works in the church’s library, but the manuscripts were thrown out during a move. Years later, when his iconoclastic style had developed even further, Ives set about recomposing the piece, to which he must have been strongly attached. His wife reported that he once said this was the only one of his works with which he was satisfied.

Gerald Finzi, deeply affected as a child by the loss of his father and three elder brothers, remained introspective and reclusive as an adult. He did teach at the Royal Academy of Music for three years, but after marrying, he moved to a modest farm where he lived quietly, nurturing an orchard of rare apple trees, assembling a library, and composing music. Finzi’s many songs and choral works set texts of English poets from all periods. For the piece that we perform, God Is Gone Up, he selected a “sacramental meditation” by the British-born American colonist Edward Taylor. Although Finzi wrote few sacred works, this radiant anthem, showing influences from Parry, Elgar, and Vaughan Williams, has found a permanent home in the repertoire of cathedral churches.

Our program continues with three works chosen to highlight each element of tonight’s ensemble on its own: organ, chorus, and percussion. In a nod to our Baroque heritage, we present two works by Johann Sebastian Bach tonight, the first of which is his Prelude and Fugue in C minor for organ. If any composer from an earlier era can hold his own with such a broad range of twentieth-century styles, it’s Bach. And what better way to feature the organ than with a work by its acknowledged master.

Benjamin Britten’s Hymn to Saint Cecilia is perhaps one of the most cherished a cappella works for mixed chorus from the twentieth century. It sets a poem that W. H. Auden had presented to Britten on his birthday, which happens to fall on the feast day of Saint Cecilia, patron saint of musicians. Auden’s ode has been the subject of numerous dissertations, including an essay by our own soprano Judy Clarence that deciphered the text for the chorus. Summarizing the poem’s meaning in her conclusion, she says, “If we can open ourselves to our emotions and to the reality of who we really are, we may be able to save ourselves from the mess we’ve made of our lives and our world. Music can facilitate that opening.”

Britten’s piece divides into three sections. In the first, the chorus narrates the legend of Saint Cecilia, a second-century Roman maiden. Music itself speaks in part two (“I cannot grow; I have no shadow”). And the voice in the last section, when the basses intone “O ear whose creatures cannot wish to fall,” is that of humankind until a solo soprano sings as Cecilia, the personification of music. In its final four couplets, the chorus invokes the violin, drum, flute, and trumpet, and four soloists reply in the voices of these representatives of the four families of instruments: strings, percussion, woodwinds, and brass.

Britten composed his Hymn to Saint Cecilia and the equally famous A Ceremony of Carols, which we performed in December, in the same eight-day period. You may recall that this was during the war while he sailed back to England with his partner Peter Pears after spending a couple of unhappy years in this country suffering from writer’s block. Once aboard ship, Britten’s muse returned, and in both the Hymn and Ceremony, he again displayed his gift for lilting melody, lush harmonies, and ingenious text-setting.

Closing the first half of our program with a bang, we feature our guest percussionists in Lift-Off! by Russell Peck, a composer born in Detroit and best known for pieces that bring the excitement of the symphony orchestra to new audiences. Barreling along on nine bass drums, his extravaganza is a real thrill ride.

Although it was more than a year ago when we selected the piece for this program, Ceremony After a Fire Raid by William Mathias on a text by Dylan Thomas does make a fitting tribute to those who died on September 11 in a horror too like the scene that inspired the poem. From the very start, the percussion’s blaring outbursts and the piano’s angry cluster tones express what the chorus then speaks in the first stanza, Thomas’ despair and agony upon seeing an infant’s burnt corpse on a London street following an aerial bombing. A glimmer of hope when the chorus first sings (“Begin with singing”) proves false, but across a twenty-minute span punctuated by two instrumental interludes, the composer and the poet eventually lead the listener from despair to rebirth in the finale (“Glory, glory, glory”). Ultimately, this piece is an affirmation of hope for troubled times.

Estonian composer Arvo Pärt has enjoyed great success over the past two decades writing in a style he calls “tintinnabulation.” This word for the sounds of bells with their ringing overtones refers in Pärt’s usage to the predominance in various inversions of a single triad. A serenely beautiful example is The Beatitudes, written in 1990. While the listener may not be aware of the compositional process, throughout the piece the sopranos and tenors trade off two notes of a triad while the altos and basses weave around the third note, moving stepwise up and down the scale, always in opposite directions. The result is a shimmering sound, simultaneously static and in flux.

Finally, on a fun note, we offer the first two movements of Bach’s Cantata 29, “Wir danken dir, Gott, wir danken dir,” in a transcription that I created for tonight’s performing forces. Bach’s music has been subjected to countless transcriptions over the years. The practice goes back to the master himself, who often reused his music, and that of others, in new contexts. You may, in fact, recognize the opening sinfonia and chorus of Cantata 29 from other works. Bach adapted the preludio of his Violin Partita in E major for the sinfonia of the cantata, assigning the bravura violin solo to the organ, with an accompaniment of strings and trumpets. I, in turn, have created a tour-de-force xylophone solo and given the trumpet parts to the vibraphone and the string parts to the organ. The chorus that follows the sinfonia may also sound familiar, for Bach later refashioned it into both the “Gratias agimus tibi” and “Dona nobis pacem” of his crowning achievement, the Mass in B minor.

We hope you enjoy tonight’s offering and that we’ll see you again in December when we present a program of works by Bach and other Baroque composers in our usual manner, in their complete, original versions with vocal soloists and an orchestra of period instruments.

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

Program Notes by Sanford Dole