Hail, Cecilia! - December 2022
Program notes by Sanford Dole
I’m thrilled to welcome you to the first concert set of Bay Choral Guild’s 2022–2023 season, our 44th year! This program is especially exciting for me, because we are presenting the world premiere of my latest large-scale work, A Song for St. Cecilia. This 35-minute, nine-movement cantata makes up the entire second half of our program. It was originally composed for large orchestra and symphonic choir, but you will hear a slimmed-down version suitable for the resources of our choir. I’ll talk about the genesis of the piece later. First I’ll tell you about the two works we’re performing before intermission.
After realizing that I could create a credible version of St. Cecilia for organ, piano, and percussion, I had half a program. But what could I pair with it to make a satisfying concert? I was attracted to Antonin Dvořák’s Te Deum not only because it had major solo parts for two of the three soloists needed for St. Cecilia, but also because it opens with a solo timpani outburst. Since I already had timpani in the reduced orchestration of my piece, this seemed a good fit. However, it is also written for large orchestra, so it, too, would need an orchestral reduction.
As the Te Deum only runs 20 minutes, I needed more for the first half of our concert. I started thinking about pieces more specifically complementing mine. I was aware that Handel and other composers had set the same poem I used, English Poet Laureate John Dryden’s A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, so I researched those. Benjamin Britten’s Hymn to St. Cecilia might seem an obvious choice, but that work is unaccompanied, so I elected not to include it on this concert. I learned that in 1692 Henry Purcell had created a work for the St. Cecilia celebrations in London. His text, Irishman Nicholas Brady’s Hail! Bright Cecilia, is quite similar; in fact, it was derived from Dryden’s poem. Two St. Cecilia odes three centuries apart seemed like a nice theme for our concert. But Purcell’s piece runs close to an hour and requires six soloists and vaster orchestral forces. So again I elected to create a pared-down edition, with organ accompaniment and including just the choral movements and a tenor solo.
In the end, I had a program, but also three big arranging tasks. This past spring was thus incredibly busy for me! But it was all worth it.
Born in 1659, Henry Purcell was a chorister in the Chapel Royal. The Grove Dictionary article about Purcell reports that he was “prodigiously gifted,” including some evidence that his first composition came at age 8. As fate would have it his voice broke at an unusually early age, after which he became an unpaid assistant to the king’s instrument keeper. Having this experience behind him, he moved on to a paid position tuning the organ at Westminster Abbey in 1674, which eventually led to his becoming the organist there in 1679.
Apart from a few early songs and anthems, nearly all of Purcell’s vast output (over 700 catalogued works) came in the short 15 years between 1680 and his death in 1695. These include six operas, a long list of incidental music and songs for plays, as well as many anthems, services, and other sacred works, secular songs, and catches. Writing in a conservative style at first, he developed a technical mastery and innovative style that sets his music apart from his contemporaries.
The practice of honoring members of the royal family with odes and welcome songs, most often on the royal birthday, had been established during the reign of Charles II in the 1660s. Purcell composed court odes throughout his career. He created these cantatas, which feature solo voices, chorus, and orchestra, for Charles II, James II, and Queen Mary. The last of these, Come, ye sons of art, away, is among his most famous works.
Purcell created odes for other occasions as well. He wrote Hail! Bright Cecilia for St. Cecilia’s Day in 1692. The text is full of references to musical instruments, including the organ, which Cecilia is supposed to have invented, and ascribes personality to instruments and voices. Purcell treats these personalities as if they were dramatic characters. You will hear one of these in the tenor aria, “The fife and the harmony of war.” Throughout the work the choir interjects praises to Cecilia. We hope you get a sense of Purcell’s skill and creative powers from hearing these grand choruses.
Antonin Dvořák rose from humble roots as the son of an innkeeper and a butcher to become a national hero of the Czech people and his country’s greatest composer. But until his mid-thirties he toiled away as a music teacher and church organist in relative obscurity. In 1874 he submitted several compositions to the Austrian State Prize for Composition, where, unbeknownst to him, Johannes Brahms was on the jury. Brahms was highly impressed, and recommended him to his publisher. This quickly led to international prominence, many invitations to visit England, and to becoming Professor of Composition and Instrumentation at Prague University.
Soon after Dvořák took the job at Prague University, he was recruited by the American philanthropist Jeanette Thurber to serve as Artistic Director and Professor of Composition at her National Conservatory of Music in New York City. Thurber was aware of Dvořák’s reputation as a nationalistic composer, and she hoped that he could help American composers develop a recognizable national style. For his arrival, she commissioned him to write a piece for the 400th anniversary of Columbus Day: a grand cantata for chorus, orchestra, and soloists. She would provide a text, but in case it did not arrive on time, “the proposition is that Dr. Dvořák choose some Latin Hymn such as ‘Te Deum laudamus’ or ‘Jubilate Deo’ or any other which would be suitable for the occasion.” Ultimately she settled on a poem called The American Flag, but by the time Dvořák received it he had already written his Te Deum.
Employing the same pair of soloists, soprano and baritone, used in Brahms’ Requiem, the Te Deum is by turns calmly prayerful and exuberantly operatic. Its four consecutive movements mimic the standard symphonic format (fast first movement, slow second movement, triple-meter scherzo, weighty final movement). The celebratory Columbus concert took place at Carnegie Hall on October 21, 1892, with 250 singers in the chorus. It was Dvořák’s first time conducting in the United States; the performance and the piece were a success. But his American sojourn was not to last. After a few years Dvořák was homesick, and when the National Conservatory entered rough financial waters in 1895, he returned to Prague and his position at the conservatory there.
The second half of our program leaves behind the music of the late 17th and 19th centuries and steps firmly into the 21st century with a brand brand-new work. The genesis of A Song for St. Cecilia dates back to the late 1970s, when I was a member of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. One year we performed Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Christmas cantata Hodie. This was in the days before Handel’s Messiah became an annual tradition at December concerts nationwide. I fell in love with Hodie and have mourned the fact that it is rarely heard, at least partly due to the marketing clout of Messiah. (I love Handel’s masterwork as much as anybody, but its popularity means that many other worthy pieces don’t get programmed.) So, ever since I began conducting choirs in the 1980s I’ve had a dream of producing a December concert that would feature Hodie.
One major reason Vaughan William’s delightful opus is not often performed is that it requires substantial resources. Scored for large orchestra, symphonic choir, children’s choir, and three soloists, the work needs a large organization such as the San Francisco Symphony and a venue to match. Still, my fantasy was that one day I would have the opportunity to conduct this piece.
As I thought more about this fantasy concert, I wondered what else could be paired with Vaughan William’s 50-minute cantata to make a complete program. That’s when I began to consider composing a new work specifically to be its companion. This idea began to really take hold after I came across John Dryden’s ode A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day in an anthology sometime in the early 2000s. The poem is in seven stanzas and concludes with what Dryden calls a “Grand Chorus.” I saw this as a good structure for a multi-movement work. Some of the stanzas have instrument “characters,” much like the Purcell ode on the first half of our concert, and these were perfect to assign to the same three soloists used in Hodie. I began to imagine a concert that would take place in early December, neatly spaced midway between St. Cecilia’s Day (November 22) and Christmas.
With no prospect of conducting the San Francisco Symphony any time soon, nor of being commissioned to compose such a work, the idea just rattled around in my brain for many years. Finally, in the summer of 2015 I decided I should just start writing the piece “on spec” in hopes that one day it might be performed. I wrote the first movement, “Harmony,” that summer as a sketch for chorus with piano. The following summer I jumped to another project, composing Songs of Isaiah for Bay Choral Guild’s upcoming season. The creation of Isaiah was a watershed event for me, because for the first time I composed a choral/orchestral work directly in full score, not as a sketch for piano and later orchestrated. Discovering that this method worked for me, I decided that my project for the summer of 2017 would be to orchestrate the Harmony movement, then continue writing as much as I could.
Since the plan was to create a companion piece to Hodie, I decided it should include the same orchestral and vocal forces (though omitting the children’s choir). Seeing a full orchestra score of blank measures is daunting! But once I began orchestrating, my creative impulses began flowing. Moving on to the second movement was easy and fun. That summer I completed not only the orchestration of the first movement but also fully realized the next four movements. This momentum propelled another composing binge in the summer of 2018. I completed the work that year feeling much internal joy and satisfaction.
The celebrations were tempered, however, once I began showing it to my conducting colleagues. I had hoped that my friends who direct larger organizations might be interested in performing it. The responses I received were politely encouraging, but almost all of them included a request for a chamber version that could be performed in smaller venues with a smaller budget. I was stumped. I legitimately had no idea how I could possibly take a piece that was conceived for a full orchestra and boil it down in a satisfactory way. My “aha” moment arrived this past February, when I was hired as an extra chorister to sing in Marin Symphony’s production of Carmina Burana. I recalled that Carl Orff had created a reduced version of his work for two pianos and percussion, which Bay Choral Guild performed quite successfully in 2015. Having two pianos allowed him to create such a rich sound that one doesn’t miss the full orchestra. And the addition of percussion adds a lot of spice.
There was my solution! However, I was concerned that my piece has sections that require sustained notes that can’t be replicated on the piano. Enter the organ, which not only has infinite sustain but also a variety of colors that would help simulate the orchestral sounds I intended.
The first seven movements of the work follow the seven stanzas of the poem. Then the orchestra has a solo moment before the concluding movement brings all the forces together. Although you will hear only organ, piano, and percussion in this concert, I thought it would be interesting to describe the original orchestration of some of these sections.
After realizing that I could create a credible version of St. Cecilia for organ, piano, and percussion, I had half a program. But what could I pair with it to make a satisfying concert? I was attracted to Antonin Dvořák’s Te Deum not only because it had major solo parts for two of the three soloists needed for St. Cecilia, but also because it opens with a solo timpani outburst. Since I already had timpani in the reduced orchestration of my piece, this seemed a good fit. However, it is also written for large orchestra, so it, too, would need an orchestral reduction.
As the Te Deum only runs 20 minutes, I needed more for the first half of our concert. I started thinking about pieces more specifically complementing mine. I was aware that Handel and other composers had set the same poem I used, English Poet Laureate John Dryden’s A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day, so I researched those. Benjamin Britten’s Hymn to St. Cecilia might seem an obvious choice, but that work is unaccompanied, so I elected not to include it on this concert. I learned that in 1692 Henry Purcell had created a work for the St. Cecilia celebrations in London. His text, Irishman Nicholas Brady’s Hail! Bright Cecilia, is quite similar; in fact, it was derived from Dryden’s poem. Two St. Cecilia odes three centuries apart seemed like a nice theme for our concert. But Purcell’s piece runs close to an hour and requires six soloists and vaster orchestral forces. So again I elected to create a pared-down edition, with organ accompaniment and including just the choral movements and a tenor solo.
In the end, I had a program, but also three big arranging tasks. This past spring was thus incredibly busy for me! But it was all worth it.
Born in 1659, Henry Purcell was a chorister in the Chapel Royal. The Grove Dictionary article about Purcell reports that he was “prodigiously gifted,” including some evidence that his first composition came at age 8. As fate would have it his voice broke at an unusually early age, after which he became an unpaid assistant to the king’s instrument keeper. Having this experience behind him, he moved on to a paid position tuning the organ at Westminster Abbey in 1674, which eventually led to his becoming the organist there in 1679.
Apart from a few early songs and anthems, nearly all of Purcell’s vast output (over 700 catalogued works) came in the short 15 years between 1680 and his death in 1695. These include six operas, a long list of incidental music and songs for plays, as well as many anthems, services, and other sacred works, secular songs, and catches. Writing in a conservative style at first, he developed a technical mastery and innovative style that sets his music apart from his contemporaries.
The practice of honoring members of the royal family with odes and welcome songs, most often on the royal birthday, had been established during the reign of Charles II in the 1660s. Purcell composed court odes throughout his career. He created these cantatas, which feature solo voices, chorus, and orchestra, for Charles II, James II, and Queen Mary. The last of these, Come, ye sons of art, away, is among his most famous works.
Purcell created odes for other occasions as well. He wrote Hail! Bright Cecilia for St. Cecilia’s Day in 1692. The text is full of references to musical instruments, including the organ, which Cecilia is supposed to have invented, and ascribes personality to instruments and voices. Purcell treats these personalities as if they were dramatic characters. You will hear one of these in the tenor aria, “The fife and the harmony of war.” Throughout the work the choir interjects praises to Cecilia. We hope you get a sense of Purcell’s skill and creative powers from hearing these grand choruses.
Antonin Dvořák rose from humble roots as the son of an innkeeper and a butcher to become a national hero of the Czech people and his country’s greatest composer. But until his mid-thirties he toiled away as a music teacher and church organist in relative obscurity. In 1874 he submitted several compositions to the Austrian State Prize for Composition, where, unbeknownst to him, Johannes Brahms was on the jury. Brahms was highly impressed, and recommended him to his publisher. This quickly led to international prominence, many invitations to visit England, and to becoming Professor of Composition and Instrumentation at Prague University.
Soon after Dvořák took the job at Prague University, he was recruited by the American philanthropist Jeanette Thurber to serve as Artistic Director and Professor of Composition at her National Conservatory of Music in New York City. Thurber was aware of Dvořák’s reputation as a nationalistic composer, and she hoped that he could help American composers develop a recognizable national style. For his arrival, she commissioned him to write a piece for the 400th anniversary of Columbus Day: a grand cantata for chorus, orchestra, and soloists. She would provide a text, but in case it did not arrive on time, “the proposition is that Dr. Dvořák choose some Latin Hymn such as ‘Te Deum laudamus’ or ‘Jubilate Deo’ or any other which would be suitable for the occasion.” Ultimately she settled on a poem called The American Flag, but by the time Dvořák received it he had already written his Te Deum.
Employing the same pair of soloists, soprano and baritone, used in Brahms’ Requiem, the Te Deum is by turns calmly prayerful and exuberantly operatic. Its four consecutive movements mimic the standard symphonic format (fast first movement, slow second movement, triple-meter scherzo, weighty final movement). The celebratory Columbus concert took place at Carnegie Hall on October 21, 1892, with 250 singers in the chorus. It was Dvořák’s first time conducting in the United States; the performance and the piece were a success. But his American sojourn was not to last. After a few years Dvořák was homesick, and when the National Conservatory entered rough financial waters in 1895, he returned to Prague and his position at the conservatory there.
The second half of our program leaves behind the music of the late 17th and 19th centuries and steps firmly into the 21st century with a brand brand-new work. The genesis of A Song for St. Cecilia dates back to the late 1970s, when I was a member of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. One year we performed Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Christmas cantata Hodie. This was in the days before Handel’s Messiah became an annual tradition at December concerts nationwide. I fell in love with Hodie and have mourned the fact that it is rarely heard, at least partly due to the marketing clout of Messiah. (I love Handel’s masterwork as much as anybody, but its popularity means that many other worthy pieces don’t get programmed.) So, ever since I began conducting choirs in the 1980s I’ve had a dream of producing a December concert that would feature Hodie.
One major reason Vaughan William’s delightful opus is not often performed is that it requires substantial resources. Scored for large orchestra, symphonic choir, children’s choir, and three soloists, the work needs a large organization such as the San Francisco Symphony and a venue to match. Still, my fantasy was that one day I would have the opportunity to conduct this piece.
As I thought more about this fantasy concert, I wondered what else could be paired with Vaughan William’s 50-minute cantata to make a complete program. That’s when I began to consider composing a new work specifically to be its companion. This idea began to really take hold after I came across John Dryden’s ode A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day in an anthology sometime in the early 2000s. The poem is in seven stanzas and concludes with what Dryden calls a “Grand Chorus.” I saw this as a good structure for a multi-movement work. Some of the stanzas have instrument “characters,” much like the Purcell ode on the first half of our concert, and these were perfect to assign to the same three soloists used in Hodie. I began to imagine a concert that would take place in early December, neatly spaced midway between St. Cecilia’s Day (November 22) and Christmas.
With no prospect of conducting the San Francisco Symphony any time soon, nor of being commissioned to compose such a work, the idea just rattled around in my brain for many years. Finally, in the summer of 2015 I decided I should just start writing the piece “on spec” in hopes that one day it might be performed. I wrote the first movement, “Harmony,” that summer as a sketch for chorus with piano. The following summer I jumped to another project, composing Songs of Isaiah for Bay Choral Guild’s upcoming season. The creation of Isaiah was a watershed event for me, because for the first time I composed a choral/orchestral work directly in full score, not as a sketch for piano and later orchestrated. Discovering that this method worked for me, I decided that my project for the summer of 2017 would be to orchestrate the Harmony movement, then continue writing as much as I could.
Since the plan was to create a companion piece to Hodie, I decided it should include the same orchestral and vocal forces (though omitting the children’s choir). Seeing a full orchestra score of blank measures is daunting! But once I began orchestrating, my creative impulses began flowing. Moving on to the second movement was easy and fun. That summer I completed not only the orchestration of the first movement but also fully realized the next four movements. This momentum propelled another composing binge in the summer of 2018. I completed the work that year feeling much internal joy and satisfaction.
The celebrations were tempered, however, once I began showing it to my conducting colleagues. I had hoped that my friends who direct larger organizations might be interested in performing it. The responses I received were politely encouraging, but almost all of them included a request for a chamber version that could be performed in smaller venues with a smaller budget. I was stumped. I legitimately had no idea how I could possibly take a piece that was conceived for a full orchestra and boil it down in a satisfactory way. My “aha” moment arrived this past February, when I was hired as an extra chorister to sing in Marin Symphony’s production of Carmina Burana. I recalled that Carl Orff had created a reduced version of his work for two pianos and percussion, which Bay Choral Guild performed quite successfully in 2015. Having two pianos allowed him to create such a rich sound that one doesn’t miss the full orchestra. And the addition of percussion adds a lot of spice.
There was my solution! However, I was concerned that my piece has sections that require sustained notes that can’t be replicated on the piano. Enter the organ, which not only has infinite sustain but also a variety of colors that would help simulate the orchestral sounds I intended.
The first seven movements of the work follow the seven stanzas of the poem. Then the orchestra has a solo moment before the concluding movement brings all the forces together. Although you will hear only organ, piano, and percussion in this concert, I thought it would be interesting to describe the original orchestration of some of these sections.
- Harmony. We start at the cosmic level, with the chorus singing of “heavenly harmony.” The piece opens with a four-note trumpet fanfare, which functions as a leitmotif—listen for it to recur later. Following this we hear a chord stream of dense cosmic harmonies from the woodwinds. The pattern of fanfare and dense chord stream repeats, next with the brass and finally the strings, leading to the chorus entrance. When the chorus later sings of “jarring atoms,” the accompaniment launches into a bubbling ostinato depicting atoms bouncing around.
- Passion. Jubal, a biblical figure whom Genesis describes as the father of music, plays a “corded shell,” which I imagined as a marimba leading a Latin band playing on a beach in the tropics.
- Trumpet. The baritone sings of the trumpet leading troops into battle.
- Flute. A baleful flute solo introduces the tenor singing of the “soft, complaining flute.”
- Violin. The soprano sings “Sharp violins proclaim their jealous pangs and desperation…” The accompaniment is strings only, playing frantically a la Bernard Hermann’s famous Psycho score.
- Voice. The choir, singing a cappella, brings a calming influence, joined by the three soloists singing together as a second choir.
- Orpheus. Orpheus, the legendary musician and prophet of Ancient Greece, “could lead the savage race.” The text continues, “and trees unrooted left their place.” I’ve set this section as a march, imagining Tolkien’s tree creatures, the Ents, plodding through the forest.
- Cecilia. Orchestra alone. Muted brass play a soft, sustained chorale. The piano, starting with the original leitmotif, plays a Satie-like solo, leading into a fantasia that combines melodies from the prior movements.
- Music. Dryden’s “Grand Chorus” brings the work to a close with a driving ostinato in 7/8. Midway through, the pulse shifts from 2+2+3 to 3+2+2, as the bass sings of “the last and dreadful hour” in canon with a solo trombone (played in this arrangement by the vibraphone). Then a trio of trumpets leads us back to the movement’s original ostinato, heading toward the ode’s final words “The dead shall live, the living die, and Music shall untune the sky!”
Creating these arrangements and performing editions is very time consuming but is something I really enjoy doing. It was a lot of work, but knowing it would result in finally bringing A Song for St. Cecilia to life in a performance was highly satisfying. I sincerely hope you enjoy the entire program. And, of course, I look forward to hearing your response to the premiere of my grand opus. As always, we thank you for supporting Bay Choral Guild. We look forward to seeing you at our next performances, “Global Harmony,” a program of unaccompanied music from around the world, the first weekend of March, 2023.
