​Welcome to the concluding concerts of Bay Choral Guild’s 2023–2024 season! After reveling in the glories of European music from the Classical and Baroque eras in our previous concerts this season, we are having a homecoming with today’s program, “American Journey.”

Having decided to focus on music created by American composers, my original concept for the theme of the show was to present a travelogue of sorts. I had hoped to take you on a musical “road trip” traveling from east to west singing songs that related to locations across the county. However, finding suitable pieces proved to be more challenging than expected. After much deliberation and research, I determined that we would instead take you on a journey through the history of our great nation, performing works that relate to eras and events in the progress of American culture.

The first half of the program works its way chronologically through musical styles and events of the 18th and 19th centuries. We begin with music in the early American Shape Note style, so called because music published in the late 1700s was printed on the five-line musical staff we know today, but the notes themselves were literally of different shapes for each step in the scale. The best known of the early American composers in colonial New England was William Billings. It seems fitting to start off our show with one of his best-loved works, I am the Rose of Sharon. With a biblical text taken from the “Song of Solomon,” this anthem was first published in his own volume, The Singing Master’s Assistant (1778), and it later appeared in many American tunebooks, including Southern Harmony and Sacred Harp.

A contemporary of Billings, Daniel Read was one of the primary members of a group of American composers called the “Yankee tunesmiths” or the First New England School. He made his living operating a general store in New Haven but supplemented his income by compiling and publishing tunebooks himself, which often contained his original works. With a text by the well-known English Congregational minister, hymn writer, and theologian Isaac Watts (1674–1748), we present a modern arrangement by Jacob Narverud of My Spirit Looks to God Alone that captures the style of singing typically heard in Shape Note singing societies.

Another member of The First New England School was Vermont native Jeremiah Ingalls. He held various jobs, such as farmer, cooper, taverner, and choirmaster. In 1805 he, too, published his own book of choral music, titled The Christian Harmony. He named the songs in these volumes by their tune name, not by their text. I’ve included two of Ingalls’s pieces, Captain Kidd (based on a 17th-century ballad), today known as God is Seen; and Invitation, now known as Hark, I Hear the Harps Eternal. I chose them in part because they are arranged by one of the great choral icons of our time, Alice Parker, who first gained fame for her work with the Robert Shaw Chorale in the 1960s. Parker has developed these songs from a simple homophonic hymn style into more intricate choral anthems. Having lost Alice Parker just this past December, I felt it was important to honor her vast legacy on this program.

Leaving colonial America, we now enter the 19th century, singing songs that relate to three significant cultural events from that era.

Enslaved Africans, whose labor fueled the burgeoning American economy from the beginning, are an important part of our cultural history. In the early 1800s what became known as the Underground Railroad—a network of secret routes and safe houses established to assist slaves escaping to northern free states and Canada—employed songs as one means of conveying coded information to guide travelers along these secret routes. Sacred and secular songs about water were one way these migrants were advised to travel the waterways to avoid being tracked.

Deep River is an old African American spiritual that became popularized in the early 20th century and has been sung in several films, including Show Boat (1929). The pathos of the lines “Oh don’t you want to go to that Gospel feast? That promised land where all is peace?” is here poignantly captured by another giant of the 20th-century choral world, Moses Hogan.

Down to the River to Pray, popularized by the movie O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000), was first notated in the volume Slave Songs of the US (1867). The text is thought to have its roots in the Underground Railroad: Whoever was to be freed (brother, sister, father, mother) was to wear the robe and the crown. Our arrangement, by Maryland composer Mark D. Templeton, wraps this tune in “swinging” majesty.

Another seminal event in American history is the Civil War. Patriotic songs became popular, perhaps none more so than the Battle Hymn of the Republic. In November 1861, shortly after the war began, the abolitionist writer Julia Ward Howe attended a public review of troops just outside Washington D.C., where she heard the song John Brown’s Body, sung to a tune known as Oh! Brothers. The final line, “He’s gone to be a soldier in the army of the Lord, His soul’s marching on,” stuck with Howe. As she awoke the next morning, the lines of a poem began to form. She writes, “I sprang out of bed, and found in the dimness an old stump of a pencil which I remembered to have used the day before. I scrawled the verses almost without looking at the paper.” The poem, titled Battle Hymn of the Republic, was published on the cover of the Atlantic Monthly magazine in February 1862 .  Our arrangement is by prolific American choral composer David Dickau.

Irish-American bandleader Patrick Gilmore wrote the lyrics to When Johnny Comes Marching Home as a gift for his sister Annie as she prayed for the safe return from the Civil War of her fiancé, Union Light Artillery Captain John O’Rourke. The tune was the same as the Civil War drinking song “Johnny Fill Up the Bowl,” which itself is likely from much earlier. Gilmore later wrote, “I happened to hear somebody humming in the early days of the rebellion, and taking a fancy to it, wrote it down, dressed it up, gave it a name, and rhymed it into usefulness for a special purpose suited to the times.” Its first sheet music publication was deposited in the Library of Congress on September 26, 1863. Listen for the old-timey bugle calls quoted in the piano during the “battle” section of this rollicking arrangement by Dan Davison.

The discovery of gold in California in 1849, silver in Nevada in 1858, and the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 were just some of the reasons that our nation began to see its citizens begin a Western Migration in the latter part of the 19th century. Arranger Mark Hayes, from Kansas City, has compiled in his Old West Medley several popular songs of the era chronicling some of the sights these intrepid travelers may have encountered.

Reaching the western-most destination of this hard-won trek meant arriving at the Pacific Ocean. We conclude the first half of our program with my arrangement of the title song from the 1936 movie San Francisco, starring Clark Gable, Jeanette MacDonald, and Spencer Tracy. The film commemorates a seminal moment in the American West’s history, the great earthquake and fire of 1906. On New Year’s Eve, 1905, saloon keeper “Blackie” Norton (Gable) hires Mary Blake (MacDonald) to sing in his bar, the Paradise Club on Pacific Street in the notorious Barbary Coast of San Francisco. Mary becomes a star attraction at the Paradise, especially for her signature tune, San Francisco. At the end of the film, as now-homeless people gather in Golden Gate Park, word spreads through the camp that “The fire’s out!” As people shout about building a new San Francisco, Blackie and Mary join the crowd as they leave the park marching arm-in-arm, singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic.

After intermission we change gears a bit. Rather than continuing chronologically into the history of the 20th and 21st centuries, this half of the program is organized by the musical genres that are so important to our musical culture.
Prior to the last decades of the 19th century, music found in symphony halls and salon recitals—often referred to as “classical music,” but which I think would be more aptly called “art music”—was almost exclusively Eurocentric. By the 1890s, however, American composers slowly began to take their rightful place in the canon of serious music making. Along with American-born authors and poets, the cultured classes, sometimes begrudgingly, began to accept the legitimacy of homegrown artists. Choral music, of course, combines text with music. We will be highlighting some works by famous and lesser-known composers as well as texts by great writers from American history in this set of American art music from the 20th and 21st centuries.

Although it was a struggle, Black American artists began to assert themselves in American culture in the 20th century. Langston Hughes, known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance, was one of the great writers of his era. His poetry and fiction portrayed the lives of the working-class Blacks in America, lives he portrayed as full of struggle, joy, laughter, and music. Permeating his work is pride in the African American identity and its diverse culture. I, too was published in Hughes’s first volume of poetry, The Weary Blues (1926). This powerful poem opens with a reference to Walt Whitman’s “I Hear America Singing” and metaphorically describes a ubiquitous racial oppression that keeps African Americans from full participation in American society. We hear the poem set to music by the “Dean of Black Women Composers,” Undine Smith Moore. Originally trained as a pianist, Moore received a Master’s degree from Columbia University and studied composition at Manhattan School of Music after having graduated summa cum laude from Fisk School (now Fisk University), a historically black college in Nashville. Eventually becoming a distinguished professor at Virginia Union University, she was awarded many accolades, including an honorary doctorate from Indiana University. In 1981 Moore was invited to deliver the keynote address at the first National Congress on Women in Music at New York University.

Samuel Barber’s Reincarnations, a choral trilogy setting the words of Irish poet James Stephens, is among the most revered of American choral works. It was composed for the chorus at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where Barber was a professor. The last of this set, The Coolin, was first performed in 1949 at the Juilliard School’s Summer Concert Series. The title is an Anglicization of the Gaelic An Chúilfhionn, meaning “the fair-haired one.”

Considered one of Langston Hughes’s best works, I Dream a World is a powerful, short poem that outlines the poet’s vision of a utopian world. There, no one is judged on the color of their skin, and all people have access to the same freedoms. It is set by another great African American woman, Rosephanye Powell, who is part of a more recent generation of American artists establishing themselves in concert halls worldwide. Currently a Professor of Voice at Auburn University, she earlier presented renowned lecture recitals dedicated to the works of William Grant Still, one of the foremost African American composers. Her choral music is published by many of the nation’s leading publishers and includes secular and sacred works for mixed chorus, men and women’s chorus, and children’s voices.

Another revered composer from the mid-20th century is Randall Thompson, a figure of such stature that I felt it important to include his music in this survey. Though perhaps best known for his Alleluia, his longer works, such as The Testament of Freedom, Frostiana, and The Peaceable Kingdom, became staples of choral programming in the latter part of the century. I have selected The Best of Rooms, a lesser-known work, but one of my favorite pieces of his. It sets a text by 17th-century English poet Robert Herrick.

Our survey of American art music concludes with a text adapted from the poetry of Walt Whitman. A Jubilant Song is an excellent example of the mid-century Americana style, with its frequent time changes, syncopations, pantonal harmonies, and explosive accompaniment. Composer Norman Dello Joio received a scholarship to attend the Juilliard School in 1939. He went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for his Meditations on Ecclesiastes, and in 1967 an Emmy Award for “most outstanding music written for television in the 1964–1965 season” for his score to the 1964 NBC television special The Louvre.

We round out our program by acknowledging the influence that popular music has had on American culture, beginning with songs created for the movies. George and Ira Gershwin made a major contribution to the genre writing songs for the films in the 1920s and ’30s that are still loved to this day. I Got Gershwin is a medley of seven of these classic tunes, created by brothers Adam and Matt Todd.

One of Frank Sinatra’s signature songs was Fly Me to the Moon, written by Bart Howard in 1954. First recorded by Kaye Ballard, Sinatra’s 1964 version was closely associated with the Apollo missions to the moon. My arrangement of this classic song was coincidentally completed on December 12, 2015, Sinatra’s 100th birthday.

Representing the iconic American art form of jazz, Duke Ellington’s hit Take the “A” Train was composed by Ellington’s longtime collaborator, Billy Strayhorn, whom he called his writing and arranging companion. Asked to meet Ellington at his home in Harlem, Strayhorn came up with the tune while riding the subway with Ellington’s directions in his hand. The handwritten instructions became the lyrics of this iconic song.

Finally, we make a stop on Broadway to honor another giant in the pantheon of American composers. Leonard Bernstein’s operetta Candide, based on Voltaire’s satiric 1759 novella, was first performed in 1956. Over the next three decades it underwent various rewrites and saw new productions, never quite achieving perfection. These days Candide, with its clever lyrics set magnificently by Bernstein, is most often heard in a concert version, and its brilliant overture is a staple on orchestral “pops” concerts. The final number, Make Our Garden Grow, has gained a place in the standard repertoire of American choral groups. We perform it in an arrangement by another choral legend, Robert Page.

We hope you enjoy this eclectic array of gems from the American choral repertoire. Thank you for supporting the efforts of everyone involved with Bay Choral Guild. We work hard to present entertaining and historically accurate programs of music from throughout the past 500 years of music history. Please join us next season, my 25th as BCG Artistic Director, for a Christmas spectacular in December, choral/orchestral masterworks in March, and songs about music, food, and love in June. See the inside cover of this booklet for more information. We can’t do this without you!