Welcome one and all to Bay Choral Guild’s 46th season! This year I am proud—and humbled—to be celebrating my 25th anniversary as Artistic Director of this fine organization. To honor this milestone we will be including my own compositions and arrangements on each of the season’s three programs. Tonight’s concert includes my 2005 Christmas motet Hodie, Christus natus est (Christ is born today), and my 1988 arrangement of the carol Angels We Have Heard on High.

As you may have surmised from the program title, our show is a full-on holiday festival, a programming genre that we have not presented in a few years. With Christmas day just over a week away we hope that tonight’s selections will get you in the mood for that last-minute shopping and warm, lovely celebrations with family and friends.

We begin with Renaissance and Baroque works ideally suited to the season. Giovanni Gabrieli starts us off with one of my favorite settings of Hodie, Christus natus est. He rose to fame in Europe in his 26 years as the organist and principal composer at San Marco church in Venice, where in earlier years he had trained under his uncle, Andrea Gabrieli. Giovanni is best remembered for his development of the Venetian polychoral style, which influenced the composers of the early Baroque in Germany and elsewhere. Taking advantage of the unusual layout of San Marco, with its two choir lofts facing each other, he was able to create striking spatial effects. We’ll give you an idea of how that worked as we perform this little double-choir gem.

Golden Gate Brass then serenades you with My Spirit Be Joyful from Cantata 146 by J.S. Bach. Though intended for the season after Easter, this music makes a spirited addition to tonight’s selections when arranged for brass quintet.

As I browsed the Internet for an extended work for double choir that could be performed with singers as one choir and brass as the other—a common feature of Baroque music—I came across an intriguing Magnificat by the obscure Antonio Nola. Little biographical information about Nola survives. Born to a wealthy merchant a century after Gabrieli, he was the maestro di cappella at the Neapolitan cathedral San Gennaro starting in 1670. I was drawn to his Magnificat by the showpiece nature of the work. Nola breaks the Magnificat text into phrases set in contrasting styles, and the solo sections give us the chance to highlight some of our wonderful singers. The piece was originally written for nine voices divided into two choirs, plus strings and continuo. To fit the forces we are working with in this concert, I assigned the five-voice choir to our singers, and arranged the four-voice choir and accompanying parts for brass quintet and organ.

The first half of our concert continues with three unaccompanied motets for Christmas by living composers.

This Endris Night is a carol text from the 15th century that has been adapted and set by Canadian composer Sarah Quartel. She states that she is “deeply inspired by the life-changing relationships that can occur when making choral music.” A review for the Choral Journal reports, “Her compositional style has an energetic, contemporary flavor to it, and her works typically embrace sweeping, charming melodies supported by a fresh, harmonic language.” For those who find the title cryptic, “endris” is an Old English word meaning “recent.” In modern parlance we would say, “The other night.”

In the past few years one of our go-to composers for interesting works has been Melissa Dunphy. Born in Australia, she emigrated to the U.S. in 2003 and now lives in Philadelphia.  She specializes in vocal, political, and theatrical music, and is currently a professor of composition at Rutgers University. She has been composer-in-residence for several choirs around the country, including Volti here in the Bay Area. O Oriens is a setting of one of the “O Antiphons.” In the Roman Catholic Church, the Magnificat, also called the Song of Mary (“My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord…”) is said, or sung, in Morning and Evening Prayer throughout the year. While the Magnificat text is fixed, there is a verse that is recited before and after the Magnificat that changes daily, based on the season and the Gospel readings of the day. The O Antiphons—so called because each one begins by calling to God by different titles, e.g., O Wisdom, O Emmanuel, O Key of David—are assigned to the seven days leading up to Christmas. Dunphy begins her setting of O Oriens (“O Morning Star”) by quoting the Gregorian chant melody traditionally used when performing the O Antiphons. Then she expands on this tune and develops it before it eventually dies away with one last iteration of the chant melody, sung by the tenors.

Almost two decades old now, my setting of Hodie, Christus natus est feels like a distant relative that one only sees at the holidays. You recognize that they are family but need to re-establish your relationship, as you have changed since their last visit. In this case, I recognize the youthful energy that went into composing this work, even as I know that my recent works tend to be somewhat less dense harmonically and rhythmically. Still, I think this piece holds up, and it’s fun to revisit it. It truly embodies musical elements that identify my style, such as changing meters, syncopated rhythms, and jazz harmonies. I hope you enjoy listening to it!

The first half of our program concludes with a holiday chestnut. Bay Choral Guild has never performed Handel’s Messiah in its entirety, though a few years ago we did perform Paul Ayres’s whacky “re-composed” version, Messyah. These days there is so much competition from other professional groups for audiences to this classic work that I have been loath to program it. Still, I am excited to present three movements from this masterpiece. I hope you agree that it adds some familiarity and warm holiday cheer to our Christmas festival.

After intermission, Golden Gate Brass will again serenade us, this time with a Renaissance dance. The choral show then resumes with a presentation of Daniel Pinkham’s Christmas Cantata. Pinkham, an organist and harpsichordist as well as composer, lived his entire life in Massachusetts. A graduate of Harvard, he famously went on to teach at the New England Conservatory of Music from 1959 until his death in 2006. He was also revered for the 42 years he spent as the organist of King’s Chapel in Boston. It was for services there that he composed his best-known works, the Christmas, Advent, and Wedding Cantatas. The Christmas Cantata’s three movements, sung in Latin, ask the shepherds what they saw, ponder the mystery that animals were present at the birth, and sing the praises of the Virgin Mother and God.

Familiar carols, in unfamiliar arrangements, come next.

Gone 10 years now, the late Minnesota composer Stephen Paulus continues to be widely performed. The extremely prolific Mr. Paulus left us with 12 operas, 55 orchestral works, and over 400 choral gems. His delightful version of Ding Dong! Merrily on High is a fine example of the craftsmanship described by The New York Times: “His scoring is invariably expert and exceptionally imaginative in textures and use of instruments.” 

A new talent on the scene, but surely someone to watch, is 22-year-old Tripp Carter. A recent graduate of Rollins College, in Florida, Carter is an avid barbershop quartet singer and arranger. With three choral works already published, it seems likely that he will go on to a successful career as a composer. His arrangement of What Child Is This employs a wonderful harmonic language that makes for a refreshing take on this classic carol.

Another new compositional voice is Patrick Vu, a Vietnamese-American composer and conductor from Allen, Texas. In 2023 he won the prestigious Raymond Brock Prize for Student Composers from the American Choral Conductors Association, and at age 26 has already been performed and commissioned by many leading choirs. Vu reports that Silent Night was one of his grandmother’s favorite carols; that although “she spoke no more than a handful of words in English, she knew Silent Night when she heard it.” She died of lung cancer in 2013. “For years, I have wanted to honor her memory,” he recalls, “and finally in 2021, I wrote this arrangement of the beloved and timeless carol for her.” A certain pathos and the love he felt for his grandmother come through in this heartfelt setting.

Having met and hung out with Amy Gordon, a young composer and arranger from Los Angeles, I can testify that this bright and cheerful rendition of Joy to the World reflects her bubbly personality. As she aptly describes it, this version “features lively rhythms, playful dialogue between the voices, and a fresh reharmonization.” Listen for the melodic, rhythmic, and motivic counterpoint adapted from another beloved carol, Deck the Halls.

We are pleased to have our longtime collaborator and friend Tim Getz joining us once again at the organ for these concerts. It is a privilege to feature his wonderful skills in a rendition of J. S. Bach’s sublime setting of the jaunty Christmas carol In dulci jubilo. The tune first appeared in a 1305 manuscript and may have existed in Europe prior to that date. The carol’s text, a macaronic alternation of Medieval German and Latin, is thought to have been written by the German mystic Heinrich Seuse, circa 1328. The carol became popular in the 19th century when it was included as part of the Nine Lessons and Carols services sung in British cathedrals. Today we know it by the English title Good Christian friends, rejoice.

Another early arrangement of mine concludes our festival. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s I was a member of the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. Directed at the time by Vance George, the Chorus presented an annual holiday concert. The December 1988 program included works that called for brass, organ, and percussion. I asked if I could create an arrangement of Angels We Have Heard on High for the program using this instrumentation. My setting was very well received at the time, but has not been performed since, due in part to the instruments required. For tonight’s program I was able to tweak the instrumentation to allow this arrangement a second performance.

The four verses of the carol tell a specific story that I have tried to illuminate musically. After an opening fanfare we hear two angels, literally on high, singing fragments of the refrain. The shepherds in fields exclaim “Angels!” as they look into the sky. The first verse follows, which describes how the shepherds have heard the angels “singing through the night.” The next verse is sung by the wives and children, who have been at home. They wonder, “Shepherds, why this jubilee?” Excitedly running back from the fields, the shepherds begin to tell what they have witnessed. They exclaim, haltingly at first, as they try to catch their breath, “Come to Bethlehem and see!” As a way of expressing their joy and wonder, they sing the refrain with jazz-inspired syncopations and harmonies. A musical time/space–travel modulation brings the shepherds and their families to the stable where they quietly comment to each other, “See him in a manger laid, whom the angels praise above.” As they do so, the angels, still hovering “on high,” interject “Alleluias” sung to the music of Mozart, because, of course, angels would sing Mozart, don’t you think?

We hope you find this program uplifting and that it brings you holiday cheer. All of us at Bay Choral Guild wish you a wonderful holiday and hope your gatherings will be full of glad tidings. Don’t forget to make plans for attending our next program, Beethoven, Brahms, and Beauty, March 15–16, when we will be joined by a chamber orchestra and soloists. The program includes the premiere of my latest composition, All is Beauty, based on texts by John Muir, created in celebration of my 25 years with BCG.