DUTCH MASTERS
June 2016
Program Notes by Sanford Dole
Program Notes by Sanford Dole
Tonight’s concert is what I refer to as a “discovery program.” After having performed two blockbuster concerts of music from the standard symphonic choral repertoire this season, we’re changing gears a little bit. Not only is the music unaccompanied, but most of it is unfamiliar. We hope you enjoy being introduced to the beautiful sounds created by composers from the Netherlands, both old and new.
The concept for the show began with the music of the great Renaissance master, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. Over the years I have frequently programmed his motets both at church and with BCG. Every time I perform Sweelinck’s music I am impressed with his contrapuntal skill as well as the sheer joy that leaps off the page. That led me to want to explore more of his music by making him a program’s featured composer, to present a “Sweelinck festival.” To create a compelling show I needed to find pieces that would make for interesting contrasts with Sweelinck’s, so I decided to look at other Dutch composers. Most of the names on this program were previously unknown to me. It is a delight to make these discoveries!
The concept for the show began with the music of the great Renaissance master, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. Over the years I have frequently programmed his motets both at church and with BCG. Every time I perform Sweelinck’s music I am impressed with his contrapuntal skill as well as the sheer joy that leaps off the page. That led me to want to explore more of his music by making him a program’s featured composer, to present a “Sweelinck festival.” To create a compelling show I needed to find pieces that would make for interesting contrasts with Sweelinck’s, so I decided to look at other Dutch composers. Most of the names on this program were previously unknown to me. It is a delight to make these discoveries!
‘Orpheus of Amsterdam’
Sweelinck came from a line of organists. His father (Peter Swybbertszoon), Sweelinck himself, and Sweelinck’s son were successively organists of the Oude Kerk (Old Church) in Amsterdam for most of 1564–1652, some 88 years. His grandfather and uncle were also organists. One of his pupils states that he was an organist for 44 years, which would have him starting at the age of 15, in 1577. However, church records from that time are missing, so his tenure at the Oude Kerk can only be traced with certainty from 1580. In any event, he worked there until his death in 1621.
After his father’s death, when Sweelinck was 11, he continued his general education with the pastor of the Oude Kerk; it is less clear who his music teachers were. For reasons unknown Sweelinck adopted the family name of his mother, Elske Sweeling, first using it on the title page of his Chanson in 1594.
Leading a well-regulated life, Sweelinck rarely left Amsterdam. In fact, he apparently never traveled outside the Low Countries. Other than for his marriage, all of his travels were in conjunction with his professional activities, usually to inspect new or repaired organs. Though engaged as an organist, he did not also, as custom might suggest, play the carillon. Nor did his duties include supplying ceremonial music for the city magistrate, although he did provide music on a few special occasions. But his workload was still demanding. Since the Calvinists saw the organ as a worldly instrument and forbade its use during services, Sweelinck was actually employed as a civil servant by the city of Amsterdam. His duties were to provide music twice daily in the church, an hour each in the morning and in the evening. On days when there was a service these hours came before and after it. Sweelinck was well known for his organ and harpsichord improvisations. Proud city officials would bring important visitors to the church to hear the ‘Orpheus of Amsterdam.’
It is quite possible that Sweelinck’s civic duties were limited so as to allow time for teaching. He was famous throughout northern Europe as a gifted teacher. His teaching role is considered an essential part of music history, as his students became founders of the so-called north German organ school of the 17th century, which culminates with Bach.
Not surprisingly, Sweelinck’s instrumental music is almost entirely for keyboardinstruments. His 70 keyboard works, mostly fantasias and toccatas, show a thorough knowledge of the English music of the time, yet none was published during his lifetime. It is his 254 vocal works, most of them sacred, that are most often heard today. Sweelinck decided early on to set every psalm, and over the course of his life he published four books of these settings. All are in French, taking verses from the French metrical Psalter, rather than the Dutch Bible in use at the time. This is because they were written not for performance in Calvinist services, but rather for the enjoyment of a circle of well-to-do musical amateurs among whom French was the preferred language. Sweelinck’s other sacred works are in Latin, nearly all of which appear in his 1619 publication Cantiones sacrae, a collection of 37 motets written on Catholic liturgical texts and dedicated to his friend and pupil Cornelis Plemp, who was Catholic. For today’s program, I have selected four motets from Cantiones sacrae and three of the French psalm settings.
Cantate Domino sets the first three lines of Psalm 96. Like much of Sweelinck’s choral music (and three of the seven works of his on our program), it has a five-part texture comprising two sopranos, alto, tenor, and bass. We follow this with the four-voice O Seigneur, loué sera, which sets the first verse of Psalm 75. It begins with only three voices, the basses eventually emerging out of the tenor line. The music is very calm and introspective in spite of the text “O Lord, we praise your name.” Réveillez-vous sets selected verses from Psalm 33. It is one of his few motets that is scored for eight parts singing as one choir throughout, rather than antiphonally. The counterpoint is brilliantly conceived, and the text setting delightfully cogent.
The next portion of our program takes a detour to the 20th and late 19th centuries. The Marian antiphon Salve Regina by Rotterdam composer and organist Anton Verheij was composed just a year before his death in 1924. Displaying the chromatic movement of late Romanticism, the motet unfolds in a largely homophonic texture as the melody is passed among the parts. Jumping ahead to 1975, the setting of Pater noster (the Lord’s Prayer) by Albert de Klerk, who became the chief organ teacher at the Amsterdam Conservatory in 1964, has a similarly clean, chordal structure, but in a more modern harmonic idiom.
Alphons Diepenbrock is considered the most important Dutch composer from the years around 1900. After graduating from the University of Amsterdam with a doctorate cum laude in 1888, Diepenbrock went on to teach. But in 1894 he left that job to devote himself entirely to music. As a composer he was completely self-taught. He created a musical idiom that combined 16th-century polyphony with Wagnerian chromaticism. He studied the classics; his doctoral dissertation, in Latin, was on the life of Seneca. It’s not surprising, therefore, that his predominantly vocal output is distinguished by the high quality of the texts used.
His Stabat mater dolorosa, about Mary, Jesus’s mother, standing at the foot of the cross weeping, was inspired by the setting of the same text by Palestrina (in fact, Diepenbrock pays him homage by quoting the opening phrase of Palestrina’s setting in the final measures of his own). Both settings are homophonic throughout. Diepenbrock’s began as a work for male choir. The first performance of the still incomplete work (only eight of the ten stanzas of the poem were included), during Holy Week of 1888 in Amsterdam, was a dismal failure. Three years later, when Diepenbrock was teaching Latin and Greek at the municipal grammar school in ’s-Hertogenbosch, a new choir there planned a performance, but scrapped it when they had trouble mastering his harmonies. It was not until five years later that he reworked the piece for mixed choir, at the same time completing the missing stanzas. This version was performed in Amsterdam on Palm Sunday of 1896, finally finding success. Diepenbrock considered it his finest work, although a companion work, Stabat mater speciosa, was more popular in his lifetime.
We return to Sweelinck to conclude the first half of our concert and begin the second. Unfolding in the standard five-part texture, Magnificat has examples of a fairly common compositional practice of the time, metric modulation, the first occurrence of which appears in the very first lines of the piece. After moving along in the standard two or four beats per measure, the beat pattern suddenly divides into three, creating a waltz-like passage before just as suddenly returning to the duple meter.
Gaudete omnes paraphrases verses from Psalm 100. The piece is very upbeat, from its opening “Rejoice and be glad, all of you” to the concluding Alleluias, which tumble one upon the next, climbing the scale upwards toward an exciting finish.
Or soit loué l’Éternel sets the entire text of Psalm 150, dividing the whole into three distinct sections. Scored for double choir, the setting uses the conventional antiphonal call-and-response between the two choirs, but also several other variations, such as using two voices from each choir together and having the response come from the remaining four voices.
Diligam te sets verses 2 and 3 of Psalm 18. The five-part texture this time has two tenor lines rather than two soprano lines. We present this motet with a smaller group, closer to the size of choir that Sweelinck himself would have used.
Hendrik Andriessen is part of a family of Dutch musicians. Born in 1892, he studied at the Amsterdam Conservatory. He was the director of the Utrecht Conservatory from 1937–1949, where he taught composition to his sons, both of whom went on to successful careers as composers themselves, Louis for his avant gardeorchestral works and Jurriaan—whose Shakespeare setting appears later on the program—for his theater and film scores. Hendrik’s 1933 motet Qui habitat sets tens verses of Psalm 91. Album annotator Paul van Reijen describes it as “one of the highlights of his choral œuvre. The modally-tinted melody so typical of Andriessen’s work alternates with imitative treatment—which goes back to an older ‘Dutch’ motet style—turning this piece into an ‘equilibrium of contrasts,’ as Andriessen himself once called it.”
The remainder of the concert is devoted to secular pieces, all from the 20th century. Perhaps the best known of tonight’s “modern” composers, due in part to his prolific output, is Henk Badings. He was born in the Dutch East Indies, where he became orphaned at an early age. He was sent back to the Netherlands, where his guardian tried to dissuade him from studying music, so he enrolled in the Delft Polytechnical Institute. After working as a mining engineer and a paleontologist, he left the sciences to devote himself to music. Though largely self-taught, he did receive instruction in orchestration from Willem Pijper, a prominent Dutch composer of that time. Badings’s prize-winning First Symphony was performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1930 to critical acclaim. From there he went on to a series of teaching positions throughout the country while working as a freelance composer on the side.
Finnigan’s Wake resets an Irish folk song about a man so drunk that he appears to be dead. (The original song also inspired James Joyce’s novel of the same name.) Badings’s setting could be described as a rhythmic choral etude; the frequent meter changes make this a virtuosic work with intense rhythmic energy. Listen for a quote from Chopin’s Marche funèbre as the choir sings “So they carried him home.”
Jurriaan Andriessen studied with Olivier Messiaen and drew upon a variety of influences, including folk music, neoclassicism, and serialism. His stay in the United States on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship from 1949 to 1951 was a fruitful one for his orchestral writing. During this time he composed the Tanglewood Overture for Serge Koussevitsky and the Berkshire Symphonies, later used as ballet music by George Balanchine. Shakespeare’s Sonnet #43 speaks of the poet’s loved one transforming night into day and day into night. Andriessen aptly creates a dreamy mood for these words as he explores various vocal techniques. The piece opens with a quiet chorale, which is hummed. Later similar interludes are sung on “ah.”
Herman Strategier was heavily influenced by Hendrik Andriessen, with whom he studied in Utrecht. In addition to teaching in Utrecht and Rotterdam, Strategier was conductor of the Dutch Madrigal Choir of Leiden for many years. Created in 1965 for that group, Les compagnons de la Marjolaine is based on a French folk song that dates back to 1650. The marching rhythms at the opening set the scene for the suggestive lyrics, which include a play on words. “Marjolaine” is the French word for marjoram, and “Marjolain” is a pet name for a baby girl. One source explains that marjoram was used in love songs in the same way as “rose” or “lily of the valley” might be. The song refers not only to the Companions of Marjoram (young men in love) but also to the Knights of the Watchtower, companions of the little baby Marjolain. What do the knights want? To marry a young girl.
We’ll conclude our survey of Dutch music with another work by Henk Badings, dating from 1957. Badings wrote the text to Canamus, amici, canamus himself, then asked a friend to translate the poem into Latin. Beginning “Sing my friends, let us sing!” it goes on to extol the Muses. The music is very lively and leads through a series of driving sequences that culminate in an exuberant, fortissimo “Jubilate!”
It has been a distinct pleasure to perform all of the concerts this season. Working with the BCG singers is a real joy! I hope you have enjoyed our concerts as much as we have this season. Please join us again next season when we’ll present more wonderful choral music from the Western musical canon. A traditional Christmas concert opens the season, with woodwind quintet accompaniment. The March concert features a string orchestra and harp in beautiful Baroque masterworks by Pergolesi and Bach, a contemporary gem by English composer Paul Mealor, and a world premiere by yours truly. In June the entire program will consist of settings of texts by William Shakespeare. We hope you’ll join us for these exciting performances. Have a happy summer!
After his father’s death, when Sweelinck was 11, he continued his general education with the pastor of the Oude Kerk; it is less clear who his music teachers were. For reasons unknown Sweelinck adopted the family name of his mother, Elske Sweeling, first using it on the title page of his Chanson in 1594.
Leading a well-regulated life, Sweelinck rarely left Amsterdam. In fact, he apparently never traveled outside the Low Countries. Other than for his marriage, all of his travels were in conjunction with his professional activities, usually to inspect new or repaired organs. Though engaged as an organist, he did not also, as custom might suggest, play the carillon. Nor did his duties include supplying ceremonial music for the city magistrate, although he did provide music on a few special occasions. But his workload was still demanding. Since the Calvinists saw the organ as a worldly instrument and forbade its use during services, Sweelinck was actually employed as a civil servant by the city of Amsterdam. His duties were to provide music twice daily in the church, an hour each in the morning and in the evening. On days when there was a service these hours came before and after it. Sweelinck was well known for his organ and harpsichord improvisations. Proud city officials would bring important visitors to the church to hear the ‘Orpheus of Amsterdam.’
It is quite possible that Sweelinck’s civic duties were limited so as to allow time for teaching. He was famous throughout northern Europe as a gifted teacher. His teaching role is considered an essential part of music history, as his students became founders of the so-called north German organ school of the 17th century, which culminates with Bach.
Not surprisingly, Sweelinck’s instrumental music is almost entirely for keyboardinstruments. His 70 keyboard works, mostly fantasias and toccatas, show a thorough knowledge of the English music of the time, yet none was published during his lifetime. It is his 254 vocal works, most of them sacred, that are most often heard today. Sweelinck decided early on to set every psalm, and over the course of his life he published four books of these settings. All are in French, taking verses from the French metrical Psalter, rather than the Dutch Bible in use at the time. This is because they were written not for performance in Calvinist services, but rather for the enjoyment of a circle of well-to-do musical amateurs among whom French was the preferred language. Sweelinck’s other sacred works are in Latin, nearly all of which appear in his 1619 publication Cantiones sacrae, a collection of 37 motets written on Catholic liturgical texts and dedicated to his friend and pupil Cornelis Plemp, who was Catholic. For today’s program, I have selected four motets from Cantiones sacrae and three of the French psalm settings.
Cantate Domino sets the first three lines of Psalm 96. Like much of Sweelinck’s choral music (and three of the seven works of his on our program), it has a five-part texture comprising two sopranos, alto, tenor, and bass. We follow this with the four-voice O Seigneur, loué sera, which sets the first verse of Psalm 75. It begins with only three voices, the basses eventually emerging out of the tenor line. The music is very calm and introspective in spite of the text “O Lord, we praise your name.” Réveillez-vous sets selected verses from Psalm 33. It is one of his few motets that is scored for eight parts singing as one choir throughout, rather than antiphonally. The counterpoint is brilliantly conceived, and the text setting delightfully cogent.
The next portion of our program takes a detour to the 20th and late 19th centuries. The Marian antiphon Salve Regina by Rotterdam composer and organist Anton Verheij was composed just a year before his death in 1924. Displaying the chromatic movement of late Romanticism, the motet unfolds in a largely homophonic texture as the melody is passed among the parts. Jumping ahead to 1975, the setting of Pater noster (the Lord’s Prayer) by Albert de Klerk, who became the chief organ teacher at the Amsterdam Conservatory in 1964, has a similarly clean, chordal structure, but in a more modern harmonic idiom.
Alphons Diepenbrock is considered the most important Dutch composer from the years around 1900. After graduating from the University of Amsterdam with a doctorate cum laude in 1888, Diepenbrock went on to teach. But in 1894 he left that job to devote himself entirely to music. As a composer he was completely self-taught. He created a musical idiom that combined 16th-century polyphony with Wagnerian chromaticism. He studied the classics; his doctoral dissertation, in Latin, was on the life of Seneca. It’s not surprising, therefore, that his predominantly vocal output is distinguished by the high quality of the texts used.
His Stabat mater dolorosa, about Mary, Jesus’s mother, standing at the foot of the cross weeping, was inspired by the setting of the same text by Palestrina (in fact, Diepenbrock pays him homage by quoting the opening phrase of Palestrina’s setting in the final measures of his own). Both settings are homophonic throughout. Diepenbrock’s began as a work for male choir. The first performance of the still incomplete work (only eight of the ten stanzas of the poem were included), during Holy Week of 1888 in Amsterdam, was a dismal failure. Three years later, when Diepenbrock was teaching Latin and Greek at the municipal grammar school in ’s-Hertogenbosch, a new choir there planned a performance, but scrapped it when they had trouble mastering his harmonies. It was not until five years later that he reworked the piece for mixed choir, at the same time completing the missing stanzas. This version was performed in Amsterdam on Palm Sunday of 1896, finally finding success. Diepenbrock considered it his finest work, although a companion work, Stabat mater speciosa, was more popular in his lifetime.
We return to Sweelinck to conclude the first half of our concert and begin the second. Unfolding in the standard five-part texture, Magnificat has examples of a fairly common compositional practice of the time, metric modulation, the first occurrence of which appears in the very first lines of the piece. After moving along in the standard two or four beats per measure, the beat pattern suddenly divides into three, creating a waltz-like passage before just as suddenly returning to the duple meter.
Gaudete omnes paraphrases verses from Psalm 100. The piece is very upbeat, from its opening “Rejoice and be glad, all of you” to the concluding Alleluias, which tumble one upon the next, climbing the scale upwards toward an exciting finish.
Or soit loué l’Éternel sets the entire text of Psalm 150, dividing the whole into three distinct sections. Scored for double choir, the setting uses the conventional antiphonal call-and-response between the two choirs, but also several other variations, such as using two voices from each choir together and having the response come from the remaining four voices.
Diligam te sets verses 2 and 3 of Psalm 18. The five-part texture this time has two tenor lines rather than two soprano lines. We present this motet with a smaller group, closer to the size of choir that Sweelinck himself would have used.
Hendrik Andriessen is part of a family of Dutch musicians. Born in 1892, he studied at the Amsterdam Conservatory. He was the director of the Utrecht Conservatory from 1937–1949, where he taught composition to his sons, both of whom went on to successful careers as composers themselves, Louis for his avant gardeorchestral works and Jurriaan—whose Shakespeare setting appears later on the program—for his theater and film scores. Hendrik’s 1933 motet Qui habitat sets tens verses of Psalm 91. Album annotator Paul van Reijen describes it as “one of the highlights of his choral œuvre. The modally-tinted melody so typical of Andriessen’s work alternates with imitative treatment—which goes back to an older ‘Dutch’ motet style—turning this piece into an ‘equilibrium of contrasts,’ as Andriessen himself once called it.”
The remainder of the concert is devoted to secular pieces, all from the 20th century. Perhaps the best known of tonight’s “modern” composers, due in part to his prolific output, is Henk Badings. He was born in the Dutch East Indies, where he became orphaned at an early age. He was sent back to the Netherlands, where his guardian tried to dissuade him from studying music, so he enrolled in the Delft Polytechnical Institute. After working as a mining engineer and a paleontologist, he left the sciences to devote himself to music. Though largely self-taught, he did receive instruction in orchestration from Willem Pijper, a prominent Dutch composer of that time. Badings’s prize-winning First Symphony was performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1930 to critical acclaim. From there he went on to a series of teaching positions throughout the country while working as a freelance composer on the side.
Finnigan’s Wake resets an Irish folk song about a man so drunk that he appears to be dead. (The original song also inspired James Joyce’s novel of the same name.) Badings’s setting could be described as a rhythmic choral etude; the frequent meter changes make this a virtuosic work with intense rhythmic energy. Listen for a quote from Chopin’s Marche funèbre as the choir sings “So they carried him home.”
Jurriaan Andriessen studied with Olivier Messiaen and drew upon a variety of influences, including folk music, neoclassicism, and serialism. His stay in the United States on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship from 1949 to 1951 was a fruitful one for his orchestral writing. During this time he composed the Tanglewood Overture for Serge Koussevitsky and the Berkshire Symphonies, later used as ballet music by George Balanchine. Shakespeare’s Sonnet #43 speaks of the poet’s loved one transforming night into day and day into night. Andriessen aptly creates a dreamy mood for these words as he explores various vocal techniques. The piece opens with a quiet chorale, which is hummed. Later similar interludes are sung on “ah.”
Herman Strategier was heavily influenced by Hendrik Andriessen, with whom he studied in Utrecht. In addition to teaching in Utrecht and Rotterdam, Strategier was conductor of the Dutch Madrigal Choir of Leiden for many years. Created in 1965 for that group, Les compagnons de la Marjolaine is based on a French folk song that dates back to 1650. The marching rhythms at the opening set the scene for the suggestive lyrics, which include a play on words. “Marjolaine” is the French word for marjoram, and “Marjolain” is a pet name for a baby girl. One source explains that marjoram was used in love songs in the same way as “rose” or “lily of the valley” might be. The song refers not only to the Companions of Marjoram (young men in love) but also to the Knights of the Watchtower, companions of the little baby Marjolain. What do the knights want? To marry a young girl.
We’ll conclude our survey of Dutch music with another work by Henk Badings, dating from 1957. Badings wrote the text to Canamus, amici, canamus himself, then asked a friend to translate the poem into Latin. Beginning “Sing my friends, let us sing!” it goes on to extol the Muses. The music is very lively and leads through a series of driving sequences that culminate in an exuberant, fortissimo “Jubilate!”
It has been a distinct pleasure to perform all of the concerts this season. Working with the BCG singers is a real joy! I hope you have enjoyed our concerts as much as we have this season. Please join us again next season when we’ll present more wonderful choral music from the Western musical canon. A traditional Christmas concert opens the season, with woodwind quintet accompaniment. The March concert features a string orchestra and harp in beautiful Baroque masterworks by Pergolesi and Bach, a contemporary gem by English composer Paul Mealor, and a world premiere by yours truly. In June the entire program will consist of settings of texts by William Shakespeare. We hope you’ll join us for these exciting performances. Have a happy summer!