POET’S CORNER
June 2014
Program Notes by Sanford Dole
Program Notes by Sanford Dole
Welcome to the final program in our 2013-14 season. It has been a wonderful year and the repertoire for tonight’s concert is no less exciting. As we tend to sing a lot of sacred music from earlier centuries I decided that, as we head into the summer months, presenting a program of secular works by contemporary composers would be refreshing.
During my sabbatical in the fall of 2011 I spent two weeks in London. Part of attending services in Westminster Abbey includes paying homage to all of the great artists buried there. One can visit the graves of composers such as Britten, Vaughan Williams, and Handel, near each other on the floor of the nave. Another area is known as “Poet’s Corner.” My memories of this visit inspired the title of tonight’s show, which includes settings of poetry by many great poets throughout history.
After our last all-contemporary concert featuring the works of West Coast composers, all of whom happened to be male, I made a point to include several women this time, both as poets and composers. It is exciting to present new musical voices and introduce you to some names that I hope you will hear more from in the future.
Our first set is by one of these new composers, Nancy Wertsch, from New York City. Composing choral music for her was a natural progression, as she is a long-time chorister, first as a charter member of The New York Virtuoso Singers, and later as a member of Voices of Ascension after graduating as a voice major from the Curtis Institute. Songs of the Spirit sets the mystical poetry of William Blake (1757-1827). Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical undercurrents within his work. Wertsch says of this work:
During my sabbatical in the fall of 2011 I spent two weeks in London. Part of attending services in Westminster Abbey includes paying homage to all of the great artists buried there. One can visit the graves of composers such as Britten, Vaughan Williams, and Handel, near each other on the floor of the nave. Another area is known as “Poet’s Corner.” My memories of this visit inspired the title of tonight’s show, which includes settings of poetry by many great poets throughout history.
After our last all-contemporary concert featuring the works of West Coast composers, all of whom happened to be male, I made a point to include several women this time, both as poets and composers. It is exciting to present new musical voices and introduce you to some names that I hope you will hear more from in the future.
Our first set is by one of these new composers, Nancy Wertsch, from New York City. Composing choral music for her was a natural progression, as she is a long-time chorister, first as a charter member of The New York Virtuoso Singers, and later as a member of Voices of Ascension after graduating as a voice major from the Curtis Institute. Songs of the Spirit sets the mystical poetry of William Blake (1757-1827). Largely unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake is held in high regard by later critics for his expressiveness and creativity, and for the philosophical undercurrents within his work. Wertsch says of this work:
Mysticism as a constant undercurrent in all of Blake’s work led me to the collect these poems under the title Songs of the Spirit.
The Tyger – The poem strikes me as stark and fierce, which inspired me to set it with a very forceful driving rhythm. This rhythm stops briefly for the solo, which asks the question, “Did he smile his work to see?” and the chorus continues with “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” The driving rhythm picks up again and continues to the end.
The Sick Rose – This is a musical depiction of a sickness that destroys from the inside. One can hear the unrest in the open fifths, starkness in the parallel octaves, and the whole piece has a warped quality as if illness prevented the sick one from perceiving the world in a normal fashion.
The Lamb – This poem speaks of the lamb as being the beautiful and innocent Christ child. I set it with tenderness and utter simplicity.
Memory, Hither Come – I composed this much later than the other Blake pieces, even though I had chosen the text at the same time as the others. The text led me to write the piece in 5/8 time, which actually works beautifully and provides a unique contrast with the other settings.
Shakespeare’s Sonnet #18, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” is set by jazz pianist Nils Lindberg. His unique crossover style combines elements of folk music and jazz with the formal structures of classical music. This sonnet is from his suite, O Mistress Mine, a compilation of Elizabethan poems set for mixed chorus, which in 1988 became the best-selling choral work in his native Sweden.
I have long considered Paul Hindemith’s Six Chansons to be a classic part of the 20th-century choral literature, ever since encountering them in high school, and it was the first work that I programmed for tonight’s concert. Hindemith was born near Frankfurt am Main, in 1895, and is considered to be among the most significant German composers of his era. His most famous work, the opera Mathis der Maler and the associated orchestral work of the same name, was written between 1933-35 during the rise of the Nazi party. While some condemned his music as “degenerate,” he was championed by the eminent conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. Still, he was never comfortable with Nazi rule (in part because his wife was Jewish), and he left for Switzerland in 1938, before finally emigrating in 1940 to the U.S., where he took a teaching post at Yale. During that transitional period in Switzerland he wrote Six Chansons, based on French poems by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). While Rilke is best known for his contributions to German literature, he wrote over 400 poems originally in French and dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, a locale that was key to the genesis and inspiration for many of his poems. Appropriately enough for the texts here, which all deal with pastoral or natural topics, Hindemith’s music seems closely akin to that of Poulenc.
From the oldest work on the program we’ll jump to one of the newest. I first became aware of Stacy Garrop when several years ago she sent me, unbidden, some of her scores. Garrop has developed a major career in the Chicago area after receiving advanced degrees from the University of Chicago and Indiana University. In 2004 her music appeared on a program of Volti, a San Francisco choir specializing in new music. In fact this work was commissioned by Volti. Garrop writes of this set:
I have long considered Paul Hindemith’s Six Chansons to be a classic part of the 20th-century choral literature, ever since encountering them in high school, and it was the first work that I programmed for tonight’s concert. Hindemith was born near Frankfurt am Main, in 1895, and is considered to be among the most significant German composers of his era. His most famous work, the opera Mathis der Maler and the associated orchestral work of the same name, was written between 1933-35 during the rise of the Nazi party. While some condemned his music as “degenerate,” he was championed by the eminent conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. Still, he was never comfortable with Nazi rule (in part because his wife was Jewish), and he left for Switzerland in 1938, before finally emigrating in 1940 to the U.S., where he took a teaching post at Yale. During that transitional period in Switzerland he wrote Six Chansons, based on French poems by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). While Rilke is best known for his contributions to German literature, he wrote over 400 poems originally in French and dedicated to the canton of Valais in Switzerland, a locale that was key to the genesis and inspiration for many of his poems. Appropriately enough for the texts here, which all deal with pastoral or natural topics, Hindemith’s music seems closely akin to that of Poulenc.
From the oldest work on the program we’ll jump to one of the newest. I first became aware of Stacy Garrop when several years ago she sent me, unbidden, some of her scores. Garrop has developed a major career in the Chicago area after receiving advanced degrees from the University of Chicago and Indiana University. In 2004 her music appeared on a program of Volti, a San Francisco choir specializing in new music. In fact this work was commissioned by Volti. Garrop writes of this set:
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was an American poet who produced a great body of work in her lifetime. Among her works are several books of poetry, essays, plays, an opera libretto, and over 200 sonnets. The topics of the sonnets range from love to politics to the fate of mankind. They are beautifully constructed, and I find that many of them are well suited to be set to music. From 2000-2006, I set sixteen of her sonnets for a cappella choir, arranged into six sets. Sonnets of Desire, Longing, and Whimsy is the fourth set. It takes a look at three aspects of love: unreasonable desire, inconsolable longing, and shallow, whimsical romance.
We’ll conclude the first half of tonight’s program with two very different takes on the poetry of e. e. cummings. The first is by perhaps the most famous American composer of choral music working today, Eric Whitacre. Commissioned in 1999, it is the middle movement of Three Songs of Faith, based on cummings’ poetry. The score includes these notes from Whitacre:
…hope, faith, life, love was causing me to lose sleep. The original poem is actually quite long, with sounds of clashing, flying and singing, and calls for music that is vibrant and virtuosic, a real show piece. The more I thought about faith however, the more introspective I became, and I modified the poem entirely to fit that feeling. I took only the first four words (hope, faith, life, love) and the last four (dream, joy, truth, soul) and set each of them as a repeating meditation. Each of the words, in turn, quotes a different choral work from my catalog…
i thank you God has long been one of my favorite poems by e. e. cummings. I have been singing another setting of it since I was in junior high school, and was going to present that version tonight. But then I received an email from Elliot Levine, director of the Western Wind Ensemble, a six-voice a cappella group based in New York, requesting information about one of my arrangements. At the bottom of that email was the note “I’ve attached one of my pieces that you might enjoy.” I did like it a lot, and decided to present it instead. The breezy, jazz-choir feel makes it a fun companion to the Nils Lindberg setting of Shakespeare heard earlier. At the beginning of the score the composer notes “in the style of James Taylor.”
The second part of the program begins with two Bay Area composers. Michael Kaulkin lives near me in Oakland and is a fellow graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. We both attended a concert of the Pacific Mozart Ensemble last December on which our music was being performed. During intermission, when I mentioned that I was working on programming Poet’s Corner and didn’t have Emily Dickinson represented yet, he said “What about Are Friends Delight or Pain?” It is a short excerpt from Cycle of Friends, a work he composed for the Music Group of Philadelphia. Here, Kaulkin explains why he chose this poem:
The second part of the program begins with two Bay Area composers. Michael Kaulkin lives near me in Oakland and is a fellow graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. We both attended a concert of the Pacific Mozart Ensemble last December on which our music was being performed. During intermission, when I mentioned that I was working on programming Poet’s Corner and didn’t have Emily Dickinson represented yet, he said “What about Are Friends Delight or Pain?” It is a short excerpt from Cycle of Friends, a work he composed for the Music Group of Philadelphia. Here, Kaulkin explains why he chose this poem:
Completed and premiered in 1996, Cycle of Friends for soprano solo, chorus, and orchestra is my first large-scale work and possibly still my favorite. It is a lush, emotional journey through five texts taken from such diverse sources as Tang Dynasty poetry of China, Sappho and Emily Dickinson, each dealing in its own way with the universal theme of friendship.
Being the third of the five movements, “Are Friends Delight or Pain” is literally central to the piece, posing the key dramatic question with its title. It is bookended by two anecdotal poems from Tang-era China that are ultimately more about the memory and loss of friendship than friendship itself. By setting the Dickinson poem as an a cappella movement in the middle of an orchestral piece, and structuring it entirely around a relentless “E” pedal, I hoped to heighten the directness of the question and its function as a chorus in the Greek sense, by commenting on the other texts used in the piece.
My setting of Charles Baudelaire’s L’invitation au voyage was composed in 2007 for Bay Choral Guild. When casting about for a poem to set I came across the works of Baudelaire in translation. In fact, the book I found included the more traditional translation, which is more literal and direct. But it also included this translation by Edna St. Vincent Millay that takes some poetic license to draw out the more dreamy aspects of the poem. The original poem is considered to be Baudelaire’s most sentimental and cheerful, in part because it is one of the few in this vein among a collection of poems, Fleur du Mal (Flowers of Evil), that deals with misery, sickness, and death. So it might help the listener to understand the angst that the writer felt in the background of enjoying this delightful fantasy of taking his lover on a voyage to paradise. I, too, was captivated by this flight of fancy, and especially by the sensuality of the individual words and images conjured up in Millay’s translation. My goal was to create a dreamy soundscape to portray the inner fantasy world of the speaker in the poem as I cloaked each word in rich harmonies. Structurally the poem has three large sections, each concluding with the same refrain, which in the traditional translation reads “There, all is order and beauty, luxury, peace, and pleasure.” But I enjoy Millay’s more lurid take, “There, restraint and order bless luxury and voluptuousness.”
Frank Ticheli lives in Los Angeles and is a professor of composition at USC. Although he is most known for his works for concert band and orchestra, his choral pieces are popular for their beauty and emotional appeal. Ticheli was Composer in Residence for the Pacific Symphony from 1991-98. This fact has direct relevance to There Will Be Rest. It was through his connection to the Pacific Symphony that he became friends with the Pacific Chorale, which commissioned this evocative setting of Sara Teasdale’s poem. Tragically, in 1999, the one-year-old son of the Pacific Symphony’s director, Carl St. Clair, drowned in the family’s swimming pool. Upon hearing the news, Ticheli went to St. Clair’s home with a copy of There Will Be Rest, which had been premiered two months earlier. He hand wrote at the top of the score “In loving memory of Cole Carson St. Clair” followed by the birth and death dates of the little boy. Ticheli’s notes in the published score additionally read:
Frank Ticheli lives in Los Angeles and is a professor of composition at USC. Although he is most known for his works for concert band and orchestra, his choral pieces are popular for their beauty and emotional appeal. Ticheli was Composer in Residence for the Pacific Symphony from 1991-98. This fact has direct relevance to There Will Be Rest. It was through his connection to the Pacific Symphony that he became friends with the Pacific Chorale, which commissioned this evocative setting of Sara Teasdale’s poem. Tragically, in 1999, the one-year-old son of the Pacific Symphony’s director, Carl St. Clair, drowned in the family’s swimming pool. Upon hearing the news, Ticheli went to St. Clair’s home with a copy of There Will Be Rest, which had been premiered two months earlier. He hand wrote at the top of the score “In loving memory of Cole Carson St. Clair” followed by the birth and death dates of the little boy. Ticheli’s notes in the published score additionally read:
Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) is regarded as one of the great American lyric poets. Her lyrical style has its roots in the works of Sappho, Christina Rossetti, and Housman. Haunted by depression in later years, Teasdale took her own life at the age of 48. Many of her poems address the pain that tormented her spirit, but to the end she seemed to draw strength and hope from the stars and their permanent radiance. There Will Be Rest, one of her last poems, is a perfect summary of her lifelong concern for the stars and their ancient promise of peace. This choral setting is designed to capture the poem’s purity of spirit and delicate lyricism.
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Emma Lou Diemer holds degrees in composition from Yale and Eastman School of Music. In 1971 she moved to Santa Barbara to take a position teaching composition at UCSB, becoming professor emeritus in 1991. She is still active as a composer-in-residence for the Santa Barbara Symphony, and is resident organist at the First Presbyterian Church of Santa Barbara. Her 1970 work, Verses From the Rubaiyat, sets five poems attributed to Persian poet, mathematician, and astronomer Omar Khayyám (1048-1131), using the famous English translation by Edward FitzGerald. A Wikipedia article about this work explains that The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his translation of a selection of poems, originally written in Persian and numbering about a thousand. A ruba’i is a two-line stanza with two parts per line, hence the word rubáiyát (derived from the Arabic language root for “four”), meaning “quatrains.” Diemer sets these brief poems about the complexities of life with lush harmonies and rhythmic vitality.
Thank you so much for attending tonight’s concert and for supporting our mission to educate and entertain residents of the Bay Area through high quality performances of great choral music. We look forward to seeing you next season after a summer of fun and refreshment.
Thank you so much for attending tonight’s concert and for supporting our mission to educate and entertain residents of the Bay Area through high quality performances of great choral music. We look forward to seeing you next season after a summer of fun and refreshment.