THE NATURAL WORLD
June 2015
Program Notes by Sanford Dole
Program Notes by Sanford Dole
So extraordinary is Nature with her choicest treasures, spending plant beauty as she spends sunshine, pouring it forth into land and sea, garden and desert. And so the beauty of lilies falls on angels and men, bears and squirrels, wolves and sheep, birds and bees….
—John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (1911), Chapter 4
After presenting Music for Holy Week in March and Brahms’ Requiem last November, I felt it was important to schedule an (almost) all-secular program to balance out our season. What better way than to celebrate the beauty of nature!
The program is organized around three broad themes in the natural world: flowers, water, and animals. Within that structure there is a variety of styles represented and texts by many of the world’s great poets, including Rilke, Lorca, Whitman, Frost, and Ogden Nash. Our Flora theme begins with an English madrigal from the 16th century before jumping to a series of 20th- and 21st-century miniature gems. Aqua includes three works: a somewhat longer piece of mine, a wordless reverie composed almost 100 years ago, and a wonderful spiritual arrangement. The second half of the show is dedicated to Fauna and includes songs about insects, birds, and various other critters.
Flora
We’ll open with a classic example of the madrigal style, complete with fa-la-la’s at the end of every half verse. Thomas Morley lived in London at the same time as Shakespeare and became organist at St. Paul’s Cathedral. He studied with William Byrd, and early on wrote sacred motets and some instrumental music in the spirit of Byrd’s style. But it was his light and breezy madrigals that cemented his reputation, one that lives on today.
One of the best-known choral composers to emerge in the late 20th century is American Morten Lauridsen. His song cycle from 1993 “Les Chansons des Roses,” setting five poems in French by Rainer Maria Rilke, was among the earliest pieces to propel him to international fame. As there are several other references to roses on the show, we will present only the first and last pieces from this set. En Une Seule Fleur introduces Lauridsen’s trademark style of simple triadic chords with an added note for richness that gets repeated and expanded upon. This piece segues directly into Dirait-on, which adds a piano to the mix.
Born in upstate New York, Halsey Stevens studied with Ernest Bloch at UC Berkeley before joining the faculties of Syracuse University, Dakota Wesleyan, and the University of Redlands for brief stints in the 1930s and ’40s. He finally landed a job at the University of Southern California in 1946 and was the Chairman of the Composition Department from 1949 to 1975, becoming Professor Emeritus until his death in 1989. One of his students was Morten Lauridsen, who became a colleague at the university in 1967, and remains on the faculty to this day. Stevens was also a noted authority on the music of Béla Bartók. Go, Lovely Rose, which sets a poem by 17th-century English poet and politician Edmund Waller, is one of Stevens’s earliest published works, dating from 1942.
After composing A Wedding Anthem for a pair of newlyweds in 1949, Benjamin Britten turned his attention the following year to the Silver Anniversary of a couple who had contributed to the founding of the English Opera Group in 1947. As they were avid gardeners, Britten chose to compose a set of Five Flower Songs to texts of multiple poets. The Evening Primrose is the fourth in the set, using a poem by John Clare. It employs clear and consonant harmonies that recall the purity of his Hymn to St. Cecelia, which had appeared in 1942.
Paul Mealor has emerged as one of the exciting new voices in English choral music. On our last program we performed his Ubi caritas, which was a rewrite of Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, the first piece in his cycle Four Madrigals on Rose Texts. On this concert we’ll hear the last piece in the set. The anonymous, medieval text, A Spotless Rose, refers to the Virgin Mary as she gives birth to “The Blessed Babe.” As in the rest of the cycle, Mealor avoids counterpoint, instead relying on rich, dense chords to color the text.
Our flower set concludes with the delightfully rhythmic With a Lily in Your Hand, by Eric Whitacre, in a translation from the Spanish of Federico Garcia Lorca’s poetry. Now established as one of America’s leading choral composers—and a popular TED talk presenter with his Virtual Choir videos—Whitacre describes being discovered by a publisher when his first concert piece was performed at an American Choral Directors Association conference in 1992. That piece, Go, Lovely Rose, became the final movement of his first published work, Three Flower Songs, of which Lily is the middle movement. I love the youthful exuberance of this piece, the sheer joy of a young composer discovering his voice.
Aqua
In 2010 I was commissioned by Pacific Mozart Ensemble (now known as Pacific Edge Voices) to compose a piece in celebration of their 35th anniversary, to be performed in a unique environment. The 100-acre Oliver Ranch, in northern Sonoma County, is the home of 18 site-specific art installations commissioned by Steve Oliver, owner of a successful construction company and past-president of the board of directors at SFMOMA. Among the sculptures scattered amidst the oak trees on the rolling landscape sits the Hamilton Tower, a concrete cylinder that rises 86 feet and is 30 feet in diameter. Accessed by crawling through some openings on the side, the interior includes two staircases spiraling up its core like a double helix. The top is open to the sky, and the base is filled with water. This was where the concert was to take place, with the performers occupying one of the staircases and the audience the other.
Inspired by the unusual circumstances, and after a lengthy search, I found a poem by the Native American writer Paula Gunn Allen that seemed appropriate for this commission. Water: Making Everything New consists of a list of ways that water appears—lakes, streams, springs, etc.—followed by specific names of oceans and rivers around the world, before extolling the beauty and importance of rain in our environment.
At the time I had been musing on the music of John Adams, wondering what he would do if he were limited to writing for an unaccompanied choir. As all of these factors came together, I chose to write in a minimalist style, reminiscent of Adams’ early works, for an 8-part choir that is physically spread out. Hearing the individual parts coming from different locations is part of the intended effect. The piece incorporates a moment where, in the premiere performance, water was poured from the roof down into the pool at the base to simulate rain. And wouldn’t you know, it rained on us as we performed that day in late October, 2010! Now, in 2015, I hope that performing this work will also act as a rain dance for the parched Western United States.
Born in the north of England to a prosperous mercantile family, Fredrick Delius resisted attempts to join the family business. He was sent to Florida in 1884 to manage an orange plantation. This only lasted two years before he returned to England, but the brief stay had an enormous impact on his life. Having been influenced by African American music in Florida, he studied music in Germany upon his return before embarking on a full-time career as a composer in Paris. “It is only that which cannot be expressed otherwise,” wrote Delius, “that is worth expressing in music.” This outlook, a clear reflection of his highly individualistic Romantic style, is readily apparent in the pair of wordless choral vocalises he composed in 1917 entitled To Be Sung of a Summer Night on the Water. The pieces were composed for an important amateur choral group, the Oriana Madrigal Society, which premiered them in 1920. We will perform the first of the pair, which is described by Kip Cranna, in notes for the LA Philharmonic, as “a dreamy idyll, whose rich chromaticism conveys an impressionistic barbershop quality.”
Mark Hayes runs his own music publishing company from Kansas City and tours extensively, conducting and leading workshops. Hearing his swinging version of Wade in the Water, it is no wonder his arrangements have become popular in the church music world. The refrain of this spiritual refers to a passage in the gospel of John where an angel would at certain times “trouble” the waters of the Pool of Bethesda, such that the next bather would be cured of whatever ailed them. Legend has it that the song served in the days of the Underground Railroad as coded advice for fugitive slaves to evade the bloodhounds sent after them.
Fauna
I discovered Robert A. M. Ross’ Departmental when I was scanning a choral conductor’s chat room conversation about nature-related music. Ross lives in Philadelphia and is very active in the area as a conductor, soloist, and chorister in addition to his prodigious compositional activities. His catalogue lists many choral works, two symphonies, and a variety of instrumental chamber works as well as experimental pieces. Setting a delightful poem by Robert Frost about “An ant on the tablecloth,” the piece, first composed when the composer was a freshman in college and revised twice in later years, is scored for four-hands piano, giving a lively, almost orchestral treatment to the story of the tiniest of animals.
Hailing from Minnesota’s Twin Cities, one of this country’s hotbeds of choral music, Abbie Betinis is a rising star. Now only 35 years old, she has already received numerous awards and commissions from groups such as Cantus, the Dale Warland Singers, and The Rose Ensemble. Songs of Smaller Creatures won the Swan Composer Prize from her alma mater, the University of Minnesota, in 2005. It comprises three short tone poems, each a character study on a small creature. The Bee’s Song takes its silly text from British poet Walter de la Mare, who included no fewer than 33 Zs in his original poem. A noiseless, patient spider takes its title from an excerpt of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. In it he compares the questing soul to a spider who launches forth her own web in order to explore the space around her. The poem Envoi, by Charles Swinburne, is about butterflies. By adding nonsense syllables to the text Betinis suggests the subtle flapping of wings, “as if the singers are suddenly there in the thick of migration.”
Our collection of bird songs begins with a trio of madrigals from the Renaissance era—two Italian and one English. Claudio Monteverdi’s Quel Augellin imagines that a small bird, “singing so sweetly,” is proclaiming the love in the author’s heart. Franco-Flemish composer Jacque Arcadelt was active in both France and Italy, becoming one of the most famous of the early madrigal composers. His Il bianco e dolce Cigno contrasts the swan’s disconsolate death song with the author’s joy in “dying,” surely implying a sexual connotation. Thomas Vautor dedicated a collection of 20 madrigals to his Leicestershire patron in 1617. But his charming Sweet Suffolk Owl is the only one performed today. The owl sits at night singing “te-whit, te-whoo” before catching a mouse. The owl then sings a dirge for its dying soul.
Charles Villiers Stanford is one of my favorite composers of the English Romantic era. Stanford was a founding professor at the Royal College of Music, where his students included Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. He composed a substantial number of concert works, including seven symphonies, but his best-remembered pieces are his choral works. His jewel-like setting of Mary E. Coleridge’s The Blue Bird transcendsthe rather mundane poem, creating an ethereal atmosphere that I find quite memorable.
I couldn’t present a group of bird songs without including the Beatles’ classic Blackbird. Daryl Runswick perfectly translates the spirit of the original into this elegant choral arrangement.
Christine Donkin was raised in northwest Alberta, where she was influenced by a variety of musical styles introduced in childhood. These included folk, fiddle, classical, jazz, and more. Her knowledge of popular styles is evident in Four Critters, a delightful collection of clever Ogden Nash verses.
We’ll wrap up the proceedings with the finale from Leonard Bernstein’s great operetta, Candide, based on the short story by Voltaire, with a libretto by Lillian Hellman. After the picaresque life story of Candide is told, the show concludes with this grand hymn, which states, “Let us try, before we die, to make sense of life. We’re neither pure, nor wise, nor good. We’ll do the best we know; we’ll chop our wood, and make our garden grow.”
We hope that you have enjoyed living in our garden of delights amid the plants and animals. We appreciate your support and look forward to seeing you at our concerts next season.
The program is organized around three broad themes in the natural world: flowers, water, and animals. Within that structure there is a variety of styles represented and texts by many of the world’s great poets, including Rilke, Lorca, Whitman, Frost, and Ogden Nash. Our Flora theme begins with an English madrigal from the 16th century before jumping to a series of 20th- and 21st-century miniature gems. Aqua includes three works: a somewhat longer piece of mine, a wordless reverie composed almost 100 years ago, and a wonderful spiritual arrangement. The second half of the show is dedicated to Fauna and includes songs about insects, birds, and various other critters.
Flora
We’ll open with a classic example of the madrigal style, complete with fa-la-la’s at the end of every half verse. Thomas Morley lived in London at the same time as Shakespeare and became organist at St. Paul’s Cathedral. He studied with William Byrd, and early on wrote sacred motets and some instrumental music in the spirit of Byrd’s style. But it was his light and breezy madrigals that cemented his reputation, one that lives on today.
One of the best-known choral composers to emerge in the late 20th century is American Morten Lauridsen. His song cycle from 1993 “Les Chansons des Roses,” setting five poems in French by Rainer Maria Rilke, was among the earliest pieces to propel him to international fame. As there are several other references to roses on the show, we will present only the first and last pieces from this set. En Une Seule Fleur introduces Lauridsen’s trademark style of simple triadic chords with an added note for richness that gets repeated and expanded upon. This piece segues directly into Dirait-on, which adds a piano to the mix.
Born in upstate New York, Halsey Stevens studied with Ernest Bloch at UC Berkeley before joining the faculties of Syracuse University, Dakota Wesleyan, and the University of Redlands for brief stints in the 1930s and ’40s. He finally landed a job at the University of Southern California in 1946 and was the Chairman of the Composition Department from 1949 to 1975, becoming Professor Emeritus until his death in 1989. One of his students was Morten Lauridsen, who became a colleague at the university in 1967, and remains on the faculty to this day. Stevens was also a noted authority on the music of Béla Bartók. Go, Lovely Rose, which sets a poem by 17th-century English poet and politician Edmund Waller, is one of Stevens’s earliest published works, dating from 1942.
After composing A Wedding Anthem for a pair of newlyweds in 1949, Benjamin Britten turned his attention the following year to the Silver Anniversary of a couple who had contributed to the founding of the English Opera Group in 1947. As they were avid gardeners, Britten chose to compose a set of Five Flower Songs to texts of multiple poets. The Evening Primrose is the fourth in the set, using a poem by John Clare. It employs clear and consonant harmonies that recall the purity of his Hymn to St. Cecelia, which had appeared in 1942.
Paul Mealor has emerged as one of the exciting new voices in English choral music. On our last program we performed his Ubi caritas, which was a rewrite of Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal, the first piece in his cycle Four Madrigals on Rose Texts. On this concert we’ll hear the last piece in the set. The anonymous, medieval text, A Spotless Rose, refers to the Virgin Mary as she gives birth to “The Blessed Babe.” As in the rest of the cycle, Mealor avoids counterpoint, instead relying on rich, dense chords to color the text.
Our flower set concludes with the delightfully rhythmic With a Lily in Your Hand, by Eric Whitacre, in a translation from the Spanish of Federico Garcia Lorca’s poetry. Now established as one of America’s leading choral composers—and a popular TED talk presenter with his Virtual Choir videos—Whitacre describes being discovered by a publisher when his first concert piece was performed at an American Choral Directors Association conference in 1992. That piece, Go, Lovely Rose, became the final movement of his first published work, Three Flower Songs, of which Lily is the middle movement. I love the youthful exuberance of this piece, the sheer joy of a young composer discovering his voice.
Aqua
In 2010 I was commissioned by Pacific Mozart Ensemble (now known as Pacific Edge Voices) to compose a piece in celebration of their 35th anniversary, to be performed in a unique environment. The 100-acre Oliver Ranch, in northern Sonoma County, is the home of 18 site-specific art installations commissioned by Steve Oliver, owner of a successful construction company and past-president of the board of directors at SFMOMA. Among the sculptures scattered amidst the oak trees on the rolling landscape sits the Hamilton Tower, a concrete cylinder that rises 86 feet and is 30 feet in diameter. Accessed by crawling through some openings on the side, the interior includes two staircases spiraling up its core like a double helix. The top is open to the sky, and the base is filled with water. This was where the concert was to take place, with the performers occupying one of the staircases and the audience the other.
Inspired by the unusual circumstances, and after a lengthy search, I found a poem by the Native American writer Paula Gunn Allen that seemed appropriate for this commission. Water: Making Everything New consists of a list of ways that water appears—lakes, streams, springs, etc.—followed by specific names of oceans and rivers around the world, before extolling the beauty and importance of rain in our environment.
At the time I had been musing on the music of John Adams, wondering what he would do if he were limited to writing for an unaccompanied choir. As all of these factors came together, I chose to write in a minimalist style, reminiscent of Adams’ early works, for an 8-part choir that is physically spread out. Hearing the individual parts coming from different locations is part of the intended effect. The piece incorporates a moment where, in the premiere performance, water was poured from the roof down into the pool at the base to simulate rain. And wouldn’t you know, it rained on us as we performed that day in late October, 2010! Now, in 2015, I hope that performing this work will also act as a rain dance for the parched Western United States.
Born in the north of England to a prosperous mercantile family, Fredrick Delius resisted attempts to join the family business. He was sent to Florida in 1884 to manage an orange plantation. This only lasted two years before he returned to England, but the brief stay had an enormous impact on his life. Having been influenced by African American music in Florida, he studied music in Germany upon his return before embarking on a full-time career as a composer in Paris. “It is only that which cannot be expressed otherwise,” wrote Delius, “that is worth expressing in music.” This outlook, a clear reflection of his highly individualistic Romantic style, is readily apparent in the pair of wordless choral vocalises he composed in 1917 entitled To Be Sung of a Summer Night on the Water. The pieces were composed for an important amateur choral group, the Oriana Madrigal Society, which premiered them in 1920. We will perform the first of the pair, which is described by Kip Cranna, in notes for the LA Philharmonic, as “a dreamy idyll, whose rich chromaticism conveys an impressionistic barbershop quality.”
Mark Hayes runs his own music publishing company from Kansas City and tours extensively, conducting and leading workshops. Hearing his swinging version of Wade in the Water, it is no wonder his arrangements have become popular in the church music world. The refrain of this spiritual refers to a passage in the gospel of John where an angel would at certain times “trouble” the waters of the Pool of Bethesda, such that the next bather would be cured of whatever ailed them. Legend has it that the song served in the days of the Underground Railroad as coded advice for fugitive slaves to evade the bloodhounds sent after them.
Fauna
I discovered Robert A. M. Ross’ Departmental when I was scanning a choral conductor’s chat room conversation about nature-related music. Ross lives in Philadelphia and is very active in the area as a conductor, soloist, and chorister in addition to his prodigious compositional activities. His catalogue lists many choral works, two symphonies, and a variety of instrumental chamber works as well as experimental pieces. Setting a delightful poem by Robert Frost about “An ant on the tablecloth,” the piece, first composed when the composer was a freshman in college and revised twice in later years, is scored for four-hands piano, giving a lively, almost orchestral treatment to the story of the tiniest of animals.
Hailing from Minnesota’s Twin Cities, one of this country’s hotbeds of choral music, Abbie Betinis is a rising star. Now only 35 years old, she has already received numerous awards and commissions from groups such as Cantus, the Dale Warland Singers, and The Rose Ensemble. Songs of Smaller Creatures won the Swan Composer Prize from her alma mater, the University of Minnesota, in 2005. It comprises three short tone poems, each a character study on a small creature. The Bee’s Song takes its silly text from British poet Walter de la Mare, who included no fewer than 33 Zs in his original poem. A noiseless, patient spider takes its title from an excerpt of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. In it he compares the questing soul to a spider who launches forth her own web in order to explore the space around her. The poem Envoi, by Charles Swinburne, is about butterflies. By adding nonsense syllables to the text Betinis suggests the subtle flapping of wings, “as if the singers are suddenly there in the thick of migration.”
Our collection of bird songs begins with a trio of madrigals from the Renaissance era—two Italian and one English. Claudio Monteverdi’s Quel Augellin imagines that a small bird, “singing so sweetly,” is proclaiming the love in the author’s heart. Franco-Flemish composer Jacque Arcadelt was active in both France and Italy, becoming one of the most famous of the early madrigal composers. His Il bianco e dolce Cigno contrasts the swan’s disconsolate death song with the author’s joy in “dying,” surely implying a sexual connotation. Thomas Vautor dedicated a collection of 20 madrigals to his Leicestershire patron in 1617. But his charming Sweet Suffolk Owl is the only one performed today. The owl sits at night singing “te-whit, te-whoo” before catching a mouse. The owl then sings a dirge for its dying soul.
Charles Villiers Stanford is one of my favorite composers of the English Romantic era. Stanford was a founding professor at the Royal College of Music, where his students included Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. He composed a substantial number of concert works, including seven symphonies, but his best-remembered pieces are his choral works. His jewel-like setting of Mary E. Coleridge’s The Blue Bird transcendsthe rather mundane poem, creating an ethereal atmosphere that I find quite memorable.
I couldn’t present a group of bird songs without including the Beatles’ classic Blackbird. Daryl Runswick perfectly translates the spirit of the original into this elegant choral arrangement.
Christine Donkin was raised in northwest Alberta, where she was influenced by a variety of musical styles introduced in childhood. These included folk, fiddle, classical, jazz, and more. Her knowledge of popular styles is evident in Four Critters, a delightful collection of clever Ogden Nash verses.
We’ll wrap up the proceedings with the finale from Leonard Bernstein’s great operetta, Candide, based on the short story by Voltaire, with a libretto by Lillian Hellman. After the picaresque life story of Candide is told, the show concludes with this grand hymn, which states, “Let us try, before we die, to make sense of life. We’re neither pure, nor wise, nor good. We’ll do the best we know; we’ll chop our wood, and make our garden grow.”
We hope that you have enjoyed living in our garden of delights amid the plants and animals. We appreciate your support and look forward to seeing you at our concerts next season.
