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1991-1992 Season (Premiere Season)

Premiere Concert

Second (Christmas) Concert

Carmina Burana

1992-1993 Season (2nd Season)

An Afternoon on Broadway

Annual Christmas Concert

The Versatile Leonard Bernstein

All-Beethoven Evening

1993-1994 Season (3rd Season)

A Baroque Christmas

An Evening of English Choral Masterworks

Classical Favorites

1994-1995 Season (4th Season)

Holiday Pops 1994

Christmas Around The World

Joy! To The World: Christmas With The Concert Singers of Cary

The Peaceable Kingdom: The Music of Randall Thompson

1995-1996 Season (5th Season)

Holiday Pops 1995

Christmas in Cary

The American Boychoir Tour

Amadeus: The Music of Mozart

1996-1997 Season (6th Season)

Messiah: 1743 Covent Garden Performance

Amahl and the Night Visitors

Un Soir Avec Fauré

Swing!

Simple Gifts: American Folk Music

1997-1998 Season (7th Season)

Holiday Pops 1997

Great Britten

Amahl and the Night Visitors

Mass Appeal

An Evening of Stars and Stardust

A gala to benefit the musical programs of the Opera Company of North Carolina
replaced the originally-scheduled "Songs of Brahms" at request of the Opera Company of North Carolina

1998-1999 Season (8th Season)

Songs By Brahms

Songs of Christmas

Saviour and Emperor

The Magic Flute

Music of the Young America

Behold, I am a Bell: a cappella music through the ages

1999-2000 Season (9th season)

Gifts and Graces: Music from the Young America

Holiday Pops 1999

Christmas Perspectives

A Symphony of Psalms

Chichester Psalms

Modern African-American Masterworks

Sentimental Journey: Music of the 1930s and 1940s

2000-01 Season (10th season)

Holiday Pops 2000

Christmas Olde and New

European Sacred Classics

Memories of Broadway

Classical Jukebox: Ode to Joy

2001-02 Season (11th season)

Holiday Pops 2001

Christmas Blessings

Laud to the Nativity

Celebrations

A Serenade to Music

2002-03 Season (12th season)

Journey to the Light

Feliz Navidad! Holiday Music from Hispanic America

Beethoven's Ninth Symphony

Brahms' German Requiem

Cary Voices Unlimited Steps Out

2003-04 Season (13th season)

Christmas Around the World...and Back

Heart Renderings

Dances / RSO Presents

Music of the Great English Cathedrals

2004-05 Season (14th season)

Light, Love and Hope: Living 21st Century Composers

Holiday Pops in Cary

Bach and Handel

2005-06 Season (15th season)

Baroque Chamber Classics

World Music

Holiday Pops in Cary 2005

Anthems, Carols & Holiday Songs

Valentine's Classics

Pope Marcellus and Lord Nelson Masses

An American Celebration

An American Celebration

Jazz Meets the Beatles

2006-07 Season (16th season)

Presentation to ACDA-NC

Psalms: Bridges of Faith

Holiday Pops in Cary 2006

Bach's Easter Oratorio and Other Works

An American Celebration 2007

Holidays in the Caribbean

Voices of Light: The Passion of Joan of Arc

Russian Nights

An American Celebration 2008

Salute to the Greatest Generation

Program Notes from Selected Concerts

A collection of program notes as they appeared (minus illustrations) in concert programs.

An American Celebration 2007
Bach's Easter Oratorio and Other Works
Holiday Pops in Cary 2006
Psalms: Bridges of Faith
An American Celebration
Pope Marcellus and Lord Nelson Masses
Anthems, Carols and Holiday Songs
Holiday Pops in Cary 2005
World Music
Baroque Chamber Classics
Bach and Handel
Holiday Pops in Cary
Light, Love and Hope: Living 21st Century Composers
Music of the Great English Cathedrals
Heart Renderings
Christmas Around the World...and Back
Brahms' German Requiem
Feliz Navidad! Holiday Music from the Hispanic Tradition
A Serenade to Music
Celebrations
Christmas Blessings
Memories of Broadway
European Sacred Classics
Christmas Olde and New
Sentimental Journey: Music of the 1930s and 1940s
Modern African-American Masterworks
A Symphony of Psalms
Christmas Perspectives
Behold, I am a Bell
Music of the Young America
Saviour and Emperor
Songs Of Christmas
Songs by Brahms
Mass Appeal
Great Britten
Simple Gifts: American Folk Music
Swing!
Un Soir Avec Fauré
Messiah: 1743 Covent Garden Performance
Amadeus: The Music of Mozart

Amadeus: The Music of Mozart, May 1996
by David R. Lindquist

Sometime early in the summer of 1791, Mozart received a mysterious visitor who offered him a commission for the composition for the composition of a Requiem. Mozart accepted because he badly needed the money, but his depression and ill health conspired to make him unduly morbid. The messenger, whom Mozart took to be some sort of emissary of Death, was actually an agent for Count Walsegg-Stuppach, who demanded secrecy because he intended to perform the Requiem in memory of his wife and to passit off as his own composition.

Mozart composed the piece interrupted by other composing responsibilities. His wife Constanze took the score away from him in mid-October fearing it would damage his precarious health. Mozart began to be obsessed with the notion that he was writing the work in preparation for his own death.

At the time of his death on December 5, just eight weeks short of his thirty-sixth birthday, Mozart had completed only the opening Introit in full score, and with the complete orchestration, but he had substantially completed the Kyrie and had drafted most of the Dies irae (though the Lacrimosa draft broke off after eight measures) and the Offertorium. These drafts consisted of the completed choral part, the bass line, and a very few indications for the remainder of the orchestration. Mozart is supposed to have discussed his plans and sketches for the Requiem with his pupil Franz Xaver Sussmayr.

Costanze first approached Joseph Eybler to complete the Requiem. Eybler completed the orchestration of the parts that had been drafted, entering his additions directly onto Mozart’s manuscript. But when it came to composing entirely new music for the end of the Lacrimosa and the rest of the work, he could not equal Mozart. Constanze asked several other composers to undertake the work but settled, in the end, on Sussmayr, who used whatever sketches Mozart had left for the remainder of the work.

Sussmayr wrote out the entire score for his completion of the work and passed it on to Count Walsegg’s agent; the Count arranged for the performance of "his" Requiem in the new monastic church at Wiener Neustadt on December 14, 1793. The Requiem was finally published as Mozart’s in 1800, and at the request of the publishers, Sussmayr described his role, explaining that everything from the verse "judicandus homo reus" (the third line of the Lacrimosa) was his own, though he had repeated Mozart’s Kyrie fugue in the closing Communion "to give the work greater uniformity. "

Compared to Mozart’s earlier Mass compositions, the Requiem is an impressive work of sombre beauty, darker in color, but rising to great heights of power and drama (as in the first two lines of the Lacrimosa, probably the last notes he ever penned), and soaring with the ineffable grace that was Mozart’s, but clearly filled, as well, with personal urgency.

Messiah: 1743 Covent Garden Performance, December 1996
by David R. Lindquist

Messiah, one of the greatest English choral works and certainly the crowning achievement in the life of George Friedrich Handel (1685-1759). The only biblical oratorio that calls on the New Testament is not a portrayal of the life and Passion of Christ, but is a lyric, even epic contemplation of the idea of Christian Redemption. The brilliant libretto crafted by Charles Jennens draws on both Old and New Testaments and particularly from the vigor and pathos of Isaiah and Psalms to illustrate Prophecy, Nativity, Crucifixion and Resurrection.

Messiah is an atypical product of the "Andrew Lloyd Webber" of the mid eighteenth century. As the composer of hundreds of works, including 46 operas, over 100 solo cantatas, 32 oratorios, 18 organ concerti, and a coronation anthem for George II that has been used for all subsequent British monarchs, Handel was the major influence on English music for half a century and on composers such as Haydn, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Beethoven. Handel preferred lavishly staged operas, but adopted oratorios in his later years as a cost-cutting expedient as rival opera companies lured away his audiences.

Messiah was born as part of a touring season in Dublin at the invitation of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and was first heard on April 13, 1742 "for support of hospitals and other pious uses". The connection between Messiah and charity predated the composition. Handel was probably invited specifically to write music on behalf of Irish charities on the strength of his reputation in sacred composition, and the oratorio is atypically undramatic, suggesting that Handel intended Messiah to be something distinct. The oratorio’s premiere was a significant event for Dublin. Leading civic and religious figures in the community helped plan the event, and Handel had access to the choirs of the two leading Anglican churches in the city. One notable critic was the Dean of St.Patrick’s, the music-hating Jonathan Swift of Gulliver’s Travels fame who made an effort to derail Handel’s effort to assemble a chorus from members of his choir, alluding to the "flagitious aggravations of (musicians’) respective disobedience, rebellion, perfidy and ingratitude."

Written in just 21 days, heavily laden with recycled material from earlier works and using very limited orchestration (lacking even the ubiquitous baroque oboes and bassoons), Messiah achieved enough success that Handel frequently revived the work through a performance just three days before his death in April 9, 1759. The work, cloaked as "A New Sacred Oratorio", did have its critics including clerics deeply shocked at the sacrilege they perceived in making a theatrical entertainment from the Life and Passion of Christ. As Paul Henry Lang notes in his biography of Handel, "So here it was, the unbelievable, Holy Scripture in the flesh, uttered--nay, sung--by the most lascivious and immoral of persons, theatre folk, and accompanied by a detestable band of fiddlers in the Play-House, that damnable institution where no true Christian could enter without being soiled."

Messiah is an interesting amalgam of influences. Both the German and Italian musical traditions of Handel’s youth are represented in the score. Handel revived themes and even entire numbers that represent the development of his long career. Despite the quiltwork of its constituent elements, Handel masterfully brings all together into a beautifully cohesive whole.

The first part of Messiah reveals God’s plan to redeem the world through a Saviour and tells the Nativity story. Beginning with a French-style "sinfonia", it includes several evocative solos and choruses, including "O thou that tellest" with its lullaby-like rhythm, the happy madrigal "For unto us a Child is born" , and the soprano airs "And lo! the angel of the Lord came upon them" and "suddenly there was with the angel" in which a pulsating string accompaniment lends excitement to the climactic visit of the heavenly host.

Christ’s ministry on Earth and the Easter story are the subject of the second part whose basic theme is the victory of Christ over sin and the perpetuation of His kingdom on Earth. This act includes the poignantly chromatic lament "He was despised", the innocently pastoral chorus "All we like sheep have gone astray" and the triumphant coronation anthem "Hallelujah!" ablaze with joyous trumpets and drums. The final act concerns the promise of eternal life. It opens with Handel’s gracious, calm and loving air "I know that my Redeemer liveth" and concludes with the glorious triple choral number "Worthy is the Lamb" sung in unison with certitude, "Blessing and honour" blending imitative passages and powerful unisons, and a fugue-like "Amen" spanning dozens of measures.

While we admire Messiah as a choral masterpiece, its author was never entirely satisfied with the composition. Throughout its performance life, Handel made modifications to suit the quality of soloists, choruses and orchestration as well as to remedy self-perceived imperfections. There is no original performance manuscript, nor did Handel leave us one definitive version of the score. Scholars believe that there are at least sixteen different versions of Messiah. Tonight’s performance is an extensively researched recreation of the first performance of Messiah in England at the Covent Garden Theatre in London in April of 1743.

Un Soir Avec Fauré, March 1997
by David R. Lindquist

While Gabriel Urbain Fauré (1845-1924) achieved a reputation for composition, he spent most of his life as a music educator. Fauré displayed early musical talents and attended the fledgling École Niedermeyer in Paris as a protégé of the illustrious Romanticist Camille Saint-Saëns. Cantique de Jean Racine, a product of those years, won first prize for composition in 1865. Its grave and graceful fluency echoes the Romantic traditions of the day. The work was originally scored for mixed voices and organ but was later orchestrated.

After stints as a provincial church organist and as lieutenant in the army during the war with Germany, Fauré returned to Paris in 1872 to teach, play organ, and renew his association with Saint-Saëns. He became music director at Paris’ fashionable Church of the Madeleine in 1877. Despite the prestige, Fauré struggled with the philistinism of the aristocratic parishioners, the disagreeable boys in his all-male choir (whom he called "geese"), conflicts over the musical repertoire (the priests wanted popular works), and the low pay. Some scholars believe that Fauré’s religious cynicism and interest in novel musical ideas stemmed from his years at The Madeleine.

Fauré’s first compositions were fresh and charming. He rapidly mastered chamber music (e.g., Piano Quartet in C Minor 1879) and refined orchestral works (e.g., Pavane 1887), but he was attentive to new ideas gleaned from Wagner, Liszt, and other stars of the day that presaged the idioms of the early twentieth century. Fauré also wrote well-crafted pieces for piano and is known for a brilliant opera (Penelope 1907). However, as a real-life "Mr. Holland" Fauré spent more time with students than with composition, especially after becoming professor of composition at the Paris Conservatory in 1896 and its director in 1905. In these posts he influenced a generation of pupils, including Boulanger, Debussy, Enesco, Ravel, and Schmitt, who appreciated his taste for both classical and contemporary forms of music.

Fauré inhabited two entirely different worlds with ease. The director of the conservative Conservatory and music critic for the stuffy Le Figaro was also the idol of young dissidents and president of their Society of Independent Musicians. As Ronald Crichton has written, "In French musical life he occupied a paradoxical position. He was at the center. Nevertheless he remained independent of the main currents, unobtrusively himself, unsensationally but fundamentally innovating from within, behind a screen of classicism that was also a firm foundation." This humble teacher never became especially well-known outside France. His elegant Requiem, a distinct exception, has become a favorite to church choirs around the world.

It is difficult to miss the sweetness and solemnity of Requiem. The work unfolds with Introit et Kyrie in which a mournful chorus echoes majestic orchestral chords, lingering on the word "requiem" (rest.) The deeply affecting Offertoire begins with a choir sans sopranos, moves to a baritone soloist accompanied by a gently pulsing viola and organ solo, and returns to the choir avec sopranos. The composition then advances to the two gems: the Sanctus, with its expressive soprano melody echoed by the men and supported by harp and violin, and the Pie Jesu, with its simple and prayerful treble solo illuminated by murmuring orchestration. The Agnus Dei carries the preceding warmth and tenderness to a reprise of the opening theme of the first movement in advance of the Libera me, where Fauré alludes to the Last Judgment. The choir’s sense of fear is offset by the tranquil and confident baritone soloist, who opens and closes the movement. Requiem concludes with the eloquently melodious In Paradisum, which portrays the flight of the soul to heaven.

Requiem included only five movements when first performed in 1888. Five years later, Libera me and Offertoire were added in the second edition (which is being performed tonight) from material composed in 1877 and 1889, respectively. Fauré originally intended a mixed chorus, with boys singing the soprano solo and treble choir parts. The light orchestration of strings, timpani, and organ was expanded in a 1900 edition (probably the work of a less experienced student) to a more conventional orchestra including flutes, clarinets, trumpets, and other instruments. However, even they were used unconventionally. The full orchestra rarely plays together, and certain instruments (e.g., flutes and clarinets) are absent in many movements.

While Requiem adheres to the basic Catholic formula for a mass for the dead, used by composers as diverse as Mozart, Bruckner, Berlioz, Dvorák and Verdi, Fauré’s Requiem is unique in omitting the sequence Dies irae (day of wrath), with its allusions to the terrors of the Judgment. This puzzled and upset traditionalists (including the priest who officiated at the burial mass at which Requiem debuted). In the words of Melvin Berger, "In their requiems, Berlioz and Verdi erected huge, overwhelming cathedrals of sound designed to overcome doubt and deepen faith. By comparison, Fauré fashioned an exquisite, intimate, candlelit side chapel where warmth and deeply felt emotion are allowed to bring peace and solace." This change in setting was dictated not by the convictions of a fervently religious man but by a skeptic who dismissed a Catholic journal with "How nice is the naiveté, or the vanity, or the stupidity, or the bad faith of the people for whom this was written!" Fauré himself noted that "they say that my Requiem does not express the terror of death; someone has called it a lullaby of death. But that is how I see death: as a happy deliverance, as a yearning for the joy that lies beyond, rather than as a sorrowful passing." It was fittingly performed for his own funeral in 1924.

Swing!, April 1997
by David R. Lindquist

It’s not the number that counts, it’s the way you play it. That’s what makes jazz.
-Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong (1900-1971)

Tonight’s program celebrates jazz, one of the most distinctive American music forms. Jazz owes a debt to the talents and genius of the African Americans who gave it birth, nurtured it in its lean early years and led almost every advance in its fascinating history. The origins of jazz can be traced to many African-American musica l traditions of the 1800s, including spirituals, work songs, minstrelsy, hymns, Creole music, African music, and call-and-response. This incredible mosaic, unified by rhythm came together as America was transformed from a predominantly rural to an urban society in the 1890s. One of the earliest strains was ragtime, with its marchlike, syncopated style. Black musicians accustomed to small-town tent shows and country tours gravitated toward the new dance halls and vaudeville theaters of the growing cities, shared complex repertoires, and developed the basis of early jazz. New Orleans which had the largest African-American community during the 1890s is generally regarded as jazz’ first home.

Jazz grew quickly in the 1910s and 1920s as the "great migration" of blacks from the South to northern cities created performance venues. The new phonograph taught a generation of performers and reached thousands of homes. Jazz also afforded African Americans a rare opportunity to overcome racial barriers and was less a revolution against mainstream values than a way to "make it" in a white world.

One of the greatest leaders of the early jazz period was Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong, who in the 1920s pioneered the styles of swing and "scat" singing identified with New York City. This first solo voice in African-American music helped early jazz, ragtime, and blues gain acceptance across America. For years jazz was considered low and vulgar by most respectable and sophisticated people of the time. It is likely that this endeared it to tens of thousands of young white people rebelling through contact with forbidden black culture during the Roaring Twenties. Nevertheless, jazz remained outside the mainstream.

Jazz needed the boost provided by the jazz band to overcome this limitation. Musicians like Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington and Irving Mills replaced improvisation with brilliant orchestration, repetition and volume. Ellington was the first true African American composer and virtually invented big-band jazz. He made a variety of changes in the jazz form, abandoning the tuba-and-banjo rhythm section in favor of guitar-and-string bass, a deeper reed sound (mostly with saxophones), and more instrumental sonorities.

The music Ellington championed demanded larger bands, and hundreds of musicians rose to the challenge. The swing style sharpened in Kansas City and Harlem (best known for its Cotton Club) late in the 1920s became a national craze. Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, and Harry James were among the leaders of large swing orchestras. The Swing Era saw another interesting development as whites, reacting enthusiastically to the arranged style of swing, began to dominate and tightly manage jazz as record makers and consumers. Regional styles were swiftly supplanted by the jazz that passed the music companies’ and radio stations’ market tests. This trend was exacerbated by the Great Depression. Performing opportunities dried up, and prominant white (or at least "established") musicians won favorable treatment in fierce "booking wars."

At the same time, blues, without which jazz could not have come into being, was now standardized on twelve bars, based on the tonic, dominant and subdominant chords. The blue notes are the flatted third and seventh. In this form, a statement is made in the first four bars, repeated in the next four, and answered in the final four. Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and the charismatic Cab Calloway are particularly well known artists from this period, which saw the growth of "happy blues," "satirical blues," and "fast moving blues," in addition to the traditional blues of pain, poverty, and death.

By the end of the 1930s a reaction against stereotyped swing music had begun, chiefly where it had originated: Harlem and Kansas City. To some African American musicians, swing had become repetitive, stale, and a little too "white." Their revolt led to bebop or rebop (later bop), which featured the flatted fifth and a highly elliptical style. Charlie Parker, Lester Young, Thelonious Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie were leaders of the then-radical movement.

Parker, modern jazz’ chief innovator, changed the face of jazz by improvising through the extension of harmonic chords. It seemed like chaos even to other jazz musicians. Yet this disciplined tonal system and its unusual syncopations had a major impact. Above all, bop swiftly engendered a counterrevolution in the 1940s called "cool jazz," so named for its unemotional quality, or "west coast jazz" because of its identification with Los Angeles. Cool jazz (and, later, "progressive jazz") leaders like Miles Davis, Lennie Tristano, Dave Brubeck, and John Lewis made their mark with small, classically trained combinations, a transcendent style, sustained atmosphere, and powerful yet restrained texture. Theirs was an intellectual appeal. Many notable singers and instrumentalists adopted this style, including John Kirby, Coleman Hawkins, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Glenn Miller, and Charlie Shavers.

Davis and his successors continued to grow, change, and experiment into the 1960s. Davis disciples John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman created new forms of jazz such as "free jazz" and "jazz rock." Other innovations drove the evolution of blues to rhythm and blues, soul, and rock and roll. Fresh experiments with the complex cross-rhythms of African music led to reggae, funk and rap. The innovation goes on today. Jazz, an vital art, welcomes new influences and demands that the true jazz musician be a restless, creative "cat."

Simple Gifts: American Folk Music, May 1997
by David R. Lindquist

Tonight’s concert celebrates America’s original country music, what we today call traditional folk music. While every culture has its own particular folk music, America’s is the product of an astonishing number of influences and models dating back to its earliest colonial days. The folk music performed tonight developed largely in the Appalachian and Ohio valley hinterlands and in the southern backwoods during the 17th and 18th centuries.

Curiously, America’s most national music was sculpted by successive waves of immigrants from the Old World. Its forebears include popular English and Irish tunes, Puritan hymns, and contributions by West Africans, Germans, Moravians and others. Its uniquely American character lies not in musical form but in its reflection of the struggles and aspirations of the peoples reaching these shores and pushing deep into the North American continent.

American folk music is most notable for its simple melodies and powerful imagery. Much of it was intended for a capella singing or accompaniment with few instruments (including the fiddle and dulcimer). The first function of folk music, be they ballads, love songs, lullabies, work songs or hymns is to distinctly produce a feeling of security for the listener by voicing particular qualities of lands, peoples, and their lives. On the frontier, far from the frenetic cultural influences of the seaboard cities, singing supplied a signal release from the rigors of life. Music touched on peoples’ work, leisure, and beliefs. Some songs amount to statements of social protest, championing rustic egalitarianism. Such tunes as Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair, The Water Is Wide, and Shenandoah paint a simple yet vivid picture of the feelings of common men and women.

Religion was also a very important part of the folk tradition. From the Calvinist psalters used by the Puritans, the joyous spirituals of the slaves in the South, and the indestructible hymns of camp meetings and revivals, a rich body of mass worship music was developed including Amazing Grace, Simple Gifts, My Shepherd Will Supply My Need, and Wade in the Water. Many of these songs retain their hypnotic power in countless Sunday services today. They needed to be powerful, for they grew out of the unique frontier phenomenon of mass worship including camp meetings and revivals.

These folk tunes changed with the decades as it they were carried further inland by lumberjacks, sailors, farmers, ranchers, and many others. In time they formed the basis of minstrel shows, sea chanteys, country and western music, jazz, and blues. Now that the frontier is gone and our lives have lost their rural character, folk music lives on in our memories, allowing us to understand better the hopes, dreams, struggles and triumphs of those built the American nation.

Great Britten, December 1997
by David R. Lindquist

Edward Benjamin Britten was born November 22, 1913 in Lowestoft, Suffolk. His prosperous parents encouraged his dazzling talents and in 1930 he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London where he studied piano and composition. Britten rapidly mastered compositional technique and won serious public notice in 1937 with Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge. He began his professional career writing cinema music, but in the 1940s he gravitated to opera, producing such works as Peter Grimes (1945) and The Rape of Lucretia (1946). As artist and pacifist, Britten was obsessed with self-alienation and stressed themes of intolerance in many of his operas. Following World War II, Britten abandoned large-scale operas in favor of chamber operas rich in texture and coloration. To develop these new settings, he helped found the English Opera Group in 1947 and the Aldeburgh Festival a year later. At this time Britten composed works like Gloriana, for the Queen’s coronation in 1952, and War Requiem (1961). After dabbling in opera for television in the early 1970s, Britten abandoned composition. His swan song was the acclaimed Death in Venice (1973). He died December 4, 1976, six months after becoming the first composer created a life peer of Great Britain.

Britten’s St. Nicolas closely follows the contours of the life of St. Nicholas of Myra written by St. Methodius of Constantinople (circa 847) who warned his readers that "up to the present the life of this distinguished Shepherd has been unknown to the majority of the faithful". Even then, Nicholas’ story was more legend than fact. The generally accepted, although still doubtful version begins with his birth about 270 to a wealthy family in Patara, a seaport Asia Minor (now Turkey). It was during his youth that the most famous legend about Nicholas arose: A poor man could not pay a dowry for his three daughters who were therefore unmarriageable). They would have been condemned to a life of prostitution, but Nicholas anonymously saved them by tossing bags of gold coins through the window.

Around 295 Nicholas answered a call to abandon monastic life and undertake a pilgrimage to Palestine. About 303, after his return, he was ordained Bishop of the see at Myra, where he is said to have been imprisoned and tortured for eight years during the "Great Persecution" of Christians under Diocletian. With Constantine’s accession, however, Christianity gained official acceptance within the Roman Empire, and Nicholas used it to great advantage, destroying pagan temples and fighting for justice even against even the Emperor himself (for which his fame grew for half a millenium). Nicholas confronted fellow Bishops equally fearlessly, among them the Arian heretics at the Great Council of Nicaea (of the Nicene Creed) in 325. His remaining years were dedicated to protecting the poor, the oppressed, and children. Nicholas died about 350.

It took centuries before Nicholas gained great popularity. In 1087 Italian merchants smuggled relics said to be his from Saracen-held Lycia to a new church at Bari which quickly became a place of healing and pilgrimage. One observer wrote "the West as well as the East acclaims and glorifies him. Wherever there are people, in the country and the town, in the villages, in the isles, in the furthest parts of the earth, his name is revered and churches are built in his honor" Nicholas was adopted as the patron of Greece, Russia and other countries and of thousands of churches particularly in the Orthodox world. His feast day, December 6, is still celebrated as a children’s holiday in some places through the giving of gifts. In the West Nicholas was eventually identified with Christmas Eve.

"Santa Claus" emerged in Protestant Northern Europe. Santa’s name is a corruption of Sint Klaes, the Dutch form of the saint’s name. The Dutch, who delight in the feast of Saint Nicholas, brought these traditions to America as early settlers of New York, and it was a New Yorker, Episcopal Bishop Clement Clarke Moore who published "A Visit From Saint Nicholas" in 1823. In Moore’s poem (a.k.a. "‘Twas the Night Before Christmas"), the saint adopts the disguise of a Nordic magician with a team of Lapp reindeer. This depiction was rendered indelible by the political cartoonist Thomas Nast who added the fur-trimmed red suit, large belt, and North Pole address. In 1931 this image was further embellished in a wildly successful Coca-Cola advertising campaign which gave the public a plumper, more jovial, commercialized Santa.

Britten had none of this imagry in mind, however, when St. Nicolas was commissioned by his friend Esther Neville-Smith for the centennial celebration of Lancing College in Sussex. Deeply moved by Britten’s 1942 Hymn to St. Cecilia, Neville-Smith sought a similar honor for Lancing’s patron, St. Nicholas. The work, set to Eric Crozier’s text, was first heard at the Aldeburgh festival June 5, 1948 and had its official premiere at Lancing in July. Britten achieved remarkable effects with modest resources, including a four-part chorus, a separate girls’ choir relegated to the gallery, an amateur string section, some percussion, piano and an organ. Listen for the composer’s interesting sting musical devices: the solemn march feel in movement I, the graceful A-minor waltz in movement 2, the onomatopoetic storm at sea and the tonal calming of the storm by Nicolas in movement 4, the agitated orchestral syncopations in movement 6, and the dramatic procession of the resurrected boys in movement 7. You are invited to join the Concert Singers in two congregational hymns inserted by Britten at key events: Nicolas’ consecration as Bishop concludes with Old Hundredth, and the cantata closes with a cathartic coda using London New.

Mass Appeal, March 1998
by David R. Lindquist

Tonight’s concert program features two settings of the Latin Mass by Viennese composers who became Olympian figures of Romantic music. These masses have much in common. They are both a subtle remaking of the classical mass setting, they are both eloquent statements of the Romantic movement, and they both predate their authors’ greatest works and represent the skills of young and evolving composers.

Mass in G was the second of six Masses Schubert would ultimately compose. The mass was written at age 17 during a year (1815) when Schubert experienced some of his most difficult life passages but also his greatest compositional output. This was the year he was forced to leave the boy choir and begin teaching, and when he failed to win the heart of a young woman. In spite of family pressure to abandon composition in order to focus on teaching, Schubert wrote over two hundred works that same year. Like his first mass, the Mass in G was written when Schubert was studying with Salieri and almost certainly pleased the aging master by dint of its simplicity, tunefulness, and innocent idiom. The Mass was written in six days and performed soon afterward at Liechtenthal Church in Vienna where Schubert sang as a boy. It was a small-scaled work accompanied by only strings and organ and lacked the usual instrumental introduction. It also featured subtle editing, for in spite of a lifetime association with the Catholic Church as a composer of sacred music, Schubert often disagreed with doctrine and took liberties with the text of the Mass, although not enough to warrant censure where it was performed.

When listening to Mass in G, note the Romantic touches applied by the young Schubert to the composition. For example, the subdued and homophonic Kyrie cedes to a moving Christe eleison solo by soprano. The Gloria brings in a note of exultation with a soprano-bass duet providing variety during the central passages. The Credo begins hushed and reverent and builds in intensity and confidence. Following a brief choral Sanctus based on a fugato Osanna, Schubert brings in a long soprano-tenor-bass trio for his Benedictus which concludes with the identical Osanna theme. Finally, the work recesses with the tender pleas of Agnus Dei as solo soprano and bass are echoed by soft chorus.

Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn in 1770. His father drove the boy to be a second Mozart. Beethoven was not nearly so gifted, but he acquired enough proficiency on organ to receive an appointment at age 14. His family life was chaotic and frustrating enough to drive Beethoven to Vienna in 1790. Here, he studied with Salieri, Albrectsberger, and Haydn and was influenced by many others including Mozart and C.P.E. Bach. The years from 1794 to 1802 saw Beethoven develop his mastery of piano in the classical styles of his tutors. These were the years of his great piano sonatas (e.g. The "Moonlight" Sonata #2). He eventually ended his association with the frustrating Haydn and in the period from 1803 to 1814 experimented with driving rhythms, dissonance and irregular resolutions. It was during these years that he composed his Symphonies 3 through 8 and Wellington’s Victory. Beethoven’s power and expressiveness were honed after 1815 as his compositional style became more abstract, dissonant and sublime and as he produced the revolutionary Symphony Number 9 and Missa Solemnis. While fortunate to have been dependent upon no wealthy patrons and benefitting from the growing power of the middle class, Beethoven was a gloomy and depressed artist. Sadly, Beethoven’s later years were especially maddening as he began to suffer hearing loss in 1802 and became entirely deaf in 1817. Disheartened and reclusive, Beethoven died in 1827.

Beethoven’s Mass in C was the product of a commission in 1807 arranged by Franz Joseph Haydn who was retiring as musical director to Hungarian noble Price Nikolaus Esterházy II. Haydn had served the Esterházy family for many years and was responsible for building one of the Austrian Empire’s finest house musical establishments. The Prince had a new choral mass performed annually in September in honor of his wife’s name day. Beethoven didn’t live up to expectations, not only procrastinating for months, but also in delivering a mass that displeased the Prince, who is said to have greeted the expectant composer with the "But my dear Beethoven, what is this you have done now?" In addition, Beethoven suffered the indignity of a singer rebellion led by chorus master Johannes Hummel who resented working under a partially deaf conductor. Beethoven promptly left town, found new patronage in Vienna, and wrote no further masses until Missa Solemnis. Beethoven’s problem was that he had both never written a mass before and made no effort to match the symphonic grandeur typical of Haydn’s later compositions. He felt free to think "outside the box" and came up with a contrived style simpler and more spiritual than that favored by the Prince and the Viennese establishment. Yet given the kind of work Beethoven was writing even at that time, the mass is an unusually quiet composition.

Beethoven’s setting places great emphasis on personal peace with dramatic touches and dynamic extremes. Throughout the work, as in many other of his compositions, key changes from the symbolic key of trouble (C minor) to the key of relief (C major) illustrate Beethoven’s anguished search for peace of spirit. His setting opens with a Haydn-style Kyrie whose three-part text and central Christe eleison in a higher third reflect the Trinity. Within, he repeatedly traces an emotional pattern from murmur to anxious plea and back against a light accompaniment. The thrilling Gloria features exuberant allegros in its outer sections and prayers set as antante mosso for soloists echoed by the choir in the central section. His Credo again features the symbolic three part text. A solo quartet is held in reserve until the hushed middle section. The resurrection and ascension are illustrated in rising motives concluding with a grand fugue for the Et Vitam Venturi. The Sanctus is short and solemn, including a fugual Osanna. The lengthy Benedictus begins with soloists and concludes with an identical Osanna. The magnificent minor-mode Agnus Dei is prayerful and earnest, using key and tempo changes and concluding with the skillful da capo return of the opening Kyrie music. Notice the anguished misereres ceding to hopeful dona nobis pacem. Some of most striking effects in the Mass in C are the unison or octave passages of the chorus which seem to periodically regress to plainchant, for example, at the end of the Kyrie, during the Quoniam tu solus sanctus in the Gloria, and twice during the Benedictus.

Songs By Brahms, November 1998
by David R. Lindquist

In Johannes Brahms, one of the greatest German composers, Classicism and Romanticism find a common ground, for his music possesses both the pureness and order of the former and the sonorous eloquence and melancholy of the latter. Brahms was the foremost exponent of counterpoint after Bach and a master of polyphony.

Born to a petite bourgeoisie family in Hamburg in 1833, Brahms demonstrated exceptional musical talent at an early age and with a sponsor's help studied for a career as a pianist. He quickly gained experience in improvisation and arranging during engagements in vulgar venues, on tour with the Hungarian violinist Reményi (who introduced him to many of Germany's premier musicians), and under the wing of Robert Schumann, who promoted Brahms as paladin against the "New German School" of Liszt and Wagner. In an 1853 article in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik Schumann hailed the prodigy, "over whose cradle Heroes and Graces had stood watch." Nonetheless, Brahms struggled for almost twenty years under the burdens of self-doubt and personal tragedy, including the premature death of Schumann in 1856, a series of on-and-off romances (particularly with Schumann's widow), and the bitter divorce of his parents in 1864. Twice rejected as conductor of the Hamburg Philharmonic, in 1863 and 1867, Brahms at first fared no better in Vienna, where his conducting skills were found wanting and his piano concerts drew harsh criticism (one reviewer disparaged his playing as so many "lacerating chords"). Worst of all, his senseless denunciation of the New German School in 1860 earned him powerful enemies and ceaseless harassment at the hands of Wagner.

After 1868, however, everything changed. Brahms gave up touring and concentrated on writing a series of masterpieces, among them the epochal German Requiem, the cantata Rinaldo, the Alto Rhapsody, and the Schicksalslied. With Variations on a Theme of Haydn (1873), his first important orchestral composition, and with the emotional release that came from putting his failures in Hamburg behind him, Brahms grew in artistic confidence. He was named music director of Vienna's famed Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, became Germany's foremost patriotic composer, and wrote four magnificent symphonies (1876, 1877, 1883, 1885), which showed not only that Beethoven had not had the final word in that form (one critic called Brahms's First Symphony "Beethoven's Tenth") but that there were now (to quote Hans von Bülow) "three B's of music: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms." By the late 1870s Brahms had achieved international renown as a composer and had been showered with honorary degrees from leading universities. In 1887 he was made a knight in the Prussian Order of Merit and in 1890 a commander in Emperor Franz Joseph's Order of Leopold. Yet Brahms never lost his simple tastes, his love of folk traditions and the common people, his informal lifestyle, or his appreciation of solitude. He eventually wearied of the demands of a busy regimen and retired from composition in 1892. On his death five years later he was honored with a vast funeral procession in Vienna.

The Schicksalslied (op. 54) is a setting of Friedrich Hölderlin's poem "Hyperions Schicksalslied" (Hyperion's Song of Destiny), which Brahms first read in 1868. Hölderlin (1770-1843), one of the greatest German lyric poets and a link between the Classical and Romantic periods, is best known for works that celebrate the ideals of the French Revolution. Several of these works feature the classically fatalistic Greek youth and political revolutionary Hyperion, who pursues the themes of liberty and beauty against the backdrop of Greece's war of independence from Turkey. The "Schicksalslied" so captivated Brahms that he set it to music immediately; however, he needed three years to solve the musical problem posed by the poem's grim conclusion. According to the critic Steven Ledbetter, "The music of the gods is luminous, sharply contrasted to the hard-driven torments of mankind, especially the dramatic depiction of 'water thrown from crag to crag,' followed by a sudden silence. The chorus ends on a note of resignation, [and] a shift from C minor to C major brings reconciliation."

With the Gesang der Parzen (op. 89), his final composition for chorus and orchestra, the fifty-year-old Brahms rose to the challenge of setting a major work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to music. Goethe (1749-1832), the greatest figure in German literature, so dominated the Romantic period that it is commonly called the Age of Goethe. In him, a first-class education, cosmopolitan connections, and associations with Neoplatonists, radical Protestants, and alchemists were fused into a Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) Renaissance man who created a uniquely German literary model from ancient Greek, English, and Gothic forms. In 1786 Goethe began a two-year sabbatical in Italy, where he wrote, among other works, the poetic drama Iphigenie auf Tauris, a humanized version of the Euripidean play in which he explores the themes of humanity, virtue, and self-control. Brahms based the Gesang der Parzen on the fourth act, which treats much the same subject as "Hyperions Schicksalslied": the gulf between the gods above and mankind, the hapless victims of the Fates, below. "As befits the darkness of the mood," Ledbetter writes, "Brahms creates a dark-colored choral sound in six parts, dividing the altos and basses into two parts each. The six-part chorus naturally falls into semichoruses of women's or men's voices, and Brahms exploits the possibilities of echoing one group against the other. But for the most part the Gesang der Parzen is ascetic in its musical approach, avoiding showy florid passages and an easy consolation. Indeed, at the beginning of the final stanza of the text we expect, for a moment, the kind of turn to the major key that has brought reconciliation in the Schicksalslied or the (Alto) Rhapsody--but here it does not happen. Brahms ends the final stanza resolutely in a dark and despairing close."

The Liebeslieder Walzer (Love Song Waltzes, op. 52) are the first of Brahms's two great love-song cycles for voice and piano based on selections from George Friedrich Daumer's Polydora. Daumer's verses were adapted from Russian, Polish, and Magyar folk songs, and Brahms naturally set them to music inspired by German folk tunes that had fascinated him since childhood. The Liebeslieder Walzer, whose rhythmic freedom is representative of his early works, date from a time when Brahms wrote many chamber and miniature vocal pieces for the Wiener Singakademie and more prominent venues. Encouraged by the success in 1867 of a set of waltzes for piano duet (op. 39), Brahms composed these waltzes within the next two years. Their premiere in January 1870 was so well received that he composed a second cycle in 1874 (Neue Liebeslieder Walzer, op. 65). In tonight's performance the Concert Singers present the original eighteen waltzes.

Nänie (op. 82) is based on the Naenia that was the ritual Song of Lamentation of ancient Rome. Friedrich von Schiller's classicizing poem was an obvious choice for Brahms to adapt as a dirge for his friend Anselm Feuerbach. Schiller (1759-1805), widely regarded as Germany's greatest dramatist, displayed fantastic talent and fiery idealism in his early works--the poem "An die Freude" (To Joy) was immortalized by Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony--but years of intense philosophical study led him to write poems and dramas concerned with the rise and fall of civilizations and with human destiny, works that influenced Jung, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Marx. Brahms came upon a setting of Schiller's poem in 1880 and shortly composed his own. Ledbetter notes that "a musical setting of a text that laments the transitoriness of all things, life, love, beauty, and heroic glory might have been a profoundly gloomy work-but it is not. Brahms makes it serene and accepting, quite in the spirit of Schiller's poem and the gentle fatalism of Greek antiquity. The first eight lines of the poem are set in 6/4 time, with soaring and hovering melodic lines intertwining from voice to voice. At the mention of Achilles' mother Thetis rising from the sea to lament the death of her son, the music moves to a bright and serene F-sharp major and a more homophonic texture. Brahms chooses to pass rather quickly over Schiller's final line, 'For the Common goes down to Orcus unsung,' and to draw out and emphasize the next-to-last line, 'To be even a song of lamentation in the mouth of the beloved is splendid.'"

Songs of Christmas, December 1998
by David R. Lindquist

I hope that all of you, . . . anywhere in the world, may sing these Christmas carols, meditating on what they say, . . . and that in them you may discover the truth about the love of God, who became man for us."
-Pope John Paul II, December 23, 1996

Tonight's concert celebrates the rich tradition of music written for Christmas. Since the fourth century, when Pope Julius I chose December 25 for the commemoration of Jesus' birth, musicians inspired by Christmas themes have left for posterity countless works that are almost unimaginably diverse in style, text, and technique.

The earliest Christmas music came in the form of simple and solemn hymns written for the use of the medieval clergy. Most employed extremely orthodox meters and texts. We do not hear many of these songs today, but a few particularly melodic ones achieved lasting popularity among the laity. One example is Veni, Veni, a twelfth-century French hymn we know as O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.

Renaissance composers applied more sophisticated techniques to the traditional liturgical Latin texts. Dufay's Gloria ad Modum Tubae (c. 1445) and Gabrieli's Hodie Christus Natus Est (c. 1575) speak to a flowering of Christmas music in Europe. Many works of this period are marked not only by their rich harmonies but also by their multichoral and antiphonal properties. Renaissance Christmas music, like the medieval hymns, is now relatively unknown to twentieth-century listeners.

The more familiar Christmas songs, some whose origins go back centuries, belong to four compositional types:

Folk music: Lost to the history of Europe are the beginnings of the Christmas "carol" (from the Greek choraulein, a dance accompanied by flute). Almost all of our favorite carols have roots in the folk music and minstrelsy of Germany, France, and England. One of the earliest is the English tune I Saw Three Ships, which recalls the visit of the Magi while evoking the maritime supremacy Britain enjoyed at the time of the tune's composition. Many folk carols with sacred emphases found their way into the church when congregational singing gained acceptance during the Reformation. Some secular folk tunes, such as Twelve Days of Christmas (1700), have become enduring signs of the season. Christmas has long been celebrated in the American spiritual tradition also, perhaps most memorably in Go Tell It on the Mountain, a standard since the late 1800s.

Sacred works: Many, if not all, of the great masters of choral music have turned to the sacred themes of Christmas at some time in their careers. Handel's Messiah (1742) has become by accident a Christmas (rather than an Easter) classic, and Herzogenberg's Christmas Song (1897) exemplifies Romantic genius. The central message of Christmas remains vital in the music of the twentieth century: Britten's Ceremony of Carols (1942) and Biebl's Ave Maria (1964) combine medieval popular and liturgical texts with innovative modern compositional idioms.

Adaptations and arrangements: Hymnals and Christmas songbooks are replete with works that began as something other than carols and were later adapted for use at Christmas. In Joy to the World, a striking example, Lowell Mason combined (in 1848 as Antioch) a tune adapted from Messiah with an Isaac Watts poem based on Psalm 98. While such adaptations and arrangements were especially abundant during the "Transcendental Awakening" of the early nineteenth century, they engage today's composers as well. Recent arrangements of older works include Courtney's Musicological Journey through the Twelve Days of Christmas (1990) and the gospel-style Handel's Messiah: A Soulful Celebration (1992).

Songs of winter: A decidedly secular trend in Christmas music that began as early as 1857 with Pierpont's Jingle Bells accelerated greatly during the 1900s and culminated in such wintry scene painting as Berlin's homey White Christmas (1941) and Anderson's ebullient Sleigh Ride (1950). Many of these tunes, written for the cinema and television, were made into instant classics by the unforgettable voices of Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Gene Autry, Judy Garland, and Mel Torme.

Christmas remains a popular subject for music of all kinds. A host of contemporary artists have recorded holiday favorites (e.g., Elton John, Stevie Wonder, Garth Brooks, and even the ubiquitous 'Three Tenors,'" and a school of "unique" arrangements has been established by such diverse settings as Guaraldi's jazzy Charlie Brown Christmas (1964) and Davis's lushly synthesized Mannheim Steamroller Christmas series (1984-). Memorable compositions continue to emerge (perhaps Webber's Christmas Dream and Geldof and Ure's Do They Know It's Christmas?) and will be known for decades to come.

Saviour and Emperor, April 1999
by David R. Lindquist

Tonight's concert spotlights works that connect two of history's greatest composers, Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Josef Haydn, and two of Europe's greatest rulers, Joseph II and Napoleon Bonaparte, at a turbulent time between the French Revolution and Waterloo. The compositions represent very different perspectives. The elderly Haydn wrote a mass that evoked his concerns for the future of Europe. The young Beethoven hailed the Enlightenment with a paean to a champion of reform. In addition, each work set in motion a search for the composer's Savior, whom Haydn soon found but whom Beethoven struggled continually to discern.

During the 1790s the demands of Enlightenment philosophers and revolutionaries put tremendous pressure on the anciens régimes of Europe. The glittering Bourbon monarchy of France had fallen in 1789, and soon Napoleon began to crush nations in his quest for the French throne. The Austrian state of the wily Hapsburg empress Maria Theresa had passed in 1780 into the hands of her radical son Joseph II (1741-90), who had chafed as co-regent for fifteen years. He immediately embarked on a program, shocking to other monarchs, of religious tolerance for Jews and Protestants, freedom for serfs, and abolition of hereditary and ecclesiastical privileges. His agenda endeared him to commoners and intellectuals but infuriated the clergy and nobility. A remarkably progressive ruler, Joseph II died at forty-nine, and his brother, Leopold II (1747-92), who briefly succeeded him, repealed many of his reforms.

Beethoven and Joseph II: Out of respect for the prince archbishop of Cologne, the artistic community of Bonn prepared a memorial service for his late older brother, and the Bonn literary society (Lesegesellschaft) asked an accomplished twenty-year-old local to write a cantata for it. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was an apt choice not only because his works spoke well of him but because he was already touring Germany and in 1787 had impressed the great Mozart, who reportedly said that "someday he will give the world something to talk about." An ardent admirer of Joseph II, Beethoven came of age during the heady years following the American and French Revolutions and was stirred by the radical writings of Egmont, Voltaire, and Schiller.

Cantata on the Death of Joseph II: The first half of an oratorio that memorializes one emperor and celebrates the accession of another, Beethoven's cantata echoes the Christian Resurrection story by placing the monarch in the role of Savior. But it was dropped from the program two days before the service, for while the commissioners were pleased with it, the complex and unconventional work required greater forces than the Electoral Court Orchestra could provide. The libretto, written by the twenty-year-old monk Severin Anton Averdonk, is also thought to have raised eyebrows with its sharp antagonism toward the Roman Catholic Church (the monster "Fanaticism"), which had been at odds with Joseph. The cantata became the first of Beethoven's "heroic" compositions. Haydn visited Bonn in 1792 and was shown the score. Greatly impressed, he accepted Beethoven as a student, but their opposing temperaments brought their association to an end two years later. Nevertheless, Beethoven made a permanent home in Vienna, Europe's musical capital, and in a few years had established himself as its leading pianist and composer.

Beethoven and Napoleon: Beethoven was an early admirer as well of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), who at twenty-seven rose to command the French army during the upheaval that toppled Louis XVI (whose queen, Marie Antoinette, was Joseph II's sister). Napoleon terrified European monarchs, humiliating Italy and Austria and nearly defeating Russia. Along the way, however, he lost the support of many intellectuals and artists. On learning in 1804 that Napoleon had crowned himself emperor in the loathed Bourbon fashion, an enraged Beethoven rededicated his new Symphony no. 3, "Eroica," to "the memory of a great man." Yet his idealism never waned, in spite of the nearly constant warfare during his adult life and the French "liberation" of Vienna that chased away the audiences for Fidelio, his opera about political oppression.

Haydn and Napoleon: A very different opinion of reform and revolution in Europe was held by another of its foremost musicians, Franz Josef Haydn (1732-1809). Beginning in 1761, Haydn served the powerful Esterházy family in Hungary as music director under Prince Anton I and then Prince Nikolaus I. Although relatively isolated, Haydn received many commissions, and his fame as a composer steadily grew. When a new prince dismantled the musical establishment at Esterháza, Haydn resigned and enjoyed several years of triumphant touring, friendship with Mozart, and international celebrity before accepting a plea from the Esterházy family to return in 1792. Unfortunately for the conservative Haydn, the new emperor, Francis II, had made his top priority the defanging of France and led repeated assaults on it. Multinational efforts in 1796 and 1797 resulted not only in Austria's surrender but also in the abolition of the thousand-year Holy Roman Empire. Undaunted, Francis attacked the French again in 1809 and in defeat was made a vassal to Napoleon. Haydn viewed such developments with dread and shared his misgivings in two great masses.

Mass in Time of War: Haydn's greatest masses, all produced for birthday celebrations of Princess Josepha Maria Esterházy, were composed late in life. Haydn had written earlier masses as well as the cantata Seven Last Words of Jesus Christ, but it was not until a sabbatical in London at the age of sixty that he came under the influences that made his final six masses such emotionally compelling masterpieces. The Mass in Time of War, written in 1796, was the second. Despite its title, it does not exhibit obvious sorrow or terror but seems, at first, joyous and hopeful. Somber music, after all, would have been unwelcome at the princess's party. Nevertheless, Haydn introduced martial themes that are hair-raising and that later inspired Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. Each movement performs scene painting with imaginative orchestration, from the timpani and trumpets in the Kyrie that announce Napoleon's arrival at the Austrian border to alarmed choral interjections in the Qui Tollis and rumbling drum rolls, representing danger, in the Agnus Dei. Two years later, following the second of Austria's ill-fated campaigns against France, Haydn wrote the Mass in Frightened Times, which gained a new nickname after he had learned of Napoleon's defeat in Egypt. In honor of the English admiral who became Haydn's friend, it was soon known as the Lord Nelson Mass. The French emperor haunted Haydn for the rest of his life, however, not only as the occupier of Vienna for most of the period between 1796 and 1809 but also as the Angel of Death. Disabled and helpless, Haydn suffered through the bombardment of the city in May 1809, died under French guard, and was buried by French officers.

Haydn and his Savior: After the Lord Nelson Mass, Haydn continued to turn out extraordinary compositions, including in 1798 The Creation, based on a text originally prepared for Handel. Wildly successful in Europe, Haydn's first sacred work in German filled him with a feeling of closeness to God: "When I think about [Him], my heart leaps with joy and then my music leaps with it." Haydn completed the delightful oratorio The Seasons in 1800 and three additional masses between 1799 and 1802 before his health began to deteriorate. Wracked with pain and frustration, he abandoned a huge oratorio based on the Last Judgment, resigned his post at Esterháza, and retired from composition. The admiring Beethoven was on hand for his last public appearance, at a performance of The Creation in 1808.

Beethoven and his Savior: Tormented by his growing deafness and the seemingly endless Napoleonic Wars, Beethoven nevertheless composed brilliantly. His Wellington's Victory, which celebrated the final defeat of the French emperor, and his Fidelio, with its theme of liberation, made him the toast of Europe. Beethoven basked briefly in Establishment acclaim, and in 1815 peace after twenty years seemed a godsend. His euphoria evaporated, however, when postwar Austria fell under the stifling rule of the reactionary Metternich and Vienna was infested with secret police and informers. Beethoven, ill and soon out of favor with the authorities, grew bitter, argumentative, and reclusive. Yet sometime after 1817 he was inspired to greatness once again. This anticlerical radical wrote the dramatic Missa Solemnis in 1823 and in 1824 finished the Ninth Symphony in D minor. A triumphant setting of Schiller's "Ode to Joy," it broke new ground in scale and in the use of massed choral forces to proclaim the glory of the human spirit to a war-weary audience. More than thirty years after the cantata dedicated to Joseph II's memory, and only three years before his own death, Beethoven had at last found his salvation in a musical unity of God, nature, and mankind.

Music of the Young America, June 1999
by David R. Lindquist

Many Americans disdain the nineteenth century as a time of crude, antiquated attitudes, yet it encompasses the astonishing period between Thomas Jefferson's election as president and the Spanish-American War, when the United States was first recognized as a world power. From 1800 to 1899 America became an urban nation, spanned a continent, built a vigorous industrial economy, developed a national literature, abolished slavery, and survived a catastrophic civil war.

Against this backdrop Americans defined themselves with unique musical traditions. Waves of immigrants from England, Ireland, and Scotland created a hauntingly beautiful folk music in the southern Appalachian mountains. Generations of African slaves gave powerfully expressive voice to their struggle for freedom. Gifted poets from the burgeoning cities put on paper lofty words and music that Americans could sing as national anthems. Men and women of faith, carrying the Word to new communities in the growing nation, prayed to God with simple yet transcendent hymns. And a gifted minstrel, Stephen Foster, listened to the voices of Americans north and south, east and west, and helped create a national musical style that lives on today.

Country Music: The people of the Appalachians, like those of many other regions, developed their own musical idioms from the music their forebears brought from the British Isles. Tonight's concert spotlights several classic examples. Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair, a passionate, lyrical folk song of the southern Appalachians, is probably based on the eighteenth-century English country song The Sailor Boy. The many versions of this tune are a consequence of the practice, common among mountain musicians, of creating new melodies from one or more earlier ones. The Water Is Wide is a simple, hymnlike Appalachian folk song. Shenandoah, one of many variations on a familiar tune, probably began as a voyageur song on the rivers west of the Mississippi and is named either for a notable Native American chief or for the Virginia river valley; no one is quite sure. In time the song became a popular capstan chantey (referring to women and water, both dear to the sailor's heart!) and a favorite even among the cavalry in the western states. In the same tradition but later, Home on the Range can be traced to Kansas, which was in the 1870s the heart of the Wild West of cattle trails, expanding fields of wheat, and frontier towns.

Spirituals: The brutal experience of slavery in America was the catalyst for a rich body of tunes created and passed along by African-Americans. Deceptively simple, these harmonically and rhythmically elegant songs are rooted not only in African melodies but in English country songs and other sources. Many were used as work chants, many more as a means of inspiring hope during scant idle hours. Not until the mid- and late nineteenth century were they widely noticed or published. They remain a popular challenge for talented arrangers, like Moses Hogan, who show contemporary listeners something new in these seemingly timeless works. Tonight's concert features several spirituals, including I Can Tell the World, Down by the Riverside (a favorite of Pete Seeger and other antiwar musicians in the 1960s), and Swing Low, Sweet Chariot (a "code song" used to alert slaves that the Underground Railroad was taking on new riders in their area). A later tune in this tradition, the New Orleans gospel song When the Saints Go Marchin' In, was probably adapted from a Bahamian tune. James M. Black and Katherine E. Purvis claimed authorship of it in 1896, although the fundamentals of the tune are much older.

National Music: The nineteenth century produced most of the great national compositions, from The Star-Spangled Banner in 1814 to Stars and Stripes Forever in 1896. Tonight's concert presents two other memorable works. The Battle Hymn of the Republic was conceived in November 1861, the first year of the War between the States. Julia Ward Howe was touring Union army camps with her husband, who served on President Lincoln's sanitary commission. In the evenings her group sang popular tunes, including the wildly popular John Brown's Body, adapted from William Steffe's Methodist hymn Say, Brothers, Will You Meet Us? Another member of Howe's group suggested that she write for the hymn new words that spoke to the great national struggle. Howe later recorded that she "awoke . . . in the gray of the early dawn, and to my astonishment found that the wished-for lines were arranging themselves in my brain." Her lyrics were published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1862, and the song became the unofficial anthem of the Union. America the Beautiful, the tune many call America's "second national anthem," was penned by Katherine Lee Bates in 1893 during a visit to Pike's Peak. "I felt great joy," Bates later wrote. "All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse." First published on July 4, 1895, the song was revised in 1904 and 1913 before Bates received the copyright to it.

Hymns: The American experience transformed many European musical settings of the biblical psalms into evocative compositions. Some embodied the style and value of the religious communities that used them as statements of faith. Simple Gifts, typical of the exuberant dance tunes, lively marches, and reverent hymns of the Shakers, who flourished in the mid-1800s, was later made famous by Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring. Other hymns were rustic arrangements of traditional works. My Shepherd Will Supply My Need, for example, may be traced to Isaac Watts's 1719 paraphrase of Psalm 23 and is set to a tune composed by William Batchelder Bradbury (as Monora and later as Southern Harmony) in 1835.

The Songs of Stephen Foster: More than anyone else, Stephen Collins Foster embodies the musical heritage of America's nineteenth century. Although best known for tunes that defined the southern way of life and the unhappy lot of antebellum blacks, Foster was a Northerner. Born in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania, in 1826, he received no formal training in music but broke into the minstrel-song business while eking out a living as a bookkeeper in Cincinnati. By 1850, having formed a relationship with the E. P. Christy troupe, he was able to set himself up as a full-time songwriter in Pittsburgh. In 1864 Foster, an alcoholic and a poor money manager, died in poverty in New York at thirty-seven, yet he had already published two hundred minstrel songs and "hearth and home" pieces, many of which celebrated then-disparaged "Ethiopian" tunes; among these pieces are the state songs of Florida and Kentucky. Many of Foster's works remain popular and are taught in the public schools, for example, Oh! Susanna, De Camptown Races, My Old Kentucky Home, Old Black Joe, Hard Times Come Again No More, and Beautiful Dreamer. Tonight we perform two of Foster's songs: Nelly Bly, published in 1850, became an immediate hit and sold thirty thousand copies in its first seven years; Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair, an 1854 tune, was inspired by Foster's wife Jane McDowell and is one of his most enduring compositions.

Behold, I am a Bell, August 1999
by Dr. Stephen J. Mulder

The bell is a versatile musical symbol. It can conjure images of happy occasions, such as wedding ceremonies and worship services, or remind us of life’s trials. Bells produce some of the purest musical sounds, full of resonance, color, and shimmering overtones. Although tonight’s concert features no actual bells, it explores many of the moods and moments to which the bell symbol applies: religious devotion, love and romance, death. The clear, beautiful timbre of a cappella voices and the literature from ages past and present will take the listener through a wide range of styles and emotions.

The program opens with Jacob Handl's Latin madrigal "En Ego Campana" in which the voices imitate steeple bells chiming "tin-ti-na-bu-lo clango!" Thus the piece provides a nice introduction not only to the concert’s theme but to the three sacred works that follow. Egil Hovland’s "The Glory of the Father", a modern work, sets a familiar text in a dramatic manner. It begins and ends with a chantlike, free rhythm, while the middle section ("In the beginning was the Word") is presented in a regular meter. Orlando Gibbons’ intimate motet "O Lord, Increase My Faith," a prayer of devotion asks for wisdom and patience even in difficult times. Giovanni Palestrina’s "Rorate Caeli Desuper" for five voice parts, is a masterful work in which various voicings--pairs, three- and four-part combinations--shift every few measures; the five parts join together only for a brief moment in the middle ("Ostende nobis" or "Show us Thy mercy") and the "Alleluias" at the conclusion.

John Dowland’s "Come again! Sweet love doth now invite" begins a set of English madrigals dealing with the joys and sorrows of romantic relationships. Verse 1 is filled with the anticipation of time spent with one’s beloved. In verse 2, she is gone and the lover is left alone in misery. The sadness continues in John Bennet’s "Weep, O Mine Eyes." The second half of this madrigal is some of the simplest yet most morose music in the genre. The fickle female sung of in "April is in My Mistress’ Face" is likened to different months of the calendar: while her face and eyes hold the freshness and warmth of April and July, her heart is as frigid as December. Gibbons’ "The Silver Swan," while not specifically about love, addresses the loss of something beautiful and beloved. As the swan loses its voice and dies, the sad world is left with more geese than swans. John Farmer’s "Fair Phyllis I Saw," a spritely, voyeuristic madrigal, describes the passionate rendezvous of Phyllis and Amyntis, and the lovers’ kiss lends a happy ending to the first half of the concert.

The second half opens with two pieces from the French Renaissance. The rhythm of Claude LeJeune’s "Revecy Venir du Printemps," a cheery tribute to the month of May and the joys of spring, imitates the meter of the poetic text. While all the voices join for the refrain, the verses are sung by soloists in an ensemble that begins as a duet and adds a new voice with each verse. Pierre Certon’s brief but exciting "La, la, la, je ne l’ose dire" depicts the eager gossiping of neighbors over an illicit affair.

Claudio Monteverdi’s Italian madrigal "Si, ch’io vorrei morire" presents the most passionate testament to love in the program. The lover is content to die now that he has experienced the embraces and kisses of his beloved. His repeated cry "Ahi" conveys the blissful pain of his rapture.

The modern composer Ned Rorem, in his sequence "From an Unknown Past," places anonymous texts from the 16th and 17th centuries in distinctive 20th century settings. Therefore, while the texts are similar to those of the English madrigals in the first half of the program, the music is strikingly contemporary. We perform four of the sequence’s seven movements: "The Lover in Winter," expresses the pain of separation; "The Miracle," the power of beauty; "Tears," the loss of a loved one; and "Crabbed Age and Youth," the way in which love sometimes seems to favor the young.

Christmas Perspectives, December 1999
by Dr. Stephen J. Mulder

The jubilant brass fanfare and the festive strains of "O Come All Ye Faithful" invite us to the manger to again observe the Nativity of Christ.

First we consider the town of BETHLEHEM; a small, unassuming place; the birthplace of Joseph, the father of Jesus. In the French Carol "Quelle Est Cette Odeur Agreable" and in the first movement of Susa's Carols and Lullabies the choir sings of finding the Savior of the world in such a humble setting. The Susa expands on this and calls Bethlehem a beacon of light that guides us on our way. In the second movement, the choir sings of Christ's birth as a light so bright and asks Christ to "bless us with your radiance." The third movement changes the focus to MARY AND JOSEPH as they arrive in Bethlehem. As they process by, the choir responds with sounds of joy and pleasure. The bittersweet Basque carol "Gabriel's Message" describes the Annunciation, when the angel appeared to Mary and told her of the holy child she would carry. The repeated refrain of "most highly favored lady" reflects the initial greeting of Gabriel. "The Virgin Mary Had a Baby Boy," a carol from Trinidad, introduces the perspective of the BYSTANDERS. The second verse in particular names the Wise Men, the donkeys and the sheep as all believers observe the arrival of Christ. Similarly, the second verse of the familiar carol "Away in a Manger" describes the cattle as they inadvertently awaken the baby. The "Shepherd's Pipe Carol" tells of a musical, young shepherd boy who is on his way to Bethlehem. He tells of the angels and the news that they brought of Christ the King and the promise of peace. As he spreads the word, the others ask to come along and accompany him to the manger.

The first half of the concert ends with three works focussing on the BABY JESUS. "This Little Babe" by Benjamin Britten juxtaposes the weak and frail image of Christ the child in the manger with the image of Christ the King as he battles Satan and his minions. The imagery of a shivering infant, crying, surrounded only by his parents and some shepherds is combined with war-like images such as shields, battering shots, arrows, and horses to create a stunning effect unlike any other Christmas work. "A Spotless Rose" by Herbert Howells is a beautiful, flowing carol using the metaphor of Christ as the Christmas Rose, springing from the stump of Jesse as described in Isaiah 11. "Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day" depicts the Nativity from the broad perspective of the story of redemption. The meter and sharp rhythms set a tone of anticipation-one imagines Christ, the night before his birth, eager to carry out the plan of salvation (which in this case is "the dance"). On Christmas day, the dance begins, and so does Christ's journey: a journey of a humble birth, of miracles, of teaching, of pain, of temptation, of denial and disappointment, and inevitably of triumph. The result is the salvation of mankind, which he has orchestrated for His "True Love." His part done, he calls us to the dance.

The dance continues in the second half of the program with the exciting and emotional Rutter "Gloria." The ANGELS respond as Luke 2:14 describes. We also respond in movement one, "Glory to God in the Highest!" Movement two is a plea for mercy, and becomes more and more intense as we cry out to the "King of Heaven." Movement three is a celebration, an outburst of thanksgiving to Christ, God the Father, and the Holy Spirit. The series of Amen's that conclude this work are a jubilant and fitting way to punctuate our expression of Christmas joy.

The concert concludes with an opportunity for chorus and audience to join our voices in one last peaceful Christmas carol.

A Ceremony of Carols by Benjamin Britten, and
Carols and Lullabies by Conrad Susa:
Benjamin Britten's ever-popular "Ceremony of Carols" is performed frequently during the Christmas season. Because it is too short to fill a concert program, directors have for years struggled with finding suitable works to accompany this work. Because "Ceremony of Carols" utilizes a harp, directors have often tried to find other pieces for choir accompanied by harp. Philip Brunelle, a choir director from Minnesota, challenged Conrad Susa, a composer from California, to write a set of pieces to accompany the Britten work that would make use of the harp. The result was "Carols and Lullabies," a series of Southwestern songs accompanied by harp, guitar, and marimba. While it has been called "a pinata party for the infant Jesus," many of the movements are nocturnal and create a peaceful mood. Tonight we perform one movement from Britten's masterpiece ("This Little Babe") and three movements from Susa's newer work.

Gloria by John Rutter:
John Rutter made his first visit to the United States in May of 1974. The British composer conducted his new composition, "Gloria," in Omaha, Nebraska. "The Voices of Mel Olsen" ensemble performed this work which they had commissioned from Mr. Rutter. Rutter explains that the piece is based on the Gregorian chants associated with the text, and that the three movements roughly correspond to symphonic structure. Since that performance, Rutter's Gloria has been a popular choice for community, church, and school choirs. While it is a natural selection for Christmas time, it can be effectively programmed at any festive time of year.

A Symphony of Psalms, April 2000
by Lawrence Speakman

Igor Fedorovich Stravinsky was one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century. The son of a famous bass singer at the Imperial Opera, Stravinsky showed little inclination to pursue a musical career until, while a law student, he bagn to study composition with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Stravinsky was catapulted into the musical limelight with the composition of three ballets for the Ballets Russes de Serge Diaghilev in Paris: Firebird (1910), Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913). The latter work caused a celebrated scandal at its first performance and remains one of the best-known and most influential pieces of twentieth-century music. During World War I, Stravinsky lived in Switzerland, and shortly afterward he settled in France. His creative association with Sergei Diaghilev continyed until 1929 and included notable collaborations with Pablo Picasso and Leonid Massine (Pulcinella, 1920), Jean Cocteau (Oedipus Rex, 1927), and George Balanchine (Apollon Musagete, 1928.) In 1939 he moved to the United States.

In 1926 Stravinsky experienced a religious conversion that had a notable effect on his stage and vocal music. A religious strain can be detected in such major works as the operatic oratorio Oedipus Rex, which uses a libretto in Latin, and the cantata Symphony of Psalms (1930). Symphony of Psalms was commissioned by the Boston Symphony for its fiftieth anniversary and first performed in December 1930.

Symphony of Psalms is divided into three movements, with no break or transition in between movements. Stravinsky claimed: "It is not a symphony on which I have included Psalms to be sung. On the contrary, it is the singing of the Psalms that I am symphonizing." The treatment of the voices is similar to that of other instruments in the orchestra.

Contrary to Gabriel Paichadze, his publisher, who wanted an orchestral piece without chorus, Stravinsky wanted the work to feature extensive contrapuntal development, and in order to increase the means at his disposal he decided to utilize equal choral and orchestral elements. For text, he selected from the Vulgate Psalm 38:13-14, Psalm 39:2-4, and Psalm 150. He scores specified that the words should always be sung in Latin.

Stravinsky's unpredictable individualism and originality precluded the formation of a school of composition, but his music has influenced a wide range of composers, including Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitry Shostakovich, Darius Milhaud, Aaron Copland, and many others. Stravinsky passed away on April 6, 1971. His funeral was held on the fifteenth, and he was buried in Venice on the island of San Michele.

Howard Hanson (1896-1981) was the founding dean of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and a well-known American composer. His Song of Democracy utilizes the full forces and sonorities of chorus and orchestra, a combination that always fascinated him. Written in 1957, the Song of Democracy was shaped by the circumstances of its commission and is described in the composer's own words: "When I accepted the invitation of the National Education Association and the Music Educators National Conference to compose a choral work in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the NEA and the fiftieth anniversary of the MENC, I realized that I had undertaken one of the most challenging assignments of my career. My task was greatly lightened by the appropriateness of the two Walt Whitman excerpts (one of which was written for a public school.)"

The problem now became one of attempting to set appropriate music to Walt Whitman's inspiring words, and to do it, if possible, in a setting which would be simple enough for school choruses and orchestras to perform. Knowing that young people demand the best that one has to give, I gave the setting of these words all of the dramatic impact of which I was capable, using as the germ of the work that harmonic progression of the 'Romantic' Symphony, so long associated with the National Music Camp at Interlochen, where the symphony was written.

"To what extent I have succeeded, the musical youth who sing this work must decide. It is written for them in affection and in appreciation of all that they have taught me."

Aaron Copland was born on November 14, 1900, in New York City. His musical works ranged from ballet and orchestral music to choral music and movie scores. For the better part of four decades Copland was considered the premier American composer. The titles of many of the works in his catalogue testify to Copland's identification with Americana. In addition to the ballets Billy the Kid, Rodeo, and Appalachian Spring, the Lincoln Portrait, Fanfare for the Common Man, and Old American Songs, readily come to mind.

Copland has often been recognized for the clever way that he incorporated elements of Americana. In Old American Songs, rather than write melodies in folksong style, he adapted traditional songs for concert presentation. The two five-song sets of Old American Songs were written in 1950 and 1952. Copland, who originally scored them for medium voice and piano, subsequently added orchestral accompaniment. Copland entrusted the transcription of these songs for chorus to his composer friend Irvine Fine (1914-62) and to Raymond Wilding-White (b.1922), a former student of both men.

Copland's Canticle of Freedom for mixed chorus and orchestra was begun in Caracas, Venezuala, in December 1954 and finished in Crotonville, New York, in March 1955. It was commissioned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the dedication of its Kresge Auditorium in Cambridge. The initial version of Canticle of Freedom was given its premiere at MIT on May 8, 1955, under the baton of Klaus Liepmann. During 1966-67, Copland revised the work for publication, leaving the choral ending untouched but compressing the orchestral introduction. Canticle of Freedom (with its freedom-extolling text by the Scottish poet John Barbour [1316-95]) gives the impression of being a symphonic movement with choral finale--somewhat in the manner of Copland's 1942 Lincoln Portrait for narrator and orchestra, where an essentially autonomous two-part, slow-fast, orchestral prelude precedes a climactic peroration. In Canticle of Freedom a standard orchestra with a large percussion section is used.

After 1970 Copland stopped composing, though he continued to lecture and conduct through the mid-1980s. He died on December 2, 1990, in Tarrytown, New York.

Modern African-American Masterworks, May 2000
by David R. Lindquist

Imagine the last century without a Gershwin or a Copland. How much poorer would we be without their contributions? Yet we have nearly lost their equals as dozens of brilliant African-American composers have passed into obscurity. Tonight’s program spotlights representative works and arrangements-classical, contemporary, and traditional-by seven remarkable African-American composers who span the twentieth century, from the darkest of the Jim Crow years to the present.

The most senior of our musicians is R. Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943). Born in Canada, Dett was the first African American to complete the five-year course of studies at Oberlin Conservatory. As director of the Hampton Institute (1913-31), Dett advocated combining African-American themes with a neo-Romantic style and was the first to use the spiritual as thematic material for an anthem. These ideas led to a series of outstanding compositions for piano and chorus, including Magnolia Suite and The Cinnamon Grove. Dett was also an authority on black sacred music (represented by the 1930 Ave Maria); published several books, including The Dett Collection of Negro Spirituals; and received an honorary doctorate from Harvard University.

Another master of the early twentieth century was Hall Johnson (1887-1970). Born in Georgia, Johnson received his education at the University of Pennsylvania and the New York Institute of Musical Art. Like Dett, he combined a "personal" African-American spiritual tradition with a European Romantic conservatory style to become a leading composer in a tradition of which Elijah, Rock! is representative. Johnson founded the most prominent black singing group of the 1930s and achieved renown on Broadway (for many years he was Harry Belafonte’s choral director). He was arranger and musical director for the stage and film productions of Green Pastures and had a notable appearance in Lost Horizon.

William Grant Still (1895-1978) rose from rural Mississippi roots to become "dean of Afro-American composers" in the 1940s. Still began as an arranger with W. C. Handy in 1916 and by 1924 had produced the symphonic poem Darker America. He took an even bigger step when the Rochester Philharmonic performed his Afro-American Symphony in 1931 (the first major piece by an African American to be accepted by that organization). Although sometimes dismissed as a mere composer of "Negro music," Still was by the end of the decade so well respected for his operas and symphonic works that he was commissioned to write music for the 1939 World’s Fair. Still followed this work with And They Lynched Him on a Tree (1941), based on a poem by Katherine Garrison Chapin, which encapsulates a long history of social injustice in a taut account of an unspeakable crime.

Like Still, William Levi Dawson (1899-1990) was a classically trained composer and conductor. Dawson, a native of Alabama, studied at the Chicago Musical College and the Eastman School of Music. Like Johnson, he made the spiritual the basis of his compositional work. As founder and chairman of the Department of Music at the Tuskegee Institute and director of the Tuskegee Choir (1931-55), Dawson became internationally famous for his creative and attractive arrangements of spirituals (including Ain-a That Good News!)

Jester Hairston (1901-2000), a native of Belews Creek, North Carolina, effortlessly combined two disparate passions. He is best known for the acting career that took him from Amos and Andy and the Tarzan films to the 1986 sitcom Amen. Despite receiving harsh criticism from fellow blacks for appearing in demeaning roles, Hairston fought behind the scenes for greater dignity for black actors. He was equally adamant about the need to preserve black spirituals. A graduate of the Juilliard School, Hairston was an accomplished director (he organized Hollywood’s first integrated choir) and composer who wrote and arranged more than 300 spirituals, including Joshua Fit de Battle of Jericho. In 1935 Hairston, who had assisted Hall Johnson for some years in New York, brought what he learned there to Hollywood, where he coproduced film scores for twenty years.

André Thomas (1952-) demonstrated amazing early talent and at fourteen became minister of music at Wichita’s Temple Baptist Church. Seemingly set on a career in classical piano performance, at which he would have excelled, he had a change of heart at Northwestern University and returned to choral singing. Since 1977 he has built choruses and taught all over the world. Dr. Thomas is currently based at Florida State University and the Tallahassee Community Chorus. His many compositions and arrangements, infused with lessons drawn from the vast choral repertory of the last 400 years, are animated with a quality of "joy." Feel the return of "a singing America" in arrangements of I'm A-Rollin’ and Ride the Chariot.

Moses Hogan (1957-), who was born in New Orleans, brings to his music the many flavors of the South. Like Thomas, he has demonstrated brilliance in piano performance (as the winner of the Twenty-eighth Chopin Competition in New York), as music director of the internationally renowned Moses Hogan Chorale, and as a composer. Hogan specializes in contemporary settings of traditional spirituals. His recordings with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and on the Windham Hill label have won critical acclaim. Arrangements like I Can Tell the World and Down by the Riverside share aspects of the classical and the modern without sounding quite like either.

Sentimental Journey, Music of the 1930s and 1940s, June 2000
by David R. Lindquist

Today's America was greatly shaped by the experiences of the 1930s and 1940s, yet those decades represent a time that few can easily understand, so distant it is from us. The period between the stock market crash and the Korean War was the most trying for the United States since the Civil War. A way of life culminating in the Roaring Twenties was swept away by economic catastrophe, political turmoil, and world war. From those who guided the nation through that time we have inherited much, including the immortal melodies we present tonight.

Songs for Troubled Times: The party of the 1920s was over, and a generation of songwriters--the students of "Tin Pan Alley"-rose to FDR's challenge to fight "fear itself" with music that helped Americans forget their troubles. Over millions of crackling radios could be heard the tunes of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, and many others (including Mood Indigo, With a Song in My Heart, and It Don't Mean a Thing). Even at the depths of the Depression, vaudeville houses readily sold tickets to hit shows that provided delightful escapist entertainments, among them Shall We Dance, Anything Goes, Porgy and Bess, Girl Crazy, Of Thee I Sing, and Goldwyn Follies. Even Hollywood got in on the act, producing the right balance of the mundane and the magical with films like The Wizard of Oz (using Harold Arlen's score).

Songs of Patriotism: The 1940s ushered in a spirit of national community like nothing before. The America weary of dubious military ventures of memory in Cuba and the Philippines (1898), and the trenches of France (1918) rediscovered patriotism when confronted with the menace of Fascism. We remember with a salute to our armed forces the powerful pride Americans felt in their young GIs, WACs, and WAVs and in heroes like Eisenhower, Patton, Halsey, and Nimitz. There were anthems that resonated powerfully on V-E and V-J Days as well as cute jingles like Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy that workers in shipyards and munitions plants hummed as they did their part.

The Age of Great Musicals: In overcoming the trials of the times, Americans laid the groundwork for a golden age of musicals that continue to delight us three generations later. From Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel and Oklahoma to Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate and Irving Berlin's Miss Liberty, audiences reveled in memorable melodies, simple but transcendent stories, and larger-than-life characters. The music succeeded brilliantly and passed effortlessly into film and then into immortality.

We hope you enjoy our celebration of the musical heritage of a nation that delighted in simple pleasures, bravely and confidently did work that needed to be done, and embraced life's possibilities.

Christmas Olde and New, December 2000
by David R. Lindquist

Tonight's performance is a special Yuletide journey in music from medieval times to the present. The selections you will hear are remarkable for combining the "olde" (traditional texts, styles, or motifs) with the "new" (fresh musical perspectives sought by their composers).

Our journey begins in fourteenth-century Germany. In dulci jubilo, said to have been written by Heinrich Suso (1295-1366), is representative of works that form a bridge between the simple, solemn hymns intended for the use of the clergy and songs derived from folk tunes. In addition, it is macaronic; that is, it combines two languages, borrowing words from the clerical Latin as well as from a vernacular tongue (we'll use English). In dulci jubilo's melody circulated through Europe and was eventually published in England about 1540 in John Wedderburn's Gude and Godly Ballates. The tune was absorbed into English popular culture about 1840, when John M. Neale's translation was set to it in the familiar Good Christian Men, Rejoice.

More sophisticated composition in Germany, under the strong influence of the Italian Renaissance, modernized the form known as the motet, in which two or more distinct melodies are harmoniously juxtaposed. The roots of the motet lie in thirteenth-century Catholic church music. By the time of Heinrich Schütz (1585-1672), a passionate disciple of the Italian school, the "New Art" movement had transformed the motet into a complex work comprising as many as six parts. Schütz's Magnificat (Canticle of Mary), SWV 468, goes even further, unfolding the ancient text across a lush eight-part choral framework.

Italy remained a vibrant center of music well into the eighteenth century. One of the masters of the modern styles of that time was the "Red Priest" and operatist Venetian Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741), whose Gloria in D, RV 589 (c. 1725), gave the traditional liturgy of the Nativity a fresh baroque expression. This work--possibly written for the marriage of the "Sun King," Louis XIV--is, uncharacteristically, not part of a large mass setting but instead represents a concertante mass with identifiable stage-music elements.

Vivaldi's influence on his great German contemporary, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), is evident in Bach's Komm, Jesu, komm, BWV 299, a sweetly intimate work that begins with a variant of the three-hammer-stroke formula familiar from Vivaldi's concerti grossi and violin concertos. Here Bach deftly interweaves the motet form, a classic Lutheran chorale (the coda), and a modern Venetian inflection to produce a work uniquely his own.

Although the great masters of the Renaissance attract much of our attention, the popular music culture of that period and the succeeding centuries was also intensely active. One example of the "alternative music" it brought forth is The First Nowell. Scholars are agreed that this carol predates its first English printing, by William Sandys in 1833, by a century or more. Most likely it is a medieval French melody that incorporates a text updated in and for a more urbanized England.

Hark! the Herald-Angels Sing, somewhat later in origin, unites a 1739 poem by the Methodist hymnist Charles Wesley with celebratory secular music written in 1840 by the Messianic Jewish composer Felix Mendelssohn (1809-47). This carol uses an amended version of Wesley's text and, in place of his slow, solemn accompaniment, a tune that the composer expressly prohibited from use in sacred settings. William Cummings gets the credit for the synthesis we know so well even though he created nothing new!

Many carols of the present day similarly combine old and modern elements or unite older pieces long after their dates of composition. An entirely different approach was taken by the Catholic Englishman John Francis Wade, who "reinvented" traditional style in 1751 with O Come, All Ye Faithful. The original tune recalls an irregular medieval rhythm and makes use of a Latin text (Adeste Fidelis). The version we perform tonight was arranged by the renowned English composer John Rutter.

An approach comparable to Wade's shaped certain carols of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. Adherents of the Moravian church, founded by descendants of followers of the Bohemian religious reformer and martyr Jan Hus, had emigrated to such places as Salem, North Carolina, and had begun to develop a new music evocative of their distant folk past. We offer three selections of this type: What Good News (composer unknown), Morningstar (or "Morgenstern," the Moravian "Silent Night" [1836]), and Christ the Lord is Born Today, a standard of the Moravian hymnal that is attributed to Francis Hagen (1817-1907).

Today, great composers continue to look to their communities' musical traditions for inspiration. Our journey ends where it began, in Germany, but some six hundred years later. The Bavarian Franz Biebl (b. 1906), who spent his career working primarily with the idioms of German folk songs, composed hundreds of choral arrangements. His Ave Maria (1964) combines the familiar Catholic prayer to the Virgin Mother and a medieval melodic sound with a surprisingly modern harmonic feel. A four-part men's choir sings the antiphon and is answered by a trio, with refrains separated by chanted versicles from the devotional Angelus text. In 1990 the work attracted the attention of the San Francisco-based a cappella group Chanticleer, which has made it one of its signature performance pieces.

European Sacred Classics, March 2001
Compiled by Lawrence J. Speakman

Bruckner: Ave Maria
Written in 1861, this is the most popular of three settings that Bruckner wrote using this text. His free flowing style is rooted in the Viennese tradition and shows elements of composition that will be established later in his symphonies.

Bruckner: Os justi
Bruckner wrote this Gradual setting in July of 1879 for the choir of St. Florian, the monastery near Linz where he had spent his formative years. It is written in Lydian mode and was dedicated to Ignaz Traumihler, the choir director there. The occasion for which the piece was written was the Feast of St. Augustine.

Faure: Cantique de Jean Racine
Written in 1865, this work was written by Faure during his last year as a pupil at the Ecole Niedermeyer in Paris, a newly founded school for the training of church musicians. The work was entered into the schools composition contest and took first prize. Racine’s text comes from his collection of Hymnes traduites du breviaire romain.

Lotti: Crucifixus
Lotti, believed to have been born in Venice, lived and worked most of his life there, gaining the prestigious position of maestro di cappella at S. Marco in 1736. This 8 voice setting of the Crucifixus text was written during a period of employment at the court of Dresden between 1717-19.

Mozart: Ave Verum
Written in 1791 for the feast of Corpus Christi, Ave Verum uses text from a hymn written in honor of the blessed sacrament (Communion). During that summer, Mozart’s wife Constanze was at a spa in the town of Baden near Vienna. Mozart visited her there and became friendly with the local choirmaster Anton Stoll, for whom he wrote this motet.

Palestrina: Sicut cervus
This has always been one of the most familiar of Paletrina’s motets and is justly held up as a model of Renaissance imitative polyphony. It’s text is taken from Psalm 42, verse 1, Like as the hart, desireth the water brooks

Stravinsky: Ave Maria
In 1926, Stravinsky rejoined the Russian Orthodox Church, from which he had been estranged for some 25 years. The main fruit of his reconversion was the Symphony of Psalms, but he also wrote three unaccompanied sacred choruses, of which Ave Maria (1934) was the last . Originally in Slavonic, it was adapted by the composer to the Latin text in 1949

Verdi: Ave Maria
This is the first of the Quattro pezzi sacri, or Four Scared Pieces which were completed in 1898. They were Verdi’s last compositions. While harmonically complex, Verdi’s legendary skills for voice writing makes the piece a tour de force for chorus.

Houkom: The Rune of Hospitality
This work was born, unlike most new music today, without a commission or a grant. Iowa composer Alf Houkom was sitting in his easy chair, Christmas-time 1984, reading a book on old Scandinavian runes. Suddenly this rune, of Gaelic origin, "simply grabbed me" he says. "In my experience, Christianity has the capacity to be a closed-door faith. This text struck me with its openness, with the possibility for the Christ to come to any place. The music just unfolded, purposefully simple." The premiere was in 1985 at Iowa’s Cornell College, where Houkom taught composition for several years until his retirement in the late 1980’s.

Nystedt: Kyrie
Knut Nystedt was born in 1915 in Oslo, Norway. As a composer, Nystedt has held a central position throughout a long period of rapidly shifting musical currents. With unfailing artistry he has shown a remarkable ability to adapt essential new discoveries to his own, highly personal, style, which is rich in colors and, at the same time, delicately nuanced. While most of his works, both orchestral and choral, have been premiered in Norway by the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra or by his own choir, he is one of the few Norwegian composers of today whose works are performed world-wide.

Mendelssohn: Heilig (Holy, Holy, Holy)
This short masterpiece of choral literature is one of three pieces composed by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809-1847) in the fall of 1846 for the Berlin Cathedral. The text of this majestic setting of the Sanctus combines Isaiah’s vision and call in Isaiah 6 with the triumphant entry of jesus into Jerusalem as recorded in Matthew 21:9, Mark 11:9 and John 12:13

Horvit: Even When God Is Silent
Of this work Michael Horvit writes; "I wrote Even When God Is Silent for the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, The Night of Broken Glass, in November of 1988. Allied troops found the poem written on the walls of a basement in Colgne, Germany. It had been written there by someone hiding from the Gestapo. It is one of the most poingnant poems I know: an extraordinary testimony of faith under horrible circumstances. ''I believe in the sun even when it is not shining. I believe in love even when feeling it not. I believe in God even when God is silent.''"

Pfautsch: Musicks Empire
Written by American composer Lloyd Pfautsch, this work was composed in 1968 for the dedication of the new Fine Arts Center at the State College of Arkansas. Set to a lyric poem by English Renaissance writer and scholar Andrew Marvel (1621-1678). Musicks Empire starts in the Dorian mode to give the work a medieval and plain song feel, though half way through it moves to D major while proclaiming Musick, the mosaic of the air.

Memories of Broadway, May 2001
by David R. Lindquist

Broadway. The name transcends mere geography. We see not just a street in lower Manhattan but the seemingly endless blaze of theater marquees ("The Great White Way") as well as the astonishing magic on the music hall stage. Our concert program tonight celebrates a century of music and magic created by uniquely American composers as we "...give [our] regards to Broadway..."

Tin Pan Alley
The musical theater business in New York City traces its roots to the 1880s. A growing community of composers and lyricists, once employed strictly by publishing houses and Vaudeville variety shows, turned its energy to producing the first real "musicals" for the many new theaters along Broadway Avenue. This informal group was known affectionately as "Tin Pan Alley." Among its leaders was George M. Cohan (1878-1942) whose Little Johnny Jones (1904) is the earliest musical we quote tonight (we also celebrate Cohan with a selection from Yankee Doodle Dandy, a film about him.) Tin Pan Alley was also home to other geniuses who remain well known today. Among these are the team of Richard Rodgers (1902-79) and Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) (The Garrick Gaieties,) Cole Porter (1891-1964, DuBarry Was a Lady,) Irving Berlin (1888-1989, Annie Get Your Gun,) and the team of Jerome Kern (1885-1945) and Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960) (Show Boat.)

Rodgers and Hammerstein
Broadway's most beloved and successful partnership began sometime before March 1943. Both Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein had already made their mark on Tin Pan Alley. Their collaboration in Oklahoma! (1943) started a succession of landmark productions including Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), and, ultimately (with Hammerstein's death,) The Sound of Music (1960). Rodger's great melodies and Hammerstein's deceptively simple lyrics set a standard and remain favorites decades later.

Lerner and Loewe
Another great Broadway pairing featured composer Frederick Loewe (1904-88) and lyricist-playwright Alan Jay Lerner (1918-86). Their association lasted from 1942 to 1958 and included such highly-regarded productions as Paint Your Wagon, My Fair Lady, and, ultimately, Camelot. Our performance tonight includes a special medley devoted to these theatrical superstars.

Frank Loesser
One of the leading lights of 1950s Broadway was Frank Loesser (1910-69). Before World War II, Loesser was one of the talented but unheralded lyricists of Tin Pan Alley. He hit pay dirt in 1948 with Where's Charley? and followed that success with a number of popular shows including The Most Happy Fella and How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

Musicals of the 1940s and 1950s
The influence of Rodgers and Hammerstein was profound in the post-war decades. This was the age of fabulous, funny, and uplifting productions. Among the shows we will quote are Finian's Rainbow, Peter Pan, Bye Bye Birdie, and The Fantasticks. One of the most delightful shows from this era is Meredith Willson's The Music Man (1950) that enjoyed a long run on stage and on film and receives a special medley treatment in our concert performance.

Jerry Herman
One of the great modern talents on Broadway is Jerry Herman (1933-) who first attracted serious attention in the 1960s with such hits as Hello, Dolley! and Mame. We are also performing a selection from a more recent show--La Cage Aux Folles.

Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber
One of the greatest present-day influences on Broadway is composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim (1930-). Sondheim realized his first stage successes in the late 1950s (e.g. collaborating with Jules Styne on Gypsy) and establishing his own name very quickly. Our concert quotes a lifetime of Sondheim's experiments and accomplishments; including the farcical A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, the neurotic Company, the affectionate Follies, the elegant A Little Night Music, and the odd, complex Sweeney Todd.
Matching Sondheim in stylistic experimentation and success is Andrew Lloyd Webber (1948-). Webber rapidly emerged from obscurity on the strength of 1969's Jesus Christ Superstar and wrote an astonishing series of "mega-hits." Among these, quoted tonight, are Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, and Aspects of Love.

Latter-day Musicals
Styles do change on Broadway, but the essential preference for focus on shows about ordinary people experiencing something extraordinary continues to the present day. At first, the lighter fare of the 1950s gave way to a succession of productions with a rougher edge like Man of La Mancha and Cabaret in the 1960s, Shenandoah, Godspell, and A Chorus Line in the 1970s, and Les Miserables in the 1980s. Yet, many recent shows retain the bubbly qualities of their early-century antecedents (including Grease and Annie.) We may not yet know how the popular taste will change in the years ahead, but we can be sure we'll be humming, singing, and fondly remembering the magnificent music of Broadway for a long time to come. Enjoy the concert!

Christmas Blessings, December 2001
by David R. Lindquist

Tonight’s concert is our 11th annual celebration of the music of the holiday season. As in past years, our program blends many traditions and styles and offers not only familiar carols and songs but wonderful compositions that may be new to you.

The program begins with three quite different carols from Orthodox and New World traditions. A chantlike arrangement of the Ukrainian carol God’s Son Is Born This Night is followed by a lively 17th-century devotional song from Russia, Shepherds of Bethlehem.

Ralph Vaughan Williams’s lushly orchestrated Fantasia on Christmas Carols quotes from four less familiar English carols, "The Truth Sent from Above," "Come All You Worthy Gentlemen," "On Christmas Night," and "There Is a Fountain," all woven together by a baritone soloist. A more recent composition, John Rutter’s Angels’ Carol, exemplifies the composer’s deceptive simplicity with sweet, lilting lines underscored by rising and falling harp passages.

Dale Warland’s beautiful setting of the 16th-century carol What Child Is This? (best known as "Greensleeves") incorporates harp and flute obbligato. The Brazilian Lullaby to the Christ Child follows, whose sweet folk melody is supported by guitar and flute.

For the first time we present some of the joyful music of Chanukah as well. Flory Jagoda’s song Ocho Kandelikas (Eight Candles) is sung in Ladino, the Jewish dialect of the Spanish world (although the song recalls the folk melodies of the composer’s native Yugoslavia). Lightly, with guitar accompaniment, this song evokes the singing of children. A translation is provided in the program.

Next, Jeffrey Van’s Child of Peace, written in much the same vein as the English carols, evokes the earliest Christian chants. It opens with a dreamlike soprano solo, after which the voices of the chorus enter in turn, accompanied by classical guitar. Stephen Paulus’s arrangement of the familiar Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella, from the French tradition, likewise joins a rich four-part choral line with guitar accompaniment.

The classical masters are represented tonight by two surpassing works, Franz Schubert’s Magnificat and Camille Saint-Saëns’s Christmas Oratorio. Schubert’s setting of the traditional song of Mary comprises three brief movements. The first, sung by the chorus, is a bold allegro maestoso that concludes with a simple fugue. The second, andante movement, sung by a quartet, is marked from the outset by loosely antiphonal play between the soprano and the other voices. The third movement, an allegro vivace, alternates chorus and quartet.

Saint-Saëns’s oratorio is one of the most beloved works in the Christmas repertoire. Composed in 1891, at the height of Saint-Saëns’s powers, it is firmly in the late Romantic tradition. It also bears the traditional cantata structure, alternating solos and choruses. From arias and recitatives in the first four movements it advances, methodically and powerfully, through duet, trio, and quartet before culminating in a quintet and then the choral finale. The libretto paraphrases the anticipation of the advent of Christ according to the Gospel of Luke.

The Cary Children’s Concert Choir gives an equally diverse performance, opening with the processional Bells Are Ringing, for voice and hand chimes. After Hodie, a touch of the classics, the children sing Behold a Tiny Baby, which combines a modern tune with the ancient O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, and Candle in the Night, a lovely song of Chanukah. In Christmas around the World they give a delightful tour of the greeting Merry Christmas in seven languages. Another medley, A Bit of Holiday Cheer, quotes from many different carols. The children close with a sung and signed arrangement that combines the round Dona Nobis Pacem with Silent Night, accompanied by flute.

Celebrations, February 2002
by David Lindquist and Eric Grush

Vincent Persichetti (1915-87) was one of the most admired composers of the twentieth century. His musical life began at age five, and by his teen years demonstrated impressive skills in performance on piano, organ, and other instruments as well as by accomplishment in theory and composition. At age 16 he took up work as organist and choir director for the Arch Street Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, a post he would hold for 20 years. Persichetti continued his education at Combs College of Music and Philadelphia Conservatory. He joined teh Conservatory's faculty in 1941 and six years later took up residence at the Julliard School of Music. He chaired Julliard's Composition Department after 1963. In his remaining years he was showered with commissions and honors, appeared often as guest composer and lecturer, and appeared frequently on major television broadcasts. Persichetti composed for nearly every musical medium. More than 120 of his works are published and many of these are available on commercial recordings.

Persichetti, like many notable composers of his time (including Grainger, Gould, and Schuman) found challenge in writing for the band and wood medium. He also had an unusual feeling for poetry. Modern poetry was one of his great passions and infuses a significant part of his creative output. Celebrations Op. 103 brought together wind ensemble and mixed voices for a setting of nine Walt Whitman poems from Leaves of Grass. Other composers of the time worked with Whitman, but in contrast to the brash grandiosity of most, Persichetti offers a gentle, lithe, bright and joyful treatment, His movements are syllabic, homophonic and lightly scored so that texts are clear and dominant. This unique composition premiered on November 18, 1966 at the University of Wisconsin- River Falls.

Commando March
Samuel Barber was conscripted into the Army Air Corps in 1942. During his first year of service he wrote his second symphony. This work made use of an electronic instrument which imitated radio signals. Upon hearing the work an Air Corps general ordered him to create a march and the Commando March, given its premiere in Atlantic City in 1943, was the result. Barber later suppressed the second symphony although its second movement was revised as Night Flight.

Fugue on Yankee Doodle
John Philip Sousa employed Yankee Doodle in many of his arrangements and patriotic fantasies. He even used it as a countermelody in his marrch America First. This arrangement is a compilation of three of Sousa's settings and highlights the fugue which he wrote for Offenbach in 1876.

Shenandoah
Frank Ticheli wrote "In my setting of Shenandoah I was inspired by the freedom and beauty of the folk melody and by the natural images evoked by the words, especially the image of a river. I was less concerned with the sound of a rolling river than with its life-affirming energy--its timelessness. Sometimes the accompaniment flows quietly under the melody; other times it breathes alongside it. The work's mood ranges from quiet reflection, through growing optimism, to profound exaltation." Shenandoah was commissioned by the Hill Country Middle School Symphonic Band. It is dedicated to Jonathan Cosentino (1984-97), a horn player in the Hill Country Band Program.

The Cowboys
This suite, arranged by James Curnow, is taken from the 1972 movie The Cowboy and The Girl starring John Wayne and Colleen Dewhurst. It is exemplary of John Williams' capacity to enrich a film with an almost narrative musical score. Through music, we are transported to the Old West and experience the joys and hardships of cowboy life. The music portrays the high spirit of wild horses and their taming, the jollity around the ranch, the loneliness of the open range, the beauty of the plains reflected in the song of a lark, and the hard work of the cattle drive including the fording of the wide, muddy river.

Rolling Thunder
Henry Fillmore was a well-known and flamboyant composer, arranger, bandmaster and publisher. He composed over 250 works and arranged over 750 others. To prevent saturating the market with his own name, he published under eight names: Harold Bennett, Al Hayes, Will Huff, Gus Beans, Ray Hall, Harry Hartley, Henrietta Moore, and his own. As a child, Fillmore was fascinated by the slide trombone, an instrument which his father considered too evil for any righteous person to play. His mother, however, believed that practicing trombone might help keep Henry out of mischief, and she secretly saved enough money to buy a second-hand instrument for her son. Rolling Thunder, written in 1916, was dedicated to the "trombone ace" Ed Hicker. It has been used by circus bands throughout the years to generate excitement.

Battle Hymn of the Republic
In 1862, Julia Ward Howe visited a Union Army Camp in Virginia. Here she heard the men singing a song about John Brown. Freeman Clarke, a clergyman who had read Howe's published poems encouraged her to write a new song for the war effort. It would replace John Brown's Body

According to Howe's own account, she awoke the next morning at dawn with the lines of a new song echoing in her head. She lay still until the last verse was complete, then arose and scrawled the words on an old piece of paper. When she finished, she lay down once more, feeling that something of great importance had occurred. In February 1862, The Battle Hymn of the Republic was published in the Atlantic Monthly. The poem was put to the music of John Brown's Body and became the North's best known Civil War Song.

The loss of so many lives in the Civil War touched Howe deeply and she subsequently went on to work with widows and orphans from both the North and the South. Later she turned her attention to other issues, including the Women's Suffrage Movement and a Declaration for a Mother's Day of Peace.

A Serenade to Music, May 2002
by Lawrence J. Speakman

Serenade to Music, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Text: William Shakespeare from The Merchant of Venice, Act V Scene 1 Serenade to Music was composed in 1938 and dedicated to Sir Henry J. Wood on the occasion of his golden Jubilee concert and in recognition of his fifty years of service as a professional conductor. Wood specifically wanted something sixteen specific soloists who had all in some way been connected with him, but otherwise left the choice of text and scoring entirely to the composer. Vaughan Williams had long desired the chance to set the scene with Jessica and Lorenzo from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice was finally set to music for this event. The score assigns parts using the initials of the original singers and is commonly recreated with sixteen soloists. Vaughan Williams makes clear however that the work can be effectively done with full chorus or a combination of chorus and soloists.

After the premiere on October 5, 1938, Henry Wood wrote an excited letter thanking Vaughan Williams for Serenade, "Again accept my warmest and deepest thanks for the Serenade, it did raise my jubilee Concert out of the ordinary rut and lent real distinction to Part II".

Mendelssohn--Psalm 98 (Sing to the Lord a New Song) Written in 1843, Psalm 98 is a curious work for Mendelssohn, and in many ways is a hybrid of Baroque and Romantic styles. The style of F.S. Bach's motets is clearly evident in the extended a cappella section but switches to the more familiar cantata format present in Mendelssohn's other Psalm settings. The original performance was harshly criticized for the use of the harp, then considered an instrument properly suited for non-religious texts. Critics also cited the combination of styles as a weakness of the work, though Mendelssohn was clearly experimenting with new combinations of compositional styles. Psalm 98 was never published during Mendelssohn's lifetime and to this day remains a largely obscure work.

Feliz Navidad! Holiday Music of the Hispanic Tradition, December 2002
by David R. Lindquist

For centuries the Hispanic world has enjoyed a rich celebration of the Christmas story. Our concert honors this heritage with folk melodies, classical settings of liturgical texts, and vivid tableaux by contemporary composers. The program includes music in a wide variety of Latin styles, with roots in Iberia, northern and western Africa, native America, even Bavaria! Common to many of these styles is a powerful rhythmic sense and a passionate intensity appropriate to the Christmas season.

We open with the Brazilian folk melody Canção de Ninar (Lullaby to the Christ Child). This sweet, simple song has rich, close harmonics set in an almost tropical G minor key. The guitar and flute evoke the rocking of an infant.

One of the great texts of the Catholic liturgy is the O Magnum Mysterium (O Great Mystery), of which we present two settings four hundred years apart. The first, by Tomás Luis de Victoria (1548-1611), one of the outstanding composers of the Golden Age, is a splendid example of counterpoint and a moving expression typical of the Italian Renaissance that inspired it, but with a distinctly Spanish mystical quality. The second setting, by the Venezuelan composer César Alejandro Carrillo (b. 1957), has the same devotional intensity but employs a rather different harmonic structure.

Ya Viene la Vieja (Here Comes the Old Lady) is a traditional Spanish song whose strikingly alliterative text playfully tells a simple story of the Virgin Mary and the Three Kings. It is a perfect carol for the beloved "Little Christmas" festival of Epiphany.

Navidad Nuestra (Our Nativity) is a Christmas tableau in six scenes. For his composition Ariel Ramírez (b. 1921) used Félix Luna’s poems, a setting of the Nativity in Argentinean homespun. The Virgin Mary is a Guaraní girl and the shepherds are gauchos of the Pampas, which makes this story not a "once upon a time" but a "here and now" of the people. It celebrates Christmas not as the drama of a single day but, in the Latin way, as a succession of scenes and feast days, from the Annunciation in March to the festival of the Virgin of the Candelaria in February . There are two important commonalities among the tableau’s movements: the musical theme of each reflects a distinctive regional dance intended to mirror the poem, and each relates a temporal or spiritual journey. The first scene is the Annunciation, sung in the style of a chamamé, in which the angel greets a village girl with astonishing news. In this delightfully homey setting, the angel chats in slang and reminds us how God moves in unexpected ways. The second scene, set to a Pampean huella, recounts Mary and Joseph’s difficult journey to their ancestral town. Theirs is the plea of the homeless everywhere. In the third scene, the infant Jesus leaves the womb and enters the world, bridging heaven and earth. The music is a sweet Catamarcan vidala with a soaring soprano. The tableau turns in the fourth scene to the countryside, where we come upon los pastores-the shepherds-whose search for the infant king is set to a pulsing Riojan chaya. In the fifth scene Ramírez sets the journey of the Magi not to the loping rhythm of camels but to the infectious beat of the takirari, and these kings are not bringing gold, either. The scene recalls the "Little Christmas" festival on January 6, when children in many Latin countries receive presents. The infant Jesus receives native gifts of sweets and an alpaca poncho! In the sixth and final scene, evoking the Feast of the Holy Innocents (December 28), the family flees to Egypt. Their terrified struggle against time and regime is symbolized by the relentlessly slow beat of the vidala tucumana and by the imagery, all too real for many Latin Americans today, of state soldiery.

The second tableau we present, Carols and Lullabies, by the San Diego-based composer Conrad Susa (b. 1935), came about as follows: "Philip Brunelle suggested I write him a companion to Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols . . . . After several years of me writhing in doubt, a friend . . . showed me a collection of traditional Spanish carols he had sung as a boy in Arizona. Excited, I juggled them around to form a narrative. I noted their many connections with Renaissance music along with their homey, artful simplicity. Finally, the overriding image of a southwestern piñata party for the new baby led me to add guitar and marimba to Britten’s harp and to compose connective music and totally reconceive the carols."

Susa’s narrative begins with two movements that set the stage for the Nativity. ¡Oh, mi Belén! is a sort of Biscayan "Little Town of Bethlehem" sung in a flowing 3/4 meter. The Catalonian El Desembre Congelat picks up the tempo, associating Christ’s Advent with a flowery spring following winter. Mary and Joseph’s journey is celebrated with a rousing Alegría (Joy) in a traditional Puerto Rican style, in which the baritone’s brassy narrative encloses the dance movement. Then the child arrives during a Spanish lullaby, A la Nanita Nana , carried largely by the treble voices. The shepherds’ visit in Las Posadas , by contrast, is a serenade focused on the bass voices. The party picks up again with the festive Andalucian Campana sobre Campana (Bell after Bell), faintly echoing a Renaissance motet, followed by El Belén Tocan a Fuego , a Castilian pavane punctuated by expressive treble solos, and then El Noi de la Mare, another Catalonian piece, with the rolling tempo of a pastoral carol. The penultimate movement, the Andalucian Chiquirriquitín , is tightly rhythmic and playful, alternately rollicking and serene. But the festivities must come to an end; as Susa writes, "In an often overlooked detail in the Christmas story, the new baby bawls loudly as the shepherds leave in the final bars of Chiquirriquitín. (You may hear him in your mind.) His parents now must dandle and soothe him to sleep [in El Rorro (The Baby), a Mexican lullaby]. Tired themselves, they drift off as the angels hover about them in protective adoration."

We close with a West Indian spiritual, The Virgin Mary Had a Baby Boy. The arranger, Robert DeCormier, says, "This . . . spiritual differs rhythmically and melodically from those we are accustomed to. The . . . way the English words are accented gives it an unusual rhythmic quality . . . underlined by the fact that the West Indian musical tradition comes primarily from Spain and Portugal. A single bell rings constantly and gently in the background supplying a distinctive and unexpected accompaniment."

Brahms' German Requiem, April 2003
by David R. Lindquist

“It was 1865. In Hamburg, a 76-year-old woman lay on her deathbed. Her oldest son—the pride and joy of her life—was summoned from Vienna by this message from his youngest brother: ‘If you want to see our mother once again, come immediately.’ Grief-stricken, he hurried to her side only to discover that he had arrived too late; his beloved mother was dead.

Her name was Christiane Brahms.

Johannes Brahms had first become acquainted with grief—and death—a decade earlier, in 1854, when he hastened to Düsseldorf upon learning of the attempted suicide of Robert Schumann, his revered sponsor and friend.” (Lara Hoggard, 1997)

Biographers have long concluded that one of these deaths gave Johannes Brahms (1833–97) the idea of composing a requiem mass based not on the traditional Catholic liturgy but on the German language and Lutheran forms. But which death is a mystery to this day: Brahms himself left no clue. His lifelong friends the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim believed that Brahms was moved by the memory of his mother, and we are drawn to the picture of a brilliant young composer creating his greatest masterpiece as a memorial to his beloved mother.

We know today of Brahms’s brilliance—arguably the greatest master of counterpoint after J. S. Bach, a master of polyphony, and a synthesizer of classicism and romanticism. But before the time of The German Requiem’s first performance (in part) on December 1, 1867, there may have been real doubts about Brahms. For one thing, he was burdened with extraordinary expectations. The great Robert Schumann promoted a 20-year-old Brahms, a pianist of skill and promise, as paladin against the “New German School” of Liszt and Wagner, hailing him as one “over whose cradle Heroes and Graces had stood watch.” Schumann’s prodigy, however, was happiest improvising Hungarian folk melodies in somewhat vulgar venues (probably friendlier places than the concert halls. At one performance a critic described his playing as “a series of lacerating chords”). Brahms demonstrated poor conductorial skills and was rejected twice as conductor for the Hamburg Philharmonic Society. He engaged in a senseless and ruinous verbal war with the mighty Wagner. And his personal life was a wreck, checkered with tragic on-and-off romances.

All of Brahms’s greatest compositions lay in the future: the cantata Rinaldo, the Alto Rhapsody, the monumental Schicksalslied, and the four symphonies (the first of which has been called “Beethoven’s Tenth”). After 1868 Brahms was a changed man, confident and imaginative. Perhaps the turning point had been the Requiem. Phoenix-like, Brahms took new life from the tragic losses of his mother and his best friend.

The Requiem was built in stages. The earliest sketches seem to have been inspired by Schumann’s musical “to-do” list. Perhaps, as Hoggard surmises, Brahms was moved by what he imagined to be a posthumous mystic message. There is ample evidence that he attempted pieces of a requiem for several years after Schumann’s death. The death of Christiane Brahms accelerated the composition. Within three months of her funeral Brahms sent what are now movements I and IV to Clara Schumann for comment, and he referred to what is now the second movement in the cover letter. A six-movement score was completed by August 1866, partially performed in 1867 (to scathing criticism), augmented with the “Now you are sorrowful” aria (movement V) in 1868, and entirely finished by February 1869.

The Requiem was extremely controversial. Traditionalists were offended that Brahms had ignored the text and structure of the age-old Latin Mass. Gone are the prayer for the souls of the departed and the terrors of the Last Judgment. In their place are, as Hoggard describes it, “comfort to the bereaved, and a blessing of eternal peace for the departed.” And there is not a single mention of, or even an allusion to, Jesus Christ. Brahms’s Requiem is almost a humanist statement. He created an entirely new liturgy, drawing from the German Bible passages that suited his purposes.

The musical form is an arc, with the music of brightest comfort and of tranquillity (IV, “How lovely is Thy dwelling place,” a favorite of church choirs today) in the center. Movements I and VII (the beginning and the end) each one another in bestowing blessings, on the mourners in the case of “Blest are they who are sorrowful” (I) and on the deceased in the case of “Blessed are the dead” (VII). Movements II (“For mortal flesh is as the grass”) and VI (“We have on earth no abiding place”)—again in symmetry—are the longest and most somber parts of the Requiem. In contrast, the next pair (III, “Lord, teach me to know,” and V, “Now you are sorrowful”) are meditations of hope: the baritone seeks and the soprano grants it.

“Throughout the work,” writes Troy Peters, “Brahms’ orchestral and choral skill is magnificent. In the first movement, he leaves out the violins, considerably darkening the orchestral palette (a trick he had already tried out in his beautiful A-major Serenade, Op. 16). When the violins enter in the second movement, they arrive with mutes and in close harmony, a spectral reflection of the piece’s most mournful text (“For all flesh is as grass”). Through the requiem’s final chords float the heavenly arpeggios of the harp, as the chorus quietly repeats the word ‘blessed.’”

A final consideration, and the reason we selected the Hoggard edition: In choral music, the key to comprehension does not always lie in the text. In Brahms’s Requiem, the most complete understanding lies in the carefully selected biblical texts. We believe that Dr. Hoggard’s sensitivity to the most precise translation of the original German and its placement within the music enables our audience to most fully appreciate and comprehend Brahms’s intent.

Christmas Around the World...and Back, December 2003
by David R. Lindquist

Tonight’s concert devotes attention to several feature compositions—-all of them arrangements of traditional Christmas liturgical texts—-that make innovative use of space and texture. We invite you to notice how we place groups of singers and how the composers create different layers of music that combine for wonderful effect.

Franz Biebl’s (1906–2001) Ave Maria may become one of the signature arrangements of the traditional Prayer to the Virgin Mother. While Biebl served for many years as choirmaster in a small parish near Munich, he was also exposed to American styles (especially African American spirituals) and adapted these idioms to his work. The Ave Maria, commissioned in 1964 for a firemen’s choir competition, came to the attention of the Chanticleer chorale and became a hit when they recorded it in 1979. Biebl’s text is not the usual Ave Maria; it also incorporates parts of the traditional Angelus liturgy recited daily in the Catholic Church. The result comprises three chanted versicles based on the Gospel, each followed by a “Hail Mary.” Biebl defers the Sancta Maria section until after the third versicle, to great effect: the choirs rise in sweeping waves and a longing, prayerful Amen.

Three selections on the program come to us from one of the great musical centers of Renaissance Italy, Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Venice. Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) advanced the grandeur of antiphonal effect in different directions. While it is thought that Monteverdi was in some artistic decline when he assumed duties as choir director in 1612, his Gloria for 7 voices proved that the master had a few tricks left---for it is one of his most splendid sacred compositions. First performed at a Thanksgiving Mass in 1631 following a devastating plague, it provides clues that Monteverdi wrote it for the relatively few survivors among his choir and orchestra. It can be performed with as few as eleven musicians----seven choristers, two violinists, a cellist, and continuo player—but possesses surprising brilliance and power. The vocal lines are rhythmic and tuneful, and the strong expressive contrasts from section to section are wonderfully adapted to the changing moods of the text. Listen for the alternating tempi of the chorus and the paired voices of soprano, tenor and bass soloists.

We continue our Venice tour with the Magnificat for twelve voices by Andrea Gabrieli (c. 1510–1586). In this work, a statement of Renaissance composition, the Song of Mary (at the Annunciation) is set to the interplay of three choruses. Exploiting the unusual Greek cross-style architecture of the great cathedral, Gabrieli placed voices in the various balconies and transepts to create an early quadraphonic effect. As you listen, notice how the three choirs advance the themes of the Marian text, answering and contradicting each other as the music grows in richness and depth.

We turn to the Canadian Healey Willan (1880–1968) for a recent treatment of the motet style. His Hodie, Christus Natus Est (Today Christ Is Born) of 1935 is an interesting fusion of Christian chant traditions (Willan was an enthusiast for plainsong), the influence of the high Anglican church in which Willan was schooled, and hints of the jazz that he enjoyed in Toronto. Willan is sensitive to the sonorities of the Latin text and moves the chorus through a succession of rhythm and tempo changes, some dancelike, some linear.

Giovanni Gabrieli (1557-1612), learned well from his uncle Andrea and took full advantage of St. Mark’s architecture, as exemplified by Jubilate Deo for eight voices, a glorious achievement and a preview of the Baroque. The basic design for this arrangement of the “Be Joyful in the Lord” liturgy is the interplay of two equal massed choirs, but the eight choir divisions, doubled by brass instruments, are constantly shifting, weaving an antiphonal byplay sometimes in groups of threes and fours. Listen for the colorful chord successions that march in contrast to independent linear parts sung by other voices.

The remaining selections are largely arrangements, most of them by modern English composers) of familiar carols. Among these are Carol of the Bells (a Ukrainian carol), , from the Scots-Irish Appalachian tradition, Hark the Herald Angels written by Charles Wesley in 1739 and set to the tune of Mendelssohn’s Festesang, and Angel’s Carol and Nativity Carol, two original carols by John Rutter. We also include arrangements of The Twelve Days of Christmas, The First Nowell, O Come All Ye Faithful, Jingle Bells, We Wish You a Merry Christmas, and Joy! To the World.

Heart Renderings, January 2004
by David R. Lindquist

Our concert includes music focused on the heart, featuring themes known to all---love, lust, heartbreak, lightheartedness, hope, and despair. The songs are drawn from many musical periods and styles, including the Renaissance, the Romantic era, the folk tradition, and modern set pieces. We hope you’ll find this collection interesting, uplifting, and endearing.

A Place of Hope was commissioned for the dedication of the Gonda Building at the Mayo Clinic. Composer Stephen Paulus (b.1949), sensitive to Mayo’s emphasis on the spiritual quality of medical practice, did intensive research to find poetry expressive of how medical caregivers value the arts in serving their patients. He found his texts in heartfelt letters and notes from Mayo patients. The composition, written for six-part chorus, is divided into four movements that reflect the value of each patient and the importance of accentuating the human side of medicine. Listen for the exuberant, uplifting accompaniment, the soaring unison choral lines, and the reflective, gentle passages fitted so perfectly to the emotions of the patients.

In a different vein, we consider a case of lonely hearts in Personals, also composed by Paulus. The texts are taken from actual personal ads in Greenwich Village newspapers. Paulus found the plights of four advertisers to be delightfully human-sometimes humorous, sometimes pathetic. As you listen, notice how Paulus sets these plaintive stories to very different styles of music-the odd extremes of Thirty, the sauciness of Seeking Mr. Right, e warm bathos of Good Looking Male, and the precocity of Dancing.

Thomas Morley (1558-1602) is regarded by many as the finest composer of English Renaissance madrigals. Now is the Month of Maying is an example of the “Fa-La” or ballet form of composition for several voices. Like many madrigalists, Morley wrote music that departed from sacred themes, often portraying lovers’ gambols and the like, with texts full of sexual puns and innuendo. Most English madrigals are happy and rhythmic, even dancelike. This song seems to be about dancing, but dancing is often a metaphor for lovemaking, and "barley-break" is a metaphor for "a roll in the hay."

Sweet Honey-Sucking Bees, one of the better known madrigals by John Wilbye (1574-1638) appeared in his Second Set of Madrigales in 1609. Wilbye adds considerable variation and declamatory expression to the earlier madrigal form. Sweet Honey-Sucking Bees was composed for five voices and employs a text by the Dutch writer Jan Everaerts. There is a great amount of musical movement in this piece beyond the dance-like rhythm-listen to how Wilbye carefully relates the parts of his musical compositions to each other, making particular musical repetitions of the lyrics and dynamics as he celebrates the sweet lips of his ladylove.

The text of If Music Be the Food of Love may be old-it’s by the 17th century poet Henry Heveningham, but this arrangement is contemporary. David Dickau (b. 1953) sets this text in a fresh Romantic era style-appropriately, as the song is dedicated to his wife, Anne. Dickau expertly colors phrases with a full palate of tonal colors.

The Hungarian composer György Orbán (b. 1947) has attracted notice in recent years with a musical style that unites ancient and modern harmonies. Daemon Irrepit Callidus is a playful motet, suggestive of a suspense movie soundtrack. Among its highlights are the pulsating chromatic scales that evoke the frenzied but ultimately futile mischief of the Devil as he “sneak[s] expertly.”

G.F. Handel (1685-1759) was a consummate recycler of tunes, and the worldly treble duet No, di voi non vó fidarmi, composed in 1741,reappeared a few months later as the beloved chorus For Unto Us a Child is Born of his great sacred oratorio Messiah (1741). The music is a nice example of Handel’s counterpoint.

Loch Lomond is a Scots folk song dating to the Jacobite Rebellion. In 1745 “Bonnie” Prince Charles led his forces to defeat at the hands of British troops at Culloden. As a result, thousands of families were destroyed or impoverished, and the Highland Scots were stripped of much of their culture. This song, arranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), reflects the heartbreak of clans from the Loch Lomond area.

Many composers have taken on the challenge of arranging the Set Me as a Seal text from the Song of Solomon. We are performing a setting by René Clausen (b. 1953) that is part of a larger work from 1989 called A New Creation. The Song of Solomon-the only book of the Bible that doesn’t mention God-is an exchange of messages understood to be an allegory for the love between God and his people. Clausen, whose wife had just suffered her fifth miscarriage in a row, was moved to employ the gentle and sentimental harmonies of a love song. He wrote: “I am struck by the phrase ‘for love is strong as death’, because when I wrote it my actual feeling was "for love is stronger than death"; abiding, all-encompassing love absorbs even the pain of death…I can't imagine a choir singing it without open hearts."

Oklahoman Gail Kubik (1914-84), best known for his film scores, set the nursery rhyme Oh Dear, What Can the Matter Be? to a choral scherzo. The text is a pleasant old folk poem from the English northcountry around Newcastle.

Il Est Bel et Bon is representative of the many chansons (bards’ songs) by the French composer Pierre Passereau (1490-1547). Passereau favored a lively style that was usually humorous and sometimes obscene. Il est bel et bon imitates the sound of hens clucking in a suggestive double entendre.

Brent Michael Davids (b. 1959), a composer from the Mohican Nation, unites elements of Native American tribal music with Western compositional techniques. His Native American Suite, commissioned in 1995 by the Dale Warland Singers, consists of three parts, one of them the Apache 49 Song (I Still Love You Yet) . A “49 song” is usually a mixture of English words and Apache vocables sung by younger singers-late at night-after a powwow, when the elders have retired. The vocables provide a unique means of communicating feelings. This tune is very lighthearted and was inspired by the teasing byplay of a musician friend and his oft-married wife. Listen to the lyrics and rhythms, as well as Davids’ jazzlike harmonies.

Music of the Great English Cathedrals, May 2004
by David R. Lindquist

Tonight’s program offers outstanding selections from the rich Anglican musical tradition from Elizabethan times through the twentieth century. With the aid of the Casavant Opus 3771 organ, we present these works much as they were meant to be heard, filling magnificent cathedrals with abundant and beautiful choral music.

We open with William Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus. Byrd (1543-1623) was the central musical figure of the Elizabethan age. This classic Latin motet (one of five from Gradualia I of 1605) is considered by some his finest work. Interestingly, Byrd was a closet Catholic and the motet was likely more significant to peers debating transubstantiation, but it well serves its stated purpose as part of a seminal compendium of service music for the church year.

A modern a cappella treasure is John Tavener’s haunting The Lamb, published in 1982. Tavener (1944-) sets an eighteenth-century William Blake poem to a very modern musical structure, a variation of the twelve-tone Schoenberg system in which Tavener plays with inverted and retrograde variations of his theme. The result is syllabic and homophonic, sometimes dissonant—but surprisingly serene.

Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924), one of the giants of the Anglican musical tradition is represented by two works. The first is Beati Quorum via, op. 38, written about 1892. Stanford rose to prominence as professor of composition at the Royal College of Music, where he taught such luminaries as Howells, Vaughan Williams, Ireland, and Holst. He and Parry led a Romantic revival of English music and his work still serves as the backbone of the cathedral church repertoire. Beati, one of three Romantic-style motets published by Stanford in 1905, ably echoes the contemplative nature of its Psalm 119 text.

Stanford’s work is also central to an arrangement (by John Ferguson) of the familiar hymn tune Engelberg (When in Our Music God is Glorified), composed by Stanford in 1904. The hymn, something of an Edwardian march, is augmented by a prelude and a bridge that include variations of the theme.

The long lull in English music between Purcell and Stanford saw at least one superstar, Georg Frideric Handel (1685-1759). The majestic Zadok the Priest was one of four coronation anthems composed for George II in 1727 and is the only one to have been sung at the nine succeeding crownings. The text from I Kings 1 recalls Solomon’s ascension to the throne (“Let Zadok the priest...anoint him king over Israel: and blow ye the trumpet and say `God Save King Solomon'”) Handel’s setting is dramatic and the message is delivered with enthusiasm.

Edgar Leslie Bainton (1880-1956) is today recognized for only three sacred works. And I Saw a New Heaven of 1928 is a treat, possessing a sensitive harmonic flow, a sublime tenor melody, and an ethereal quality. It also has a few twists including unexpected major chords at the end of minor-scale sections. Bainton gives us a warm and loving sense of being carried to the new heaven once the first earth and heaven have passed away, according to Revelation 21.

Could a survey of contemporary sacred music be complete without the prolific John Rutter (1945-)? Rutter scored his 1988 arrangement of the Te Deum liturgical text for a thanksgiving service at Canterbury Cathedral. The setting is vintage Rutter—majestic bookends, frequent meter changes, and a whiff of saccharine sentimentality—but in his own assessment it is “accessible” and belongs to the Anglican tradition of “functional” (non-symphonic) Te Deums.

Herbert Norman Howells (1892-1983), a student and “son in music” of Stanford’s, was devoted to the trend toward originality in church music during his time. His unique harmonization is clearly in evidence with the warm and prayerful Like as the hart desireth the waterbrooks (Psalm 42), the third in a set of four anthems written in four days while Howells was snowbound in Gloucestershire in 1941.

The leading British composer of the later twentieth-century, Benjamin Britten, (1913-76) was particularly notable for his choral music. Festival Te Deum, op. 32 (composed in 1945 to celebrate a church centenary), opens with a chantlike unison melody and rhythmic accompaniment, swells energetically in the middle section, and closes with a meditative passage featuring a sweet soprano solo.

Henry Balfour Gardiner (1877-1950) was briefly music master at Winchester College but, as a gentleman of means, settled into a life as a composer and promoter of junior composers. Evening Hymn (1926), a jewel of an anthem, features a lush harmony, a sweeping twenty-one measure “Amen,” and fine organ accompaniment.

One of the most neglected of the great Anglican composers was Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Parry (1848-1918). Parry, with Stanford, exerted a strong influence as composer, director of the Royal College of Music, and teacher of Vaughan Williams, Holst, Howells and others. We perform his triumphant seven-part anthem and organ tour-de-force I Was Glad When They Said Unto Me, which was sung at the coronation in 1953 and the jubilee thanksgiving service in 2002.

William Mathias (1934-92) achieved notice as conductor and pianist at the University College of North Wales and as a house composer at Oxford University Press with an extraordinarily wide range. Let the People Praise thee, O God, op. 87, using text from Psalm 67, is a rhythmically playful arrangement composed especially for the wedding of the Prince and Princess of Wales in 1981.

We close our program with a work by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), perhaps the greatest composer of modern Anglican music. Vaughan Williams studied with Parry and Stanford but was fascinated by folk music, which facilitated the pastoral quality of many of his compositions. O Clap Your Hands, one of his most popular anthems, was published in 1920. The text from Psalm 47 is nominally set in a motet, but the effect is a rousing country folk dance that places dramatic emphasis on the words “sing praises.”

Light, Love and Hope: Living 21st Century Composers, November 20, 2004
by Lawrence J. Speakman

Robert Young was born in Santa Cruz, California, April 20, 1923, Robert H. Young attended public schools there until his enlistment in the United States Marine Corps where he served from 1941 to 1945. His collegiate career includes a Bachelor of Music degree from Otterbein College, Master of Music from Northwestern University, and a Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of Southern California. After serving as Minister of Music in several California churches, Dr. Young joined the faculty of Baylor University in 1962 where he remained until retirement in 1993. Dr. Young continues an active performance profile as Choirmaster at St. Paul's Episcopal Church (Waco) and as Conductor Emeritus of the Baylor Chamber Singers.

Daniel E. Gawthrop was born October 21, 1949 in Fort Wayne, Indiana. His studies included organ performance and composition at Michigan State University and Brigham Young University. Gawthrop has been the recipient of over one hundred commissions to write original music. In addition to his work as a composer, Gawthrop has been active as a broadcaster, clinician and adjudicator, church musician, conductor, teacher and writer (including a period as music critic for The Washington Post).

An accomplished composer, conductor and lecturer, Eric Whitacre is one of the bright stars in contemporary concert music. Regularly commissioned and published, he was honored in 2001 with his first Grammy nomination (contemporary classical crossover). Commercially he has worked with such luminaries as Barbra Streisand and Marvin Hamlisch. Born in 1970, Whitacre has already achieved substantial critical and popular acclaim. The American Record Guide named his first recording, The Music of Eric Whitacre, one of the top ten classical albums in 1997, and The Los Angeles Times praised his music as "electric, chilling harmonies; works of unearthly beauty and imagination." His Water Night has become one of the most popular choral works of the last decade, and is one of the top selling choral publications in the last five years. Ghost Train, his first instrumental work written at the age of 23, is a genuine phenomenon; it has received thousands of performances in over 50 countries and has been featured on 40 different recordings. His music has been the subject of several recent scholarly works and doctoral dissertations as well. Eric received his M.M. in composition from the Juilliard School of Music, where he studied composition with Pulitzer Prize winner John Corigliano.

Stephen Paulus is one of America's most prolific and accomplished composers. He is among the few who support themselves on commissions from their compositions. Having over 200 works to his credit, Paulus (b. 1949) is fluent in all genres, including music for chamber ensembles, solo voice, concert band, piano, organ, chorus, orchestra and opera. A Place of Hope was commissioned for the dedication of of the Gonda Building at the Mayo Clinic. Sensitive to Mayo’s emphasis on the spiritual quality of medical practice, Paulus did intensive research to find poetry expressive of how medical caregivers value the arts in serving their patients. He found his texts in heartfelt letters and notes from Mayo patients. The composition, written for six-part chorus, is divided into four movements that reflect the value of each patient and the importance of accentuating the human side of medicine. Listen for the exuberant, uplifting accompaniment, the soaring unison choral lines, and the reflective, gentle passages fitted so perfectly to the emotions of the patients.

René Clausen - Many composers have taken on the challenge of arranging the Set Me as a Seal text from the Song of Solomon. We are performing a setting by René Clausen (b. 1953) that is part of a larger work from 1989 called A New Creation. The Song of Solomon is an exchange of messages understood to be an allegory for the love between God and his people. Clausen, whose wife had just suffered her fifth miscarriage in a row, was moved to employ the gentle and sentimental harmonies of a love song. He wrote: "I am struck by the phrase 'for love is strong as death', because when I wrote it my actual feeling was "for love is stronger than death"; abiding, all-encompassing love absorbs even the pain of death...I can't imagine a choir singing it without open hearts."

James Quentin Mulholland is a faculty member at Butler University and is a much published and performed composer and arranger. His compositions have appeared as required repertoire on over forty states’ high school choral lists and are performed regularly by universities and choral associations throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. A native of Laurel, MS, Mr. Mulholland completed his B.M. and M.M. Degrees at Louisiana State University. His D.M.A. in Performance and Literature is from Indiana University.

Morten Lauridsen has emerged as one of America's finest and most-beloved composers. His distinguished music has reached a permanent place in the standard vocal repertoire, and is performed regularly by choruses and vocal artists throughout the world. His catalog at present includes six major vocal cycles—Les Chansons des Roses (Rilke), Mid-Winter Songs (Graves), Cuatro Canciones (Lorca), A Winter Come (Moss), Madrigali: Six "Fi resongs" on Italian Renaissance Poems, and Lux Aeterna—as well as various individual songs and choral works, including the moving O Magnum Mysterium and Dirait-on from Les Chansons des Roses; these two works have become the highest- selling choral octavos ever distributed by the Theodore Presser Co., our exclusive U.S. distributor. In addition to his residency with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Mr. Lauridsen (b. 1943) is Chair of the Composition Department Creation. The Song of Solomon is an exchange of at the University of Southern California School of Music in Los Angeles, a faculty he joined in 1967 following his studies in advanced composition with Ingolf Dahl and Halsey Stevens. A native of the Pacific Northwest, Mr. Lauridsen divides his time between Los Angeles and his summer home on a remote island off the northern coast of Washington State.

Lux Aeterna was composed in 1997 and was first performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Los Angeles Music Center The work is in five movements, performed without pause and uses sacred Latin texts that each contain references to light. The piece opens and closes with the beginning and ending of the Requiem Mass, with the three central movements drawn, respectively from the Te Deum, O Nata Lux, and Veni, Sancte Spiritus.

Lauridsen says his work Lux Aeterna mixes religious and non-sacred philosophy the same way he does personally. "The work was designed for concert halls," he says, "but it's showing up more and more in religious services. And I'm very democratic about how it is being used. It is a very contemplative piece and one of the things I like the most about it is hearing a large group sing very softly. There is this mass of sound that is put under control". Besides teaching, Lauridsen has become a leading American composer of vocal music. He has written six vocal cycles, four for choir and two for solo voice, as well as other vocal works and individual songs. Lauridsen wrote it when his mother was ill. She died before getting a chance to hear it. "So it is a very personal work," he says.

Holiday Pops in Cary, December 4, 2004
by David R. Lindquist

Tonight’s concert features some delightful Christmas presents—-traditional carols wrapped in appealing arrangements by accomplished composers of the past half-century. We urge you to "shake" these musical gifts to see what’s inside — and to savor the various enhancements that make these new and fresh.

Fantasia in G – Timothy Mahr "Fantasia in G is a joyful celebration for winds and percussion. The piece was inspired by the opening line of Johann von Schiller’s poem Ode to Joy: ‘Freude, Schoner Gotterfunken’ (Joy, Bright Spark of Divinity). This same text was used by Ludwig van Beethoven in his famed Symphony No. 9.” — from the composer’s notes

A Symphony of Carols and Christmas Flourish Randol Alan Bass (1953-) is a composer with a long resume of commissions by prestigious orchestras and choruses. We perform two of his holiday medleys. Christmas Flourish was commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in 1993 and builds on four rather different carols unified by a fanfare motif. The structure is a symphony in miniature: William Billings’ joyful early American Shiloh is the opening allegro "movement", Handel’s triumphant Joy to the World takes a scherzo role, Gruber’s soft Silent Night is an andante, and the durable French carol Angels We Have Heard on High forms the concluding allegro. Bass also contributes A Symphony of Carols, which was commissioned by his hometown Dallas Symphony. The carols here are more pastoral, but the device of symphony-in-miniature is again used where Chanticleer (a French carol) is the allegro "movement", Pat-a-Pan / Fum-Fum- Fum (Catalonian and Spanish carols, respectively) is the scherzo, Stille Nacht/Still Still Still (German carols) form the andante, and the Latin mainstay Adeste Fideles is the concluding allegro.

White Christmas - White Christmas was a dreaded assignment for the musical legend Irving Berlin (1888-1989). He was asked to write a song for each of the major holidays of the year as the gimmick for the 1942 film Holiday Inn starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. The composer had for years avoided Christmas—-a painful reminder that his infant son died on December 25, 1928. The wistful lyrics and recall of something lost poignantly represented Berlin’s tremendous sense of loss and grief. To Berlin’s surprise, the song was a staggering success. Crosby’s 1942 recording lasted a stunning 11 weeks at #1 and he was overwhelmed by WWII soldiers’ requests to sing it again and again. It even inspired a hit film—appropriately titled White Christmas-—in 1954 (again starring Crosby). Can you name any of Berlin’s other "holiday" tunes from Holiday Inn? (answers: Let’s Start the New Year Right, I’ll Capture Your Heart Singing, Be Careful, It’s My Heart, Abraham, Washington’s Birthday Minuet, I Can’t Tell a Lie, In Your Easter Bonnet, Easter Parade, Let’s Say it With Firecrackers, Song of Freedom, Lazy, You’re Easy to Dance With, Plenty to be Thankful For, Happy Holiday, White Christmas, Finale Ultimo).

Russian Christmas Music – Alfred Reed "The Russian Christmas Music is based throughout on actual liturgical themes or carols and original material conceived in the spirit of that musical language. The Eastern Orthodox Church (of which Russian church forms a part) admits no instrumental music in its services, believing that one should worship only with the human voice. Therefore it is obvious that literally every note, every rhythm, every melodic, harmonic, or rhythm inflection in this score should produce an impression of singing, regardless of texture or tempo. After all, is not the human voice, basically, a wind instrument also?" – from The Instrumentalist, October 1979

Twas The Night Before Christmas - This work, by Randol Alan Bass, was commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra in 1988. It takes the form of a very cinematic soundtrack for the well known Clement Clarke Moore poem.

A Musicological Journey Through the Twelve Days of Christmas - For many, The Twelve Days of Christmas is notorious for its quickly tiresome repetitions. Arranger Craig Courtney tackled this problem in a 1990 setting by the device (reminiscent of Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals) of musical quotations. Courtney has cleverly clothed each "day" in the guise of a different composition from the history of Western music. The earliest quotations present a plainsong partridge and turtledoves set to a 15th Century French motet. As the gifts pile up, the action gets increasingly and delightfully madcap. Can you name the other composers Courtney quotes? (answers: 3rd day: Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, 4th day: Antonio Vivaldi, 5th day: C.P.E. Bach, 6th day: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 7th day: Camille Saint-Saëns, 8th day: Richard Wagner, 9th day: Johann Strauss, 10th day: Amilcare Ponchielli, 11th day: Pyotr Illych Tchaikovsky, 12th day: John Philip Sousa) Christmas Festival - Leroy Anderson (1908-75) was an accomplished conductor and for some years house arranger for The Boston Pops under Arthur Fiedler. He is celebrated for delightful light concert music including The Syncopated Clock, Bugler’s Holiday, Fiddle Faddle, and Blue Tango. A Christmas Festival, written for the Pops in 1950 showcases eight traditional carols in his distinctive semiclassical style. This free-wheeling medley sets a number of back-and-forth moods: a grand Joy to the World, the boisterous Deck the Halls, a restrained God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and Good King Wenceslas, a lively Hark the Herald Angels Sing, a subdued Silent Night, the over-the-top Jingle Bells, and grandly dignified O Come All Ye Faithful. On the way we get a taste of Handel, Tchaikovsky, and many others.

Sleigh Ride - Sleigh Ride is Leroy Anderson’s best-known work. It began as an instrumental tune originally intended not for Christmas but as a seasonal mood piece. In fact, Anderson was inspired to write it during a New England heat wave in July 1947. It is sparkling and crisp—suggesting Mozart’s Carriage Travel and Delius’ Sleigh Ride. The tune soon attracted the attention of the gifted lyricist Mitchell Parrish (celebrated for wordsmithing the 1930s classics Stardust, Deep Purple, and Moonlight Serenade, among others). Mitchell’s lyrics made Sleigh Ride an even bigger hit, and the song has been recorded by many of the most popular recording artists since.

Bach and Handel, April 16, 2005
Lawrence J. Speakman

Magnificat in D Major, BWV 243:
No other liturgical text has provided a richer source of inspiration for composers than the Magnificat. This text appears in the earliest Christian liturgies, and since the earliest poly phonic settings in the 15th century, it has been set by literally hundreds of composers. The Magnificat, one of the Biblical canticles (Luke 1: 46-55), is in the voice of Mary: a heartfelt response both to Elizabeth's conception of John (the Baptist) and to the Annunciation that she herself had conceived a child by the Holy Spirit. The text is chanted during the Vespers service in the Catholic liturgy, but it was also taken up enthusiastically by Martin Luther, who explained that: "The little word Magnificat means 'to make great,' 'to elevate,' and 'to appreciate a person' ... by using this word, the Virgin Mary also indicates what her hymn is to tell us: about God's great deeds and words to strengthen our faith, to comfort all the low and to frighten all the high people on earth. We must take the hymn to serve this threefold use or purpose." In the Baroque era, composers from Monteverdi and Schütz onwards broke the canticle into small sections, stressing the emotional content of individual passages or words, or exploiting the illustrative qualities of the text. (For example, the words omnes generationes are nearly always marked by a sudden appearance of the full chorus.)

This Baroque tradition of Magnificat writing culminated in Bach's great D major Magnificat. Bach's Magnificat setting is a product of his extraordinarily fertile early years as Kantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. The Thomaskirche used a German version of the M a g n i f i c a t twice each week, but the Latin Magnificat was also sung during the most important feasts of the church year: Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. Bach's setting was composed during his first year in Leipzig, for the Christmas service of 1723. This original version was set in E-flat Major, and included four interpolated texts for the Christmas season. At some point between 1728 and 1730 or somewhat earlier, Bach revised the work, recasting it in D major, making some compositional changes, and abandoning the Christmas interpolations. He also reworked the orchestration, substituting flutes for recorders and changing the scoring of some movements. In this work, Bach at once adapts and surpasses the conventions of the Baroque Magnificat. All of the musical cliches are here: the descending melody on deposuit and the corresponding rise on exultavit during the tenor's aria, the fragmented counterpoint on dispersit, the sudden choral entry on omnes generationes, and many others. However, Bach's use of these conventional devices achieves a natural, simple grace, which is never forced. The members of Bach's Leipzig congregation were intimately familiar with the Magnificat text, in both its German and Latin versions, and these musical commonplaces were a traditional part of their musical life. In addition to the traditional modes of expression, Bach fashioned other subtleties that his congregation would certainly have caught. One notable example is the setting of Suscepit Israel, where the oboes play the intonation for the ninth psalm tone—the melodic formula used to chant the German Magnificat each Saturday and Sunday—as a cantus firmus behind a trio of women's voices.

Dettingen Te Deum:
Georg Frederic Handel began writing the Dettingen Te Deum on 17 July 1745, to celebrate the English victory over the French at the Battle of Dettingen, a few weeks earlier. The Te Deum was considered to be the only musical form appropriate to celebrating a ruler's recovery or return from battle. Also called the Ambrosian Hymn, this mass is a work for chorus and orchestra, with several arias for bass, or for bass with chorus. Handel later reworked some elements of this Te Deum in his oratorio Joseph and his Brethren This majestic, celebratory work, shows its colors from the very first notes: timpani, horns, winds and strings sound a martial call before the opening chorus cries out in glory. The work continues with a series of movements featuring beautiful choral sections, and Handel's typical mastery of melodic accompaniment. Highly reminiscent of the Messiah, this is a work where the choir has center stage.

World Music, November 12, 2005
Lawrence J. Speakman

Planning a program with the title "World Music" is in many ways an impossible task. The world is a large place and including all of the interesting and worthy music of cultures from around the world would produce a concert that would last weeks. What we have attempted to do here is present a concert of music that often is overlooked in Western cultures in combination with familiar favorites.

Balia Di Sehú (Let’s Dance the Sehú) is a harvest dance that is sung in April or May when it is time to harvest the corn. The dancers, who often decorate themselves with parts of the harvested corn, form two lines facing each other with the corn between them. They stand with their hands on the hips of the people next to them and shuffle toward each other to the rhythm of the music. When they reach the middle, they shuffle back to their original places. This lasts for long periods of time, often all day and night.

Salmo 150 is written by Brazilian composer Ernani Aguiar and is sung in Latin. It is typical of a style of young Brazilian composers' music that is very rhythmic and uses rapid articulations.

Voices of Autumn was written by composer Jackson Hill when he was on a Fulbright scholarship in Japan. It is a setting of a ninth-century poem and uses compositional devices derived from Buddhist chant and ancient Japanese court music.

Silent, O Moyle is a setting of text by Thomas Moore and is set in the Celtic tradition by Irish composer David Mooney. Mooney’s arrangements are sung throughout Ireland and the United Kingdom.

El Guayaboso is a choral guaguancó, one of three variants to the rumba, a distinctly Cuban style of composition. It is almost always very jovial in spirit and recounts a humorous or festive happening. Only percussion accompanies it.

Praise the Lord is a processional song used by women in Cameroon. The song was collected by Elaine Hanson, a missionary of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America who spent 11 years in Cameroon, and who was a member of the Femmes Pour Christ (Women for Christ). This particular group used French as their common language, hence the French verse. Traditionally, it is used as a processional on communion Sunday.

It Takes a Village is a setting of the West African saying that “It Takes a Whole Village to Raise a Child.” It essentially uses the voices as a companion percussion instrument to the congas, with each vocal part using its own rhythmic pattern using vocal syllables.

Kyrie by Glenn McClure is a street samba that uses the distinctive Caribbean sound of steel drums and melodic material typical of the unique style of the region.

Native American Suite is written by Native American composer Brent Michael Davids. The three movements are from the Lenape, Apache, and Zuni tribes and calls for crystal soprano flute, shakers, bird roars, and a powwow drum. Commissioned by the Dale Warland Singers, this suite presents an interesting blend of Native American melodies, lyrics, and rhythms.

Chanflín is wriiten by composer Juan-Tony Guzman, who is a faculty member at Luther College in Decora, IA. The meringúe is a popular dance rhythm native to the Dominican Republic and is the most representative dance of the festive Dominican spirit.

Gladsome Light is an example of the fabulous work of Russian choral director Vladimir Morosan, who brought us many works by early 20th century Russian composers that never saw the published light of day after the Bolshevik Revolution. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, Morosan has published hundreds of Russian manuscripts through his company called Musica Russica. Composer Alexander Vasil’yevich Nikolsky wrote over 400 individual choral titles. Gladsome Light is one of the most ancient Christian hymns and still is in use today.

Mí Yítnení Of (Who Will Give Me Wings) is a traditional Jewish melody that uses piano with flute obligatto. It is sung in Hebrew.

Flower Drum Song is sung in Chinese and is a Chinese folk song arranged by composer Jing Ling Tam. It is written for chorus with bamboo flute, cymbal, drum, gong, and temple blocks.

Moses Hogan was one of the leading composers and arrangers of spirituals of the last 20 years before he died of a brain tumor at the age of 44. Hogan was a popular clinician at choral festivals here in North Carolina and across the nation.

Holiday Pops in Cary, December 3, 2005
David R. Lindquist

Randol Alan Bass’ Gloria premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1990 by the New York Pops Orchestra and has been recorded by the Boston Pops Orchestra. The text is the traditional liturgy of the visitation to the shepherds that is popular at Christmas concerts, translated loosely as “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and good will to all”. This setting is joyous and makes extensive use of multi-metric rhythms typical of eastern European dances. These patterns are tempered by moments of almost bittersweet lyricism as well as bombastic brass fanfares.

“The Russian Church Music is based throughout on actual liturgical themes or carols and original material conceived in the spirit of that musical language. The Eastern Orthodox Church (of which the Russian church forms a part) admits no instrumental music in its services, believing that one should worship only with the human voice. Therefore it is obvious that literally every note, every rhythm, every melodic, harmonic, or rhythm inflection in this score should produce an impression of singing, regardless of texture or tempo. After all, is not the human voice, basically, a wind instrument also?" from The Instrumentalist, October 1979'

Twas the Night Before Christmas, by Randol Alan Bass, was commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra in 1988. It takes the form of a very cinematic soundtrack for the well- known Clement Clarke Moore poem.

White Christmas was a dreaded assignment for the musical legend Irving Berlin. He was asked to write a song for each of the major holidays of the year as the gimmick for the 1942 film Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. The composer had for years avoided Christmas - a painful reminder that his infant son died on December 25, 1928. The wistful lyrics and recalling of something lost poignantly represented Berlin's tremendous sense of loss and grief. To Berlin's surprise, the song was a staggering success. Crosby's 1942 recording lasted a stunning 11 weeks at #1 and he was overwhelmed by WWII soldiers' requests to sing it again and again. It even inspired a hit film - appropriately titled White Christmas - in 1954 (again starring Crosby).

Bass also contributes Christmas Flourish which was commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in 1993 and builds on four rather different carols unified by a fanfare motif. The structure is a symphony in miniature: William Billings' joyful early American Shiloh is the opening allegro “movement,” Handel's triumphant Joy to the World takes a scherzo role; Gruber's soft Silent Night is an andante, and the durable French carol Angels We Have Heard on High forms the concluding allegro.

J. S. Bach’s Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C Major (BWV 564) is one of many popular Bach toccata-and-fugue combinations. It was written during Bach’s Weimar period between 1698 and 1717 in the basic form of the popular Italian concerto grosso of the time. It has three movements with a fast-slow-fast pattern of tempos.

The toccata is bold, athletic, and prankish: its original organ setting features one of Bach’s most difficult pedal solos. It is followed by a lush and dignified adagio centered on an unusually chromatic grave section and a majestic close. The work concludes with a surprisingly cheerful 6/8 fugue with an unexpected ending to the coda. This Bach composition gets occasional airings on Hollywood soundtracks, most recently in the 1998 comedy Sour Grapes.

Sleigh Ride is Leroy Anderson's best-known work. It began as an instrumental tune originally intended not for Christmas but as a seasonal mood piece. In fact, Anderson was inspired to write it during a New England heatwave in July 1947. It is sparkling and crisp suggesting Mozart's Carriage Travel and Delius' Sleigh Ride. The tune soon attracted the attention of the gifted lyricist Mitchell Parrish (celebrated for wordsmithing the 1930s classics Stardust, Deep Purple, and Moonlight Serenade, among others). Mitchell's lyrics made Sleigh Ride an even bigger hit, and the song has been recorded by many of the most popular recording artists since.

A Symphony of Carols was commissioned by Randol Alan Bass' hometown Dallas Symphony. The carols here are more pastoral, but the device of symphony-in-miniature is again used where Chanticleer (a French carol) is the allegro “movement”, Pat-a-Pan / Fum-Fum-Fum (Catalonian and Spanish carols, respectively) is the scherzo, Stille Nacht/Still Still Still (German carols) form the andante, and the Latin mainstay Adeste Fideles is the concluding allegro.

Anthems, Carols & Holiday Songs, December 17, 2005
Lawrence J. Speakman

Jesus Christ the Apple Tree is based on text from Divine Hymns or Spiritual Songs compiled by Joshua Smith in 1784. It is a favorite among mens and boys choirs around the world and of choirs in England.

Hodie Christus Natus Est was published in 1575. It has rhythmically clear-cut antiphonal exchanges between high and low choirs and has writing that is more chordal and less contrapuntal than is usual with Palestrina. It hints at the later Venetian style of Giovanni Gabrieli.

A Child Is Born by Samuel Scheidt is typical of the early Baroque writings of Germany that also included Heinrich Schütz. Much of this music was written to have flexible forces to enable congregations to utilize what was available to them after the destruction caused by the Thirty Years' War.

A Virgin Unspotted is representative of the music of William Billings, one of the earliest American composers. It has a distinctly European style, but also a quaint simplicity typical of a new and emerging nation.

Frohlocket ihr Völker auf Erden was written by Mendelssohn while employed by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia in 1843. It uses eight-voice writing for rich harmonic sonority rather than antiphonal or contrapuntal effects, typical of earlier eras.

A Spotless Rose is based on 14th century text and was dedicated by Herbert Howells to his mother. While it is written metrically, it varies between three-four, five-four, four-four and five- eight meters to give a chant like effect.

Il est né le divin enfant and Quelle est cette odeur agréable? are traditional songs of the nativity that date back to medieval times and still come to life at Christmas time in Quebec and France. They are folk songs that often are quoted by composers in instrumental and keyboard compositions.

S’Vivon is a traditional song sung by children during Chanukah. It is arranged by Joseph Flummerfelt, who just retired after 33 years as artistic director and principal conductor of Westminster Choir College of Rider University. He continues to serve as chorus master of The New York Philharmonic and the Spoleto Festival USA.

O Little Town of Bethlehem (arr. by Nancy Grundahl) is a jazzy version of the traditional hymn.

Deck the Hall and Away in a Manger are two of the many arrangements by English composer and arranger David Wilcocks, who served as music director of The Kings College in Cambridge.

The Virgin Mary Had a Baby Boy is a Spanish carol arranged by American composer/arranger Robert DeCormier. Its celebratory quality is typical of the cultural view of the nativity.

O Little Town of Hackensack and Good King Kong Looked Out were written by Peter Schickele under the comic pseudonym of P.D.Q. Bach, the fictitious 21st child of J.S. Bach who was hidden as a family embarrassment. Schickele also has a serious side as a composer and has many compositions written under his real name. He is a graduate of the Julliard School and the Manhatten School of Music.

Jingle Bells (arr. Gordon Langford) was originally written for the King's Singers, a six-part all male vocal ensemble that has entertained many over the last 25 years.

Pope Marcellus and Lord Nelson Masses, April 8, 2006
Lawrence J. Speakman

Missa Papae Marcelli (Pope Marcellus Mass)

Much has been written over the years about this composition “saving” multipart vocal music in the Catholic Church by showing Pope Marcellus II that polyphonic music could be written in a way that would enable the listener to comprehend the words. While the evidence to this seems to discredit this claim, we do know that Palestrina did play a major role in writing music that had many parts, but clearly projected a meaningful text in a liturgical setting. The Counter Reformation of the church was headed in the direction of simplicity in music in reaction to the extravagant and bewildering excesses of earlier composers. There was also a backlash against using “popular” tunes to sacred text, a practice that was common at the time. Palestrina's greatest contribution to liturgical music was to develop a polyphonic (multiple-voice part) style that repeated text often and dedicated a new round of imitation to each new phrase of text.

What we do know about the circumstances surrounding the Pope Marcellus Mass is that Palestrina wrote the work late in his life in the early 1560s and it was published in 1567. It was written after the Counter Reformation and does not reflect any pre existing models of composition. It is a six-part work and is more harmonically based and word oriented than others at the time. Pope Marcellus II only lived to serve three weeks as Pope (in 1555) and the evidence suggests that Palestrina took much longer than that to write the work, making the link a somewhat dubious one.

One of the final ironies of Palestrina’s life was that he was fired by the newly elected Pope Paul IV. Paul discharged any musician who was not celibate or who wrote popular music outside the Church.

Missa in Angustiis (Lord Nelson Mass)The Lord Nelson Mass as it is called, is a polar opposite of The Pope Marcellus Mass in that it has no liturgical value or intention. It was written purely for a concert setting, employing a level of virtuosity that was only appreciated in that circumstance. It was also too long to have any liturgical value.

The reasons for Haydn writing a concert mass were many. First, he had recently returned from five glorious years of composing in England, where he was heavily influenced by the large-scale performances of Handel’s works. Second, Prince Esterhazy II, who was the son of the man who employed Haydn for over 30 years prior to his years in London, asked Haydn to return and write and perform a grand mass at the palace each year to commemorate the birthday of the Prince’s wife. And third, the reform decrees of Emperor Joseph II banned instrumental music from church services. Haydn wrote grand masses for six years for the Prince’s wife, before ill health required him to pass this task on to Johann Hummel. Beethoven wrote his Mass in C for this purpose, though there is some evidence that neither the Prince nor Beethoven thought very highly of each other.

The work, composed in 1798, is known as The Lord Nelson Mass because according to legend, while Haydn was at work on the Benedictus, news arrived of Nelson’s decisive victory over the French at the battle of Nile, whereupon he wrote the powerful trumpet calls in that movement. While this claim is dubious, a better justification might be that Nelson himself attended a performance two years later in Eisenstadt in 1800.

The Lord Nelson Mass is written for four-part chorus and solo quartet with strings, three trumpets, organ, and timpani. It is a work that shows off the skills of the performers in a lavish way. Though written in the minor key of D, it is an intensely upbeat and celebratory work. Even though its title references a naval conflict and its music has some militaristic elements, the work ends with a glorious fugue built on the Latin text Dona nobis pacem (grant us peace).

An American Celebration, May 27, 2006

Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) copyrighted his first song at the age of 15 and went on to compose music for many famous Broadway shows and Hollywood films. In 1951, NBC gave approval for the production of a documentary television series about naval warfare during World War II entitled Victory at Sea. Rodgers was signed to compose the musical score for the 26–episode series. Rodgers contributed twelve short piano themes, leaving the arranging and much additional composition to Robert Russell Bennett, the NBC Symphony Orchestra conductor, who also transcribed the concert band arrangement of the Victory at Sea Symphonic Scenario being performed today. The series aired in half-hour segments on Sunday afternoons beginning in October 1952 and won an Emmy in 1954 as the best public affairs program.

Howard Hanson (1896-1981) was the founding dean of the Eastman School of music in Rochester, New York, and a well-known American composer. His Song of Democracy utilizes the full forces and sonorities of chorus and orchestra, a combination that always fascinated him. Written in 1957, the Song of Democracy was shaped by the circumstances of its commission and is described in the composer’s own words: “When I accepted the invitation of the National Education Association and the Music Educators National Conference to compose a choral work in commemoration of the hundredth anniversary of the NEA and the fiftieth anniversary of the MENC, I realized that I had undertaken one of the most challenging assignments of my career. My task was greatly lightened by the appropriateness of the two Walt Whitman excerpts (one of which was written for a public school.) The problem now became one of attempting to set appropriate music to Walt Whitman’s inspiring words, and to do it, if possible, in a setting which would be simple enough for school choruses and orchestras to perform. Knowing that young people demand the best that one has to give, I gave the setting of these words all of the dramatic impact of which I was capable, using as the germ of the work that harmonic progression of the ‘Romantic’ Symphony, so long associated with the National Music Camp at Interlochen, where the symphony was written. “To what extent I have succeeded, the musical youth who sing this work must decide. It is written for them in affection and in appreciation of all that they have taught me.”

The Battle Hymn of the Republic was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in February 1862. The words were written by Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) during the American Civil War after visiting a Union army camp on the Potomac River near Washington, D.C and hearing the marching song John Brown’s Body. The hymn was sung at the funerals of Winston Churchill, Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan.

Frank Ticheli (b. 1958) is an American composer of orchestral, choral, chamber, and concert band works. He lives in Los Angeles, California, where he is a Professor of Composition at the University of Southern California. Of An American Elegy, he writes: “[It] is, above all, an expression of hope. It was composed in memory of those who lost their lives at Columbine High School on April 20, 1999, and to honor the survivors. It is offered as a tribute to their great strength and courage in the face of a terrible tragedy. I hope the work can also serve as one reminder of how fragile and precious life is and how intimately connected we all are as human beings. I was moved and honored by this commission invitation, and deeply inspired by the circumstances surrounding it. Rarely has a work revealed itself to me with such powerful speed and clarity. The first eight bars of the main melody came to me fully formed in a dream. Virtually every element of the work was discovered within the span of about two weeks. The remainder of my time was spent refining, developing, and orchestrating. The work begins at the bottom of the ensemble’s register, and ascends gradually to a heartfelt cry of hope. The main theme that follows, stated by the horns, reveals a more lyrical, serene side of the piece. A second theme, based on a simple repeated harmonic pattern, suggests yet another, more poignant mood. These three moods - hope, serenity, and sadness - become intertwined throughout the work, defining its complex expressive character. A four-part canon builds to a climactic quotation of the Columbine Alma Mater. The music recedes, and an offstage trumpeter is heard, suggesting a celestial voice - a heavenly message. The full ensemble returns with a final, exalted statement of the main theme.”

In 1941, Aaron Copland (1900-1990) was commission to write a piece based on a famous American. Copland chose Abraham Lincoln, and Lincoln Portrait was completed in 1942. Copland used excerpts from different Lincoln speeches and combined the narration with musical quotations from two American songs. The first song is Pesky Sarpent also known as Springfield Mountain, and Copland’s choice of this song may have been influenced by its connection to Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln grew up. The second song is Stephen Foster’s Camptown Races, and the melodies of both songs are combined before narration enters in the second half of the piece. An interesting note is that the piece was programmed on the concert for Eisenhower’s inaugural concert in 1953, but it was canceled when Copland was accused of having communist sympathies. Yet, ten years after this, the United States Information Agency distributed the piece throughout the world in every conceivable translation. The piece continues to be one of Copland’s most enduring works and has been narrated by authors, statesman, actors, and politicians, as well as by Copland himself.

America the Beautiful, the tune many call America’s “second national anthem,” was penned by Katherine Lee Bates in 1893 during a visit to Pike’s Peak. “I felt great joy,” Bates later wrote. “All the wonder of America seemed displayed there, with the sea-like expanse.” First published on July 4, 1895, the song was revised in 1904 and 1913 before Bates received the copyright to it.

Shenandoah, one of many variations on a familiar tune, probably began as a voyageur song on the rivers west of the Mississippi and is named either for a notable Native American chief or for the Virginia river valley; no one is quite sure. In time the song became a popular capstan chantey (referring to women and water, both dear to the sailor’s heart!) and a favorite even among the cavalry in the western states.

Eric Whitacre (b. 1970) received no formal musical training before the age of 18, but his experiences in college choir led him to pursue composition in a graduate program at Julliard. Sleep (2000) was originally composed for a cappella chorus. Initially, the music was a setting of Robert Frost’s poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. However, Whitacre was unable to secure permission after lengthy legal involvement, so Whitacre’s friend and poet Charles Anthony Silvestri was commissioned to set new words to the music which had already been written. Silvestri’s poem perfectly fits the music and was inspired by Silvestri watching his own daughter fall to sleep.

God Bless America was written by Irving Berlin (1888-1989) during the summer of 1918 at Camp Upton, located in Yaphank, Long Island, for his Ziegfeld-style revue, Yip, Yip, Yaphank. However, Berlin decided that the song did not fit with the rest of the revue, so it was not used. With World War II approaching in the fall of 1938, Berlin decided to write a song of peace and revamped his God Bless America from twenty years earlier with some alterations to reflect the different state of the world. Singer Kate Smith introduced the revised God Bless America during her radio broadcast on Armistice Day, 1938. The song was an immediate sensation with a great many performances and with the sheet music in very high demand. Berlin established the “God Bless America Fund”, donating the royalties for the music to the Boy and Girl Scouts of America.

John Philip Sousa (1854-1932) took a vacation to Europe with his wife in late 1896 in a much needed break from his hectic tour schedule. During the trip, Sousa received word that the Sousa band tour manager, David Blakely, had died unexpectedly. Sousa realized that he had to return home quickly so that he could manage the band’s business affairs before the start of their next tour. On the voyage home, the sounds of the steamship mixed with the thoughts of all of the work that had to be done created a marching melody in Sousa’s head that stayed with him across the Atlantic. When we arrived home, he wrote The Stars and Stripes Forever. The march was an immediate success and was played at almost every Sousa band concert for the next 25 years. It was the last piece that Sousa conducted when he passed away after a rehearsal of the Ringgold Band in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Psalms: Bridges of Faith, November 19, 2006

In Virtute Tua (Psalm 20)Grzegorz Gorczycki (1665 – 1734) Grezegorz Gorczycki was a composer, church musician and priest during the late Baroque era. Following studies at Prague University and Vienna University, he returned to his native Poland where he served several churches including the Wawel Cathedral in Krakow. His compositions are mainly settings of Latin liturgical texts in both the stile antico and the stile moderno featuring two or more instruments and continuo. His works are well known and often performed in Poland. – William Bausano

Haleluyah. Haleli nafshi (Psalm 146)Salamone Rossi (c.1570 – c.1630) When one thinks of Renaissance choral music, it usually is limited to music of the Christian church. While central Italy was abloom with an effervescence of new thinking and new politics, the court of Mantua embodied the new spirit of artistic magnificence. Jews were not only tolerated, they were often allowed to mingle freely with non-Jews where they achieved remarkable artistic success. Salamone Rossi was a singer, violinist and composer at the court of Mantua from 1587 until 1628. He composed nine collections of music for various combinations of voices with and without instrumental accompaniment. – Lawrence Speakman

Hallelujah (Psalm 150)Valentin Alkan (1813 – 1888) Valentin Alkan spent his entire life in Paris where his father was the founder of a school for Jewish children. Most of his works were written for piano and his style has great deal in common with Chopin, Schumann and Liszt, all of whom were his close friends. Although some of his Jewish contemporaries converted to Christianity, Alkan remained a Jew all of his life. – Lawrence Speakman

Wie der Hirsch schreit (Psalm 42) Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (1809 – 1847) Felix Mendelssohn turned to Psalm texts for inspiration throughout his life, writing his first setting at age 13 and his last just 3 years before his death. He composed Psalm 42 in 1837 and revised it later that year. Wie der Hirsch schreit is the opening chorus from the longer work and frequently is used on its own. Mendelssohn converted to Christianity but always held up the Psalms as a way to express his convictions while honoring his Jewish heritage. Mendelssohn referred to Psalm 42 as “my best sacred piece”. – from Scott MacPherson

How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place (Psalm 84) Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897) When Johannes Brahms wrote his Ein Deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem), he departed from the text of the Roman Catholic Liturgy and used scripture that was translated into German by Martin Luther. One of the alternate texts that Brahms included was Psalm 84, How Lovely Are Thy Dwellings. Brahms believed in singing in the vernacular and sanctioned translations of the work just prior to his death. Our performance today will be in English. – from Lara Hoggard

The Heavens Are Telling (Psalm 19)Josef Haydn (1732 – 1809) After more than 30 years of employment by the Esterhazy family, Josef Haydn went to England where he encountered the grand oratorios of Handel. At a fiftieth anniversary observance of Handel’s death held at Westminster Abbey, the German composer was inspired by the more than 300 singers who were employed in the performance. He spent five years in London as the latest German import and composed some works using the larger forces that were at his disposal. The Heavens Are Telling is from his Oratorio The Creation and frequently is performed as a stand-alone piece and is composed in English to enhance comprehension. – Lawrence Speakman

Laudate Dominum (Psalm 117) Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791) This was among the very last music for the church that Mozart wrote while in residence at Salzburg. Archbishop Colloredo had required that Mozart not repeat text, keep his church music free from unnecessary effects, and always be subservient to the liturgy. For a composer of Mozart’s gifts of expression, this must have been extremely difficult. Psalm 116/117, Laudate Dominum, is set in A-major as a brilliant Neapolitan-style concert aria for soprano solo, its high-spiritedness enhanced with a frisky organ obbligato. – from John W. Ehrlich

Bless the Lord O My Soul (Psalm 103) Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov (1859- 1935) Mikhail Mikhailovich Ippolitov – Ivanov graduated from St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1882 with specialties in theory, composition and conducting. He was a student of Rimsky-Korsakov and served in many posts at the Russian Choral Society in Moscow from 1899-1906. – from Vladimir Morasan

Sixty Seventh PsalmCharles Ives (1874 – 1954) The music of Charles Ives confounded his contemporaries and even five decades after his death continues to baffle and tantalize listeners. Ives, a true maverick, sought to link innovations of European music with uniquely American idioms. Sixty Seventh Psalm (1939) shows Ives at his most confounding. The twelve-tone work, draped in the dark hues of Depression-Era America evokes traditional songs but is set in two different keys: the women in a confident and stately C major, the men in a darker G minor. – David R. Lindquist

From the End of the Earth (Psalm 61) Alan Hovhaness (1911 – 2000) Alan Hovhaness - an important but marginalized 20th Century American composer. A "true original" who foreshadowed future musical techniques and aesthetic values. Rejecting the vogues of Americana, serialism and atonality, he pioneered contemporary development of archaic models and was among the earliest to meld Western musical idioms with those of the East, making him a pioneer of East-West "fusion" decades before the term "World Music" had been coined.– from Hovhaness.com

The Lord Is My Shepherd (Psalm 23) John Rutter (1945 – ) John Rutter’s The Lord is My Shepherd is the penultimate and climactic movement of his beloved Requiem (1986), written in memory of his father. This stirring statement of faith and confidence is lushly orchestrated and builds on a progression of voices beginning with an exquisite oboe solo. Rutter, a product of Clare College, Cambridge, celebrated his 60th birthday in September 2005 in grand style. The Royal Philharmonic and the Bach Choir performed Requiem at St. Paul’s Cathedral in his honor. – David R. Lindquist

Lobet den Herrn, alle Heiden (Psalm 117) Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750) Lobet den Herrn is one of only two motets by Bach in which the entire text comes from the Bible, in this case, Psalm 117. Despite the more than six minutes of music, only the first two verses of the Psalm are set. The work is scored for SATB choir and continuo. The norm for Bach’s motets is for a continuo group to perform as support for the choral parts, even where continuo is not explicitly indicated in the score. In the case of “Lobet den Herrn,” however, the continuo part is written separately in the score, and often independent of the other parts. This has led some scholars to believe that “Lobet den Herrn” may actually be a part of a larger Bach work, perhaps a cantata. While there are only two clear divisions to the motet in the score, there are other subdivisions indicated by changes in text, texture and character. – Lawrence Speakman

Holiday Pops in Cary, December 2, 2006
David R. Lindquist

Tonight’s concert features some delightful Christmas presents—-traditional carols wrapped in appealing arrangements by accomplished composers of the past half-century. We urge you to "shake" these musical gifts to see what’s inside — and to savor the various enhancements that make these new and fresh.

Randol Alan Bass (1953-) is a composer with a long resume of commissions by prestigious orchestras and choruses. Gloria premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1990 by the New York Pops Orchestra and has been recorded by the Boston Pops Orchestra. The text is the traditional liturgy of the visitation to the shepherds that is popular at Christmas concerts, translated loosely as “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace and good will to all”. This setting is joyous and makes extensive use of multi-metric rhythms typical of eastern European dances. These patterns are tempered by moments of almost bittersweet lyricism as well as bombastic brass fanfares.

J. S. Bach’s Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C Major (BWV 564) is one of many popular Bach toccata-and-fugue combinations. It was written during Bach’s Weimar period between 1698 and 1717 in the basic form of the popular Italian concerto grosso of the time. It has three movements with a fast-slow-fast pattern of tempos. The toccata is bold, athletic, and prankish: its original organ setting features one of Bach’s most difficult pedal solos. It is followed by a lush and dignified adagio centered on an unusually chromatic grave section and a majestic close. The work concludes with a surprisingly cheerful 6/8 fugue with an unexpected ending to the coda. This Bach composition gets occasional airings on Hollywood soundtracks, most recently in the 1998 comedy Sour Grapes.

Twas The Night Before Christmas - This work, also arranged by Randol Alan Bass, was commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra in 1988. It takes the form of a very cinematic soundtrack for the well known Clement Clarke Moore poem. Bass was an acolyte of the great John Williams. You may recognize musical elements inspired by some of Williams’ many movie soundtracks.

The late Mel Tormé wrote Christmas Song, of all times, during a Los Angeles heat wave in 1944. The inspiration came during a visit to a friend’s home. The friend, lyricist Bob Wells, had been trying to beat the heat by “thinking winter” and had earlier scribbled four lines on a notepad: “Chestnuts roasting”, “Jack Frost nipping”, “Yuletide carols”, and “Folks dressed up like Eskimos”. In only 40 minutes, Tormé, a rising jazz singer, turned those cool thoughts into a song which gained great popularity after it was recorded by Nat King Cole in 1945. Ironically, Tormé did not particularly care for his creation.

Bass’ Christmas Flourish was commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra in 1993 and builds on four rather different carols unified by a fanfare motif. The structure is a symphony in miniature: William Billings’ joyful early American "Shiloh" is the opening allegro "movement", Handel’s triumphant "Joy to the World" takes a scherzo role, Gruber’s soft "Silent Night" is an andante, and the durable French carol "Angels We Have Heard on High" forms the concluding allegro.

The Eighth Candle: Prayer and Dance for Hanukkah - Steve Reisteter’s work begins with an extended hymn-like section before breaking into an exciting dance of celebration.

Bass' Seasonal Sounds, composed in 2005, is a splashy arrangement of four of the more cliche-ish songs of the holiday season. The tunes: "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town", "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer", "Frosty the Snowman" and "Jingle Bells" are dressed up with unexpected rhythms and harmonies including Barbershop, Polka, and Dixieland Jazz. Originally the work included a treatment of "Here Comes Santa Claus" as a second movement, but Bass was unable to secure rights for American publication and it has been omitted in our presentation.

White Christmas was a dreaded assignment for the musical legend Irving Berlin. He was asked to write a song for each of the major holidays of the year as the gimmick for the 1942 film Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. The composer had for years avoided Christmas - a painful reminder that his infant son died on December 25, 1928. The wistful lyrics and recalling of something lost poignantly represented Berlin's tremendous sense of loss and grief. To Berlin's surprise, the song was a staggering success. Crosby's 1942 recording lasted a stunning 11 weeks at #1 and he was overwhelmed by WWII soldiers' requests to sing it again and again. It even inspired a hit film - appropriately titled White Christmas - in 1954 (again starring Crosby).

Sleigh Ride is Leroy Anderson's best-known work. It began as an instrumental tune originally intended not for Christmas but as a seasonal mood piece. In fact, like Mel Tormé, Anderson was inspired to write it during a New England heatwave in July 1947. It is sparkling and crisp suggesting Mozart's Carriage Travel and Delius' Sleigh Ride. The tune soon attracted the attention of the gifted lyricist Mitchell Parrish (celebrated for wordsmithing the 1930s classics Stardust, Deep Purple, and Moonlight Serenade, among others). Mitchell's lyrics made Sleigh Ride an even bigger hit, and the song has been recorded by many of the most popular recording artists since. -David R. Lindquist

Bach's Easter Oratorio and Other Works, March 31, 2007
Lawrence J. Speakman

An American Celebration 2007, May 26, 2007

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