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Performance Archives This page includes the complete program from the Kirkland Choral Society's March 2006 concert, "Voices of the New World". VOICES OF THE NEW WORLD
Kirkland Choral Society With an introductory American folksong, Shenandoah, we embark on a journey throughout the New World. We start here in the Northwest, with Vancouver composer Stephen Chatman’s short cycle of five pieces, Due North; the texts for these pieces were written by the composer, and range from smooth chanting of trees’ names to the insistent buzzing of mosquitoes. A rhythmically exciting arrangement of the Newfoundland folksong Feller from Fortune leads us to a Canadian’s vision of Ecuadorian rainfall, forming a bridge from Canada to lands south of the border. Perhaps history’s pre-eminent Latin American composer is Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos, whose beautiful Ave Maria reflects the deep Catholic traditions of the continent. Mata del anima sola is a nostalgic work about the plains of Venezuela, and Prende la vela is a delightful romp from the Colombian coastline. To conclude the first half of tonight’s program, we also journey back in time: ¡Oh Señora! is a playful Renaissance motet written in Nahuatl, the Aztec language. After the intermission, Argentinean-Californian Pablo Ortiz brings us back to the States with a neo-medieval work of haunting beauty. You can’t get much more American than a circus, and you certainly can’t get more American than Charles Ives’s Circus Band! George Gershwin’s Sing of Spring is a paean to the season, complete with birds who apparently sing in jazz harmonies. Copland’s Ching-a-Ring-Chaw is folksong gaiety at its best, followed Randall Thompson’s classic Alleluia. The concert will conclude with three very different works from the African-American tradition: William Dawson’s Soon-ah will be done gets the blood moving, Copland’s At the River soothes it again, and Moses Hogan’s Elijah Rock is a riotous celebration.
Shenandoah
(1971) James Erb was educated at the Austrian State Academy of Music, Indiana University and Harvard, and since 1971 has been director of the Richmond Symphony Chorus. His delicate, eight-part arrangement of the American folksong “Shenandoah” was written for the 1971 European tour of the University of Richmond Choir, which he directed for forty years (1954–94). The tune itself dates from the early 1800s, as merchants and flatboatmen from western Virginia’s Shenandoah River extended trade routes to the Mississippi. Eventually “Shenandoah” became a popular sea shanty, heard on American clipper ships around the world, and is now the official state song of Virginia. There are many versions of the folksong, including one in which the traveler tells a native chief of his intention to take the chief’s daughter to the distant American west. James Erb has chosen a more broadly universal text for his arrangement, expressing a gentle longing for the traveler’s distant home in the Shenandoah Valley.
Due North: Five
Songs of Nature for Unaccompanied Mixed Chorus (1991) The musical culture of Canada is a rich and varied one, though Stephen Chatman is one of relatively few Canadian composers whose works are often performed abroad, as far afield as Berlin, Sydney and Seoul. Chatman was born in Minnesota, received a doctorate from the University of Michigan, and since 1976 has taught at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver. Due North is a cycle of five choral songs celebrating the various physical and biological features of the Pacific Northwest. ‘Mountains’ features starkly rising intervals which jut from the choral texture as so many Cascades and Rockies. In ‘Trees’, Chatman requires the choir to gently but rhythmically chant the names of various species of Northwest trees. ‘Woodpecker’ is a celebration of the bird which has been so busy at a dead bough that it has in fact become double-dead! During the final two movements, ‘Varied Thrushes’ and ‘Mosquitoes’, the choir dispenses with words entirely, resorting to onomatopoeically appropriate humming, whistling, and buzzing.
Feller from Fortune,
from Five Songs of the Newfoundland Outports (1965) The early twentieth century saw a great interest in collecting European folksongs. The communal singing of folk music was seen as a dieing art throughout Europe, and ethnomusicologists and composers—such as Ralph Vaughan Williams in England, and Béla Bartók in Hungary and Romania—traveled the countryside, inviting elderly locals to sing regional tunes from their childhood. This activity has continued even in North America, where Gerald E. Doyle collected the tune ‘Feller from Fortune’ from Newfoundland in 1955. The story is raucous, at times even slightly bawdy, recounting the carefree life of fishermen and the girls who wooed (or, rather, vigorously pursued!) them. This lively arrangement, in which the refrain never returns with the same rhythm, is by Toronto composer Harry Somers, who was perhaps the foremost Canadian composer of his generation.
La lluvia
(1996) Stephen Hatfield lives on Vancouver Island. While teaching at a high school with only a rudimentary choral program, he developed a strong belief in multicultural choral music, of which La lluvia (“The Rain”) is a fine example. The main melody is a folk tune from Ecuador, and hence forms a bridge between tonight’s Canadian music and that from Latin America. The tune is traditionally played on Andean panpipes known as the siku, but Hatfield scores his composition for wordless voices and three percussionists. The sound of the shaker particularly evokes the rainfall of the work’s title, but occasional harmonic shifts from B minor to G major invoke the mildly thunderous vibraslap. Hatfield has created a texture which is entirely melodic, making the piece particularly rewarding to sing, since at any given time, everyone has a main melody!
Ave Maria
(1938) Probably the most important Latin American composer in history, Heitor Villa-Lobos began his career playing cello in cafés. After collecting folksongs deep in the Amazonian heartland and studying formally in Paris, he eventually settled in his native Rio de Janeiro, where he became the central figure of Brazilian music. Villa-Lobos wrote music for major political and cultural events; his vocal works were even occasionally performed by choral groups which filled an entire stadium. Perhaps his most popular works are the nine Bachianas brasileiras, which combine an inherently Brazilian rhythmic and melodic nature with the rich counterpoint of Bach. He twice set the traditional Catholic Ave Maria text. Tonight we will perform his first setting, written in Portuguese.
Mata del anima sola Little is taught of Venezuelan classical music here in the United States, but Antonio Estévez should be hailed as one of his homeland’s most important composers. Estévez traveled widely, including encounters with Stravinsky and Copland in New York and with electronic music in Paris, and taught at the Universidad Central de Venezuela. His masterpiece is the choral/orchestral work, Cantata criolla, setting a lyric text by Venezuelan poet Alberto Arvelo Torrealba. The unaccompanied choral miniature, Mata del anima sola (“Three of the lonely soul”), is also to a Torrealba text. The tenor soloist—in the unaccompanied style of a llanero, or Venezuelan cowboy—nostalgically evokes the experiences of the vast western Venezuelan plains, with its river banks, wind, and violet dusks. Meanwhile, the choir imitates the sounds of traditional Venezuelan joropo dance music, including the “cha-cu-ru-cu” sounds of the cuatro, a four-stringed guitar.
Prende la vela The folk music of Colombia has many rich and varied styles, including the cumbia folk-music tradition centered on the Atlantic coastline in northeastern Colombia. The cumbia evolved from native American and imported African music, and is associated with a fast-moving, shuffling dance. Lucho Bermúdez was one of the great popular musicians in mid-twentieth century Colombia, who refined cumbia by incorporating it with big band and other influences. The tune Prende la vela is by Bermúdez, but is heard tonight in an arrangement for unaccompanied voices by Alberto Carbonell. A tenor soloist calls his African sweetheart to the evening dance at the lively Marbella beachfront in Cartagena, a popular destination for surfers even today.
¡Oh Señora! Nahuatl, the language of the Aztec culture, has gained a bit of press recently as one of the world’s many languages that is simply fighting for its survival. But in the late sixteenth century, Spanish composers living in Mexico would occasionally set devotional Nahuatl texts in an attempt to convert the native population to Catholicism. One such composer was Hernando Franco (1532–85), active in Guatemala and Mexico City. However, Hernando Franco was not the composer of ¡Oh Señora!. In fact, the title “Don” indicates that the composer was a member of the native nobility, who adopted the name of his Spanish teacher upon his Catholic baptism. ¡Oh Señora! is believed to be one of the earliest surviving compositions by a native American writing in the European classical style. The juxtaposition of indigenous dance-like music with traditional European harmonies and cadences is particularly striking.
Epithalamica
(1997) The very touching and equally tragic story of Peter Abélard—the pre-eminent twelfth-century Parisian philosopher, priest, poet and composer—and his student, Heloïse, is one of the great love stories of any age. It is possible that Abélard wrote the chant sequence entitled Epithalamica on the occasion of their secret marriage, though the text itself seems allegorical of Christ’s love for the Church, in the style of the Song of Solomon. In the late twentieth-century, Pablo Ortiz based this short motet on two phrases of the seven-minute Abélard chant, adding his own unique rhythmic accents and gently dissonant harmonies. Ortiz’s musical training began in his native Buenos Aires, Argentina. He eventually traveled to New York, where he studied electronic music at Columbia University. After a time teaching at the University of Pittsburgh, Ortiz is currently chair of the music department at the University of California, Davis. The conductor wishes to dedicate this performance of Epithalamica to his fellow former student from Ortiz’s composition class—and now fiancée—Marnie Efishoff.
Circus Band Ives was one of the great innovators in American history: not only was he a strikingly original composer, but the standards he created for his day-job as an insurance executive remain strong models even today. Ives’s father was a bandmaster, whose piano lessons to his son would involve simultaneously playing a piece of music in one key with the right hand, another key with the left, and singing it in yet a third key! This influence can be heard in works such as his Symphony No. 1 in D minor, in which the last chord includes all twelve chromatic pitches save one: the tonic, D. Circus Band is a much simpler work, evoking the world of a wild parade as the circus comes to town. However, even a work as benign as Circus Band isn’t free from Ives’s innovations: the last verse combines many of the melodies heard earlier, and hidden among the joyous cacophony is even a subtle reference to Ives’s Yale fraternity, Delta Kappa Epsilon.
Sing of Spring
(1936) George Gershwin started his musical career as a teenager, plugging the newest Tin Pan Alley songs to bandleaders by playing an upright piano on the sidewalks of Manhattan. He eventually became the leading composer in the genre, and expanded his music-making to the classical tradition, musical theater, and even film music. Sing of Spring is one of Gershwin’s few songs written specifically for choir—though many choral arrangements have been made of his jazz standards, such as I Got Rhythm, Embraceable You, Summertime, Fascinating Rhythm.... This celebratory paean to the season, in which birds apparently sing in jazz harmonies, was written for the film A Damsel in Distress, which starred Fred Astaire and Joan Fontaine and featured another of Gershwin’s standards, Nice Work If You Can Get It.
Ching-a-ring-chaw
(1952) Aaron Copland has been called “the father of American classical music”, but that title is fair neither to Copland nor to the rich history of American classical music. However, Copland was the first American to gain a major international reputation by writing music in the European classical tradition which incorporated elements of Americana. He almost single-handedly rescued the great wealth of nineteenth-century Shaker hymnody from obscurity by incorporating the tune Simple Gifts into his 1944 ballet, Appalachian Spring. Ching-a-ring-chaw is a minstrel song dating from the 1800s, which Copland arranged for solo voice and piano in a cycle titled Old American Songs. Irving Fine, a friend of Copland and another major figure in post-war American music, made this choral version with the composer’s permission.
Alleluia (1940) Randall Thompson is quite possibly American history’s pre-eminent composer of choral music, but that is a rather simplistic picture of this major composer, whose works also include three symphonies and two string quartets, and who taught at Harvard for many years. Not bad for a former undergraduate who failed in his first audition to join the Harvard Glee Club! Thompson was beloved by the most important American composers and conductors of the mid-twentieth century, as evidenced by the Alleluia, which was commissioned for the opening of the famous music school at Tanglewood in the Berkshires of Massachusetts. Thompson wrote the work in just four days, and delivered it to the conductor, G. Wallace Woodworth, barely forty-five minutes before the first performance. Woodworth’s first impression: “Well, text at least is one thing we won’t have to worry about.” Alleluia justly remains the most popular piece of choral music by an American composer.
Soon ah will be done
(1934) The slave trade of African men and women to the plantations of the South had a deep influence on the development of American music. Traditional African songs joined with Christianity to form a new genre, the spiritual, which eventually evolved into Gospel music and jazz. The texts of many spirituals mask a hidden meaning; for example, while Soon ah will be done may refer to spiritually escaping the “troubles of the world” through heavenly salvation, it may also refer to physically escaping the “weeping and wailing” of slave life by fleeing to the North. William Levi Dawson was a major African-American composer active in the mid-twentieth century, teaching for twenty-five years at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. His 1934 Negro Folk Symphony, which incorporates spirituals into an orchestral texture, was premiered by no less a figure than Leopold Stokowski (of Disney’s Fantasia fame) and the Philadelphia Orchestra. That same year, Dawson’s powerful arrangement of Soon ah will be done was first published.
At the River
(1954) The creation of the hymn tune, At the River, is a surprisingly simple tale. Robert Lowry, a white Baptist pastor in Brooklyn, mused in July 1864 on river of death, and resolved instead to create a musical homage to the “pure river of water of life” from Revelation. More complex is how the tune became particularly beloved of the Baptist churches in the South, dominated by black membership. Perhaps it became so popular because of its text, which—as with so many spiritual texts—could have a double, or even triple, meaning: is the river a baptismal spot, or the Ohio and Potomac Rivers which formed the boundary with the free North, or even the Atlantic Ocean which formed a metaphorical river to Africa? In any case, this Gospel tune remains popular in churches across America today, and here has been arranged faithfully by that great Jewish composer from Brooklyn, Aaron Copland.
Elijah Rock (pub.
1994) With the recent death of Moses Hogan, choral music prematurely lost one of its brightest stars. Born in New Orleans and educated at Juilliard in New York, Hogan was director of the Moses Hogan Singers, a professional choral ensemble which gave spirituals a much greater international following. He continued in the tradition of William Dawson and others, making brilliant contemporary arrangements of great nineteenth-century spirituals. Much of Hogan’s music often focuses on combining historic tunes with short melodic fragments to create a rhythmic vitality, and his arrangement of Elijah Rock is no exception. Listen particularly for the restrained but passionate central section for four-part women’s chorus, after which Hogan turns to a build-up of great energy, separating the choir into nine parts with both the lowest and highest notes of the evening.
— Program note by Gary D. Cannon
Gary D. Cannon is active as a choral conductor throughout the Seattle area. He is director of choral music for the Annas Bay Music Festival in Union, Washington, where he will conduct the resident Chamber Choir for their inaugural season this summer. Gary is in his fifth season as chorusmaster of the Northwest Mahler Festival, and recently concluded five years as choir director at St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Lynnwood. He holds a Master’s degree from the University of Washington, where he was director of the University Singers and the UW Men’s Ensemble, and where he continues doctoral studies. While receiving an undergraduate degree at the University of California, Davis, Gary was founding artistic director of the student vocal/instrumental ensemble, Pulchritudina, and conducted the Davis Festival Singers. In addition to his work as a conductor, Gary is a professional tenor, with recent solo appearances with the Rianier Symphony, Eastside Symphony, Issaquah Chorale, and Cantaré Vocal Ensemble, and three years as a regular in The Tudor Choir. He is also adjunct faculty at Whatcom Community College in Bellingham, where he teaches music history and fundamental theory, and heads the voice faculty at the annual Midsummer Musical Retreat in Walla Walla. An avid musicologist, Gary is considered one of America’s leading experts on the music of the twentieth-century British composer, William Walton. He also periodically dabbles in musical composition, especially vocal and chamber music. Tonight’s concert is presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in choral conducting at the University of Washington, where Gary is a student of Geoffrey Boers and Abraham Kaplan. Andrew Seifert is currently a doctoral candidate in opera production and direction at the University of Washington, where he studies with Claudia Zahn and Philip Kelsey. He also holds a Master of Music degree in conducting from the University of Washington and a Bachelor of Music degree in conducting from Chapman University in Orange, California, where he studied with William Hall. While in Seattle, Andrew produces, directs, and coaches operas and operatic workshops at the University of Washington, is accompanist for several choral organizations, guests as a tenor soloist and section leader, and is Organist at St. Thomas More Catholic Church in Lynnwood. In demand as a guest lecturer and workshop artist, Andrew is active in West Coast high schools, colleges, and universities as a pundit of conducting, theory, contemporary composition, and operatic interpretation and criticism. Andrew’s directing and conducting credits are numerous and include Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte, Pergolesi’s La serva padrona, Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges, Sullivan’s The Mikado, Moreno Torroba’s La chulapona, Menotti’s The Old Maid and the Thief, and dozens of scenes from various operas in several languages. During the summers, Andrew returns to his hometown of Napa, California, and is deeply involved in the executive artistic staff of the Jarvis Conservatory Zarzuela Festival, the only professional Spanish opera company in the United States. |
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