The contemporary choral composer Dan Forrest had no way of knowing when he was contacted by the professional choir Bel Canto for a commission that he would write something audiences would associate with the COVID pandemic and the death of George Floyd. Since the premier took place in October 2019, though, the association was inevitable. The piece poignantly represents the truth that “There’s beauty and joy and wonder in every breath we take.”
I’ve had the privilege of singing most of the pieces I write about on this site with my wonderful choir the Cherry Creek Chorale, and I remember getting the sheet music for “Kerry Dancing” on the first night of rehearsal for our March 2023 Celtic concert. As I glanced through it and read the words I felt a sense of longing and sadness. Why was that?
The first clue is the word “oh.” Not to belabor the point here too much, but have you ever thought about the rich array of meanings in this two letter word? It can mean:
Original Scottish dialect: Standardized English:
Duncan Gray cam here to woo Duncan Gray came here to woo,
(Ha, ha, the wooing o’t!—repeated refrain) (Ha, ha, such was the wooing of it!)
On blythe Yule-Night when we were fou On merry Christmas Even when we were drunk,
Maggie coost her head fu’ high, Maggie cast her head full high, (raised her head)
Look’d asklent and unco skeigh, Looked askance (scornfully) and very skittish,
Gart poor Duncan stand abeigh – Made poor Duncan stand off
Duncan fleech’d, and Duncan pray’d Duncan wheedled/beseeched, and prayed
Meg was deaf as Ailsa Craig Meg was deaf as Ailsa Craig (a rocky island)
Duncan sigh’d baith out and in, Duncan sighed both out and in,
Grat his een baith bleer’t an’ blin’, Wept his eyes both bleary and blind,
Spak o’ lowpin o’er a linn – Spoke of leaping over a waterfall
William Butler Yeats, the great Irish poet of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, was obsessed with Irish legends and the occult. The story behind his poem “A Dream of a Blessed Spirit” neatly encapsulates both ideas, since it concerns a mythic Irish character, the Countess Kathleen O’Shea, who sold all her goods and finally her soul to help her starving tenants. Because the Countess had given her soul for the good of others and not to enrich herself, God refused to let her be damned and instead brought her to heaven. Yeats also wrote a whole play about her, but it’s safe to say that it’s never performed these days. The poem, on the other hand, has provided the text for a lovely art song that is quite popular. My own group, the Cherry Creek Chorale in the Denver metro area, has programmed it several times. I found the words to be fascinating and puzzling:
Probably everyone who’s attended some kind of Christian funeral has heard this hymn, as it’s especially popular for those occasions. And you can see why. The words are beautiful and striking, and the melody is at the same time lovely and singable. What’s not to like?
Then there’s the backstory to the song, which contains drama and irony in about equal parts: John Newton, a slave trader, is converted to Christianity and leaves his dreadful business, becoming a part of the anti-slavery movement. We all love a good redemption story, don’t we?
Real life, however, is seldom if ever so simple and straightforward. The more you delve into a person’s actions the more complicated and messy they become. I used the example in an earlier post about fractals, those designs that reveal new layers as they are magnified. There is never an end to the detail. The same is true in your life, even if you think of it as rather mundane. So it is with John Newton.
We left John Newton on the way back to England after having been rescued from slavery to the African Princess Peye. Be sure to go back and read Part I if you haven’t done so already to find out how he got himself into this pickle to begin with. The ship ran into a severe storm off the coast of Ireland and almost sank. At this point of crisis Newton turned to God, praying for mercy. The storm died down and the ship was able to reach port. For the rest of his life Newton marked the anniversary of this event: March 10, 1874. However, he didn’t give up participation in the slave trade, signing on with a slave ship after he got back to England and making several more voyages. He did not leave active participation in this horrible business until he suffered a stroke in 1754, when he stopped going to sea but continued to invest in others’ efforts. It isn’t clear to me exactly when he gave up even that support of slavery. Here’s a good summary from Wikipedia, however:
I classify this carol along with “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” as having a very confusing title. In order to understand the meaning we’ll have to dive into a little grammar wonkery, with some biblical doctrine along the way.
Okay. Everybody got that? The lyrics were written by an American Unitarian Universalist minister, Edmund H. Sears, and, notably, they do not mention the actual birth of Christ at all. Let’s look at the first two lines of the carol itself:
It came upon a [or the] midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
In a word: No. Why not? Because he was in a tuberculosis sanitarium. How weird and sad is that? Very.
So, back in the winter of 1934, 33-year-old Richard Smith was sitting in his room at the West Mountain Sanitarium after having a recurrence of his TB, trying to keep himself occupied by entering jingle contests for ad copy. (He actually won the Maybelline eye shadow contest with the slogan “The Eyes Have It.” Clever!) He could see children playing in the snow outside his window and was reminded of how much he’d enjoyed those same activities when he was growing up in the small town of Honesdale, Pennsylvania. A powerful nostalgia was at work here, but, given the actual wording of the song I think there was something else going on: he missed his wife, Jane, whom he’d married in 1930.
The choir to which I belong, the Cherry Creek Chorale, is privileged to include a composer, Gloria Srikijkarn, whose works we have performed at several concerts. For our October 2022 concert Songs of Thanksgiving we have a section titled “The Valley of the Shadow” that includes her setting of “Kyrie.” She says that she wrote this moving and beautiful piece “at a very dark time in my life.”
The simple text comes from the service of the Roman Catholic Mass but is often, as here, used as a stand-alone piece. It’s always helpful, though, no matter how separate from the original a version is, to look at how it was used in the first place. So if you were to attend an actual service of the Mass you’d participate in singing the text right after the priest or minister had address the congregation by saying,
I’m not really going to cover the millennia of this word’s usage; there are whole books on the subject. Instead, I’ll concentrate on the word itself and on pieces my choir has sung that include it. I will include a brief foray into its usage in Shrek, though, so keep going to the end if you want to get that!
It’s stunning to look at the pieces that are either totally built around this one word or include it as a significant part of the lyrics. Why is it so powerful and attractive? Such questions are always in the end unanswerable. I’d postulate, though, that the sound of the word itself and its use as an exclamation of praise can claim at least partial credit. Why are there two spellings, by the way? Very simple: “hallelujah” is a transliteration from the Hebrew Old Testament and “alleluia” is a Latinized version of the same word in Greek.