Art Songs Archives - Page 3 of 6

How Has the Jewish Bible book of Ecclesiastes Been Used in Musical Settings?

January 21, 2021 by debisimons

I’ve had the privilege of singing a piece titled “Beautiful In His Time” by the American composer/arranger Dan Forrest, which uses a passage from the book of Ecclesiastes chapter 3 in the Jewish Bible. Forrest is by no means the first to set verses from this chapter to music, though; there’s a long history of doing that, going all the way back to Brahms. Before I get to an overview of that history, though, I’d like to comment a bit on the book as a whole, since Ecclesiastes is fascinating in and of itself, considered to be part of the “wisdom” section of the Old Testament along with Job, Psalms, Proverbs, and Song of Solomon. Yet it seems to have a very different message from any other book of the Bible, for it can come across as cynical and fatalistic, especially in the earlier chapters. Most Bible scholars believe that it was written by Solomon, king of Israel after David, who would certainly fit the description of “teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem” given in the first verse. But why would Solomon, whom the Bible says had the greatest wisdom of all mankind, say in verse 2, “It is useless, useless . . . life is useless, all useless”? We are given at least a partial answer at the end of chapter 1: “The wiser you are, the more worries you have; the more you know, the more it hurts.” (Good News Translation)

The Little-Known but Greatly-Affecting “Rainsong” by Houston Bright

December 16, 2020October 29, 2020 by debisimons

Until I sang this gorgeous and poignant piece with my own choir back in the spring of 2017 I had never heard of Houston Bright, a prolific and esteemed composer and conductor who lived from 1916-1970, dying far too young at age 54 from cancer.

Bright spent his entire career teaching music at West Texas State University, although his 30 years there were punctuated with a stint in the military during World War II and some time off to earn his Ph.D. at the University of Southern California. Along the way he taught composition and music theory, formed and led choirs, and worked on his own compositions, which number over 100, for piano, solo voice, band, orchestra, and, especially, choir. Interestingly, one of the few poems by someone other than himself that he set to music was Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky.” I was very interested in finding a performance of this piece since it seems so outside the range of Bright’s other music, but even the vast resource of YouTube doesn’t seem to have an example.

A Motet by a Master

April 3, 2023April 28, 2020 by debisimons

Stanford as a young man; anonymous public domain photograph; accessed via Wikipedia.

The master of this motet, “Beati Quorum Via,” was Charles V. Stanford, an Irishman who lived from 1852-1924 and who had an extremely distinguished career as a composer, teacher, and conductor. Out of the extensive list of his accomplishments I’ll just mention that he was one of the founders of the Royal College of Music, which is still around today. He produced over 200 works, including symphonies and operas, but nowadays the performances of his works are limited to some of his church music and an iridescent, shimmering piece “The Blue Bird” which I’ve performed with my own choir. Head over to that post if you’d like to read about it.

Two interesting tidbits about Stanford’s productive years: 1) He really, really wanted to be recognized for his operas and wrote nine of them. Only one had any success to speak of, Shamus O’Brien, which premiered in 1896 and ran for 82 performances. But it was a comic opera, not at all what he’d been writing previously in the genre. Alas! And while that number of performances was pretty good, guess who his comic opera competition was? None other than Gilbert & Sullivan. (Arthur Sullivan was also Irish, by the way). So Stanford was probably never going to get much traction if he’d pursued that path. But his serious operas got basically no traction at all, with a review of one, Savonarola, calling the music “crushingly tiresome.” 2) He was known for his combative personality. Here’s a description from his time on the board of the Royal College:

Just how much literary and historial wonkery can be mined from Longfellow’s poem “Jugurtha,” which forms the text for a song by Daniel Morel?

March 6, 2023April 10, 2020 by debisimons

Jugurtha in chains before Sulla, from Sallust’s La conjuracion de Catilina y la Guerra de Jugurta (Madrid, 1772)

Answer: You won’t believe how much. Keep reading to find out.

The contemporary American choral composer/arranger Daniel Morel has set to music a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about an African king named Jugurtha who was captured during (what else?) the Jugurthine Wars with Rome in the first century B.C. The king was brought back to Rome to be paraded in chains as a spoil of war by the Roman general who had defeated him. He then was taken to the Tullianum, a dungeon in Rome, and left to starve to death. I have no contemporary descriptions of Jugurtha as he lived out his last miserable days, but I was reminded of a scene in a historical novel about another captured king, the Gallic leader Vercingetorix, as he sits underground awaiting his own fate:

I moved the lamp so that I could see him. He shivered and trembled. He hid his face in his hands. Insects and glistening slugs crept amid the strands of his matted, filthy hair. A rat skittered between us. (from The Triumph of Caesar by Steven Saylor, accessed via Amazon)

In the Blurred Line Between Waking and Sleeping, Reflections on the Past in “The Stilly Night”

December 15, 2020February 28, 2020 by debisimons

Billie Grace Ward from New York, USA / CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)

As I write this post my beloved choir has recently performed a great concert of Irish music in the latest of our every-other-year Celtic concerts. (Sadly, because of the pandemic, as of March 2020, we have just had to cancel our final concert of the year that would have been performed in May. But we’ll be back!) The tenors and basses (in other words, the men plus me) sang “Oft in the Stilly Night” with text by the early-19^th-century Irish poet Thomas Moore. So I want to explore the imagery of the poem and then take a look at the composer of the version we sang.

What’s the “Story Behind the Song” for “The Awakening”?

December 5, 2020October 23, 2019 by debisimons

Sometimes you don’t need to reinvent the wheel! Joseph M. Martin, the author of the lyrics and composer of the music for our selection “The Awakening” has written a definitive essay about the meaning of this piece, and there’s nothing more I need to say. With his kind permission I’m including a quotation here of his opening statement and then encourage you to follow the link and read the entire piece:

When I was asked to write the commissioned anthem for the 20th anniversary of TCDA (Texas Choral Directors Association), I knew that the piece would be sung first to music teachers and I wanted to encourage them in their work and remind them of how important they are to the lives of our young people.

“The Story Behind the Song” by Joseph M. Martin

How Does One Selection on our Program, “Psalm 139,” Encapsulate a Whole Piece of Chorale History?

December 15, 2020October 14, 2019 by debisimons

So, so interesting, folks! There are three components: the text, the composer, and the dedicatee.

First, the text, a psalm from the Jewish Bible/Christian Old Testament that celebrates God’s omniscience and omnipresence. I have been fascinated with the way the composer, Will Baily, used just a few lines from this psalm. Familiar as I am with the passage, I had never really thought about the specific meanings of some of the words. Working on the song has made me look a little more closely. For instance, what are the “wings of the morning”? Honestly, that question had never occurred to me before. Most commentators say that they’re the sunbeams that stream up from the horizon as the sun rises; indeed, a number of translations use the phrase “wings of the dawn.” Those wings are going to take the speaker to “the farthest sea” or, in many versions, “the uttermost parts of the sea.” There’s a rich visual here: the sun rises in the east; the sea (which for the ancient Israelites would be what we call the Mediterranean Sea) is to the west. So the imagery has the speaker flying, literally, at the speed of light from the east horizon at dawn as far west as the eye can see, but God is there before him. And if the speaker feels overwhelmed by the darkness, he can be reassured that it is no barrier for God. I was reminded of a phrase from the Christian New Testament: “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.” (I John 1:5 NIV)

Meet the Artists Behind Our Premiered Commission–Silvestri and Veros

November 10, 2021October 7, 2019 by debisimons

For over seven years I’ve been writing background posts for the Cherry Creek Chorale’s concert selections. It’s been a great experience all around, with the special privilege of learning about, and in some instances contacting, living composers. I was able, for instance, to contact John Rutter via his Facebook page with a question about the reasons for his many commissions from America, and he graciously responded. That was a thrill, to be sure.

This past Tuesday night provided another thrill when the lyricist for our newly-commissioned piece, “-RADIANCE-,” did a Skype call with us. Charles Anthony Silvestri has developed a career over the past 20 years as a provider of “bespoke” lyrics. (I love that word! It means “custom made.” The only other context in which I’d heard it was that of an English suit, one tailored to the individual’s measurements.) What a wonderful experience for me to sit with some dozen or so other Chorale members who were able to come early and listen to this man talk about his work and ask him questions. At one point our conductor mentioned that Silvestri seemed to be in his studio. Not his writing studio, you understand: his painting studio. Not only does he have a career as a lyricist and poet, not only is he a full-time professor of Medieval and Renaissance history at the University of Kansas, but he also paints in the styles of the same periods about which he teaches. (And makes his own paint!) If any living person deserved the title of “Renaissance Man,” well . . .

Of course our main questions for him centered around his collaboration with Santiago Veros for our own piece. It was very much of an ongoing process as he described it, with the two of them communicating back and forth. Veros had given Silvestri the title, so the word “radiance” was a must-have in the lyrics. For a composer the experience of writing music to fit the words of a text that is already written, especially by someone who has died, is a far different experience from the ongoing process that can occur with a living author.

Three Lovely but Bittersweet Autumn-Themed Songs

August 23, 2024August 26, 2019 by debisimons

Ah, autumn! On the one hand it’s the start of crisp, invigorating fall weather and the new school year; on the other it’s the end of summer and the inevitable slide towards winter. I’ve always loved fall, but as a gardener I also mourn the end of the growing season, trying to comfort myself with the refrain, “Next year!”

Three pieces of film/stage music capture this two-sided aspect of autumn: “The Summer Knows” from Summer of ’42 (1971), “Les Feuilles Mortes”/”The Autumn Leaves” from the post-WWII French film Les Portes de la Nuit (The Gates of the Night), and “September Song,” originally written for the 1936 Broadway musical Knickerbocker Holiday and later used in the 1950 film September Affair.

What three strands produced our selection “Friendship” by K. Lee Scott?

December 15, 2020August 20, 2019 by debisimons

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

Ecclesiastes 4:12 says, “A threefold cord is not quickly broken.” Certainly there are at least three cords, or strands, of friendship that have characterized the relationship of composer K. Lee Scott with the Cherry Creek Chorale and especially with one of its members, Ron Lester.

Ron has been a member of the chorale for over 15 years, first joining us because he was looking for variety and fun in the music being performed as well as a certain amount of flexibility in rehearsal attendance due to his work schedule. (I wonder what other chorales he looked at! Our rehearsal schedule is pretty demanding, to my mind at least.) He ended up serving on the board in various capacities and feeling such a part of the group that when he and his wife Ann started estate planning, he says, “We thought it would be a lot more fun to give a gift to the Chorale now and be a part of that gift.”