Art Songs

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

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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)

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Meet the Artists Behind Our Premiered Commission–Silvestri and Veros

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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.

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Three Lovely but Bittersweet Autumn-Themed Songs

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Image by Pepper Mint from Pixabay

Introduction to the Medley

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.

I could write an entire post about each of these beautiful pieces, but since I originally sang them as a medley I’m combining them into one. (See info at the bottom of this post about the medley and its performance.)

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

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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.”

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Blue Bird Thoughts

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Photo credit: Jim Simons

I’ve written about bluebirds before, when I asked why Uncle Remus had a bluebird on his shoulder in the song “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” and I revisited that image when I talked about “Over the Rainbow.” Now I want to re-revisit the topic in a short post about the short piece “The Blue Bird” by Charles V. Stanford with lyrics by Mary Coleridge. I probably can’t add anything to the musical analysis given below by a professional, so I’ll confine myself to some info on the author of the text and also about the composer.

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The Fascinating Backstory on Franz Biebl’s “Ave Maria”

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You just never know what you’re going to find out when you google something! I assumed (a common action for me) that Franz Biebl was someone who lived several hundred years ago, as the music has a very old-ish feel to me. Perhaps he lived in the 1600’s or 1700’s? And it certainly would never have occurred to me that:

1) the piece has become a favorite of brass bands, particularly marching bands, and 2) the piece was the subject of a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States.

But I’ll get to the info on these two fascinating facts in a minute.

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“Oread Farewell” and Its Many Meanings

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Overlooking Lawerence and the Kansas River. (Boston Public Library) (cropped).jpg
Old North College, the first building on the University of Kansas campus, at the northeast promontory of Mount Oread, looking north over Lawrence and the Kansas River, ca. 1867. Image accessed via Wikipedia.

One of the great privileges of performing classical music is that you get to delve into pieces written hundreds of years ago and others written within this century. If you’re fortunate you get to read or watch interviews with the composers and lyricists of modern music. Such is the case with the modern choral composer Dan Forrest, whose music my own choir has performed multiple times. We are also familiar with the work of poet/lyricist Anthony Silvestri, who provided the text. “Oread” was featured in our May 2018 concert as the closing piece, performed in the round.

So the first question is, “What’s an oread? And why is Forrest saying good-bye to whatever it is?” First things first. “Oread” is a term from Greek mythology meaning a mountain nymph. (Echo was one such, who was a consort of Zeus and was doomed by Hera, Zeus’s wife, to speak only the last words that had been spoken to her. Thus, when Echo fell in love with Narcissus, she couldn’t tell him how she felt and was forced to watch him falling in love with his own reflection in a pool.) So “oread” would be a suitable name for a mountain itself.

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The Rich Imagery in Ferril’s Texts for Effinger’s “Four Pastorales”

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Both Thomas Hornsby Ferril and Cecil Effinger are fascinating characters. Ferril was Colorado’s first poet laureate, holding that title from 1979 until his death in 1988. He was chosen to write the captions for the first-floor rotunda in the Colorado state capitol building in Denver, and his home in the Capitol Hill neighborhood is a historical and literary landmark. Effinger was a Colorado composer and contemporary of Ferril who should be much better known than he is, having written well over 150 works, including operas and symphonies. But his fame rests largely on the Pastorales, a fact that he was wont to get a little testy about at times. As he’s said, “I’ve got the Four Pastorales for Oboe and Chorus which has gone hog-wild all over the place!  It is done time and time again, you know, and others that I think are just as good, somehow don’t find their way!”

I would love to know how Effinger chose these four poems; I thought at first that Ferril had put them together into a set, but that’s not true. The poems are from several different books of Ferril’s poetry and don’t have a unifying theme that I can see. I’m going to guess that these four just happened to catch Effinger’s eye. The suite has a lovely, haunting oboe accompaniment which adds to its evocative power and is probably one reason for its popularity. Here are the four poems with my attempts to analyze/explain them without ruining the poetry.

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Is “Oh Hush Thee” a Christmas Song?

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Image from the Library of Congress, Storer, Florence Edith, artist created circa 1912

The original title of this poem is “Christmas Eve,” and it was published in a book of poems and short stories by Eugene Field called Christmas Tales and Christmas Verse. So those facts would seem to end the matter. It’s a lullaby being sung by a mother to her child at Christmas, with stars and angels in the mix. It must be Mary singing to the baby Jesus, right? Well, I don’t think so.

Why not? First of all, look at the illustration that goes with the poem. It’s of an early 1900’s mother and child—and note the “child” part, as it’s not a baby. Secondly, consider the title: “Christmas Eve,” not “Christmas Night.” Nit-picky to the max, I know, but still! It’s taking place the night before Christmas. I will also take a little credit myself here and say that I found the words of the song to be puzzling the first time I heard it, even before I knew the original title, because there seemed to be a muddle about who’s being addressed. The child who is being sung to sleep is told to “hear the Master calling” and reminded that “the Shepherd calls his little lambs.” It seems clear that the Master and Shepherd titles refer to someone other than the child, right? That’s the way I read it, anyway.

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What Can We Learn from a Taciturn Star?

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Image by TeeFarm from Pixabay

I have been absolutely salivating at the idea of sinking my teeth into this Frost poem. We tend to associate Frost with his familiar and simple poems: “Stopping by Woods,” “The Road Not Taken,” and perhaps “Mending Wall.” Even those poems can be mined for deeper meaning, but when you get to some of his other ones, well! You (or perhaps I) can go on just about forever.

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