Sacred Music Archives - Page 3 of 6

Jocelyn Hagen Encourages Us to Pray and Sing

June 21, 2022February 21, 2022 by debisimons

I’ve had this experience many times: I get my new music for an upcoming concert with my choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, take a look, and see composers’ names that are completely unfamiliar to me. Then I start doing research for these posts and find out that these unknown people are quite active in the world of choral music. Such was the case as I leafed through our sheet music for the March 2022 concert centered around works by American women and saw the name “Jocelyn Hagen” on the piece “I Will Sing and Pray.”

A Timeless Text Set by a Timely Composer—Elaine Hagenberg’s “Alleluia”

January 26, 2026August 18, 2021 by debisimons

One of the greatest pleasures for me in writing these music posts lies in finding out about choral composers who are active today. Yes, it’s always rewarding to find out more about the creative geniuses of the past, and I’m typically surprised when diving into the life of someone such as, say, Antonio Vivaldi or Robert Schumann. So fascinating! But guess what? I can’t go onto those guys’ websites and use the contact form. I can’t message them on Facebook. It’s very gratifying to get info straight from the composer’s mouth, as it were, as I’ve been privileged to do a number of times.

So I was pleased to find out that we’re singing a piece by Elaine Hagenberg for the October 2021 concert of the Cherry Creek Chorale, my beloved community choir. Our conductor, Brian Leatherman, had told us previously that a consortium of choirs had commissioned a 20-minute piece from Hagenberg which will be premiered in May 2022, but I didn’t know until the music list came out that we were also performing an already-published short work of hers. The title led me to believe that we were singing the Randall Thompson version, which we have done before and which is seriously, seriously great. But so is the Hagenberg piece! My take, as a totally underqualified music analyst, is that Thompson is . . . sturdier? And Hagenberg more . . . lyrical? Or is that too gender stereotypical? What I think is really interesting is that Thompson’s piece is more than double the length of Hagenberg’s but that he uses only the single word “alleluia,” while Hagenberg has a middle section in which she uses text from St. Augustine. Very different approaches, totally masterful results.

A Rich American Musical Tradition in “Hark! I Hear the Harps Eternal”

November 21, 2022February 17, 2021 by debisimons

There’s approximately ONE TON of information that I could include in this article, ranging from Gregorian chant to early American shape-note singing to the great Alice Parker and her arrangements for the Robert Shaw Chorale, of which “Hark” is one of many. I’m going to rein myself in at least somewhat, though, fascinating as all of this is.

Let me just briefly say first of all that we haven’t, of course, always had the musical notation that we have today, nor have we had the mathematical theory behind it. The Greek mathematician Pythagoras is the one who came up with at least the basic ideas of how pitches work. (So he wasn’t just about triangles.) He figured out that a plucked string vibrated at a certain frequency, or pitch, and that a string half that length vibrated an octave above it. In other words, the same note, but higher. I guess one of these days I’ll have to read up on how he figured all of this out, if indeed we have any info about that process at all. Then, as far as we know, it took only about 1500 years for the notation system of today to get its start, in connection with what we call “Gregorian chant,” used in services of the Roman Catholic Church. But this system didn’t really specify pitches but only direction of pitches—up or down. Someone who knew the melody had to teach the monks or nuns or whatevers the actual tune. The music, an oral (or aural) medium, had to be passed down orally, that is, by memory. But that idea shouldn’t be terribly strange to us, as we know that verbal material was also passed down orally. Ancient poets and bards who didn’t have access to writing recited long stories that they had learned “by heart.”

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

February 18, 2026January 21, 2021 by debisimons

Wooden carving of an Jewish prophet or preacher — Image from Pixabay

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)

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:

How did William Mathias attain the honor of having one of the largest audiences ever to hear the premier of a musical work?

March 8, 2023April 2, 2020 by debisimons

How large was that audience? Well, estimates vary–all the way from 750 million to one billion. And I was one of them, folks.

Oh how well do I remember the early morning of July 29, 1981, when my mother came into the bedroom at 3:30 AM to get me up so that we could watch the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer live on my parents’ color TV. (The festivities began at around 10:30 AM British Summer Time, which is 7 hours ahead of Mountain Daylight Time, thus the unearthly rising time.) All I had at my apartment was a little black-and-white set, so we’d decided that I’d come over and spend the night and then get up with her. (I think my dad was working his night shift at the Post Office so he was out of the picture, in more ways than one—there’s no way he would have gotten up to watch it, I’m sure.) I remember groaning when she woke me up and saying, “I don’t want to do it” or something equally graceless, to which she said, “What? You don’t want to get up? You want to miss this?” So I heaved myself out of bed and we watched the whole thing. I have to say that my most vivid memory of the ceremony itself was thinking that the train on Diana’s dress looked kind of . . . strange. Like a hugely-long apron stretching down the aisle. Sorry! For some reason Diana did not consult me about the design of her gown. I also remember watching her climb out of that Cinderella coach and having to pull all those yards of silk out after her. Just as I thought, ‘Wow, that dress is really wrinkled,’ the commentator of the moment said that the dress had been made of heavyweight silk that would shed its wrinkles quickly. Well, maybe so.

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)

Parts of Vivaldi’s “Gloria” Sound Very Christmas-y. What Gives?

December 15, 2020February 26, 2019 by debisimons

The texts of the first two sections of Vivaldi’s Gloria are the words of the angels in their announcement of Christ’s birth, words that are sung repeatedly in Christmas music, either in Latin or English:

Gloria in excelsis Deo
Glory to God in the highest

Et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis.
And on earth peace to men of good will.

What Groups Formed Vivaldi’s Clientele for His Many Works?

December 15, 2020February 20, 2019 by debisimons

Here’s what you may already know about Antonio Vivaldi:

1. He wrote The Four Seasons.

2. He . . . wrote lots of other stuff, behaving kind of like a one-man composition factory.

3. Ummm, he was known as “the red priest”?

We’ll dispose of #3 first, as that’s the easiest to address: the nickname is a reference to Vivaldi’s hair color, and he was ordained as a priest in the Roman Catholic church at age 25, so that’s that. (Although of course you can’t see his real hair in the picture.)

Lambs in the “Requiem”

February 19, 2019 by debisimons

To begin with this week I’m bringing back some material that I wrote two years ago about the Mozart Requiem. Hey, we’re all in favor of recycling, aren’t we? I was struck by Rutter’s choice to put two sheep- or lamb-related sections together; the “Agnus Dei” from the Latin Mass and Psalm 23 as it is worded in the Book of Common Prayer.