Two Hagenberg Hits

Table of Contents

“By Night”
“You Do Not Walk Alone”

My own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, has performed quite of few of Elaine Hagenberg’s choral compositions, and we were privileged to be part of the original commissioning consortium for her first extended work, Illuminare. She burst on the classical choral world in 2013 with “I Will Be a Child of Peace,” an arrangement of a Shaker hymn, and hasn’t looked back since. (When Ms. Hagenberg came to one of our final rehearsals for Illuminare she graciously submitted to some Q&A, and of course one question was “How did you get started composing?” She said she’d always had a lot of hobbies and decided to try composing. Well . . . I think her getting started as a composer was a little more challenging than, say, trying out that first crocheting pattern. But we were all charmed by her self-deprecation.)

“By Night”

For the Cherry Creek Chorale‘s March 2024 concert we performed two of Hagenberg’s pieces that fit in with the overall theme of the concert, “Hope’s Journey.” They are both gorgeous, and the texts are very different from each other. I’m going to start with the newest one of the two, “By Night,” which was published in 2022. Hagenberg used an excerpt from a poem of that same name by the American poet, novelist and short-story writer Harriet Prescott Spofford who lived from 1853-1921. Spofford herself is a fascinating character; I’ve thoroughly enjoyed reading about her. She reminds me a great deal of Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women, who lived during roughly the same period of time and who, like Spofford, turned to writing not only as a creative outlet but also as a way to support her family. In Spofford’s case this need to contribute financially to her family stemmed from her father’s ill health and her mother’s reaction to that situation, such that both parents became completely disabled and unable to work. “As Harriet was the eldest child, she felt the need of making her talents available, and began courageously to work, contributing to the story-papers of Boston, earning small pay with a great deal of labor. She once wrote fifteen hours a day, and continued her toil for years. These early stories have never been acknowledged or collected.”¹ Spofford eventually gained some recognition with the short story “In a Cellar,” described as “a sparkling story of Parisian life,” and which the editor of the Atlantic Monthly at first refused to publish since he thought it must be a translation from the French and not Spofford’s own work. Once he was convinced that the story was original to her he published it, and from that time on her work was welcomed by the leading periodicals of the day. (I did make an attempt to get through the story myself but found that, alas, the sparkle seems to have worn off.)

“By Night” is not one of Spofford’s best-known poems, and I’ve been unable to locate it online, which raises the question of where Hagenberg found it. After all, if it isn’t online, it might as well not exist, right? I’m always intrigued by the question of where choral composers find their texts. Will you permit me a brief excursion here? The work of writing choral music differs greatly from that of writing music on its own. You may be commissioned to write a piece with the proviso that you use a certain text, or you may love a certain poem and decide to set it to music, or you may have an idea for a melody and look for words that fit, or you may ask someone to write the text for you, or you may write it yourself. I was fascinated to run across a brief video on the website Teachable.com in which Hagenberg discusses this very question within the context of a course she is offering to aspiring composers. Follow the link below² if you’d like to be directed to the site and watch it. I was very pleased to figure out what book of quotations she was holding up as one of her main sources; I include a link³ to that resource also.

Hagenberg changed the original poem quite a bit, rearranging some of the lines and omitting the final verse. Here are the Spofford and Hagenberg versions side by side:

Original poem by Spofford (taken from the PDF on Hagenberg’s website):

She leaned out into the midnight,
And the summer wind went by,
The scent of the rose on its silken wing
And a song its sigh.

Deep in the tarn the mountain
A mighty phantom gleamed,
Shadow and silver and floating cloud
Over it streamed.

And, in depths below, the waters
Answered some mystic height,
As a star stooped out of the depths above
With its lance of light.

And she thought, in the dark and the fragrance,
How vast was the wonder wrought
If the sweet world were but the beauty born
In its Maker’s thought.

And up from the tarn and its phantom
Wandered her weary glance
Where that star, as the awful ranks wheeled by,
Held its shining lance.

Hagenberg’s version as used in her piece:

Deep in the tarn the mountain
A mighty phantom gleamed,

She leaned out into the midnight,
And the summer wind went by,
The scent of the rose on its silken wing
And a song its sigh.

And, in depths below, the waters
Answered some mystic height,
As a star stooped out of the depths above
With its lance of light.

And she thought, in the dark and the fragrance,
How vast was the wonder wrought
If the sweet world were but the beauty born
In its Maker’s thought.

The poem is described on Hagenberg’s product page as depicting “a young woman who discovers a bold new world of thrilling beauty when she ventures beyond her familiar walls.” But I’m not at all sure Spofford had that meaning in mind. Let me pick it apart a little. First, a definition: a “tarn” is a small mountain lake with no visible tributaries and often with steep rocky sides. Also, just to pick a little more, I almost think Spofford left out a word in the line “Deep in the tarn the mountain”–shouldn’t it read “Deep in the tarn of the mountain”? I wonder if by any chance this poem was one of those desperately-churned-out-for-money items that Spofford wrote during her 15-hour days and it was sent off to the publisher without being carefully proofread? There’s no date supplied. Be that as it may, the imagery is certainly striking and beautiful, but the young woman doesn’t really “venture” anywhere. She seems to be leaning out of a window and looking into the night. The “mighty phantom” that gleams in the tarn is, I guess, the reflection of the star with its “shining lance.” The young woman wonders if the whole world that she sees is but the thought, or the imagination, of its “Maker,” presumably God. But that last stanza, the one Hagenberg omits, has a twist: the woman’s glance is “weary” and the ranks of the stars are “awful,” a word than can mean “awe-inspiring” but also “terrible” or “dreadful.” Since Spofford was known for her Gothic imagination, expressed particularly in her fiction,⁴ it seems perfectly possible that she has a darker meaning here than one would suppose without that last verse. But since the poem has long since passed into the public domain, Hagenberg, or indeed anyone else, can do with the text whatever he or she pleases. So the composer has written lovely, dramatic music for the poem and included optional strings and percussion with the piano accompaniment. I note with interest that the piece is the result of a commission from a high school choir; I wonder if that director chose the text or if it was left up to the composer. Whatever the origin of this choice, it has resulted in a truly remarkable piece. Below is the performance video from Hagenberg’s website, performed by the commissioning chorus, the Timber Creek High School Chamber Choir, Adrian Kirtley, conductor.

“You Do Not Walk Alone”

The text for this piece is much more straightforward than that of the previous one: it’s a traditional Irish blessing. Or a Celtic blessing. Or even a Gaelic blessing. Those terms are somewhat interchangeable, with the emphasis on the “somewhat.” And what’s a “blessing,” anyway? The best one-word definition that I’ve run across is “approval.” Think about it: if a pastor or other officiant pronounces a blessing at the end of the wedding, say, he or she is saying that the wedding is approved. If you say a blessing at the beginning of a meal, you’re usually giving thanks for the food, thus implying that it’s worth the gratitude. If you give something your blessing, even for something trivial (“I’m giving my roommate my blessing to be able to move out of the apartment without paying a penalty”) then you’re giving approval. Remember all those Victorian novels with plots revolving around getting the father’s blessing on a marriage? Well, there you go.

The specific Irish blessing that Hagenberg uses for this piece is usually identified by the line “You Do Not Walk Alone,” although I’ve also seen it as a “Blessing for Comfort in Time of Grief.”

May you see God’s light on the path ahead
when the road you walk is dark.
May you always hear, even in your hour of sorrow,
the gentle singing of the lark.
When times are hard may hardness never turn your heart to stone.
May you always remember when the shadows fall you do not walk alone.

The Cherry Creek Chorale has also sung Hagenberg’s “Deep Peace,”⁵ the text of which resembles a traditional Irish/Celtic/Gaelic blessing, but which has a known author. The whole question of what constitutes folk or traditional music is discussed in my post about that piece. The description of this music for this piece pays tribute to its traditional roots, saying that “voices and piano hint at Celtic musical elements.” It’s truly lovely, and while others have set this text to music it’s Hagenberg’s version that pops up first on Google searches–and rightly so, I’d say. As with “By Night” and many other Hagenberg pieces, this one came about as a result of a commission, from the River City Men’s and Women’s Choruses of Jacksonville, Florida. I don’t see a YouTube video of this group’s performance, and while the video on the composer’s website shows many gorgeous scenes of Ireland, I fell in love with this one. (And yes, I know it’s technically not a live performance, as it was most certainly dubbed–but oh well! I’m a sucker for this sort of thing.)