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

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Image by falco from Pixabay

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.”

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A Smaller Version of the Brahms “Requiem”–“Nanie”

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“Orpheus and Eurydice” by Anselm Feuerbach, accessed via Wikimedia Commons, public domain

It has been fascinating to read about the life of Johannes Brahms, and his late composition “Nänie,” written over the course of a year from 1880-1881, is a good example of how he viewed relationships. This piece comes well over a decade after his Eine Deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) was finally completed in 1869, but both that major work and this single piece are focused on the theme of consolation for those who are mourning a death. (As I write this article in early February 2021 I’m planning to make my next project in book form to be on the Requiem. This is therefore a good warmup! If the subject of the Requiem intrigues you, be sure to check back on this website for updates. And of course the best way to be sure you do that is to subscribe to the blog. Go to the sidebar to do that.)

“Nänie” was written to honor the memory of Brahms’ friend Anselm Feuerbach, a painter who died at the tragically young age of 50. Brahms knew Feuerbach because of his own interest in art; he had a circle of friends who were painters, among them Feuerbach. In fact, the painter’s style was compared to that of Brahms: both were interested in severe classical restraints on personal emotion. Feuerbach’s paintings were focused primarily on Classical themes and subjects, so when he died Brahms’ choice of text illustrated the painter’s style as well as his own. The piece was dedicated to Feuerbach’s stepmother Henriette; more about her below.

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The Many Creative Wellsprings for the Musical “Guys and Dolls”

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English: Portion of title page of Guys and Dolls, Libretto and Vocal book, printed by Music Theatre International, 1978.

First, let’s define a few terms that will help along the way in outlining the wellsprings mentioned in the title above, particularly “libretto” or “lyrics” vs. “book.” I’ve run into these terms before and never quite gotten them straight. So the “libretto” (literally “little book” in Italian and typically used for opera) is the text of the sung parts, including the individual songs (or arias, again used primarily in opera) and any recitatives (that is, sung exposition). While an opera is usually all sung (but there are certainly exceptions such as The Magic Flute), musical theater typically has spoken parts as well. So the “book” is the compendium of everything the performers say or sing, as well as the stage directions. And thus the stage is set (ahem) for endless combinations, borrowings and re-workings. You’ll hear about someone getting an idea for a musical or an opera from seeing a play or reading a book and then going through the long and sometimes tortured process that will turn one format into another. Unless the creative mind behind it all is capable of doing everything—the words, the music, the staging—various roles have to be farmed out.

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Who are the two heavy hitters involved in the light, shimmering piece “A Boy and a Girl”?

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Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

And they are: Eric Whitacre, one of today’s most popular American composers of classical choral music, and Octavio Paz, Nobel-Prize-winning poet, essayist and diplomat. Quite a team!

Let’s start with Paz and his poem. While the title’s translation from the original Spanish is typically rendered as “A Boy and a Girl,” I ran into an interesting blog post that had this to say:

As a side note, the title “Los Novios” is very difficult to translate into English without losing something.  The word “novio” means a boyfriend or a romantic partner and comes from the Latin novus, or new.  The feminine form “novia” means the same thing, and in Spanish, if there are multiples in a group consisting of females and males, the plural word takes the masculine plural.  While “los novios” could be translated as “the boyfriends,” context here is clear that it is the sum of a boyfriend and a girlfriend and not some sort of homoerotic message.  Because “The Boyfriend and the Girlfriend” is an awkward title, I took the liberty of translating the title as “The Lovers,” which seems to me to capture the essence of what Paz was trying to convey. (from “The Lovers”: A New Translation of Octavio Paz’ “Los Novios”)

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What Serious Moral/Social Issue Is Addressed in the Musical “South Pacific”?

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Musical1949-SouthPacific-OriginalPoster.jpg
Original Broadway poster, 1949, accessed via Wikipedia

And the answer is: racial prejudice. If you don’t know the plot of this musical and think it’s just something lighthearted, you might be surprised by its content. The location is an island in the (where else?) south Pacific during World War II. The central conflict between the two main characters, Nellie the Naval nurse and Emile, the French planter with whom she falls in love, is that Nellie finds it very difficult to accept that Emile has been married before to a “dark-skinned Polynesian” and has two “mixed race” children. It’s only after Emile is almost killed in a secret mission to spy on the Japanese forces that Nellie realizes how much she loves him and his children. Another character, the Naval officer Cable, falls in love with a Polynesian girl, Liat, and that romance is also considered pretty scandalous. He decides that he can’t marry her because of how his family back home would react. He’s killed during the spy mission. But before he goes off to that fate he sings a very famous (and controversial at the time) song about how prejudice develops: “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught.”

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

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Image by Hans Braxmeier 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)

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What’s the Meaning of the Phrase “Whistle Down the Wind”?

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Image accessed via https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/whistle-down-the-wind.html

I am, of course, referring to the song from the musical by Andrew Lloyd Weber that premiered in 1996 and has been arranged for use by choral groups. But Weber wasn’t the first to title a major work by this name. Here’s the genealogy:

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Three Men, Three Countries, One Masterpiece—“Homeland”

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National Guard troops guarding the US Capitol building, Jan. 13, 2021, accessed via bbc.com.

Do you want to know my clearest memory of this piece? My choir had scheduled it for a March 2013 concert; when we sang it through for the first time at rehearsal I suddenly realized that the woman who sat next to me was crying. The words had hit her like a ton of bricks—her fiancé had been killed in Vietnam, she said. And indeed the words are very emotional, even more so when you know their history.

The first of the three men associated with this piece was Cecil Spring Rice, a British diplomat who served as ambassador to the US starting in 1912 and who wrote a poem named “Urbs Dei”

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The Wild and Wacky World of Wassailing

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no image attribution given on the website https://www.manmadediy.com/

Oh my goodness! If you’ve read many of my posts on this site you’re probably familiar with my saying, “Well, I thought this was a simple song . . .” But nowhere would this phrase be more appropriate than it is here, as I attempt to explain the concept of “wassailing” and then apply those ideas to two traditional Christmas songs that are often performed during the holidays, “Gloucestershire Wassail (Wassail, Wassail, All Over the Town)” and “Here We Come A-Wassailing,” with a bonus mention of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” which doesn’t directly mention wassailing but which contains wassail-adjacent ideas as you’ll see below.

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

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Image by Ioannis Ioannidis from Pixabay

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.

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