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

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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)

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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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Who’s “She,” and What Mountain is She Comin’ Round?

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Picture This is another one of those endlessly variable folk songs with about a hundred verses. You might ask, though, “Okay, but who’s the ‘she’ who’s comin’ round the mountain?” Good question. I originally made an assumption here, thinking that this was a literal woman, but she’s not that in the original at all. Guess what ‘she’ actually is? A chariot. That’s right. This song is drawn from a spiritual about the Second Coming of Christ, and the “she” refers to the chariot that “King Jesus” will be riding. As with many spirituals, though, there may be an underlying meaning about freedom and the Underground Railroad.

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Britten’s Blunder but with a Bright Side–Choral Dances from Gloriana

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Benjamin Britten in his library
Britten in the mid-1960s, by Hans Wild; image accessed via Wikipedia.

I want you to imagine yourself in this situation: You’re a very popular English composer, becoming especially known for your operas. Your country has just gone through the rigors and horrors of World War II, the current king has died, and now a new queen is to be crowned. She’s young and quite attractive, and she’s been an inspiration during the war, speaking via radio to displaced children and joining an ambulance corps over the objections of her family. You’ve been asked to write an opera to be performed as part of the coronation festivities.

So what would be a good subject for said opera?

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A Motet by a Master

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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:

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A Neglected Gilbert & Sullivan Gem and Its Complicated Finale–The Gondoliers

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From Act I of the 1907 D’Oyly Carte production at the Savoy Theatre; image accessed via Wikipedia.

I’m a certified Gilbert & Sullivan junkie, as are my husband and his family. When I was in grade school I had a set of Golden Something-or-Other records and a little record player (yes, it’s true), and one of those ancient disks had G&S selections on it. I can remember listening over and over again to the Mikado’s “My Object All Sublime” and trying to figure out what on earth the words meant about the punishment doled out to a “billiard shark” (whatever that was): “On a cloth untrue/With a twisted cue/And elliptical billiard balls!” I finally realized that this was a pool table with a distorted tabletop, cues and balls. I’ve seen numerous productions of The Mikado and even two performances of the Hot Mikado, a jazz version that is, like, totally great. (The gentlemen of Japan are dressed in zoot suits.) I’ve seen H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance on both film and in live performances. (Check out the Linda Ronstadt/Kevin Kline/Angela Lansbury version.) I’ve seen a live performance of Patience, one of the lesser-known in the canon. But until I participated in a concert that included the finale from The Gondoliers I’d never even heard of this particular creation.

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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?

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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)

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