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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What’s the Real Story Behind “Grimsby Town”?

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c1900 Art Print Engraving Tragedy Drowned Fisherman Washed Ashore By H.Guillen – Original Magazine Print, accessed from Amazon.com.

The short answer that this folk song describes an actual event that took place on February 8 and 9, 1889. That being said, there’s an almost endless array of discussion/argument about its wording. To give you just a taste of this backing and forthing, there are whole threads on discussion forums talking about why the song says “from Yarmouth down to Scarborough” when Scarborough is clearly north of Yarmouth. (Don’t believe me? Here’s the link to Google maps.) Since I’m no sailor, I can’t pretend to understand the reasoning as to why this wording is perfectly accurate in nautical terms, but it has something to do with the direction of the winds and currents. I think. And that’s just one small point in the whole mix. If you’re of a mind to do some reading yourself, google “Grimsby Town fishing disaster” and you’ll have more than enough to keep you busy. (Don’t just google “Grimsby Town” on its own, as all you’ll get is stuff about their football club—soccer to us ignorant Americans. Very interesting in its way, of course, but not much to our point here.)

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About the lyrics to “Cailleach an airgid”–say wh-a-a-a-a-t?

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I know. This song is, like, seriously crazy. Right? Well, yes and no.

First of all, the crazy part. Or at least the let’s-not-take-this-too-seriously part. This is a get-up-and-dance, stomp-those-feet kinda tune. (Okay, I’ll try not to use any more hyphens.) The words don’t really matter all that much in the final analysis. I’ve been in a Celtic concert before in which we sang a song about a lonely fish! By comparison this one is a model of reason and logic. Still, by the time it has repeated “Si do Mhaimeoi I” about five hundred times any sense of the words is lost, whether you know the translation or not.

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“Danny Boy” and His Descendants–A Musical Journey through Time

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Where did the tune originate?

The tune used for “Danny Boy” is a true folk melody, originally called “Derry Air,” because it was first written down in County Derry, Ireland, in the town of Limavady. Once Ireland became an official part of Britain, the county was renamed “Londonderry,” with the choice of name somewhat determined by one’s political views. But whatever the name of the county, the origin story seems fairly straightforward: Jame Ross, a collector of Irish traditional folk music, heard a harpist (or a fiddler, depending on the version, and usually identified as blind) performing in the street outside her house and rushed out to copy down the tune he was playing. Unfortunately, she neglected to get the performer’s name, but she sent in her notated manuscript, along with a number of others she had collected. to the musicologist George Petrie, whose 1855 book The Ancient Music of Ireland listed the tune as an anonymous air but with a note attributing its collection to Ross. The tune was published as an instrumental piece with no lyrics but quickly became extremely popular with songwriters. The most well-known of these settings is the song “Danny Boy,” written in 1910 by an English lawyer named Frederic Weatherly. The meaning of the lyrics has been consistently misunderstood, however, leading to the next question:

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Was Annie Moore in “Isle of Hope, Isle of Tears” a Real Person?

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Why yes. I’m glad you asked.

First, a little personal context. I’ve just spent awhile trying to find a picture that has haunted me ever since I visited Ellis Island back in the summer of 2010. I think it’s one of the many blown-up photographs that line the Great Hall, the area where immigrants were initially processed, but I haven’t been able to find it. So I’ll just describe it: a woman on her hands and knees, with a bucket and a brush, scrubbing a hallway. Her back is to the picture and you can’t see her face. Out of all the old photographs I saw that day I remember only this one. To me it’s a representation of the life that many of these people faced. On that same trip we also toured a tenement museum, trying to imagine the lives of people just like the woman in that photo, living in crowded apartment buildings with no running water and barely enough space to breathe. People slept in all sorts of strange contortions, the most memorable being that of the boys who had their upper bodies on a couch and their feet on chairs. (Visit the Tenement Museum the next time you’re in NYC!)

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In Which I Do a Little English-Teachersplaining about Thomas Moore’s “Sing, Sing”

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Léon Bazille Perrault [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
A song about singing is a great choice for a choral concert! So what’s the deal with the lyrics for this song? Well, first let me take a look at the poet himself:

Thomas Moore was an Irishman who lived from 1779-1852. He had a long and varied career, as they say, which could have ended much sooner if the duel he was supposed to fight in 1806 had not been stopped by the authorities; he forever afterward had to deal with rumors that his opponent (the editor of a critical review) had been given an unloaded pistol.

Eventually Moore was persuaded to write lyrics to some already-established Irish airs. These songs included the more-famous “The Last Rose of Summer” and “Believe Me, If All These Endearing Young Charms.”

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How Many Double Meanings Are There in “And You Will Sleep”?

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The choir to which I belong performed this piece only two years after its 2015 premier. The composer, Philip Biedenbender, was a senior at St. Olaf College at the time and a member of the famous choir attached to the school. He’s gone on to build a career, with many other works to his credit. You can visit his website here. Such a great joy to present works by young, up-and-coming artists! 

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Where Did We Get the Story of “The Little Drummer Boy”?

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One of the joys of writing the material on this site is that I have an excuse to dive into the meanings of Christmas songs that I’ve been hearing all my life and always vaguely wondered about.  “The Little Drummer Boy” certainly falls into that category. I sort of assumed that it fell into the genre of stories about gifts brought to the Christ child, and indeed it does, but there’s a surprising amount to say about it beyond that general idea. Let’s start with its origin. (As I’m writing this post I’m listening to the Pentatonix version; you can access the video below.) The song was written in 1941 by a woman named Katherine K. Davis, an American composer and music teacher. Out of her 600+ compositions she is known today only for this one piece. When first published, the heading included the words “Czech Carol freely transcribed by K.K.D.” However, the original carol has never been found, although there is apparently a Czech traditional lullaby that is sometimes listed as the source even though it doesn’t really resemble the carol. Who knows? And I don’t read Czech, so even if I could find it I wouldn’t be able to tell you what it means!

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Mary’s Magnificent “Magnificat”

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Mary and Elizabeth meeting; the Magnificat
“The Visitation” by Philippe de Champaigne, public domain

This is another one of those posts where I may get completely carried away. I’ll try to rein myself in. I want to start out with some info about the composer of the setting I have sung, David N. Childs.  He sounds like an extremely busy composer with lots of irons in the fire. I would encourage you to take a look at his professional website, River Avon Productions, just to get a taste of what he’s up to. Interesting little note: he’s married to a laryngologist. Isn’t that like, so cool? Somebody in one of his choirs is having vocal problems? No prob! He can call in his wife to diagnose the case.

When the choir to which I belong performed this piece in our Christmas 2017 concert, we had the opportunity as we have so many times before to publicize the work of a living composer. It’s so great to be able to do this! You don’t just look the artist up on Wikipedia; you get to see what he/she is up to right now. I’m a little tickled to see that Childs is more than happy to fulfill commissions for “video gaming.”

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What Are the “Gates” in “Eil Nora Alilah”?

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This piece repeats the phrase “bish’al han’ilah”–”as the gates begin to close.” So what are these gates?

So much to say here! Let’s start out with the context of these particular words and indeed of the lyrics as a whole. It’s not tied to Hanukkah but to Yom Kippur, the “Day of Atonement,” and is typically sung at the closing service in observance of this special date on the Jewish calendar. But where did the whole thing start? To find that out we have to go back to the book of Leviticus in the Hebrew Bible, in which God spells out the ceremonies that are to take place on the original Day of Atonement:God spoke to Moses:

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