Behind the Music

Lynn Ahrens’ Wonderful Career with Musical Words

October 29, 2023March 2, 2022 by debisimons

Cover of cast recording, accessed via Wikipedia and used here in accordance with fair use guidelines.

What would you say about a career that started with a chance encounter in an advertising company’s break room and has since spanned over 50 years? I’d call it remarkable, and that term certainly applies to Lynn Ahrens, who was 22 years old and bored silly with her secretarial job in 1970. So she started bringing her guitar to work with her to break up the monotony by singing and playing over her lunch hour. One of the company’s executives walked by and heard her. He had gotten involved with an educational project called “Schoolhouse Rock” and thought she might be able to write a song for it. She ended up writing several songs for the series, with the first being “The Preamble.” (These three-minute animated shorts originally ran from 1973-1984, but the pilot was produced in 1971, about the time that Ahrens got her big break.) As she says in an interview, “It was dumb luck—being in the right place at the right time with the right person passing by.” (“’Schoolhouse Rock’ interview: songwriter/singer Lynn Ahrens”) The songs she wrote and sang for that project got her out of the secretarial pool and into creative work. (If you’re reading this and you don’t know what a secretarial pool is, well, you’re just too young.) She went on to a career as a copywriter, as a freelance TV writer, a jingle writer, a television producer of many network shows for young people (including a stint at “Captain Kangaroo,” one of my childhood faves), and ultimately a musical theater writer. But, as she says, “It all started there.”

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.”

Sweet Charity’s Sisterly Sourcing and Songs

August 21, 2023February 10, 2022 by debisimons

Actress Giulietta Masina in Nights of Cabiria; licensed under Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode

The Sourcing

The Broadway musical Sweet Charity opened in 1966 to rave reviews, sweeping up nine Tony nominations and winning one, lasting for a respectable 600+ performances and then being revived many times, both in the US and abroad. Bob Fosse won the Tony for choreography and then ended up directing the film version, his directorial debut in that genre. Everybody could be pretty happy about how this story about “a girl who wanted to be loved” turned out. But where did the idea for the whole thing come from in the first place?

All sources I’ve consulted agree that the precursor to the plot of Sweet Charity was the 1957 film by famous Italian director Federico Fellini called Nights of Cabiria, which concerns an ever-hopeful prostitute who never loses her optimism that someday she’ll find true love and happiness. And where did he get the idea for the plot, you ask? Well, often the source of ideas is completely unknown, even to the artist him/herself. (One of the most irritating questions you can ask an author is, “Where do you get the ideas for your books?” The only legitimate answer is usually a shrug, perhaps accompanied by an eye roll.) But for this story we do have at least somewhat of a source, probably gleaned from Fellini’s letters or other papers. It’s not terribly upbeat: “The film took its inspiration from news reports of a woman’s severed head retrieved in a lake and stories by Wanda, a shantytown prostitute Fellini met” on the set of a previous movie. (Wikipedia) The mystery of creativity, of course, is that lots of other people had read that head-in-the-lake story, and Wanda probably talked to lots of other people on the film set. But only Fellini got the idea of making those disparate elements into a movie. He started the film with his main character ending up in the river, not a lake, and still in possession of her head—but having been pushed in by her cad of a boyfriend who then stole all of her money. The story went on from there with Cabiria going from cad to cad; at the end she was left alone but still hopeful.

A Hard Truth Expressed Joyfully–Gloria Srikijkarn’s “Laugh, Sing, Rejoice”

June 21, 2022February 7, 2022 by debisimons

It’s an unusual concert at which there will be in attendance two composers of the music being performed. It’s even more unusual to have one of those composers actually singing in the choir. (We’re also singing an arrangement by a member of the choir; I’m going to try to get to that piece in a later post.) We’ve been privileged in the past to sing Gloria Srikijkarn’s rousing setting of Psalm 100; now we get to present her 2019 composition using lyrics from “Solitude” by the mid-19th-century American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Srikijkarn is a long-time member of the Cherry Creek Chorale and at present serves as the chair of our artistic committee.

I asked the composer about her creative process with this song, and she told me that when she was growing up her father had a book of poetry containing “Solitude.” (The poem has as an alternate title “The Way of the World.” Don’t know why.) As an adult Srikijkarn remembered the poem and decided to set it to music, but when she went back and read the whole thing she realized that it was much darker than she’d thought. Her first draft ended up being unusable, and she used just half of the lines in her finished piece. Here they are:

An Illuminating New Work–Elaine Hagenberg’s “Illuminare”

June 21, 2024January 24, 2022 by debisimons

The Commissioning Consortium Process

Elaine Hagenberg’s Illuminare was initially financed and publicized through a group of choirs that formed a commissioning consortium in 2021. This type of support for a major musical work is a classic case of a win-win situation. The composer can offer a way for groups to share the financial cost of a commission and is also assured of a certain number of performances right off the bat. The choirs are able to share in the project at a lowered cost without any diminution of quality. Indeed, for Illuminare, a 24-minute orchestrated piece, the cost-sharing aspects surely made the commission as a whole possible, as it would have been difficult for any one choir to undertake the financial burden of such a long work. All of the consortium choirs get to participate in the excitement of a performance premiere and (possibly) have the composer present. My own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale in the Denver area, was privileged to have Ms. Hagenberg on board for our final rehearsal. The composer was a full collaborator that evening, listening and critiquing gently but firmly.

Jan Garrett writes a paean to rain

June 21, 2022January 6, 2022 by debisimons

Oh my goodness. As I’ve said before in these posts, a huge plus for me as I research and write about the texts, composers and backgrounds of the programmed pieces for my beloved Cherry Creek Chorale is that I discover wonderful music and people that I’d never known existed. Such is the case with “I Dreamed of Rain” by Colorado composer Jan Garrett. What a character! Garrett’s been writing music for decades and won many awards, but had I ever heard of her? No, not at all.

Garrett describes herself as a “a jazz singer with a poet’s soul. A native of Colorado and a lifelong musician, she is a master teacher, wilderness vision quester, creativity guide, and (yes) certified laughing instructor.” I find that last item to be the most intriguing, don’t you? You can listen to a track of (I’m assuming) her and her husband, laughing uproariously, on her website. (Link is to the home page, with the audio button on the right sidebar.)

John Tavener and William Blake: Two Mystics Team Up to Produce a Masterpiece

July 11, 2024December 1, 2021 by debisimons

This image represents copy C, object 8 of Blake’s original poem, currently held by the Library of Congress, public domain.

I have been privileged to sing John Tavener’s “The Lamb” twice with the Cherry Creek Chorale here in the Denver area. It’s interesting for me to look back on that first performance in 2013 and to realize how little I understood the piece’s complexities. Our 2021 concert gave me a chance to dig a little deeper.

Let’s start with the author of the text, William Blake. If you remember your English literature class, you’ll know that he was an early Romantic mystic who claimed to have had visions starting in early childhood; he was actually more interested in his art than his poetry. He and his wife put out an illustrated edition of some of his poems, with a few initial copies including his own hand-colored engravings. “The Lamb” is from his poetry collection Songs of Innocence. It seems like a simple little ditty, almost a child’s poem, until you look at it closely, which I will now proceed to do. Here’s my own line-by-line analysis:

Was the Singing of the Angels on Christmas Night “Soft,” “Sweet,” or “Faint”?

October 27, 2022November 30, 2021 by debisimons

Image by falco from Pixabay. Kind of a cool contemporary stained-glass depiction of the angels and shepherds.

Let me start out by questioning the very supposition in the above title: did the angels in the Christmas story actually do any singing at all?

Here’s the relevant text from the translation I know best, the King James Version:

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, . . . And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men. (Luke 2:9-10, 13-14)

Who were the Magi?

October 11, 2023November 23, 2021 by debisimons

So, to begin, let me just say, once again, with feeling, that the Magi did not show up on Christmas night with the shepherds. The Gospel of Matthew 2:11 says, “On coming to the house, they saw the child with his mother Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him.” At this point it makes sense to think that it’s been at least a year since the Magi set out from their home. I know that those colorfully-bedecked camels (which are never mentioned in the biblical narrative) add quite a splash to the manger scenes we set up every year, but they weren’t there.

What’s the Historical Background of “Do You Hear What I Hear?”?

June 21, 2022November 21, 2021 by debisimons

Note the nicety of the double question mark, please!

Okay. If you’ve ever thought about it at all, didn’t you assume that this Christmas carol was along the lines of an old folk song? I certainly did, at least partly because the words don’t make a lot of sense—to me, anyway. But when I googled “Do you hear what I hear meaning” I found something quite different, and rather surprising, about its source.