Sweet Charity’s Sisterly Sourcing and Songs

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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.

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

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Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

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:

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

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The Commissioning Consortium Process

Image by Stefan Keller from Pixabay

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.

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Jan Garrett writes a paean to rain

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Image by Fotoauge from Pixabay

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.)

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

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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:

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

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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)

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Who were the Magi?

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Image accessed via Pixabay.

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.

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

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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.

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Is the “Bell Carol” Only About . . . Bells? Not By a Long Shot!

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Yet another of my many posts that starts out with the words “I assumed,” as in “I assumed that the ‘Bell Carol’ was a traditional Christmas folk song.” Well, it’s always helpful to read the info on the sheet music itself. Over the title are the words “to D. V. W., seventy years young,” and at the bottom of the first page is the statement “This carol was commissioned by the Bach Choir in celebration of the seventieth birthday of Sir David Willcocks.” The composition date is 1989, and Willcocks would indeed have been 70 that year since he was born in 1919. Was Willcocks especially fond of Christmas music, or bells, or both? The answer to that question is lost to history, I’m afraid. The author of both words and music is William Mathias, who lived until 1992 and seems to have been composing right up until the end of his life.

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Dreidels and Other Hanukkah Traditions–What’s What?

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I’ve written quite a bit about Hanukkah in previous posts, specifically about the significance of latkes as traditional food during this holiday and about the meaning of the menorah as it relates to the eight days of miraculous oil, but I haven’t written anything about dreidels, so here goes:

As with anything to do with folk traditions, the origins of this item and the game you play with it are very murky, with several strands of meaning attached to them, and with some later interpretations being projected back onto the past. It is clear that games of chance such as this one, in which you win or lose depending on how an object lands after you spin it or throw it, are very ancient. Spinning tops specifically date all the way back to the ancient Babylonians, who played with clay versions as early as 3500 BC. And—get this—there was a wooden spinning top in King Tut’s tomb! Very, very cool.

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