Seraphim Singers programs
I wrote program notes for Boston's Seraphim Singers for five years. Here is a sample from their recent Winter 2017 performances:
Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983)
Lamentaciones de Jeremias Propheta (1946)
O vos omnes qui transitis per viam
Ego vir videns paupertatem meam
Recordare Domine quid acciderit nobis
The music of Argentinian modernist Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) is captivating, exhilarating, and demanding, especially for vocalists. At once lyrical and rhythmic, his music is known for informing classical structures with elements from South American folk and popular music. But his three Latin Lamentations for a cappella mixed chorus burn white hot: they are results of his forced exile from Argentina in the mid-1940s. Similarly, the Jewish prophet Jeremiah’s texts lament the Babylonian exile and mourn the destruction of Jerusalem in the 6th century BCE. Christian composers set these Old Testament verses as Easter motets to show their relevance to Christ’s Passion in the New Testament.
After signing a petition supporting civil liberties in 1945, Ginastera was forced out of his teaching positions by the pre-Perón junta. The Lamentations, finished during his Guggenheim-supported work in New York City in 1946, are influenced by Bartók, and they precede his dissonant dodecaphonic music by over a decade. These motets reveal a surprising reverence and intimacy that may surprise listeners, and the development of each movement is complex, with unifying threads and hallucinatory shifts of voicing that subtly morph from one textual image to another.
Ginastera’s varied responses to the lamentation texts are dramatic and compassionate: a hushed invocation, interrupted by anguished, desperate howls and powerful declamatory singing, introduces the first movement: O vos omnes (O, you that walk past, do you care?). Taken from chapter two of the Lamentations, the text describes God’s anger, cutting “off all the strength of Israel,” and drawing “back His right hand from before the enemy.” The following tightly controlled fugal section in Baroque style illustrates God’s wrath against the nation. It culminates in vocal pyrotechnics and high fortissimo chords (Ginastera railing against the turmoil in his native country?). Stamping and raging to the end, the first movement concludes with a furious return, forcefully fusing dance and religious prophecy.
In stark contrast, movement two (Ego vir videns/ I am he who has seen sorrow) explores the lower, darker registers of each voice part in rich Renaissance-style counterpoint. Slow, expressive suspensions and quartal harmonies heighten the sense of intense agony and despair. This text from chapter three of the Lamentations laments that a wrathful God has “driven and brought me into darkness without any light,” but when the speaker describes his hope for rescue, Ginastera transforms the harmony from darkness to miraculous, consoling light.
Recordare, from chapter five of the Lamentations, begins with a gentle plea to “look and consider our disgrace” and ends in praise. Ginastera begins in a free contrapuntal idiom preferring solemn fourths and fifths, and shifts to an Allegro (“turn back to you...renew our days as in the beginning”) featuring a wide exploration of keys, jagged melodies, and dissonant fugatos. The work’s majestic, uplifting conclusion confirms “the Lord will remain forever.”
Calvin Hampton (1938-1984) There Was War in Heaven (1975)
The motet There Was War in Heaven sets English text from the Book of Revelation (12:7-8, 10). Angels fight dragons, loud voices ring out, some hurled out of heaven, and battles are won in this apocalyptic vision. The composer frames descending cantus firmus-like melodies in C minor with rhythmic fanfares and contrapuntal motives shaped like a dragon’s tail. After the vocal battle, Hampton moves into an expansive, lyrical, and ultimately ascending section beginning in B major at the text, “neither was their place any more in heaven.” A short chromatic coda soothes the wounds of conflict and draws the work to a consoling conclusion in C major. Commissioned by Michael McGuire, in memory of George W. Stratton, the anthem was premiered atSt. Michael & All Angels Church, Buffalo, New York, in August 1975.
Calvin Hampton (1938-1984) was a widely respected composer of solo organ and choral works, and as early as the 1960s the renowned British hymnologist Erik Routley (1917-1982) dubbed him “the greatest living writer of hymn tunes.” Many of his hymns were first sung at Calvary Episcopal Church in New York City (where he performed free midnight concerts on Fridays from 1972-1982), and the best are collected in The Calvin Hampton Hymnary (G.I.A. Publications).
After establishing himself as a concert performer on the organ and ondes Martenot, he died in 1984, leaving a vast canon of published works and unpublished manuscripts. The most notable of these include his Concerto for Saxophone Quartet, Strings, and Percussion (premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 1977), a full cantata for chorus and orchestra entitled Live or Die: A Ceremony of Healing, which was commissioned in 1983 to honor the memory of gay and lesbian victims and survivors of the Holocaust, a Suite [for organ] in Five Movements commissioned for Christ & St. John Lutheran Church in West New York, New Jersey (1981), and an organ-dominated vocal postlude (1983) combining Stanford’s famous hymn tune Engelberg with Fred Pratt Green’s 1972 text, When in Our Music God Is Glorified. The composer called this last work “an Edwardian romp,” and it has become an unofficial anthem for the American Guild of Organists.
Hilary Tann (1947-) Paradise (2008)
This is Welsh composer Hilary Tann’ first setting of George Herbert’s poem Paradise; in 2011, she interpolated much of this music into a longer choral cantata for the University of Rochester (Exultet Terra: Among the Trees). The original motet in Latin and English received its American premiere at Harvard in 2008 and was performed in Boston and Cambridge last October by the RenMen. It was commissioned by the London-based professional choir Tenebrae and premiered at the 75th Anniversary of the Welsh Gŵyl Gregynog Festival in 2008. This location had special resonance for the composer, as she spent most of her childhood in the coal-mining valleys of South Wales, and the poet she chose to set (George Herbert, 1593-1633) was born only a few miles away. Recently, Ms. Tann was named Composer in Residence by Ty Cerdd (the main grant-making and sponsoring organization for choral music in Wales), and the National Youth Choir of Wales featured Paradise on their 2015 tour of South America and performances through the UK. Since 1980, she has been John Howard Payne Professor of Music at Union College, Schenectady (NY), and founded the Union College Orchestra.
Ms. Tann writes, “The Persian word ‘paradise’ means ‘walled garden’ — such as the walled gardens of the Taj Mahal. Again and again biblical texts refer to trees as images of peace and joy: ‘All the trees of the wood sing out at the presence of the Lord.’ Although present, the environmental and religious aspects of the words are not the primary focus of the composition. While listening to the piece the audience is invited to consider the beauty of the pastoral world and the sense of peace and joy that such a world gives to those who are fortunate to live ‘among thy trees.’ I hope that contemplation of this topic will lead to enhanced enjoyment of the natural world and, as a consequence, its preservation.”
The poet, who served both as the Public Orator for Cambridge University and served a parish in Salisbury, England as its rector, came from a family who encouraged the arts (John Donne dedicated his Holy Sonnets to Herbert’s mother. About the text, Ms. Tann writes, “His beautiful poem, Paradise, has long appealed to readers both for its sentiment and for its successively “pruned” end-rhymes. When I learned that one of the root meanings of the word “paradise” is “walled garden,” I knew this poem would be particularly appropriate for the 75th Anniversary of the Gregynog Festival. The straightforward (though “growing”) setting of Herbert’s poem is framed by phrases in Vulgate Latin that are gradually “pruned” to a bell-like echoing figure.”
A Latin quotation from Psalm 95 winds through the work, framing Herbert’s text with a 25-measure introduction and a 42-measure coda. Each short verse of Herbert’s poem is followed by a fragment of the Latin text, which also acts as a descant in the second and fourth stanzas. Tann chooses to develop each English stanza with a gradually increasing number of voices (duets that grow into trios and sextets, or sequential duets that stack up to create a full choral texture. She contrasts syllabic, largely homophonic English with fragmented and meandering sprigs of Latin: Herbert’s approach to “pruning” the last words of each line originally made Tann hesitant, but she decided that the pruning “let in more light,” and developed “three [musical] tree shapes at the beginning which are quite full. Then we go into the poem, and then at the end the tree-shapes are hollowed out into shorter, recognizable fragments.”
Our second triptych of compositions contrasts two pleas for peace with a call to action from American poet Thomas Merton.
McNeil Robinson II (1943-2015)
Missa brevis for chorus and organ (1996)
“Neil” Robinson maintained an international career as a performer while serving as the longtime organist at Park Avenue Synagogue (1965-2012), Director of Music and Organist the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, and the Chair of the organ departments at the Manhattan School of Music and Mannes College of Music. A Juilliard-trained organist, he studied privately with Marcel Dupré in Paris, played several of Fauré’s organs, and premiered and commissioned works by many composers. An internationally renowned recitalist, he is recognized as one of the all-time great European and American organists, and personally underwrote the AGO’s National Competition in Organ Improvisation for many years.
Robinson’s own compositions range from Hebrew liturgical settings to choral commissions from the Archbishop of Canterbury to an Organ Symphony premiered by the San Francisco Symphony in 1984. This Missa brevis is the later of his two contributions to the form, retaining all of the Latin text of the Mass except the long, central Credo text. His first Missa brevis was commissioned by Musica Sacra in 1986 (premiered in Avery Fisher Hall), and his the second is the French cathedral chant-inspired work heard today. At times fluid and homophonic, its sense of pomp and jubilation celebrated the 1996 AGO Convention in New York City; it was premiered at the Church of the Holy Family in New York City.
In the opening Kyrie and Sanctus movements, playful shifts of meter energize the texture, with tiny measures of two beats hidden in the largely triple meter texture like pearls. The overlaying of dissonance and the high tessitura demanded in the otherworldly Kyrie identify this as a virtuosic and demanding work from the start. Running sixteenth notes and bass rumblings in the organ frame beautiful adagio sections (Domine Deus for female solo and Filius Patris) in the Gloria. The work’s angelic Sanctus has a few hidden references to and gestures from the liturgical music of Olivier Messiaen. When asked about his main influences among choral composers, Robinson noted “particular love for the motets of Maurice Duruflé and Francis Poulenc” and an interest in “the music composed for the Ste.-Trinité in Paris, where Messiaen was organist for so many years.”
The closing Benedictus and Agnus Dei sections provide a quiet, devotional coda to the work. In an interview, Mr. Robinson stated that when he first came to New York “Forty years ago, the singing was loud, and the organs were played even louder.” This Missa brevis incorporates his expertise in early French modernism with a more peaceful, pastoral approach to the Latin texts.
Christina Whitten Thomas (1979-)
Take Peace (2005)
Ms. Thomas is an active teacher, vocalist, and composer based in Pasadena, CA. She studied composition at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, receiving her MMus in 2005, the same year of this composition. She currently resides with her family in Pasadena, California where she is an active vocalist and teacher. Her awards include first place in the 2011 Indianapolis Symphonic Choir composition competition for A Child of the Snows, first place in the 2010 Wallingford Chorus composition competition for The Lamp of Life, and second place in the 2010 NATS Art Song Composition Award for her song cycle In the Garret. Recent commissions and recordings include work with Voices of Ascension (in Carnegie Hall), Musica Sacra (at Lincoln Center), and the LA Master Chorale. In March 2016, Seraphim sung her Longfellow setting My Cathedral, which is filled with the sounds of birds and the wind rushing through trees.
Take Peace, employing text adapted by the composer from writings attributed to Fra Giovanni Giocondo, but in fact written by Ernest Temple Hargrove, a leading member of the Theosophical Society in America who lived from 1870 to 1939. As the text is published in the Theosophical Quarterly (Vol. 8, No. 4, April, 1911) under Fra Giovanni’s name, the composer writes, “We can assume that if Hargrove did indeed write these words, he preferred to have the text associated with this 16th century monk.” Take Peace is an accompanied motet for four choral voices, composed in 2005 and premiered by the Chamber Choir of the Thornton School of Music, University of Southern California, under the direction of Dr. William Dehning.
After first reading this text, the composer wrote, “I was immediately taken in by the universal relevance of their timeless message. The text is simple and straightforward, yet it touches the soul and encourages us to look at life from a different angle. My music for the first two stanzas is a contemplative invitation to personal reflection. As the text exclaims, ‘There is radiance,’ the choir expands in range and intensity, stressing the word ‘Glory’ with a soaring melisma. The choir returns to an intimate level as the words ‘Take peace’ are repeated, reinforcing the message. The first stanza returns at the end, a tranquil reassurance that peace resides within each of us.”
Zachary Wadsworth (1983-)
Earthquake (2015)
After performing Zachary Wadsworth’s fascinating setting of Whitman’s last September, Seraphim was delighted to explore his stunning anthem , composed in 2015. This exploration of contemporary American mystical poetry by Thomas Merton O.C.S.O. is at once sacred and secular. Its lyrical sophistication and virtuosic organ writing is reminiscent of Benjamin Britten’s best choral music. The dramatic seven-minute plea for peace was commissioned by the American Guild of Organists and premiered by the Houston Chamber Choir at the 2016 AGO Biennial National Convention in Houston, Texas.
The composer writes, “Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was a monk, a social activist, and a poet. His writing vividly describes a peaceful and socially aware Christianity. In 1966, in response to the Christian non-violent movement for Civil Rights, he wrote Eight Freedom Songs. In the last of these, Earthquake, he reimagined Isaiah 52 as a call to action for the Christians of the world to use their “marching feet” to become ‘messengers of peace,’ and to build a world in which ‘All ... people / shall be one.’ This message of strength and obligation reverberates powerfully in the continuing civil rights struggles of our time, and the poem’s strong inner rhythms resonated powerfully with me as a composer. My anthem, Earthquake, starts darkly with Merton’s invocations to ‘tell the thunder / To wake the sky,’ but erupts joyfully with images of the bright paradises of love and unity.”
The composer studied with Steven Stucky while earning his DMA in composition at Cornell, and he is now an Assistant Professor of Music at Williams College. Both an award-winning composer (with three Morton Gould Young Composer awards from ASCAP) and an active performer (as a pianist and a tenor), his song cycle Pictures of the Floating World won the 2007 Lotte Lehmann Foundation Art Song Competition and was premiered at Lincoln Center.
Our final triptych is introduced by the hymn O Day of Peace That Dimly Shines. This text was commissioned for the The Hymnal (1982) from Episcopal priest Dr. Carl Pickens Daw Jr., who has been the Executive Director of the Hymn Society since 1996. Dr. Daw focused on images from Isaiah 11:6-8 (the peaceable kingdom and paradise regained), fitting his poetry to Parry’s popular tune “Jerusalem” (more commonly sung to a text by William Blake on social justice). Sometimes used as an unofficial British national anthem, “Jerusalem” came to prominence in the U.S. after being featured in the 1981 Chariots of Fire.
Dr. Daw writes: “This hymn deals with two aspects of peace: pax, an understanding of peace based on the cessation of conflict, and shalom, the condition of living abundantly in harmony and mutual goodwill. Although this hymn affirms that peace is always God’s gift, it also recognizes the importance of human responsibility in preparing an environment in which peace can flourish.”
Carlyle Sharpe (1965-)
Psalm 122 – I Was Glad (1992)
Carlyle Sharpe is Professor of Music Composition and Theory at Drury University (MO) with commissions from the AGO, the NEA, and the 2002 Winter Olympics. Before joining the faculty at Drury, he taught at BU and MIT, studying under John Harbison and completing commissions for local ensembles including the Providence Singers, the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, ALEA III Contemporary Ensemble in Boston, and the Seraphim Singers.
His I Was Glad When They Said Unto Me, a setting of Psalm 122 for SATB Chorus, tenor solo and organ, won the 1996 American Guild of Organists/ECS Publishing Award in Choral Composition. It is dedicated to the Marsh Chapel Choir at Boston University; they premiered the work in 1993 under the direction of Julian Wachner. The psalm’s text expresses the sacred joy of pilgrims entering the holy city of Jerusalem (shalem being a form of the Hebrew word for peace), and presents a series of prayers for peace and prosperity.
This complex eight-minute anthem shows the influence of Sharpe’s studies with Jacob Druckman and Bernard Rands at the Aspen Music Festival, and extends the tradition of modernist Anglican church music. Based in C major, the virtuosic organ part adds flashes of bitonality and short ritornelli between each of the opening phrases. At the heart of the work (“Pray for the peace of Jerusalem”), Sharpe switches to a richer, more sustained homophonic treatment of the text supported by subtly shifting triadic harmonies. Driving 5/8 rhythms return in the last third of the anthem, bringing it to a stunning close with a return of the opening theme.
William Henry Harris (1883-1973)
Faire is the Heaven (1925)
This beautiful motet for a cappella double choir (of angels and archangels?) sets a poem by Edmund Spenser (1552-1599). Spenser is most famously remembered for his epic work, The Faerie Queene, his great allegory of his direct contemporary Queen Elizabeth I. His Hymnes of Heavenly Love and Heavenly Beautie are a poetic reflection on late sixteenth-century British theology, and the words for this motet are taken from its conclusion. Since Spenser was influenced by the Reformation (i.e. we are saved by grace), he deliberately reversed the Dionysian order of the Angelic choirs: his Seraphim and Cherubim are furthest from God, and “fairer than they both and much more bright” are the Angels and Archangels, “which attend on God’s own person without rest or end.” This was an outrageous thought to many of his contemporaries, but it expounds a great truth: all may approach God directly.
William Harris studied at the Royal College of Music, where he later became a professor. He was organist for New College, Oxford, Christ Church Cathedral, and St. George's Chapel, Windsor, where he gave piano lessons to the young princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret. He composed the romantic and evocative Faire is the Heaven in 1925 while recovering from the horrors of the First World War, nostalgically musing on his privileged Edwardian boyhood. The motet is full of yearning for lost innocence, for the beauty of youth and for the release of death and the ascent to beauty beyond compare – “that Highest ... endless perfectness.” The music combines with Spenser’s poetry to draw us into the very presence of God.
Herbert Howells (1892-1983)
Te Deum & Jubilate – Collegium Regale (1944)
To conclude this program, Seraphim presents the first, and grandest, of the Anglican anthem pairings of Herbert Howells, a notable British modernist and longtime faculty member at the Royal College of Music. Founding Music Director Jennifer Lester comments, “We present the Te Deum’s declaration of faith in this program as part of a poetic vision of the heavenly liturgy, following the Gloria from Robinson’s Missa brevis (the shepherds’ vision of peace come down to earth) and his Sanctus (Isaiah’s heavenly vision of the throne of God surrounded by six-winged seraphim).”
Like his Requiem for unaccompanied a cappella chorus, sung by Seraphim this Fall, Howells composed this music with the choir of King’s College, Cambridge (in Latin, Cellegium Regale) in mind. Unlike some of Howells later music, the mood for both the canticle and psalm text are optimistic and joyful. This may surprise listeners, since it was composed during the Blitz, but the music dates from his four happy years spent deputizing for Robin Orr as organist of St. John’s College, Cambridge (while Orr was on active duty in the RAF).
Howells weaves long, sinuous melodies through a harmonic language that is at once modal, chromatic, impressionistic, and visionary. Kaleidoscopic choral virtuosity is balanced by Howell’s challenging organ part: he remarked, “In all my music for the Church, people and places have been a dual influence. The Cathedral in Gloucester, St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey in London, Christ Church and New College in Oxford, St John’s and King’s College Chapels in Cambridge – these and their recent Directors of Music have been a paramount shaping force. Men, choir, organ, ecclesiastical buildings have become inseparably a part of that force. So too have exemplars and – acoustics.” One of the most fundamental influences on Howells was Gloucester Cathedral, with its immense, vaulted spaces and glorious east window. He called it “a pillar of fire in my imagination,” and he consciously mirrored these architectural elements of spaciousness and luminosity in many of his choral works. These early Christian texts call on God, name those who venerate God, and then follow the outline of the Apostle’s Creed. The Te Deum concludes with praise for both the universal Church and the singer in particular, asking for mercy and reunification with the elect. The minor-mode Jubilate is a psalm of joy and thanksgiving. Our director notes, “With this concert, we remember that even in a time of war, the vision and reality of peace and Paradise are also always present.”
