The title of tonight’s concert is drawn from the famous 1926 novel by Ernest Hemingway, which in turn quotes a biblical passage from Ecclesiastes: “The sun also rises, and the sun goes down, and hastes to the place where it arose” (1:5, NKJV).
The Hemingway allusion is deeply resonant on many levels. Roughly one century earlier, the world of that story was like our own in at least some ways. Hemingway’s setting is shortly after World War One—known at the time as the “War to End All Wars”—as well as not long after the 1918 influenza pandemic that was even more deadly than our current Covid crisis. Hemingway’s main characters are American expatriates seeking escape in France and Spain from their disillusionment with the “Gilded Age” in their native land. The “refuge” they find is not happy, but they do find a clear-eyed acceptance of the cycles of the risings and settings of the sun alluded to in the novel’s title reference to Ecclesiastes (also the source of Pete Seeger’s classic folk song “Turn! Turn! Turn!”).
Of special artistic relevance in the novel is that the closest the characters come to an optimistic outlook is in discovering the “art” of everyday life, especially in encounters with the natural world. Perhaps the most important episode in the novel is the trout-fishing trip to northern Spain undertaken by the main character, wounded war veteran Jake Barnes. Hemingway’s simple, artful descriptions of the minute details of fishing equipment and proper angling technique endow Jake’s thoughts and actions with near-sacramental significance, implying that such “art” is essential to the universal search for life-values. This outlook suggests that we can “also rise,” by discovering the art in the realities that confront us.
So it can be with the musical art in tonight’s concert. Many—if not most—of the selections are decidedly optimistic, exploring themes of darkness and light, awakening and dawning, redemption, and the triumph of hope. In designing the program, GCA director Dr. Stephen Mulder observed, “Obviously, it is premature to claim the ‘new day’ when there are still lots of infections and deaths in the news. But an artistic expression of resilience and determination is not out of the scope of our story.”
In fact, the theme of “story” will anchor the entire season, along with an important subtheme, that of collaboration, both with other singers and with guest instrumentalists. Tonight’s program will be repeated on Sunday, October 24, at Spivey Hall. In May 2022, the groups will collaborate again for a pair of concerts entitled “Consider the Lilies.”
The sun sets, but it also rises. While tonight’s concert features his anthem Unclouded Day, another of composer Shawn Kirchner’s choral works invokes a similar message of long-term hope, in the words of the 14th-century English mystic Julian of Norwich (also famously cited by T. S. Eliot in his late poem “Little Gidding’): “All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner [of] thing shall be well.”
PRELUDE (piano and strings): “Home,” from Winter Songs
Ola Gjeilo, b. 1978
This short instrumental anticipates the centerpiece work of tonight’s concert by representing another work by composer Ola Gjeilo. Even more important, its musical mood reminds us of the quiet reflectiveness experienced by many of us during the darkness of Covid that can still prepare us to “Rise Up the Greet the Morning Dawn.”
Rise Up to Greet the Morning Dawn
Linda Kachelmeier, b. 1965
A fascinating blend of the old and the new, this anthem revives both the energetic shape-note style of early American folk singing and the text of the familiar 19th-century hymn “Amazing Grace,” by John Newton—substituting the new text (of the title) for Newton’s opening stanza, though still alluding to grace: “By grace we shall behold this day.” The uncommon key signature (F-sharp major, designated by six sharps) helps make this dawn even sunnier.
This work was sponsored by the American Composers Forum (whose motto is the important reminder “All music was once new”), and premiered at Wesley United Methodist Church in Marshall, Minnesota.
Minnesota-born composer Linda Kachelmeier has received numerous grants, commissions, and awards, highlighted by the prestigious McKnight Fellowship for Composition in 2017. Since 1991 she has served as the Director of Music at First Presbyterian Church in South Saint Paul.
Dreamweaver
Ola Gjeilo, b. 1978
A wonderful example of the power of collaboration featured in this GCA season is tonight’s centerpiece, representing the collaboration between Norwegian-born composer Ola Gjeilo and highly acclaimed American lyricist Charles Anthony Silvestri (who is also an accomplished composer).
The vocal score describes this remarkable work: “The text for Dreamweaver is based on parts of the well-known Norwegian medieval folk poem Draumkvedet, an epic ballad that has a lot in common with Dante’s The Divine Comedy. The protagonist, Olav Asteson, falls asleep on Christmas Eve and sleeps for thirteen days. He wakes up and rides to church to describe his dreams to the congregation about his brave, terrifying, and ultimately redeeming journey through the afterlife.”
Tony Silvestri describes the process of composing the text, with an eye toward the possibilities it creates for the composer:
The Norwegian poem “Draumkvedet” is a dense and enigmatic text, full of mysticism and puzzling images. My task was to render this poem in English in a way that makes sense as a choral work, but which maintains the flavor and integrity of the original. First I obtained a copy of the original text and a literal translation. Then I organized the images and “storyline” into a program which would work as a choral piece. What was my interpretation of the poem? How overtly religious did I want it to be? I chose to retain much of the original narrative religious content, but made more subtle the ending message. The next task was to choose a style. I wanted it to sound ancient, and vaguely Northern European, and ultimately I chose a variety of archaic styles. Readers might notice the opening word, “Listen!” reminiscent of the “Hwaet!” which begins Beowulf. The short, choppy stanzas which begin the dreamsong each ends in a similar declarative statement. This I did to provide the composer with some internal structure, should he wish to use it. The next three stanzas mimic the Anglo-Saxon structure, with split lines, internal rhyming, etc. This style is more stately to my ears, and suited well the speaker’s audience with the Holy Mother. . . . Next come rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter, to bring the story faster and faster to the climactic confrontation. All through the text I have borrowed words and phrases from a variety of sources–scripture, Shakespeare, Tolkien–and maintained many images from the original text. The confrontation itself is given to a narrator. While writing this text I performed the narrator part for a performance of Britten’s “The Company of Heaven” and was struck by the power and majesty of a spoken part above the music. These lines spoke to me in a narrator’s voice (and also solved the problem of moving through a lot of territory briefly, rather than adding thirty minutes worth of text to perform!). Finally I returned to the original dreamsong motive and a return of the bard’s voice at the end. (https://www.charlesanthonysilvestri.com/published-works-1)
Ola Gjeilo was born in Norway in 1978 and moved to the United States in 2001 to begin composition studies at the Juilliard School in New York City, where he now lives and works as a full-time composer, drawing major acclaim in contemporary choral circles.
Dreamweaver was commissioned by Halgrim Thon and premiered by the Manhattan Chorale at Carnegie Hall in 2014.
Hark, I Hear the Harps Eternal
Arr. Alice Parker
With the mystic sounds from a vision of the Norwegian paradise still ringing in our ears, we return to sounds of early American music, in this famous, rousing 1967 setting of the early American folk tune INVITATION, as arranged by the legendary proponent of a cappella singing and long-time collaborator with Robert Shaw, Alice Parker.
My Spirit Sang All Day
Gerald Finzi (1901-1956)
This joyful motet (written when he was courting his future wife) is the third in a series in a 1937 cycle of songs setting poems by Robert Bridges (1844-1930), Britain’s Poet Laureate from 1913-1930.
While aware of more experimental compositional styles in European music of his time, Finzi wrote relatively simply in conveying the text. Still, however, the harmonies in this motet are often surprisingly bold.
Finzi’s esteem as a leading British composer of the twentieth century continues to grow. After rising to prominence in the early 1920’s, he was taken under the mentorship of Ralph Vaughan Williams, who helped get Finzi a teaching position at the Royal Academy of Music in London from 1930-1933. Finzi’s career was cut short by a 1951 diagnosis of leukemia.
Light Beyond Shadow
Dan Forrest, b. 1978
GCA audiences are familiar with the music of young American composer Dan Forrest from numerous motets but primarily through Forrest’s large-scale Requiem for the Living, performed twice, in March 2019 and again in May 2021. In a very real sense, that work is still present in spirit in the overarching themes of tonight’s concert.
The motet Light Beyond Shadow was a commission from the United Methodist Church of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, in honor of its music director, David Gilson. This gentle, yet dramatic, composition sets a text by English poet Paul Wigmore (1925-2014), whose jack-of-all-trades life also included publishing over one hundred hymn texts.
Unclouded Day
Arr. Shawn Kirchner, b. 1970
In his preface to the choral score, arranger Shawn Kirchner describes the work:
“Unclouded Day,” the bright first movement of Heavenly Home: Three American Songs, is an eight-part a cappella setting of the treasured gospel tune by J. K. Alwood [1826-1909]. A straight-forward first verse and chorus are followed by two verses in which traditional bluegrass vocal stylings combine with counterpoint and fugue in a crescendo of excitement that peaks in a roof-raising eight-part chord on the phrase “in the city that is made of gold.”
Shawn Kirchner is a singer, composer, and pianist in the Los Angeles area. A member of the prestigious Los Angeles Master Chorale since 2001, he was named Composer in Residence of the Chorale for a three-year term in 2012.
One of triplets born and raised in Cedar Falls, Iowa, he earned a BA in Peace Studies from Manchester College and an MA in Choral Conducting from the University of Iowa. His choral writing expresses his interest in folk traditions, as well as in gospel and jazz. (Also see the reference to Kirchner that concludes the introduction to these notes.)
Sure on This Shining Night
Samuel Barber (1910-1981)
From the introduction to the choral score comes this description of the piece:
This has become the most famous of Barber art songs. He later created a voice and orchestra version, and also this choral arrangement. The composer told an audience about a 1979 conversation with a New York City telephone operator who asked him to sing the beginning of “Sure on this shining night” to prove that he was Samuel Barber.
Though Barber and [text author] James Agee would become friends after the composer’s setting of Knoxville: Summer of 1915, they had not yet met when “Sure on this shining night” was composed. The poem is from the “Descriptions of Elysium” section of the 1934 Agee collection Permit Me Voyage.
James Agee (1909-1955) was a screenwriter (The African Queen), journalist, novelist, and a literate and respected film critic, writing for Time and The Nation. . . . His posthumously published novel, A Death in the Family, won the Pulitzer Prize.
Like an American Gerald Finzi, Barber was acquainted with the more experimental compositional styles of his European and fellow American composers, but nonetheless chose to write in simpler, more easily listenable styles, as is especially appropriate for the themes of this piece.
We Rise Again
Leon Dubinsky (b. 1941); arr. Stephen Smith
Leon Dubinsky is a Canadian actor, theater director, and composer from Sydney, Nova Scotia. His musical prominence arose in the 1970s and 1980s with his association with the regional touring band Buddy and the Boys. In the early 1980s he produced an annual musical stage revue, The Rise and Follies of Cape Breton. A song from that show, “Rise Again,” eventually became a Canadian pop music standard.
Composer Stephen Smith, also a Nova Scotian, studied piano and organ in his home province and later attended the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England. Since 1990, he has lived in Vancouver BC, where he earned his doctorate in piano performance. He served as Assistant Conductor of the Vancouver Bach Choir from 2000 until 2010 and remains with the ensemble as rehearsal pianist.
As Rise Up to Greet the Morning Sun was the perfect “opener” for this concert focusing on hope in the face of dire challenge, We Rise Again may well be the perfect “closer.”
Program notes by Bill Pasch, copyright 2021, except where indebted for information from Dr. Stephen Mulder, Dr. Sean Vogt, and commentator Robert Hanshaw (Arizona Repertory Singers),
