The Bach-Mendelssohn Connection

by Montie Meyer

Starting at a tender age, Felix Mendelssohn continuously paid homage to music of bygone compositional times—summarized sardonically by Hector Berlioz as “[loving] the dead a little too much.” Yet, bypassing the implied accusation of sentimentalism and conventionality, Mendelssohn chose to revive one of J.S. Bach’s most original and emotionally gripping works, the St. Matthew Passion BWV 244, whose libretto describes events leading to the crucifixion of Jesus and whose memorably expansive melodies offer a bridge to Romanticism. Written and premiered in 1727 in Leipzig, the Passion was occasionally performed at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche after Bach’s death in 1750, but otherwise was not widely known outside the city.

Considered too complex and inaccessible to interest large audiences, Bach’s music was nonetheless already well respected by professional musicians and middle class intellectuals. Its aficionados included Mendelssohn’s maternal great-aunt Sara Levy, a harpsichordist who studied with Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, and commissioned works from his other son Carl Philip Emmanuel. With her flutist husband, Levy performed works of J.S. Bach at musical salons in their home. In 1820, Felix and his sister Fanny joined the choir of the Berlin Singakademie. A few years later, when Felix was fifteen, his maternal grandmother Bella Salomon gifted him a copy of the Passion’s score. Salomon’s sister Sara had acquired the copy from Carl Friedrich Zelter, Felix and Fanny’s music theory instructor and the head of the Singakademie.

In 1827, Felix and a few friends—including Eduard Devrient, an actor and principal baritone at the Berlin Royal Opera—began weekly rehearsals of the Passion. In early 1829, Devrient persuaded Felix to ask Zelter for the support of the Singakademie in supplying its chorus and orchestra for a public performance of the work. Devrient made the verbal entreaties in their joint meeting with Zelter, hoping to sing the part of Jesus, as he eventually did. Zelter reluctantly gave his approval, noting that the choristers would simply stop showing up to rehearsals if the project went poorly. The inaugural performance occurred on March 11th, 1829 and differed—perhaps in a democratic direction—from historical standards.  It involved a much larger, mixed amateur-professional 158-voice choir with Fanny singing and Felix, now twenty, conducting from piano as opposed to harpsichord. In addition, the three-hour work was halved in duration. Mendelssohn changed the orchestration, and cut more of the solo arias than the chorales, both to emphasize the dramatic arc of the Passion and suit available personnel. The concert drew a capacity audience including King of Prussia Wilhelm Friedrich III, poet Heinrich Heine, philosopher Friedrich Hegel, and virtuoso violinist Niccolò Paganini. The demand for tickets was so high that up to one thousand people were turned away at the door, necessitating repeat performances on 3/21 (Bach’s birthday) and 4/17 (Good Friday; conducted by Zelter). This event sparked additional performances across Prussia, followed by an overall revival of Bach’s works in Europe.
 
Despite its great success, the Passion revival proved insufficient for Mendelssohn to be elected leader of the Singakademie upon Zelter’s death in 1833.  The post went instead to Carl Friedrich Rungenhagen, and Mendelssohn departed for Dusseldorf and Great Britain soon thereafter. Scholars have speculated that this was a result of concerns about Mendelssohn’s youth and possible interest in innovation as well as of anti-Jewish sentiment. Though baptized Lutheran in childhood, Felix was the grandson of Jewish Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, who forcefully promoted social and religious equality for Jews and non-Jews alike. Mendelssohn consciously honored his heritage, retaining the surname and promoting the publication of his grandfather’s writings. The Passion revival led to one of Mendelssohn’s few explicit references to his cultural origins: "To think that it took an actor [Devrient] and a Jew's son to revive the greatest Christian music for the world!"

Cecilia’s upcoming exploration of the Bach/Mendelssohn connection includes:
JS Bach’s setting of the Martin Luther hymn, Vom Himmel Hoch, da komm ich’ her’
JS Bach’s Jesu, Meine Freude: BWV 227—the longest and most musically complex of Bach’s motets, set in 11 movements, and the first to be recorded
Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s Gebet in der Christnacht (A Prayer on Christmas Eve)—an early Romantic setting of the poem by Wilhelm Müller
Felix Mendelssohn’s rarely performed polyphonic double chorus motets, Sechs Sprüche, Op. 79—Weihnachten (Christmas) and Lasset uns Frohlocken (Advent).

Encountering Arvo Pärt

by Montie Meyer

As college freshmen, my friend and I were asked to accompany a mezzo-soprano on viola and violin, for her senior recital, in a song called Es sang vor langen Jahren.  The composer, Arvo Pärt, I had never heard of. It is a testimony to the startlingly distinctive quality of the piece that I recall it clearly, over 25 years later. (Or maybe I just remember it because the recital was on “green key weekend,” when normal kids were hanging out on frat row instead of in a church). The Es Sang text, depicting the lonely tedium of a pining lover, spoke to some relevant facts of my life at the time, surely shared by other romantically inclined 18-year-olds. More notable was the sparse, desolate yet poignant melodic material - which corresponded perfectly emotionally.  In fact, the song pairs verse by Clemens Brentano, a major figure of German Romanticism, with a musical style that has been described as holy minimalism or neo-romanticism—a style employed by certain 20th century composers, hearkening back to the lyricism of the 19th century.

This could explain Pärt's appeal to me and other fans of entirely dead Romantic composers, yet Pärt is entirely alive, aged 87, and currently the most performed living composer in the world.  Born in Estonia in 1935, Pärt witnessed the deportation of extended family members from Estonia to Siberia during the Stalin regime, completed compulsory service in the Soviet Army (1954–1956) playing oboe and piano/percussion in the military band, and then worked as a sound engineer at the Estonian Radio (1958-1967).  He began his career by composing neoclassical piano music and progressed to write works exemplifying dodecaphony, sonorism (e.g. discovering new types of sounds from traditional instruments), and collage technique (e.g. combining fragments of the works of different composers to create a new piece).

Pärt’s characteristic musical language developed after a prolonged period of personal tumult -- spurred both by the censure of the Soviet authorities who banned his work “Credo’ (for its open affirmation of Christian faith), and disenchantment with serialism and the other 20th century compositional techniques he had previously explored.  Years later, he recalled: "I didn't know at the time that I was going to be able to compose at all in the future. Those years of study were no conscious break, but life and death agonizing inner conflict. I had lost my inner compass and I didn't know anymore, what an interval or a key meant." From 1968-1976, while composing mainly Soviet film music to earn a living, Pärt married for the second time (to Nora, a musicologist), converted from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy, and extensively studied Renaissance and other choral music in search of his own expressive idiom. From this grew a style he termed tintinnabulation (from the Latin for “small tinkling bells”), music built from one voice arpeggiating a tonic triad and another voice moving diatonically in stepwise fashion. Tintinnabulation is usually also characterized by slow tempi, stretches of silence, medieval tonal and rhythmic structures, and controlled dissonances.

Pärt’s works after his 1980 emigration from Estonia to Vienna and then Berlin, returning to Estonia in 2010, reflect the novel tintinnabular style. His four symphonies (written in 1963, 1966, 1971 and 2008) mark his creative journey, with the first and second featuring dodecaphony and compression, and the third showing signs of the transition to melodic writing and tintinnabulation that fully characterizes the fourth.

Relatively reclusive, Pärt largely avoids the media, and prefers to let his music stand on its own, once saying to a journalist: “I have nothing to say…music says what I need to say.” Yet, elsewhere (to Hermann Conen, in the essay White Light) he describes his music rather poetically: "I could compare my music to white light which contains all colours. Only a prism can divide the colours and make them appear; this prism could be the spirit of the listener.”

In Loaded Dice, we hope to engage this spirit, by presenting a varied palate of Pärt across time:
Solfeggio (1963): his first work for a cappella choir; text consists only of syllable names of the notes: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, si; minimalist structure based on a C major scale
Magnificat (1989): tintinnabulation exemplified; drones provide a tonal center from which controlled dissonances emerge; sharp dynamic and textural contrasts
Bogoróditse Djévo (1990): Exuberant, joyful work, text in Church Slavonic reflecting Russian Orthodox church traditions; lasting about a minute, Pärt’s shortest piece
Da Pacem Domine (2004): Based on a 9th century Gregorian antiphon; written in memory of the 2004 Madrid train bombing victims

The Boston Cecilia chorus will present 𝙇𝙤𝙖𝙙𝙚𝙙 𝘿𝙞𝙘𝙚: 𝙈𝙪𝙨𝙞𝙘 𝘿𝙚𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙢𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙙 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙄𝙢𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙫𝙞𝙨𝙚𝙙,  which will contrast the highly structured works of Arvo Pärt, Brahms, Byrd, Dufay, and Lassus with the improvisatory music of Pauline Oliveros, an influential LGBTQ composer.
The concert will be held on May 13th at 4:00 pm at the MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, MA.
General admission: $35 (Student $15).

After the concert join us for our Gala: On a Roll with The Boston Cecilia  
(Tickets: $125 for Concert & Gala)

A Fireside Chat with Michael Barrett on 'Loaded Dice: Music Determined and Improvised'

[On Saturday May 13th at 4:00 PM, The Boston Cecilia will present Loaded Dice: Music Determined and Improvised, in the MIT Media Lab. The program will contrast the highly-structured music of Arvo Pärt, William Byrd, Orlande de Lassus, and Johannes Brahms with the improvisatory sonic meditations of Pauline Oliveros.

Music Director Michael Barrett sat down with Cecilia alto Grace Leung for a conversation about his creative journey for this thought-provoking program.]

GL: When did you come up with the idea for the Loaded Dice program? How has it evolved since then?
MB: The genesis for Loaded Dice was not a singular “Aha!”  moment, but some of the seeds were planted from the very first moments when I knew that I had this wonderful opportunity to work with Boston Cecilia [as the new Music Director in the Spring of 2020].
I felt an opportunity and a responsibility to think about the breadth and depth of musical exploration that we could do together. Previously, I led a talented chamber choir whose mandate was almost exclusively Renaissance music. With Boston Cecilia, I wanted to be able to explore and think about what it had explored musically so far, and how we might evolve and go in new directions together.
So, I thought, what are the parameters that are taken for granted about the repertoire choices and the learning approaches? Such as, we are mostly looking at music that is composed and recorded on pieces of paper (or, nowadays, on tablets). There is a saying that goes something like “the score is not the music,” which reminds me that [a musical score] is just a symbolic language and that it is not sound at all. The music is the sound. There is a disconnect between this symbolic language versus the sound itself.
I want to use the exploration of music that is not notated, or does not even exist in a traditional on-paper fashion, to think about how we interact with one another as members of a community and as listeners.
I hoped that in doing so that there would be an opportunity for people to take a more active role in the music-making process itself and the creative process.

Do you mean having a choir that does not blindly follow the conductor, and an audience that does not passively listen?
A choral situation is tricky. As human beings, if we are in a group of - say 50 people - and have a leader, there is a certain implied expectation that, okay, we contribute X amount of ourselves, but it's not necessary that we are engaged with our complete creative selves.
But if we could explore different kinds of repertoire that are not set down, where individual performances can be wildly different from one another, and where the outcome very much relies on an individual choice from moment to moment, then I think there is an opportunity to shake things up a little bit and get people more involved.
I am trying to facilitate a musical experience that in a way is not my own. As you know, I am not making any noise, but it is the people who are actually singing and singing together.
In Loaded Dice, I also want to get to the question about “what music really is?” Most pointedly or dramatically, if we make extreme contrasts, we could look at predetermined music that is not only printed but generated by algorithmic thinking on the part of the composer.
The first composer I thought about was Arvo Pärt, whose work is very often tied to a certain set of instructions, and it can get more or less complicated. For example, in Pärt’s Magnificat, the melodies are based on the number of syllables in the word. The stressed syllable gets a long note, and then there is an alternation between a whole note and a dotted half note in the stressed syllable.

As a singer, I enjoy cracking the code of Arvo Pärt’s music because I can see the patterns on paper, and the music sounds great, too. Perhaps we are all pattern-seeking creatures and patterns have an effect on our brains.
Yes, and for performer and listener alike in complementary ways.

How does Brahms get into the mix?
Oh, because of the Canons. In the canon, a certain amount of the structure is foregrounded, so that you can hear as one voice enters, and as another voice enters…[creating] this deterministic outlay of musical material.

I see, so there is a repeated element.
But you have to engineer the unit such that it works with itself.

So, the pieces we are singing are characterized by discernible patterns.  How will the Oliveros pieces contrast with that highly structured music?
Pärt is one extreme [i.e. predetermined and algorithmic music], and then we go in the total other direction, where nothing is taken for granted [i.e. with Oliveros’ improvisations]. Although I think there is an interesting parallelism between the short set of instructions that you can infer in a piece like Pärt’s, and then the short set of instructions that are explicitly given in a piece like Oliveros’.

When I first read Oliveros’ Sonic Meditation in the MIT Music Library, I was shocked and thought “What is this?!” And yet, her sonic approach was intriguing. I remember asking the librarian, “Have you ever seen something like this being performed?” and she answered, “Yes, and it can be rather convincing.”
I like to be as open and honest about my appreciation of the result of our improvisation, and it is a kind of combination of the sonic experience which I think has been really compelling, and then also just the knowledge that singers are injecting their own component to that sound and being actively engaged. I plan to open things up for the audience to participate in a couple of these meditations, and I hope that we can tweak our physical placement as well, so that we also can break down this fort wall [between performers and the audience]. I think we have a fun space to play with that idea.

Yes, the MIT Media Lab!
When we perform in a church, we don't have very much to choose from in terms of where the performers are and where the audience are, as there is a clear architectural divide between the altar area and the pews. In the Media Lab set up, we can break down that barrier for this show.

During improvisations, the choir somehow knows when to end the piece together, as if we are one organism. It is amazing.
Yes! We respond as individuals to such subtle social cues. And I think that, as we hear and respond, the musical result has a direct analogy to just how we interact as social beings.

When you first joined Boston Cecilia, you gave another interview in which you shared your hope and vision for Cecilia. I think the key word was “flexibility.” Is Loaded Dice part of your grand plan to train singers, and even the audience, to become more flexible and to open ourselves to whatever musical challenges or experiences that we might have?
Oh, I would say, yes! I feel interested in and also responsible for pushing the envelope in different sorts of directions.  I hope that our chorus comes along for the ride, and it has felt that way to me; that there is a trust that has built up, and that people are willing to experiment a bit. I would not mind it if Cecilia came to be known as the chorus who can do all sorts of different things. I think we can all benefit from that and continue to explore.

I have done some internet research, and it turns out that Arvo Pärt is the world’s most-performed living composer*.  His music resonates.    
Yes, and that's an interesting thing about this concert. We have a known quantity in Arvo Pärt, and an unknown in Oliveros, and I hope that that gets a few people in the door to explore with us.

* https://estonianworld.com/culture/arvo-part-is-the-worlds-most-performed-living-composer/

A New World Friendship: Dvořák and Burleigh

Montie Meyer

Czech composer Antonin Dvořák arrived in New York City in 1892 to lead the recently formed National Conservatory of Music, expressly with a mandate to create a national music for the United States.  As a beer-drinking, uncaged bird-owning son of a butcher and part of a minority population (Bohemian) under the Habsburg empire, Dvořák perhaps experienced a natural affinity with the disenfranchised in America. He wrote in the New York Herald: "It is to the poor that I turn for musical greatness. The poor work hard; they study seriously.... If in my own career I have achieved a measure of success and reward it is to some extent due to the fact I was the son of poor parents and was reared in an atmosphere of struggle and endeavor".  

In this context, Dvořák met Harry Burleigh, a 26-year-old African-American singer from Erie, Pennsylvania, who had recently enrolled at the Conservatory in the fall of 1892.  Already a skilled baritone, Burleigh had learned many old plantation songs from his maternal grandfather, Hamilton Waters, who in 1832 bought his freedom from slavery on a Maryland plantation. Waters, known for possessing a beautiful voice, taught Burleigh traditional spirituals and slave songs, while Burleigh accompanied him on his route as town crier and lamplighter. Burleigh came to NYC already a skilled baritone, but his scholarship wasn't enough to cover the cost of living in the city, so he supported himself doing maintenance work. His singing while cleaning the conservatory's halls caught the attention of Dvořák, who asked Burleigh to sing for him in the evenings. Dvořák immersed himself in the spirit of these refrains, which served as inspiration for ongoing compositions. Burleigh later wrote, "I gave him what I knew of Negro songs - no one called them spirituals then - and he wrote some of my tunes (my people's music) into the New World Symphony."  In fact, the second theme of the symphony’s first movement, presented initially by the flute, is derived from the spiritual "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot."  In 1895, Dvořák wrote “a while ago I suggested that inspiration for truly national music might be derived from the Negro melodies or [Native American] chants…undoubtedly the germs for the best in music lie hidden among all the races that are commingled in this great country. The music of the people is like a rare and lovely flower growing amidst encroaching weeds.”

Burleigh became Dvořák’s personal assistant—as well as the librarian and copyist, and occasional double bass player, in the conservatory orchestra Dvořák conducted.  Noting his eye for musical detail, Dvořák recommended Burleigh to his publisher, Ricordi of Milan, as an editor. For many years Burleigh served in this role, editing among other works a collection of études written for his primary instrument the double bass, and arranging/composing over 450 songs for publication.

During the summer of 1893, while Dvořák was in the Czech immigrant community of Stillville, Iowa, writing the famous “American” string quartet, Burleigh successfully completed an audition (behind a screen) to become the first Black soloist at an all-white congregation at St. George’s Church in NYC, where he sang for over 50 years. In the fall of 1893, Dvořák successfully petitioned the National Conservatory’s leadership to offer full scholarships to Black students. Soon, well over 150 African-Americans were among the 600+ students enrolled at the Conservatory.  In January 1894, Burleigh was a soloist and many of the other Black students sang in the chorus for Dvořák’s arrangement of “Old Folks at Home,” presented in New York’s Madison Square Garden.

Burleigh played a lesser-known role in activism during his student years, participating with several other Black men in sit-in’s at over twenty dining saloons to test NYC’s 1895 civil rights bill promising equal accommodation. “Only at the Continental Hotel was there any unpleasantness and there a party of six withdrew in high dudgeon,” reported the New York Tribune.

In 1895, Dvořák returned to Prague due to funding problems at the Conservatory.  Burleigh graduated and embarked on a long, distinguished career as singer and composer. His spiritual arrangements brought the “sorrow songs” (as termed by W.E.B. Du Bois) out of their earlier plantation and minstrel settings and onto the classical stage. Without his work, the spirituals might have been lost in light of many Black Americans wanting to forget the grim conditions in which they arose.  Later in life, Burleigh was wary of the rise of jazz forms as an expression of Black musicality, calling out jazz’s “perverting” of melodies/rhythms as a misappropriation of spirituals.

For Prophecy, Cecilia will present works of Dvořák and Burleigh. "Napadly písně" ("(Melodies fell into my soul") and  "Dnes do skolu a do písničky" ("Come, let us dance and sing together") are songs from Dvořák’s 1882 choral cycle V Přírodě; In Nature’s Realm -- secular Czech texts focusing on different idyllic scenes in nature, a frequent inspiration for Dvořák.  Burleigh’s setting of “My Lord, What a Morning”, originally composed by free Black people in the early 1800s, features biblical imagery of the second coming of Jesus. Several older editions substitute “mourning” for morning. Hence, the refrain incorporates a bit of double entendre: resurrection day may simultaneously be a “morning” in which hope dawns on the horizon, and a “mourning” in which the world collapses and ceases to exist.  Dvořák’s and Burleigh’s lives and musical works are remarkable in how they capture such forward motion, spirit and growth arising from toil.

A Mantuan Master: Salamone Rossi

montie meyer

Though little-known to modern audiences, Salamone Rossi is an important transitional figure in composition, situated between the late Italian Renaissance and early Baroque. Notably, given the zeitgeist of the era, Rossi forthrightly appended to his name the word “Hebreo”—Salamone Rossi the Jew—and he stands out as the first composer ever to write music in Hebrew. At around the time of his birth in 1570, Pope Pius V had expelled all Jewish Italians from most areas of the papal states, with several cities establishing ghettos in which Jews were required to reside. Luckily, Rossi lived in the Northern Italian city of Mantua (situated midway between Milan and Venice), which remained much more open-minded than many Italian cities, though still requiring the yellow identification badge of its Jewish citizens. Here, Jews were not only tolerated but often allowed to mingle freely with non-Jews. In this context, Rossi entered the service of the Mantuan court under Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga, first as a violist and then violinist/concertmaster of the orchestra. He became only one of two Jews in Mantua exempted from wearing the identification badge—though likely still paid for each service rather than occupying a salaried position, generally reserved for Christian musicians.

Rossi collaborated regularly with Claudio Monteverdi, and his compositional style likely influenced motives of L’Orfeo—the first opera that is still regularly performed today. Immersed in the dominant culture of polyphonic music, Rossi innovated by applying the principles of monodic song—in which one melody dominates over accompanying parts—to instrumental music.  His compositional output comprises Italian madrigals, instrumental music mostly in the form of trios (often two violins and a chittarone, a lute which could reach 6 feet in stature!), and Songs of Solomon, a collection of psalms and prayers in Hebrew. These stand out for their role in Jewish sacred music—the first polyphonic settings of the synagogue liturgy for mixed choir. In developing the edition for publication, Rossi worked with Rabbi Leon Modena, sharing decisions including whether to print the music from right to left as would be the case in Hebrew text. They opted against this, apparently so that the singers would not “lose their minds.” In addition, the original published edition did not include Niqqud -- the diacritical signs representing the vowels -- given the assumed familiarity of their singers with Hebrew.

Rossi’s musical career came to a halt after the War of Mantuan Succession in 1628. Historians believe he died either during the associated invasion of Austrian troops or in a subsequent plague that decimated the area.  Some of his Jewish musician peers fled to the Venice ghetto, where they founded the aptly named Accademia degli Impediti (the “Academy of the Impeded”). Rossi’s and other related polyphonic works—some with instrumental accompaniment—briefly enlivened Venetian synagogues, although one historian noted that “all of this was but an intense and quick fire….before the Academy ended and the music returned to its previous state.” Rossi was then all but forgotten until the late 1800s, when Samuel Naumbourg, cantor of the Great Synagogue of Paris, published a modern edition of his music with the intention of using it in the liturgy.

For Evensong, Cecilia will present Rossi’s setting of Psalm 124 – part of the Christian Old Testament and the Hebrew Bible, and one of fifteen psalms that begin with the words "A song of ascents" (Shir Hama'alot). Using traditional metaphors of the time, it vividly recalls the dangers from which the Lord had rescued the nation of Israel.

Trevor Weston

Deborah Greenman

Trevor Weston, Composer and Chair of the Music Department at Drew University, was born in 1967 and grew up in Plainfield, NJ. He began his musical career as a 10-year-old boy soprano in the renowned choir school of St. Thomas Church in New York City. And he was 34 years old and only a few years from receiving his PhD in Music from UC Berkeley when Gerre Hancock, his former choir director at St Thomas Church, commissioned him to write the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis that Cecilia will perform in its Evensong concert.

In a publicity interview with the San Francisco Symphony, Weston described his beginnings as a composer. “I was cleaning up the science room (we all had chores), and I started singing something, and I could hear the other parts while I was singing. I could hear them continuing even when I stopped singing. I didn’t know that was composing; I just thought I was having fun. I didn’t know it was a career option until I studied composition at Tufts University with T.J. Anderson, and he said I should go study with Olly Wilson. And that’s how I made it to UC Berkeley. And I guess the rest is history.”

First winner (2021) of the Emerging Black Composers Project of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the San Francisco Symphony, Weston has talked of the challenges of being an African American composer: “And in this culture there’s such a distinction between what is popular and lowbrow, and what is from afar. And that affects people of color often because many of us write music that’s connected to our cultural background, which is usually a very American background…”. Weston, whose parents both sang in their church choirs, grew up hearing Duke Ellington and Bach in equal measure. In a recent podcast interview for Composer Connections, Weston noted that many of his compositions have been inspired by political and social issues and the suffering caused by hatred and racial injustice. In 2002, he composed a piece titled Ashes about the events of September 11th. In the program notes, he wrote “Ashes was written to work as an empathetic musical response for those who suffered due to 9/11 and all other acts of senseless violence.” More recently, in response to the horrific killing of George Floyd, he co-produced a video with Choral Conductor Marika Kuzma that is underscored by his 2004 composition Visions of Glory. The video includes scenes from the aftermath of Floyd’s death along with excerpts from the Mountain Top speech of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Trevor Weston is emerging as an important composer for our times, and – as noted - he was first a singer. He told one interviewer, “If I write for myself, I write choral music.” His Magnificat, written for organ and SATB chorus, begins with simply written lines for soprano and alto voices and then for the tenor and bass parts, and gathers harmonic complexity and fervor until it ends with a loud and jubilant declamation. The Boston Cecilia is excited to be performing a major Weston choral work for the first time.

Where does double-choir music come from?

by Larry Herz

St. Mark’s Cathedral
in Venice

Choruses and audiences LOVE double-choir music, most famously the Bach motets Komm, Jesu, Komm, Fürchte dich Nicht, and Singet dem Herrn. But most of us have only the most general idea where this kind of choral composition originated.

The standard one-line answer is that the balconies in the magnificent St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice allowed for two separated musical forces, and that choirmaster Giovanni Gabrieli fully developed the impressive effect of alternating or echoing choirs. This characterization captures double-choir's public-affairs iconic moment. Whereafter European composers flocked to this center of musical sophistication, and carried the double-choir technique along with other precursors of the Baroque back to their cathedrals and courts.

There is no recorded liturgical or dramatic need for a two-choir form. The virtuosity needed to compose these pieces and the forces and rehearsal time needed to perform them might suggest that they are simply compositional acrobatics, perhaps an excess of the late Renaissance. To look a little deeper, there are some important antecedents to this musical photo op in late 16th c. Venice.
Antiphonal music is prefigured by the archetypal alternation between a leader's call and a group's (perhaps a congregation's) response. Some scholars see this structure in the Psalms, suggesting that antiphony was part of ancient Hebrew worship. Ignatius of Antioch is said to have introduced antiphony into early Christian (c. 100 CE) worship after seeing a vision of two choirs of angels. An appealing prefigurement for our concert!

Medieval Christian antiphony retaining the call & response element developed from two distinct voices and roles into the polyphonic (many-voiced) technique we associate with Renaissance motets, in which the voices carry equal emphasis and none "has the melody."

The center of early Renaissance polyphony was northern Europe, especially the Netherlands. By the beginning of the 16th c., Josquin de Prez and other Franco-Flemish composers emblemized the Ars Perfecta. One of this school of accomplished composers, Adrian Willaert, was hired as St. Mark's choirmaster in 1527. Josquin had traveled in Italy in his youth in the 1480s. The transalpine exchange of influence was certainly a two-way street.

St. Mark's Basilica was built at the end of the 11th. c. as a giant space with many domes and two choir lofts on opposite sides. Other Venetian composers before Willaert had followed the obvious suggestion to write music for two choirs, but this had not become a coherent style or movement. Willaert is recognized as a champion of this technique during his tenure, composing and performing much music for two separated alternating choirs and publishing "Salmi Spezzati" ("separated psalms"), an antiphonal setting of psalms and the first published polychoral compendium. This publication became famous and spawned broad imitation. One of Willaert's pupils and imitators was Andrea Gabrieli, who taught his nephew Giovanni. Giovanni would become the most influential and imitated composer in Europe in his time, his name firmly linked to the Venetian Polychoral Style. Choirs imitated each other, echoed each other, and overlapped to glorious effect. Heinrich Schutz, Hans Leo Hassler, and other Germans who studied with him later seeded the development of the German Baroque.

As persuasive as this origin story of architecture-as-destiny is, it isn’t adequate. An earlier Franco-Flemish master, Johnnes Martini, had written a set of psalms for antiphonal double choir in the 1470s. Like others in his school, he had employment by the aristocracy of Italy, but he had no separated musical field to populate. There were also others before Willaert. So why?

Perhaps inspiration came from the Psalms’ chief poetic structure of parallelism.

O praise the Lord, all ye nations; praise him, all ye people.
O sing unto the Lord a new song; sing unto the Lord, all the earth.
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork.
He shall not suffer thy foot to be moved: He that keepeth thee shall not slumber
The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
Who is this King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle.
Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a right spirit within me.
In thee, Lord, do I put my trust; let me never be confounded.
Praise him with the sound of the trumpet; praise him with the psaltery and harp.
O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good; for his mercy endureth forever.

These and many other examples are dear to the hearts of singers everywhere. And how far back? From the celebrant intoning the first portion and the worshipers the second, it would be a small step to Choir I and Choir II. But nobody seems to know when it was first taken.

How Stephen Jay Gould Brought Me Back to Cecilia

by Steve Neel

Before he was Stephen Jay Gould – world-renowned paleontologist, science writer, and genius grant recipient – to his fellow singers he was just Steve Gould, long-time Cecilia bass. We knew that Steve was smart, funny, and a devoted Cecilia supporter. What became clear, as his fame grew, was that he would remain loyal to Cecilia and its musical mission to the end.

Steve’s devotion to Cecilia took many forms. When we needed a persuasive fundraising letter, Steve said, “I’m a professional writer – let me do it.” As Cecilia’s 1976 centenary approached, Steve wrote and published The Cecilia: The First 100 Years. Awarded one of the first MacArthur “genius grants” in 1981, he directed a portion of the grant to Cecilia, supporting our pioneering Jordan Hall performances of Handel’s oratorios with period instruments.

In 1991 The Boston Globe Magazine carried Steve’s “Ode to Cecilia,” with this subhead: “An evolutionary biologist and second bass makes a plea for the endangered species known as the choral society.”

“The Boston Cecilia,” Steve wrote, “honors the patron saint of music in its name, a good title in the current [financial] crisis, for the legendary Cecilia was not only an accomplished organist but proved especially hard to kill at her martyrdom (she was ultimately beheaded, after flames failed to hurt her.)”

His “Ode” continued: “My case for Cecilia is both personal and historical. . . Each individual must make his own definition of wholeness and personal integration. Singing, for me, ranks with family, friends, satisfying and useful work, even baseball, among the components of a full life.”

Steve’s devotion to Cecilia became personal for me in 2002. I had joined the chorus in 1974, and had sung with Steve as a fellow bass for years. In 1985 I decided to leave the chorus, convinced that my work schedule and young children at home would not allow me the time to keep singing.

Seventeen years later, soon after Steve’s death in spring of 2002, I received a call from Cecilia’s long-time music director, Don Teeters. Steve, of course, had continued singing with Cecilia and pursuing his phenomenal career, despite the cancer which he had survived well beyond expectations. Don told me that Steve, when death was imminent, had requested that Cecilia perform a memorial concert of works he had chosen, and that I and two other former members of Cecilia be invited to join the chorus for that concert. At this point, both Don and I were in tears.

That Steve had reached out to me in this way was not only indescribably moving, but a complete surprise: while Steve and I had been singing colleagues, and he had once graciously met with my young son to discuss dinosaurs, we were not close friends. Yet he knew something that I did not, or had forgotten: that I needed to be singing with my fellow Cecilians.

So, after singing at Steve’s memorial concert at Sanders Theatre in late summer of 2002, I rejoined Cecilia and regained that sense of “wholeness and personal integration” that choral music brings.
In this pandemic year of 2020, a passage from Steve’s 1991 “Ode to Cecilia” has special resonance. After appealing to the reader to “please come hear us,” Steve tells us why “this corner of Boston’s history, this island of current quality,” merits attention and support: “The product that we present belongs among the proudest and most enduring legacies of the human mind and heart.”

When Steve wrote that piece, the specter endangering Cecilia, and all arts organizations, was financial. Now, the threat from a pandemic feels even more existential. All the more reason, then, for us – singers and listeners – to heed Steve’s call to keep choral music in our lives, as I was fortunate to do eighteen years ago when he brought me back to Cecilia.

Steve Neel is a member of the Bass section of Cecilia.

COVID-19 Pandemic not the first time Cecilia halted in recent times

by Keith Glavash

Nothing in modern times compares with the total upheaval of musical activity that the Covid-19 pandemic has inflicted on arts organizations worldwide, singling out choral singing as a “super-spreader” activity and relegating it to be among the last resumed once a vaccine is available. But for those of us old enough to have been around Boston in the late 1970s, we recall the Blizzard of ’78 for its dramatic impact on Boston area music making.

As it happens, the storm struck in early February on the Monday of a Cecilia concert week. The venue was Old West Church, on Cambridge Street, and the program was Bach, including at least a couple of the motets. Dress rehearsal was scheduled for Monday night, with the program to follow on Friday night. Despite storm warnings sounding from early on Monday, the sense among many singers was that it was a must-do rehearsal, and our only chance to try it out in the concert venue.

Recall that this was an era long before widely broadcast weather alerts and smart phones, so there was little sense of the potential scale of what was to come. Consequently, intrepid singers traveled through steady snow to arrive at Old West by 7 pm for the rehearsal’s start, some coming from their homes and others directly from in-town workplaces. About an hour into the rehearsal, someone stuck their head outside to check on the snowfall, reporting it had heightened to “whiteout” conditions and was piling up much faster than it could be cleared. With that update, music director Don Teeters hurried through the remaining pieces and quickly dismissed everyone with admonitions to get home safely and spend some extra time reviewing their music before Friday’s concert.

Little did any of us know what was to follow – another day-and-a-half of blizzard conditions, amounting to something like 36 inches of snow and drifting to unheard-of heights, flooding along the coast, and nothing less than a total “shutdown” of the Commonwealth for the next two weeks or so. And it was much longer than that before anything returned to normal, including rehearsals and concerts.

My own saga of that Monday night’s return from rehearsal included a harrowing drive – with three other Cecilia members – to Gloucester, where I ended up spending the next week, unable to return home to Ipswich. Fortunately, being snowed-in with Cecilia friends just down the street from an open grocery store allowed us all to make the most of the situation. Listening to recordings, eating and drinking far too much, and chipping away at the mountains of snow that buried our cars, kept us content for days. Some Cecilia members who couldn’t get home on Monday night due to the cancellation of all mass transit, ended up returning to their offices or nearby hotels for several days.

Cecilia’s doomed Bach concert did eventually get rescheduled, although memory fails me regarding the details. The Blizzard of ’78 certainly supplied many of us with an adventure never to be forgotten!

Keith Glavash is a member of the Bass section of Cecilia.

J.S. Bach's B Minor Mass and The Boston Cecilia

by Larry Herz

Like many classical choral organizations, The Boston Cecilia has periodically risen to the challenge of the great Bach works: B Minor Mass, St. Matthew and St. John Passions, and in one memorable concert, all six Motets.

The relationship between these pieces of music and today's leading choruses is older and richer than you might guess. They were a crucial part of the development of serious amateur choruses. Looking back to the beginning of "public music", we'll review some of this and speculate about its meaning for the present.

Serious classical music was a product of two streams of wealth for most of its history. It was an outgrowth of worship in the cloister (but developed to high polish only in centers of ecclesiastic wealth such as cathedrals), and a luxury fostered by the aristocracy for social and religious occasions. In the case of court chapels, these worlds overlapped. With the rise of a bourgeois class, towns were sometimes able to support chapel music as a municipal expression of popular musical enthusiasm. It was in such a situation that Bach found himself for most of his life. Although he wrote the Brandenburg Concertos as an application for court sponsorship (and failed), he succeeded as Kappelmeister at the Thomaskirke in Leipzig, where the town authorities paid for a church choir school, choir, and orchestra. Bach's famous use of small numbers of singers and musicians for his weekly cantatas was less his choice than a subject of complaints to the town - how he would have loved to conduct Boston Cecilia! When he had larger forces at his disposal, such as in the B Minor Mass or the Passions, how well he used them!

After J.S. Bach's death, his sons moved from Leipzig and from the Baroque style to follow their fortunes in the new sensibility which would become the Classical Period. But a large collection of J.S. Bach's musical scores remained at the Thomas School, which continued to perform his motets despite the change in musical fashion in the larger European world. The young Mozart heard one of these performances in 1789 and was impressed. In Berlin, a cult of Bach appreciation developed around Princess Amalia of Prussia (sister of Frederick the Great), a composer and esthete of the higher forms of counterpoint. Her Bach library became a great resource for the coming Bach revival of the 19th c. Individual organists who had studied with or had known Bach continued training students in his habits and style, and performing his organ works in church.

Mozart first met the works of Bach in 1782 at the Vienna Court Library. “I go every Sunday at noon to Baron van Swieten and there nothing is played but Handel and Bach." His wife Konstanze loved their counterpoint and begged her husband to write fugues in this style, which he did. Beethoven's teacher Neefe in Bonn introduced him to keyboard works of Bach in 1783, and Beethoven's skill at performing the Art of the Fugue was immediately publicized.

In the early 19th century, several emerging trends began to prepare the way for a Bach revival. The classes and guilds of European society were succeeded by the free middle class, which began to enjoy more wealth and leisure than its predecessors. The Seven Years' War and Bavarian War of Succession had sapped the courts of the zest and funding for music which had sustained the composers of prior centuries. As courts lost their orchestras, serious musicians looked for new opportunities. When in 1810 the Gewerberfreiheit laws deprived town fiddlers, trumpeters, and pipers of guild protection, they began to swell the ranks of the new opera orchestras. The age of Rationalism, for which Bach was an exemplar of the highest discipline of musical craft, began to yield to Romanticism, which would come to see Bach as an inspired devotional composer and a towering hero of the German cultural heritage. In Romantic music criticism, Mozart was compared to Rafael and Bach to Michelangelo and Newton.

The Berlin Opera was able to offer the first subscription concert series. The Prussian King's harpsichordist, increasingly idle, began gathering Berlin students for weekly group singing at what became the Berlin Singakademie. In this format, the middle-class citizens of both sexes, instead of paying professional musicians to perform for them, began to learn, interpret, and later perform music for themselves. The Berlin Singakademie became so famous that visiting celebrities like Beethoven and the Crown Prince attended rehearsals when in town. This middle-class pursuit generated popular enthusiasm for Handel's works in the concert-halls and Palestrina's works in church. Rehearsal of Bach's music at the Singakademie began in 1794 with Motet #1, and covered several of the motets that same year. The Passions followed. By 1813, the singers were tackling the B Minor Mass. None of these rehearsals were preparation for a public performance, since this music was deemed too difficult for the public to appreciate. Goethe experienced some of this music, and was stricken: "as though eternal harmony were conversing with itself, as might have happened in God's bosom just before he created the world." Nietzsche expressed very similar feelings about Bach. Felix Mendelssohn was most impressed after hearing one of the motets performed in 1822 by the Cacilienverein (Cecilia Society!). Finally in 1828, the Credo from the Mass in B minor was performed for the public in Frankfort by a total of 172 musicians. In 1829, Mendelssohn presented the St. Matthew Passion in abbreviated form in Berlin. The public proved up to the challenge, and enthusiastically demanded repeat performances that year and every year thereafter in ever-increasing numbers of cities. The Bach Revival became one of the sustaining elements of amateur choral repertoire around the world.

Classical music groups in America continued the civic performance tradition, beginning with the Stoughton Musical Society in 1786 and later Boston's Handel & Haydn Society and Cecilia Society.

The transition between Court and guild music and music performed by average citizens is an unfinished story. Classical music survived the end of the nobility's support because an emerging citizenry could indeed appreciate and support complex and profound musical experience. Will it survive TV, CDs, cocooning, file-sharing, and Reality Shows? You get to vote.

The Historical Perspective on the Transcendentalists

by Larry Herz

Most of us study the Transcendentalists at some point in our schooling, and read (or read excerpts from) Thoreau and Emerson. It’s easy to get the impression that these people were doing very eloquent woolgathering, because from our viewpoint almost two centuries later, their back-to-nature quotes seem heady and a bit vague.

Reading Conflagration by John Buehrens helped me understand better what all the fuss was about. The mainstream New Englanders were in a bit of a crisis. Their Puritanism was full of Calvinism, a grim and harsh religious outlook. The Enlightenment had raised some interesting possibilities for this life, but while science was making inroads in the Europe and the Americas, humanism was still scandalous to the Puritan sensibility. In the European reaction to scientific progress, Keats was decrying “dark satanic mills” and Kant was positing structures of understanding innate to the soul. Americans gradually began absorbing European advances in philosophy, which began to pose major challenges to their religious and ethical outlook. To sensitive souls, scripture and doctrine began to seem less adequate to describe the whole human situation. Predestination of the soul began to seem arbitrary; the Trinity began to seem contrived and Popish; material progress and its foundation on slave labor began to seem soulless. Although these were deeply religious people, the religious conventions of the time seemed less relevant than their own awoken spiritual convictions.

This is the crux of the movement: the urgent need to find new expression of imminent spiritual realities, and to thrash it out together. The literary Transcendentalists expressed the stirrings of their inner lives in increasingly non-religious and individualistic terms. Others began to propound the divine within all people, and found that social or racial strata had lost all validity for them. Living in emulation of Christ began to outshine traditional Old Testament guidance. Many of these thinkers were in the clergy (most of them educated at Harvard Divinity School), so this discussion played out publicly in New England sermons. The most radical, such as James Clarke and Theodore Parker, alienated the power structure, but were so persuasive that hundreds thronged to their sermons. Partly through them, Boston became the heart of the opposition to slavery and of the nascent Women’s Rights movement. Emerson and Thoreau were supportive, and Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience became an important model for activists (later including Gandhi and King). But much of the crowd-moving and fund-raising went on in the congregations and drawing rooms of Boston. Parker penned ideas later amplified by others: “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it tends toward justice” (used by Martin Luther King), and “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people” (used by Abraham Lincoln).

It’s impressive to reflect that religion, art, literature, oratory, and music can awaken a broad movement of conscience so dramatically, as the U.S. started to come to grips with the institution of slavery and women’s disenfranchisement.

A unique genius is about to pay a visit to Cecilia!

by Larry Herz

He was born in 1882 - composed an overture for his school orchestra at age 15, and a mass for chorus and orchestra the following year. During college and graduate school, he became among the first collecting ethnomusicologists, until WW I got in the way.

He won fame for a work he called a psalm celebrating his nation. Made it big in Europe. Was shocked by how little and how poor the musical instruction in his country was. Developed principles for early music education which were named after him and spread widely. His name was resurrected in the 1977 movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where his system of hand signals for notes was needed for interplanetary communication.

He was so celebrated that when he refused to divorce his Jewish wife and the Gestapo arrested him, the public outcry forced them to release him. She died when he was 75. After a year, he remarried...his 19-year-old student. His career started out by demonstrating that there was a real national music that wasn’t the commercialized Gypsy music it was usually taken for; he wrote a distinctive body of instrumental and choral music; and he ended with a system of principles for musical and rhythmic instruction taught all over the western world. This genius is Zoltan Kodály.

“Now as I was young…” : Reflections on 'Fern Hill'

by Deborah Grose

An older man reminisces about his charmed youth. He speaks in the straightforward vocabulary of a child immersed in the natural world. The colors (blue, white, green and gold) are basic; the emotions (happy, easy, carefree) are uncomplicated. His boyhood is populated by plants, animals, and the recurring rhythms of heavenly bodies, as he runs, climbs, walks, sleeps, plays, sings, races, and flies. No other humans come into view. Rather, his antagonist is time, whose name he utters on six occasions. Nostalgia turns bittersweet as he acknowledges the inevitability of change and loss and death. In so doing he conjures our awareness that past and present - youth and maturity - innocence and worldliness are opposite poles, but are inextricably linked, even while neither end can fully apprehend the other.

The Hope of Loving

by Benjamin Perry

Poets write of love as that which gives us purpose, that human capacity of deep connection and genuine compassion that makes our lives meaningful. In the fourth movement of Jake Runestad’s The Hope of Loving, the words of Meister Eckhart communicate our need for love. The language is plain and simple, yet penetrating and evocative:

“What keeps us alive, what allows us to endure?

It is the hope of loving, of being loved.

We weep when light does not reach our hearts.

We wither like fields if someone close does not rain their kindness upon us.

My soul has a purpose, it is to love.” - Meister Eckhart

So, according to Eckhart, love literally “keeps us alive.” It is both our purpose and an absolute necessity in life. Just as flowers require sunlight to thrive, so do we as humans require the warmth and connection of other beings to flourish. Just as plants need water to survive, we too need kindness to “rain down upon us.”

Eckhart describes another aspect of love: love’s ability to pull humans through the toughest of times; It allows us to endure even the most difficult circumstances. A beautiful example of love’s capacity to shine through amidst dark times is found in the writings of Nelson Mandela. Even while enduring the harsh conditions of prison during the apartheid, he had the capacity to love. He explained that the most painful part of that experience was living with the fear that he might lose his love for his captors. The guards had to be changed out a number of times because they ‘cracked,’ meaning Mandela’s love for them was so present that they could no longer be the ones to keep him locked up. For someone in such extreme circumstances to unflinchingly generate love, goodwill, and compassion for their oppressors is inspiring evidence of our innate goodness as humans and a testament to our deepest sense of love.

The words of St. John of the Cross, in the third movement of the Runestad, add another dimension. He says: “Tenderly, I now touch all things knowing one day we will part.” The word ‘tenderly,’ used in this context, is evocative because it shows a recognition of our impermanence as beings in this world - the beauty that comes from living life to the fullest because of how fleeting and precious life is. In this sense, love proves to be an act of gentle presence. For if we live our lives residing in the fullness of the present moment we truly appreciate the relationships and the beauty that surround us. In the end, it is clear that love is at the same time a necessity for our survival and an element of self actualization. It permeates our entire spectrum of needs.

This poetry is evocative, and Runestad’s music beautifully captures the sense of the words. He carefully sets the text by using creative harmony, exciting rhythmic figures, and the idiosyncratically delicate and soulful sounds of a string quartet accompaniment. Indeed, he brings these sentiments to life in a fresh and exciting way that allows us to reflect on our most primal needs while bathing in a beautiful sound space.

Benjamin Perry is the Assistant Conductor of The Boston Cecilia

Radiant Dawn

by Benjamin Perry

The Boston Cecilia’s next concert, Radiant Dawn, will feature the theme of light. As we near the solstice, we will perform music about light in winter, the season of darkness. In December, the sun sets early, our stores of Vitamin D run low, and the cold weather pushes us indoors. We overcome the darkness by focusing on the qualities of light in the human sense: the warm-heartedness, the kindness, and the generosity. The darkest and coldest time of the year is a time to bring warmth with celebration - Christmas, Hanukkah, Mawlid el-Nabi, and Rohatsu (Bodhi Day). It is in this spirit of joy, hope, and reflection that we present the music of Radiant Dawn.

One of the pieces on the program will be Morton Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna. Few composers have captured the essence of radiance so fully as Lauridsen. He is the most frequently performed American composer of choral music, and light is one of his central themes, particularly in Lux Aeterna. But what is it about his music that makes us experience this aural vision of light so readily? To quote his website: “His music has an overall lyricism and is tightly constructed around melodic and harmonic motives.” Lauridsen’s choral music has an overall lushness and cinematic exquisiteness to it. It contains dense and bright harmonies and clever voicings that bring the “light” out of the sound. All of these elements combine to create music that simply wants to be sung with enthusiasm and heart.

Cecilia will also perform Serenity, Ola Gjeilo’s setting of the beloved Christmas text “O Magnum Mysterium.” Gjeilo’s piece with its overlapping layers of sonorous chords and its beautifully simple melodies paints an image of light; it creates a sound-world that resembles light passing through the prism of colorful stained-glass windows. This aural image is paired with the text, with its emphasis on mystery and blessedness, and is emphatically communicated through Gjeilo’s compositional techniques.

The holiday concert will also feature Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on Christmas Carols, as well as a cappella pieces of Eric Whitacre, James Macmillan, and Gabriel Guillaume. Organist Kevin Neel, cellist Shay Rudolph, and baritone John Bitsas will join the Cecilia chorus to celebrate light in this holiday season with Radiant Dawn.

Benjamin Perry is the Assistant Conductor of The Boston Cecilia

Armistice: The Journey for Peace

by Benjamin Perry

Boston Cecilia’s first concert this season is entitled Armistice: The Journey for Peace. The concert includes music and poetry that explore war and sorrow, death, and the response of hopefulness even in difficult times. Humans have been known to wage ruthless wars and harden their hearts, but it is also in human nature to seek peace and understanding. Throughout history there are countless stories of soldiers putting their weapons down, even for a moment, to honor love and peace even in the midst of war. Our music is a celebration of those moments, where our more evolved and compassionate consciousness shines through.

Veterans Day, a holiday dedicated to American veterans of all wars, will take place on Sunday November 11, 2018, the centennial of the 1918 Armistice. In 1918, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, an armistice, or temporary cessation of World War I hostilities, was declared between the Allied nations and Germany. World War I was known as the “war to end all wars.” Both sides suffered an immeasurable loss of life, but at least the fighting was over. When news of the Armistice broke out in London, the streets were full of people exclaiming the end of war and, not surprisingly, singing - something we have done for millennia to celebrate peaceful times. One year later after the armistice, in 1919, November 11 was declared “Armistice Day" in America.

On November 11, 1921, an unknown soldier, who had already been laid to rest at a cemetery in Europe, was placed aboard a ship to Washington D.C. It was to fill the new "Tomb of the Unknown Soldier". News of the event was broadcast far and wide causing thousands of people to flock to see the body and pay their respects. There was a funeral procession down Pennsylvania Avenue and each state sent in floral arrangements to adorn the tomb. Taps was played and the casket was placed into the tomb at 11:00 am. The President requested that all flags be flown at half-mast. That single unknown soldier not only symbolized America’s losses, but the losses of the world at large and the blood shed on Earth’s soil. The music played at the occasion symbolized the rest and peace of the nation after war, music that was fought for by those who died.

It seems fitting that we make music 100 years later that responds to this moment, fully acknowledging war's inevitable existence and working to learn something from it. The music we make wields a power that, if we let it, can work to conquer fear in our world. Music inspires peace, and the immediacy of our need for music is ever present. Armistice Day serves as a reminder that war and violence can end. And the music in this program is a reminder that, amidst the pain and suffering of the world, there is hope. Among the pieces performed in this concert is Howell’s Requiem, a work which beats its heart in direct acknowledgement of the mortality of our world. Another piece on the program, Jeffrey Van’s A Procession Winding Around Me, sets the Civil War poetry of Walt Whitman to music for choir and classical guitar. These works, along with the others on the program, serve to awaken our hearts and minds in times of deep despair and look for peace; indeed, they promote an almost “armistice-like” spirit. We hope you will join us in this meditative experience as we explore through music a Journey for Peace.

Benjamin Perry is the Assistant Conductor of The Boston Cecilia

Composing 'Canticle'

by Kile Smith

Saints bless the world, even when the world doesn’t know it. Saints who write, though, let the world know it, and if we pay attention, their words can go all the way in, regardless of our tradition. St. John of the Cross, one of those blessings, created some of the deepest and finest mystical literature the world has ever known. “Deepest” speaks to the spiritual in his writing, and “finest,” to the literary, for St. John’s Dark Night of the Soul and The Spiritual Canticle are recognized as writings of the highest order.

His writing is clear, and it is sensual. He draws images and words directly from the biblical Song of Solomon (also called the Song of Songs). The bride and bridegroom, flowers, the stag on the hill, and foxes in the garden all populate and animate The Spiritual Canticle.

Although the words are clear, they are not always easily understood. The language of the Bible and the language of the troubadours may be foreign to some of us, and mystical meaning is, by its nature, often hidden. But anyone who has ever been in love will not miss the frustration or even anger here:

         Alas! who can heal me?
         Give yourself at once to me,
         do not send me
         any more messengers today
         who cannot tell me what I want.

Or will not know the pull of this feeling:

         The bride has entered
         the sweet garden of her desire;
         she rests in delight,
         resting her neck
         on the sweet arms of the Beloved.

St. John of the Cross uses experiences we know in this world to show us a world deeper still. It is a world we may have guessed at or may have even hoped for, but it is a world we do not yet know.

The challenge I felt in setting this text was the layer upon layer of meaning inhabiting each stanza, even surrounding every word. The way I dealt with it was to center in on, and to try to convey, one emotion.

Music cannot explicate text, after all. I love creating music for words, I always have, but music does not teach. What it does is open a window into the soul. I look into mine and attempt to create, in sound, what I feel. If I have done it well, someone else will feel it, too.

I cannot take full credit for the interesting combination of instruments in Canticle. Craig Hella Johnson is the music director of the Vocal Arts Ensemble in Cincinnati that commissioned this piece. Craig and I were discussing what the commission would be, and when he liked my idea of this text, we agreed it should be accompanied by something unusual. He mentioned a choral work he liked, Dominick Argento’s 25-minute Walden Pond, which uses three cellos and harp.

I fell for the cellos immediately, and wondered about making them a quartet. Canticle, though, needed enough variety in the sound to carry it for over an hour. We both wanted to avoid piano, if only to aid the otherworldliness of the text. Harp has a percussive quality in its plucked sound, but is still another string instrument. No, I should just go right to percussion, I thought. Marimba is lovely, but that would be a lot of dark wood sounding with the cellos. It should be something brighter, but not so bright as glockenspiel. It should have the flexibility of playing chords, and it should be able to carry over the choir and cellos.

Vibraphone quickly became the obvious choice. To that I added a bass drum, which I fell in love with when I wrote The Consolation of Apollo for choir, bass drum, and crotales. You may not have spent too much time thinking about it, but the bass drum is capable of a great range of personality. At a soft volume it carries very well. The only “special” technique I call for is crumpled paper to be placed on it at one point (the drum is mounted horizontally). The percussionist slaps the paper with one hand, making a nice “chiff” sound. This is in No. 10, “My Beloved Is the Mountains.”

Finally, the tambourine appears here and there throughout the work. I heard it right away, though, for the beginning “Where have you hidden yourself,” in which I imagined music of the 16th-century Spanish Renaissance and a troubadour playing guitar (provided by the cellos, pizzicato).

There are a few composerly techniques in Canticle, such as voices moving in opposite directions in “O crystal spring! If only on your mirrored surface…” and, in “The little white dove has returned to the ark with an olive branch,” a simple round that keeps mutating into something fairly elaborate. But mostly, Canticle is composed, as is all my music on texts, with text-painting. That is, I keep the words ever before me, and the feelings they enkindle. I write the music to that.

Anyone who follows the words, and who grows to love them as I have, will grow into the music. My hope is that the music and the words will go all the way in.