evensong — December 2022

by Michael Barrett

We have adopted and adapted the framework of the Evensong service as a vehicle for showcasing music connected to different faith traditions, including Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Judaism, and various sects of Protestantism, in the context of a public concert. This is not such a stretch in at least one sense, for some of the texts one hears in a typical Evensong service can be found across the spectrum of Judeo-Christian traditions. This is especially true of the approximately 150 poems known collectively as the Psalms of David that appear in the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament.

Joseph Rheinberger’s Abendlied (“Evening song”), a late-Romantic gem in the tradition of Schütz and Brahms, serves as the invitation to this evening’s performance. This motet is followed by Kevin Allen’s setting of Hodie scietis, which serves as the Introit (an “entering” song) for our concert, a sort of opening credits for the framework that follows. Allen has composed extensively for the Catholic liturgy, and his musical language, while taking significant inspiration from composers of the Renaissance, displays a flexibility of tonal center and gestural types that offer a fresh yet accessible take on Renaissance compositional practices.

Next comes a short passage from the Preces and Responses by the 18th-century English composer William Smith. Preces (simply Latin for “prayers”) and responses begin the Evensong service proper, and as in this case are usually arranged in call-and-response phrases. This chordal declamatory style closely resembles the Anglican tradition of chordal, unmeasured Psalm singing.

Next in the liturgical order of the Evensong comes a statement of belief, and here we draw from the Lutheran tradition through Max Reger’s German-language setting, Wir glauben an einen Gott (“We believe in one God). Reger’s setting, like the Preces before it, is highly chordal and declamatory, yet here the drama of the text is expressed through dramatic pivots in tempo, dynamics, and harmony.

Following the creed is a prayer to God that, according to the Bible, Jesus taught to his disciples. This version is Stravinsky’s spare setting in the language of Eastern Orthodoxy, Church Slavonic. Stravinsky follows the prosody of the text in great detail, yielding the sorts of irregular meters that, in a very different context, enliven much of his Primitivist writing such as the Rite of Spring.

The tradition of Psalm singing that features prominently in both Judaism and Christianity found a fascinating musical voice in the music of Salamone Rossi. His publication of Psalm settings in 1622 was the first to wed Hebrew and Aramaic texts of the Jewish liturgy with European-style part writing. From this collection we perform Rossi’s setting of Psalm 124, a poem that describes what would have befallen the poet’s people had God not been on their side. Rossi articulates the phrases of his Hebrew text with changes from full to partial scoring. While his setting favors declamatory, homorhythmic passages, there is a judicious application of imitative or staggered polyphony to enliven certain moments, as when he brings the Psalm to a close as the Psalmist sings “Our hope is in the name of the Lord / who made heaven and earth.”

Rossi’s setting of Psalm 124 is followed by Jubliate Deo in E Flat Major, Britten’s lesser-known setting of Psalm 100 (carrying a Latin title, though the text is in English), published only after his death. Perhaps slightly less boisterous than his setting of the same Psalm in C major, it is nevertheless a joyous setting that befits the celebratory mood of the Psalmist. Of particular interest is how Britten builds up volume and joy in his setting of “For the Lord is gracious / his mercy is everlasting.” Here altos, tenors, and basses trade off in short statements, while divided sopranos sing a kind of cantus firmus, ever ascending in parallel thirds, to a brilliant climax.

We then return to music for Jewish worship in Herbert Fromm’s Sabbath Madrigal, a buoyant setting, as the title suggests, of one of the prayers from the Amidah, the “standing” prayers of Jewish worship. Fromm, like so many of his European Jewish contemporaries, fled the scourge of the Nazis in the 1930s to find a new home in the United States, including work in a synagogue in Brookline.
Two more Psalm settings follow, both in Latin. Charles Villiers Stanford typifies the sacred musical voice of Victorian England, one that shares much with German composers like Rheinberger, as Stanford’s beloved setting of Beati quorum via demonstrates. Arvo Pärt, in his typically methodical manner (and in its way like Stravinsky’s or even Smith’s approach), structures his setting of Cantate Domino by the syllable count of each word. The vocal tunes, and their organ accompaniment, are formulas of scalar or arpeggiated fragments respectively.

We now arrive at the musical centerpiece of most Evensong services, the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis pairing, here presented with an interlude to be described below. The Magnificat and Nunc dimittis texts are part of the Offices of Vespers and Compline respectively, and thus form a pair in the Evensong liturgy.

The Magnificat text is Mary’s litany-like response to the news from the angel Gabriel that she will bear the baby Jesus. The Nunc dimittis, also known as the Song of Simeon, is a canticle (song of praise), also taken from Luke, in which the speaker asks God for leave to depart in peace. This act of departure is the apparent connection to services late in the day.

Trevor Weston is an accomplished composer in many genres. His interest in sacred choral music stems from his days as a child soprano in the service of the choral program at Saint Thomas Church in New York City, and he is one of the several composers on tonight’s concert who continues to contribute new music to enduring ritual traditions.

Mary’s reaction to the news of her pregnancy is open to many interpretations in music. Weston, in a musical language that glides effortlessly between tonal certitude and ambiguity, begins with a contemplative affect, pairing sopranos and altos, then tenors and basses, and reserving full choral strength until Mary declares that all generations hence will call her blessed. Weston continues to offer vivid musical expressions of Mary’s imagery, such as his jagged setting of “strength with his arm,” or the tonally fuzzy passage describing the empty handed dismissal of the rich.
Weston’s settings share similar musical material in their Doxologies, the standard appendix that praises the triune God. Note how, in the second case, the ensemble begins softly but in a lively fashion, as if being roused one last time at this late hour.

Between Weston’s paired settings is another text from Luke, Angelus ad pastores ait, describing the visit of angels to the shepherds as part of Jesus’ birth story. The passage is set to music by Raffaella Aleotti, one of the first women of the Renaissance to publish her own music. This short motet packs in a lot of impressive musical material given its brevity, including a meter change that underscores the beginning of the angels’ speech. The writing borders on the virtuosic, and thus we have chosen five singers from our ranks to sing this small yet brilliant work as a chamber ensemble.

Nathaniel Dett’s setting of Son of Mary belongs to the Spiritual tradition of Black America. As in this setting, Dett’s musical language often fuses late Romantic classical traditions with the heritage of Black sacred and secular song. (This was the path that Antonin Dvorak advised for American composers to follow: to draw on African American and Indigenous musical traditions as their sources of inspiration. This advice and how it was followed or ignored is the subject of our concert in March 2023.) Dett’s music powerfully supports the poet’s pleading for Jesus to hear the prayers of his people. The verses are set apart by at times very different compositional approaches, from hymn-like homophony to a rather strict fugue.

For our closing selection, we return to the story of the shepherds, here rendered in verse. (The tune is called Sherburne; such tune designations often had little to do with the poetic content.) Daniel Read’s musical setting belongs to the Sacred Harp tradition, in a musical language that borrowed heavily from European practice but with a distinctly colonial accent. As was often the fashion, a short homophonic passage is followed by a “fugueing” B section, where the various parts sing in imitation. We close our evening ritual — the ritual of the public concert — with Sherburne’s final verse, a call for universal goodwill and peace for this night and forever more; it is a wish that, no matter your tradition or background, I suspect we can all share.