Ordinary Beauty Program Notes
by Olesia Gordynsky Castuera
“The Ground” from Sunrise Mass by Ola Gjeilo
Ola Gjeilo was born in 1978 in Norway and grew up listening to a variety of musical genres. His formal studies began at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo and continued at the renowned Juilliard School in New York City and later at the Royal College of Music in London. He has written compositions for choir, wind band, and piano and many of his albums have a second version containing piano improvisations over the arranged music. He has collaborated with several ensembles and is currently the composer-in-residence for Albany Pro Musica and DCINY, allowing his music to be heard in large venues like Carnegie Hall and the Lincoln Center. While his music is influenced by the choral greats as well as jazz, folk, and pop music, he has a special love for film music, evidenced by the lush, airy but thick sounds he creates in his compositions.
“The Ground” is the finale of Gjeilo’s work for string orchestra and choir called the Sunrise Mass but Gjeilo reworked it to be a stand-alone piece. Gjeilo’s mastery of the piano is visible in his ability to make subtle yet creative changes in the accompaniment that mark the different sections. He utilizes the entire length of the keyboard in a way that is very active but does not take attention away from the voices and the homophonic choral texture in a major key brings a sense of calm and peace. Three major key changes echo the drama of a sunrise with a third between each modulation, ending the piece very far from where it began.
Excerpts from Four Slovak Folk Songs by Béla Bartók
1. Wedding Song from Poniky
Poetic Translation:
Thus sent the mother her little daughter into a distant land. Sternly she bid her: “Follow thy husband! Never return to me”
“Lo! I shall change me into a blackbird, fly to my mother’s home; There I’ll be waiting, sad in her garden, on a white lily’s stem”
Out came the mother, “Who is this blackbird? Strange is her song and sad; Forth and be gone now, go little birdling from my white lily’s stem.”
“To a bad husband, mother has sent me forth to a distant land. Why must I suffer such bitter pining in an ill-mated bond”
3. Dancing Song from Medzibrod
Poetic Translation:
Food and drink’s your only pleasure, And to dance madly
But to work with pin and needle Never appeals to thee
To the merry bagpipe player Have I paid some money
For while you are dancing, I stand by alone, nobody cares for me
4. Dancing Song from Poniky
Poetic Translation:
Bagpipes are a-playing! Dancers are a-swaying! Piper play till all is spent,
To our hearts and heels content!
Play on bright and bonny, While we have the money! Tavern keeper, one for you! Here is for the piper too!
Once a goat was straying, now his skin is playing! While the goat no more can prance, bagpipe now makes young folk dance!
Béla Bartók (1881-1945) was one of the first collectors of folks songs, analyzing and preserving melodies heard throughout Europe and compiling them for publishing. His love of folk music began when he was a child in Hungary and then Ukraine, Romania, and Slovakia, as his family moved often and so did the borders. This experience mirrors his many works, which include Romanian, Hungarian, and Slovak folk songs. He realized the unique and eclectic features they had, including melodies in various musical modes and a mixture of time signatures. His teaming up with Zoltán Kodály, another great composer and ethnomusicologist, led to the collection of thousands of songs, many with several variations. Sensing the danger of Nazi Germany in 1940, Bartók moved to the United States and continued his research until his death in 1945.
Four Slovak Folksongs (BB 78) premiered on January 5th, 1917, at a time when Bartók had developed his compositional voice using the influences of Liszt, Strauss, and Debussy and combined them with the rhythmic and melodic elements of folk music. He also utilized modern voices like Stravinsky and Schoenberg in his use of unusual rhythms and harmonies that hinted at atonality.
This work is one of many settings of folk songs that Bartók composed. The first movement is a melancholy lamentation about moving far away from home for marriage. The sad lyrics against the final major chord sum up the complexity of many of life’s moments. The next three movements describe ordinary village happenings, like finishing the work of harvesting hay and cheering on the musicians at a dance. Folk songs were often in a mixed meter since the tune was made to fit the words. In the third movement, Bartok cleverly creates four modulations in this short thirty-eight measure movement, offering four different reflections at a music-filled social gathering. The tenors have their moment in the first key, then the altos, and finally the sopranos. When all four voice parts finally sing together, Bartok once again ends on a major chord with melancholy lyrics about being lonely while everyone else dances. The fourth movement immediately starts with the same chord that ended the third movement and continues the raucous energy of the dance, as if panning away from the lonely person and to the joyous group. Spirits are high as the top three voices sing together over an open chord repeated for almost the entire movement. As the accompaniment finally begins to change harmonically, Bartok ends the piece abruptly on a five chord, choosing not to harmonically resolve to a satisfying “home” chord.
Liebst du um Schönheit (If You Love for Beauty) by Clara Schumann
Translation:
If you love for beauty,O love not me!
Love the sun, She has golden hair!
If you love for youth, O love not me!
Love the spring, Who is young each year!
If you love for riches, O love not me!
Love the mermaid, Who has many shining pearls!
If you love for love, Oh yes, love me!
Love me always;
I shall love you forever!
Clara Schumann was born in 1819 and was raised in Leipzig, Germany, where she received a focused musical training from her father, Friedrich Wieck. As a girl, she toured around Europe, with her father as a manager, launching her to fame early. She met her husband Robert, the now famous composer, when he began taking lessons from her father.
The two were wed when she was 21 and for the entirety of their marriage, their art was intertwined. Their music was full of hidden musical love notes for one another and Robert would often credit Clara as the inspiration for pieces while she would often perform his pieces. Her piano playing was lauded for decades as she performed and toured throughout her entire life. Her compositions included works for solo piano, chamber groups, choirs, and piano concertos. Throughout her life, she had 8 children, 4 of whom died during her lifetime, and in 1854, her husband Robert suffered a mental breakdown and admitted himself to a mental institution.
After Robert died in 1857, Clara focused more on performing and editing her husband’s work. She also helped launch the careers of contemporaries such as Johannes Brahms by performing their music.
The text to “Liebst du um Schönheit” was written by Friederich Rückert who wrote the text as part of his collection of love poems called Liebesfrühling. Robert and Clara Schumann published a joint work of 3 songs featuring this one in 1841. When it was first published, there was no indication of who wrote which piece, Robert’s way of dreaming about their enmeshed life together. He gave it to Clara for her birthday after the birth of their first child.
Clara herself is credited with this specific piece and in her manuscripts, she dedicates it to Robert. In it, she explores the many expressions of what is thought to be love and beauty and settles on authentic love. The piece marks an early innocent and optimistic hope of the future before the couple was struck with tragedy not long after. While this piece is written for only voices and piano, it displays the dynamic drama and expressive composing that was so popular at the time.
One May Morning – English Folk Song, arranged by Charlene Archibeque
Charlene Archibeque was born in 1935 and currently lives in the Bay Area. She has created a legacy that includes 35 years of teaching vocal music at San Jose State University. She has toured as a conductor and clinician for various honor choirs, and has won many competitions throughout the US and internationally. She studied at San Diego State, and the University of Michigan, which she visited several times as a guest conductor. In 1969, she was the first woman to receive a DMA in choral conducting, paving the way for other women in a male-dominated field. Her training of thousands of student conductors has resulted in many of her students themselves leading music departments at various universities.
One May Morning is an arrangement of the folk song Searching for Lambs. It shares a characteristic with many English folk tunes in that it is in the Aeolian mode, a key outside of the common 12 keys of Western music. Contrasting the structure and rhythmic rules of art music, folk music allows the singer to create rhythms that serve the song rather than the other way around. Archibeque stays true to the melody in her arrangement that toggles the unconventional five-four with the more common three-four time. This carries a sense of uncertainty and mystery, as the natural sense of strong and weak beats is interrupted.
“Spring” and “Summer” from Two Eastern Pictures by Gustav Holst
Born in Cheltenham, England, Gustav Holst (1874-1934) was raised in a family that had in its history a long line of musicians.. After admission to the Royal College of Music, he studied with Charles Villiers Stanford and became close friends and colleagues with Ralph Vaughan Williams. He was particularly interested in Indian mythology and from that came Two Eastern Pictures, written in 1909. “Spring” is the first of two pieces and is a bright, joyful contrast to the more mysterious and ethereal “Summer.” It was originally arranged for harp and voices and the text is from the poetry of Kālidāsa, an ancient Indian writer from the 5th century. Holst translated the original Sanskrit text himself.
The first movement displays the joys and beauties of springtime, with all its mystery and wonder. The piano does very little harmonically but adds a steady texture the voices glide smoothly over the short, bright notes in the accompaniment. The voices alone transition the piece into a new key on two separate occasions. The second movement, “Summer” has a darker, more mysterious mood as the modality isn’t truly established and listeners question whether the movement is in a major or minor key. The accompaniment plays on the listener’s rhythmic expectations, starting with a steady triple meter pattern, then going into syncopation unexpectedly and later a duple meter. The text alternates between hums, embodying the wordless nature that is described later, and an elegant scene of dancers in the night.
And Joy is Everywhere by Andrea Ramsey
Dr. Andrea Ramsey (1977) is originally from Arkansas and has worked as a composer, conductor, clinician, and scholar. She has worked with a wide variety of voices and her compositions display that knowledge of the range of singers. She has worked at the University of Colorado Boulder serving as the Associate Director of Choral Studies and Assistant Professor of Conducting and also teaching music education at Ohio State University.
The text of And Joy is Everywhere was written by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), a Bengali poet, writer, playwright, philosopher, and social reformer. He is known for his poems, songs, and short stories through which many in the West were introduced to Indian culture. His travels and eloquence led him to become the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for literature with his collection of poems called Gitanjali (translated by himself into English, Song Offerings). Ramsey does a marvelous job with word painting as she takes listeners on an adventure through every line of this poem and draws it out with each voice part adding something significant. As the text mentions knowledge and power, the voices are rigid and cold, moving as minor chord blocks. The twinkle-like piano theme, in the beginning, accompanies the phrase that returns over and over again: “And joy is everywhere.”
Drop, Drop Slow Tears by Orlando Gibbons
Orlando Gibbons was born in 1583 in Oxford and spent most of his life as an organist in the Royal Chapel in England. Though he was a renowned keyboardist in his day, he is now known for compositions, which have almost all been published and performed. He is known for his mastery of polyphony and word setting in both simple and complex works, with sacred and secular texts. His influence on the British choral tradition is most visible through his development and mastery of the madrigal genre. Much of his work is still performed today.
The text of Drop, Drop Slow Tears is written by priest and poet Phineas Fletcher, a contemporary of Gibbons’s . The poem draws from several different scriptures of the Bible but mostly from Luke 7:36-50. The story describes a woman so in awe of Christ’s forgiveness that she weeps at his feet, washing them with her tears and expensive oils. The hymn was published in 1623 in The Hymnes and Songs of the Church as one of seventeen hymns that he contributed. The three verses are written homophonically, a departure from the rich polyphony that Gibbons became known for. However, the simplicity and expression of this piece has kept it relevant for centuries.
The Last Words of David by Randall Thompson
Born in New York at the turn of the century, Randall Thompson (1899-1945) helped to shape the choral music of the 20th century. He studied at Harvard then Eastman School of Music and eventually taught at the esteemed Curtis Institute of Philadelphia. He even spent some time as a professor at the University of California Berkeley. As an academic, his research influenced music education by strengthening the field of music in American colleges, helping to create a more holistic system of music education. He composed in a variety of media including symphonies, solo piano, instrumental, and opera but he is best known for his choral music.
The text of The Last Words of David is taken from 2 Samuel 23:3– 4 of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. King David of the Old Testament is a character with many triumphs and failures and, nearing the end of his life, he speaks a divine charge to his people. The result is a beautiful picture of leadership pursuing the good of the people. One of Thompson’s values was to make text easily intelligible, and this piece displays just that, as the voices mostly move homo-rhythmically. Only at the end is there a cascading “Alleluia” as each voice part sings in canon. Two distinct sections are used to demonstrate the text. The first section has commanding, masculine words like “ruleth,” “must be just,” and “fear of God.” They inspire a strict and orderly reaction, while the piano uses sweeping scales to span the entire piano from bottom to top every couple of measures, evoking a sense of vastness and grandeur. The low, dense chords demand attention and the rhythm in the voices is rigid. The second half, however, uses gentle poetic imagery. It invokes awe, wonder, and goodness as everything is brought down to pianissimo and the music slowly rises in intensity with pulsing rhythms that peak musically with the text describing the rise of the sun.
Jubilate Deo by Peter Anglea
Peter Anglea is an up and coming composer based out of Massachussets. He received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Church Music and composition from Bob Jones University in South Carolina. His approachable yet creative arrangements make them sought out by community groups, church groups and school groups alike.
Jubilate Deo is a creative take on the beloved Latin text meaning “Make a joyful noise.” It begins with a refrain section that is heard two other times in the music, making it easily memorable. This refrain is in a 10/8 time signature, a meter that is rarely utilized, yet it doesn’t feel awkward because the music effortlessly fits the text. The next section is in 6/8 but toggles a duple and triple feel, throwing the strong beats in unexpected places. It ends in a strong cadence that leads back to another refrain, which is now familiar to the listener even though the sopranos split, adding another harmony. The rhythm in these first two sections is driven entirely by the voices and the piano adds some auxiliary textures with some arpeggios. The third section is entirely new and brings the energy down as the upper and lower voices sing their own phrases respectively. Changing roles, the piano then becomes the driver of the rhythm and the voices carry the smooth melodic line. As each group approaches the text “in generationem,” the music prepares for a modulation into the key of B where the refrain is heard once again in a bold finish.
Grant Us Thy Peace by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was one of the forerunners of the Romantic Era, greatly shaping the choral and instrumental music of the time. He was born in 1809 in Hamburg into a Jewish family with a strong reputation and intellectual prowess. Though the family was not in immediate danger, the children were baptized into the Protestant church, largely to avoid any trouble with the public. Along with his sister Fanny, with whom he remained close his entire life, Mendelssohn showed a natural talent at the piano and began formal musical studies at age six with piano and composition at age ten. At a tender age, he was introduced to the music of Bach, which eventually led to him inspiring a Bach revival when he performed the St. Matthew Passion for the first time since Bach’s death. During his life, his roles included performer, conductor, director and composer, and he often interacted with influential musicians such as Robert Schumann and Franz Liszt. He is recognized equally for his instrumental and choral music, both of which demonstrate the expressive and emotive traits of the Era while honoring the elegance of the Classical Era.
Grant Us Thy Peace (Verleih uns Frieden) is a chorale cantata originally written in German in 1831 with a Latin translation. The text is Martin Luther’s version of a Latin prayer that asks for peace and the music exhibits Mendelssohn’s upbringing in the Lutheran church, along with his love of Bach. The text is the simple plea “ Grant us Thy peace,” as all the voices are united in unison for the length of the full melody. In the next entrance, the sopranos and altos continue the melody in a second verse as the tenors and basses accompany them in counterpoint. Simultaneously, the accompaniment moves up higher in range, getting out of the way of the voices. The third entrance is full and rich in four parts, with the accompaniment temporarily ceasing its movement and simply doubling the voices. The ending resumes the motion of the accompaniment while the voices trickle in imitating each other, concluding gently.
Ain’-a that Good News -Traditional Spiritual, arranged by William Dawson
William Dawson (1899-1990) is often called the Father of the Negro Spiritual because he is one of the first Black composers to bring arrangements of spirituals to prominence. Born in Anniston, he often heard spirituals in rural Alabama, inspiring his composer’s voice for decades. At 15, he attended the Tuskegee Institute and eventually learned almost every band and orchestra instrument. His legacy lies in his 25 years working at the Tuskegee Institute. His groups performed at Carnegie Hall, the White House, and on many broadcasts over the radio. Vernon Huff of the Choral Journal explains his legacy, “Most published choral settings of spirituals from this era were set as four-part hymns, but Dawson used his extensive classical training to arrange songs in new, more technically challenging ways.” He died in 1990 having influenced generations of choral singers and composers and having preserved a powerful tradition of folk songs.
Dawson’s arrangement of Ain’-a That Good News was originally published in 1937, the tail end of the Harlem Renaissance. Many have considered this the first notated arrangement of this song. It contains many characteristics shared by Spirituals, such as repetition, call and response, and the use of “blue notes”. The text of Ain’-a That Good News highlights hope and joy in the coming afterlife, usually contrasting poverty in regular daily life. The crown, robe, and harp, all symbols from the Bible represent all their needs and desires being met sometime in the future, whether that is on earth after being liberated or in heaven. This piece contains many instances of call and response, with one voice part as the “leader” and the other voices parts responding and finishing the phrase. This is a heavily used tool in spirituals and eventually, blues and jazz, along with heavy syncopation. The voices take turns neatly singing the melody but eventually the excitement builds to a climax where the melody moves through all the parts. The ending resembles the trumpets said to be at heaven’s gates, a satisfying conclusion. Through generations of passing down folk songs orally, Spirituals are preserved to this day and adorned with new arrangements repeatedly, keeping alive the stories of the people who sang them.