It is a great pleasure to be returning to St. George’s Church in Whyke for our contribution to this year’s Festival of Chichester. Last year, when I selected the 4th of July as the best date for our concert this summer, it seemed an obvious choice to present a programme of American choral music, as the date coincides with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. It is also appropriate to perform here in Chichester with The Sussex Declaration (the only known contemporary ceremonial parchment manuscript copy of the American Declaration ofIndependence apart from the signed original at the US National Archives) located in the West Sussex Records Office only a short distance away. Our chairman and I had the privilege of seeing this document last week.
The current political landscape may have made this a contentious choice of programme; I am aware of at least one other choir that changed their plans as a result. However, we are simply presenting a survey of American choral composers, not quite from A to Z but we have managed B to W in (mostly) chronological order. There are one or two significant omissions, of course, but we hope you appreciate our survey, which presents a sample of choral music in the New World from the 18th century through to the present. Early on we clearly see the influence of European culture, with many American composers studying with their European counterparts; in some of the later compositions it is clear that the effect has been reversed – we hear echoes of Lauridsen and Whitacre in some of our contemporary choral writers’ compositions.
We hope you enjoy the concert. Malcolm Keeler, Musical Director
Programme notes
William Billings was the best known American composer and musician of the eighteenth century, sometimes called the father of American choral music. He was born in Boston in 1746, and died there in 1800, aged 53. He wrote more than three hundred compositions, almost all of them settings of sacred texts, and almost all of them in four parts for a cappella singing. He was active as a singing-school master for over thirty years in Boston, and the first American composer to publish a book entirely of his own compositions.
Virtually all of Billings’ music was written for four-part chorus, singing a cappella. His many hymns and anthems were published mostly in book-length collections. Sometimes Billings would revise and improve a song, including the new version in his next volume. Most of the texts came from the poetry of Isaac Watts, with a few from other sources including Billings himself.
Billings’ work was very popular in its heyday, but after his death his music was almost completely neglected in the American musical mainstream. However, his compositions remained popular for a time in the rural areas of New England. A few of Billings’ songs were carried southward and westward through America as a result of their appearance in shape-note hymnals. They ultimately resided in the rural South, as part of the Sacred Harp singing tradition.
In the latter part of the twentieth century a Billings revival occurred, and a complete scholarly edition of his works was published. Works by Billings are commonly sung by American choral groups today, particularly performers of early music. In addition, the recent spread of Sacred Harp music has acquainted many more people with Billings’ music: several of his compositions are among the more frequently sung of the works in the Sacred Harp canon.
I am the Rose of Sharon was published in The Singing Master’s Assistant in 1778. It presents a biblical love lyric from the Song of Songs (Solomon 2:1-8,10-11) in a lively and highly varied setting. There is colourful word painting (“skipping,” “rise up”), frequent changes of metre, and places where the harmony is incomplete by European standards, giving it a kind of primitive quality. But the feeling is honest and joyful and the music itself is completely infectious.
Cobham first appears in The Waterhouse Manuscript, 1780-1781, as Raynham for Tenor and Bass and attributed to Billings, so it must have been composed before 1780. It was later published in The Continental Harmony in four parts.
Edward Alexander MacDowell (1860 – 1908) was an American composer and pianist. His piano suite Woodland Sketches, written in 1896, includes his most popular short piece, To a Wild Rose. In 1904 he was one of the first seven Americans honored by membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Though not known as a choral composer, he has a significant place in American musical history as the founder in 1907 of the MacDowell Colony (renamed Macdowell in 2020) in Peterborough, New Hampshire. It serves as a quiet retreat for creative artists to work. Over the years, some 9,000 artists have been supported, including Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland.
Amy Beach [née Amy Marcy Cheney] was born in 1867 in Henniker, New Hampshire. She reportedly could sing dozens of songs by her first birthday, taught herself to read by age three, and started improvising tunes soon after. Her mother – an accomplished pianist and singer – and father determined that she had perfect pitch, and perhaps synaesthesia, as she often requested music by colour. Known as the first female composer to have a symphony performed by a major orchestra (her Gaelic Symphony, premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1896), she was also one of the first U.S. composers to have her music be recognized in Europe, and the first classical U.S. composer to achieve success without the benefit of European study.
A remarkable child prodigy, she made her public debut as a pianist in 1883, also the year of her first published compositions. In 1885 she performed with the Boston Symphony, but upon her marriage to the distinguished surgeon, Dr. H.H.A. Beach, she curtailed her performing in accordance with his wishes, and focused on composition. She made one performance per year, with the proceed donated to charity, and one of these performances was of her own piano concerto with the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1900. Following the death of her husband in 1910, she resumed performing, and toured Europe to great acclaim, performing her own music, until the onset of WWI.
Later in life she spent most summers composing at the MacDowell Colony, and the rest of the year based mostly in New York City and her Cape Cod home in Centerville, Massachusetts. At her death in 1944 she left more than 300 published works, and more of her music has been published in recent decades. She declared the MacDowell Colony as her estate executor, and all earnings from her music aid in the operations and continuation of the Colony.
Charles Ives (1874 – 1954) received his earliest musical instruction from his father, who was a bandleader, music teacher, and acoustician who experimented with the sound of quarter tones. At 12 Charles played organ in a local church, and two years later his first composition was played by the town band. In 1893 or 1894 he composed Song for the Harvest Season, in which the four parts—for voice, trumpet, violin, and organ—were in different keys. That year he began studying at Yale University under Horatio Parker, then the foremost academic composer in the United States. His unconventionality disconcerted Parker, for whom Ives eventually turned out a series of “correct” compositions.
After graduation in 1898, Ives became an insurance clerk and part-time organist in New York City. In 1907 he founded the highly successful insurance partnership of Ives & Myrick, which he headed from 1916 to 1930. Nearly all his works were written before 1915; many lay unpublished until his death. Chronic diabetes and a hand tremor eventually forced him to give up composing and to retire from business. His music became widely known only in the last years of his life.
Ives’s music is intimately related to American culture and experience, especially that of New England. His compositions—with integrated quotations from popular tunes, revival hymns, barn dances, and classical European music—are frequently works of enormous complexity that freely employ sharp dissonance, polytonal harmonies, and polymetric constructions. He drew from European music what techniques he wished while experimenting with tone clusters, microtonal intervals, and elements of chance in music (in one bassoon part he directs the player to play whatever he wants beyond a specific point). Believing that all sound is potential music, he was somewhat of an iconoclast and occasionally a parodist.
Psalm 67 dates from 1894 and sets the upper and lower voices in two different keys, C major and G minor. The effect has been described by two of his contemporaries as ‘mysterious grandeur’ (and is not unlike the sound world of John Tavener’s Hymn to the mother of God, written some 90 years later). Ives wrote a number of Psalm settings; his father regarded Psalm 67 as ‘the best for singing in church’. The structure of the anthem is ABA, with a concluding benediction in the style of Anglican chant.
The compositions of George Gershwin (1898 – 1937) spanned both popular and classical genres, and he was equally successful in both fields. He wrote most of his vocal and theatrical works, including more than a dozen Broadway shows, in collaboration with his elder brother, lyricist Ira Gershwin.
His three Preludes For Piano were written in 1926. Gershwin referred to the longer slow central prelude as “a sort of blues lullaby”.
Gershwin was the 20th-century’s most popular composer, the opening of A Rhapsody in Blue as familiar as the first four notes of Beethoven’s 5th. His opera Porgy and Bess and numerous Broadway musicals generated 32-bar song forms (e.g. I got rhythm, Embraceable you, Fascinating rhythm) that, along with those of his contemporaries, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and Richard Rodgers, flowed into a standard song-book that has supported jazz and popular music ever since.
An American in Paris was begun in 1926 during a visit to Paris, where Gershwin was intent on studying with Ravel. It’s an orchestral tone poem that portrays the impressions of an American visitor strolling about the city, listening to the street sounds and absorbing the French atmosphere. One of its themes expresses homesickness and is labelled ‘The Blues’. It is this section that the contemporary Italian clarinet player and conductor Michele Mangani has singled out using a transcribed solo by Heghel Gualdi (1924-2005) to deploy a wide range of licks, smears and vocalised sounds typical of mid-20th-century jazz and its more famous American exponents, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Buddy DeFranco. Jazz musicians often quote from other songs in their solos and Mangani has drawn on A Rhapsody in Blue at the start and finish. Gershwin, by the way, did not write that famous opening slide for the clarinet: it was a modification of Gershwin’s opening scale that Ross Gorman, principal clarinet in the Paul Whiteman Orchestra, intended as a cheeky wind-up at the work’s first rehearsal with the composer in attendance. To everyone’s surprise, Gershwin loved it and asked Gorman to do the very same thing in the concert – with as much of a wail as possible.
Randall Thompson (1899 – 1984) was for most of the last century considered to be America’s pre-eminent composer of choral music. Only in the last forty years or so has he been eclipsed by Morten Lauridsen and Eric Whitacre.
His short setting of Alleluia is his best-known work. It was commissioned by Serge Koussevitsky and the trustees of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the spring of 1940 for the opening exercises of the new Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood. Koussevitsky wanted a “fanfare” for voices. However, deeply affected by the war in Europe and the recent fall of France, Thompson instead produced a quiet and introspective piece.
The date for the opening of the Music Center was 8th July. However, Thompson didn’t commence writing the work until 1st July, completing it on the 5th. The music was only presented to the Choir Director, G. Wallace Woodworth, 45 minutes before the scheduled performance. His first comment was “Well, at least we won’t have to worry about the text.” Alleluia has become something of an anthem for American choirs, with over three million copies of the work sold.
Aaron Copland‘s name is synonymous with American music. It was his pioneering achievement to create concert music that is characteristically American. At the same time, he was able to stamp his music with a personality so vivid as to transcend stylistic boundaries, making every work identifiable as his alone.
Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1900, Copland set out for Paris in 1920 to study with Nadia Boulanger. His return to New York was marked by a new enthusiasm for a whole range of other musical disciplines, including lecturing, performing, and lending enthusiastic support to the work of local music societies. Copland found himself increasingly involved in the general musical life of America. He was head of the composition department at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood from 1940-65, and lectured widely, most notably at Harvard.
Copland’s output slowed markedly from the mid-1950s, in part because of his decision to take up conducting. He made regular appearances all over the world in addition to recording the greater part of his orchestral output, mostly with the London Symphony Orchestra for CBS. He died in 1990.
Copland’s Four Motets were composed in the fall of 1921 while he was studying with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. They are scored for a capella chorus using biblical texts. They were performed in Fontainbleau by the Paris-American-Gargenville Chorus in November 1924. Boulanger conducted a performance of them shortly after, and also gave their first Paris performance8in 1937. They remained unpublished until 1979. Copland wrote, “I think of these as student pieces that show some influence of Mussorgsky, whom Iadmired. While they have a certain curiosity value – perhaps people want to know what I was doing as a student – the style is not yet really mine.”
Samuel Barber was born in 1910 at Westchester, Pennsylvania, into a comparatively wealthy and cultured and musical family. He studied music at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He lived for most of his life at a house in Mount Kisco, New York state, which he shared with the composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Despite the early fame which he gained through the very popular Adagio for Strings (1938) he never really received critical acceptance as a proper American composer; this was partly because he made little effort to write works that were specifically American, and also because his musical language, which has been described as neo-romantic (he was muchinfluenced by Brahms), was out of step with the modernist approach of most American composers of the mid twentieth century. Barber’s music is howeveralways concise, well expressed and beautifully crafted.
Sure on this Shining Night was originally written as a song in 1938 (part of his Opus 13 cycle) and was arranged by the composer for choir and piano in 1941. It is one of Barber’s best melodies, a lyrical little gem which deservesto be heard more often.
– Interval –
Copland’s Old American Songs were originally set for solo voice and piano, but a number of them were later arranged for chorus by Irving Fine, with Copland’s approval. Set One dates from 1950 and Set Two from 1952.
Ching-a-Ring Chaw, is a minstrel tune from the Harris Collection. Copland was drawn to the tune but hesitant to use the original words, so penned new text to describe a more universal vision of “the promised land”. This was his only effort as a lyricist.
Long Time Ago, here presented in Copland’s original arrangement, is also thought to have originated as an anonymous minstrel tune, which was adapted in 1837 with words by George Pope and music by Charles EdwardHorn. Copland discovered it in S. Foster Damon’s Series of Old American Songs in the Harris Collection of American Poetry and Players at Brown University Library.
I Bought Me a Cat is perhaps the American version of Old MacDonald. Copland was introduced to this song by his friend, the playwright Lynn Riggs, who sang it as a boy in Oklahoma.
Carson Cooman (b. 1982) is perhaps less well-known than most of the other composers represented in this concert. Born in Rochester, New York, his primary composition studies were with Bernard Rands, Judith Weir, AlanFletcher, and James Willey. He is a prolific composer in many forms, from solo instrumental pieces to operas, and from orchestral works to hymn tunes.
His music has been performed on all six inhabited continents in venues that range from the stage of Carnegie Hall to the basket of a hot air balloon. His music appears on over forty recordings. As an active concert organist, Cooman specializes in the performance of contemporary music. Over 1,500 new compositions by more than 400 international composers have been written for him, and his organ performances can be heard on a number of CD releases. Cooman is also a writer on musical subjects, producing articles and reviews frequently for a number of international publications. He serves as an active consultant on music business matters to composers and performing organizations, specializing particularly in the area of composer estates and archives.
A Cosmic Prayer was written for Murray Forbes Somerville and the Choral Fellows of the Harvard University Choir, and in memory of William Mathias on the 10th anniversary of his death.
Morten Lauridsen, of Danish ancestry, was born in 1943 in the Pacific Northwest of the USA. He has taught at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music since 1972, and now divides his time between Los Angeles and his summer cabin on a remote island off the north coast of Washington State.
Lauridsen’s characteristic choral style, inspired partly by plainsong and the music of the Renaissance, and combining ‘beauty, power and spiritual depth (according to his citation for the National Medal of Arts, presented byPresident George W Bush in 2007) has gained him worldwide popularity His most famous works are perhaps the unaccompanied motet O magnum mysterium, and the non-liturgical requiem Lux Aeterna, which we perform tonight in the version for organ accompaniment.
Lux Aeterna was written for the Los Angeles Master Chorale and premiered on 13 April 1997. It consists of five movements performed without a break, on texts from sacred Latin sources which all have references to light. Itsmood is one of warmth and consolation, and from a musical point of view is permeated with augmented chords, especially that of the ninth (D major triad plus E). In the composer’s words, it expresses ‘hope, reassurance, faith and illumination in all of its manifestations’. A perceptive ear will note reminiscences of Lauridsen’s other works, particularly O magnum mysterium.
The text of the opening movement, ‘Introitus’, is taken from the Requiem Mass. A slow instrumental introduction in a low register indicates the seriousness of what is to come. The speed increases at ‘Et lux perpetua’ (which is technically an extended canon), and new material appears at ‘Te decet hymnus’. The opening words return at the end, a cappella as before, but with the addition of an eloquent line for solo cello.
The second movement, ‘In te Domine speravi’, uses two passages of text from the ‘Te Deum’, the late-4th-century canticle in rhythmical prose that is well known from the Anglican service of Matins. A single verse from Psalm 112 (‘Beatus vir’) is included, to provide the reference to light. The musical texture here is spare, and composed in short sections. It includes first the rather severe cantus firmus Herzliebster Jesu (the tune familiar in English hymn books as ’Ah, holy Jesus, how hast thou offended’); and later a clever inverted canon at the words ‘fiat misericordia’.
‘O nata lux’ by contrast is a radiant a cappella motet, whose warm harmony circles round the keys of D major and A major. The simple, concise text here is the Office hymn at Lauds on the Feast of the Transfiguration (6 August), best known in the setting by Thomas Tallis. Further richness of texture is supplied by the splitting of vocal parts, sometimes up to six in number.
Next comes ‘Veni sancte spiritus’. Here the instrumental accompaniment returns, sometimes in contrasting quavers. The text is the Sequence for the Feast of Pentecost, attributed to Stephen Langton, archbishop of Canterbury (c. 1150-1228). Each stanza has three lines of seven syllables, nearly all end-stopped, and with much repetition of wording. The rhyme scheme is AAB, every third line ending in ‘ium’. Lauridsen’s setting is spirited and jubilant, in triple time and at a faster speed than earlier movements, but with something of the same ethereal mood.
The sublime final movement, ‘Agnus Dei – Lux aeterna’, takes text from the later part of the Requiem Mass. The gentle ‘Agnus Dei’ is a prayer for peace, concluding with the words ‘requiem sempiternam’ (‘rest everlasting’). ‘Lux aeterna’ reprises material from the opening ‘Introitus’ (No. 1), which however becomes more impassioned, leading to a passage of ecstatic ‘Alleluias’ before subsiding to a mood of final acceptance.
Eric Whitacre was born in 1970 in Nevada. He received no formal musical training before the age of 18, but his experience of singing Mozart’s Requiem in his college choir changed his life. He went on to study in Las Vegas and New York, graduating from the prestigious Julliard School of Music. He is arguably the most performed American composer of choral music of his generation. He is currently Visiting Composer at Pembroke College, Cambridge University and is an Ambassador for the Royal College of Music.
He recently completed two terms as Artist in Residence with the Los Angeles Master Chorale. His Virtual Choir, begun in 2010, has united singers from over 100 different countries.
In 2000 Whitacre set Robert Frost’s poem Stopping by Woods to music, only to discover that he had not secured permission to use the poem. Rather than waste the music, he asked his friend Charles Anthony Silvestri to write new words, and Sleep is the result. In 2023 Frost’s poem became public domain, and so Whitacre was able to publish the original version in 2024.
We end our recital with a performance of Billings’ Wake Every breath. This is a round for up to six parts to words by Mather Byles (1706-1788). The choir will sing the work through, after which we invite you to join in while we sing it as a round. You will find the words and music at the end of the texts, including a version in the original key using shape-note notation.
