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American Voices -- A Choral Legacy

Bryan F. Black, Director
Leanne Elmer Herrmann, Accompanist

In conjunction with Arts & Ideas at Oglethorpe University

Saturday, October 26, 2002
First Congregational Church
Atlanta, Georgia

Modern Music (1781) by William Billings (1746-1800), from The Psalm Singers Amusement

The Battle of Stonington (ca. 1812), traditional American folk song, arr. George Brandon (1924-2000)

Edom (ca. 1800) by John Cole (b. 1774), words by Isaac Watts (1674-1748)

God is Seen, folk hymn, arr. Alice Parker (b. 1925)

Barbara Allen, from Three Mountain Ballads (1959), folk song, arr. Ron Nelson (b. 1929)

Followers of the Lamb (1977), Shaker text and tune (1847), arr. Philip R. Dietterich (b. 1931)
   John Scott, baritone

How Can I Keep From Singing, American Folk Hymn, arr. Ronald Staheli
   Terese Rabbit, soprano

Choral Variations on American Folksongs (1995) by Kirke Mechem (b. 1925)
   1. Skip to My Lou
   2. Let Us Break Bread Together
   3. Love and Pizen (Springfield Mountain)

Circus Band (1894) by Charles Ives (1874-1954)

Reincarnations (1940) by Samuel Barber (1910-1991)
   1. Mary Hynes
   2. Anthony O’Daly
   3. The Coolin

Built on a Rock, arr. F. Melius Christiansen (1871-1955), text by N. F. S. Gruntvig (1783-1872), chorale by Ludvig Lindeman (1812-1877)
   David Mayersky, baritone

In the Beginning of Creation (1970) by Daniel Pinkham (b. 1923)

The Word Was God (1996) by Rosephanye Powell

Alleluia (1987) by Ralph Manuel (b. 1951)

Ride On King Jesus, traditional Spiritual, arr. Moses Hogan (b. 1957)
   Laura Wyatt, alto

Program Notes

In planning this concert of "American Voices," the challenge is not so much in finding music to perform - there is so much! - but rather in determining exactly what to include in a program that can only represent a miniscule portion of the whole. From the hymns of the Puritans to the electronic music produced in today's studios, the United States has consistently fostered, developed, and changed the musical traditions brought to these shores by practitioners from Europe, Africa, and other continents, welcoming artists who might not be as free to develop their unique talents and visions had they remained in their native lands. The United States, which stands today as an accomplished representative of all musical styles, continues to distinguish itself in the quality, quantity and diversity of its music, global in scope and world-class in terms of music education, composition, and performance.

Tonight's concert begins appropriately with a work by William Billings (1746-1800), pioneer composer of hymn, anthems and "fuguing tunes," in which each voice strives for "mastery and victory." This tanner's apprentice - blind in one eye, with a short leg and a withered arm, addicted to tobacco, and with what one contemporary called "an uncommon negligence of person" - gained a rudimentary knowledge of music by reading printed treatises. At age 24, he published his first book of choral pieces, The New England Psalm Singer, its frontispiece engraved by Paul Revere. It contained fuguing tunes described by Billings as "more than twenty times as powerful as the old slow tunes." Unhampered by rules, Billings relied on his own inventiveness, producing one tune with nothing but dissonances, several popular hymns, including "Chester" and "The Rose of Sharon," and the exquisite canon, "When Jesus Wept," all of which have earned him a permanent place in music history. "Modern Music" is from The Psalm Singer's Amusement (1781).

In its notated form, "Edom" is an example of the shape-note, or "fasola," tradition, in which four syllables were combined to form an eight-note major scale, sung as "fa-sol-la-fa-sol-la-mi-fa". Used in England since Elizabethan times, fasola was introduced here in 1721 by Reverend John Tufts, who replaced the note heads on a music staff with the initial letters of the syllables and used punctuation for rests. In 1798, William Little and William Smith translated the syllables into shape-notes: a triangle for "fa," a circle for "sol," a square for "la," and diamond for "mi." The tool was a pedagogical success as singing schools formed and tune-books were developed for community use. Though originally intended to improve the quality of church singing among illiterate congregations, the tradition took on a life of its own as "Sacred Harp" singing spread from New England to the rural south and west to frontier borders, becoming an important part of religious and social life. In The Sacred Harp: A Tradition and Its Music (1978), Buell E. Cobb, Jr., cites a social, spiritual and musical harmony that has since resulted from the interaction of traditional singers with those newly interested in shape-note singing. The current proliferation of organizations, forums, festivals, and websites devoted to fasola and tune books (including www.fasola.org from which most of these notes are taken) attests to, as Elisabeth M. Stimpert puts it, "an effect on future generations far beyond their original goal of improving church singing and musical literacy."

In The Sacred Harp songbook, the composer of "Edom" is cited as Elisha West, 1797, while The Southern Harmony by William Walker attributes it to John Cole, about 1800. Both agree, however, that the text was written by Isaac Watts (1674-1748), a popular poet and writer of nearly 600 hymns. Though considered a non-conformist because of his opposition to the Trinity, Watts was widely admired for his learning and piety. The "Edom" text is a paraphrase of Psalm 147:8, "Who covereth the heaven with clouds, who prepareth rain for the earth, who maketh grass to grow upon the mountains."

"The Battle of Stonington," for male voices, is an arrangement of a "Traditional American Song" from Father Kemp's Old Folks Concert Music: A Collection of the Most Favorite Tunes of Billings, Swan, Holden, Read, Kimball, Ingles and Others, originally published 1874. It describes an encounter during the War of 1812 when a strongly armed British naval squadron with over 160 cannons attacked the coastal village of Stonington, Connecticut, which had three cannons and a makeshift fort. The result? The British felled one barn, "sadly mauling" a cowhouse, while the Americans retreated to their fort. Though little damage was done and no blood was shed, the town of Stonington considers the event a victory and celebrates its anniversary every year. Arranger George Brandon (1924- 2000) earned master's degrees in Sacred Music and Religious Education from Union Theological Seminary in New York. He settled in Davis, California, in the 1960s, where he held several church music positions and pursued interests in family and regional history as well as church music. American hymnody is cited in his obituary as a particular passion. Brandon's 300 published works include hymn tunes and texts, choir responses, anthems, secular choruses, and works for piano and organ.

"God Is Seen" is a folk hymn, No. 50 in William Walker's Southern Harmony and Musical Companion. The tune itself has been used as the melody for a variety texts describing renowned admirable (and not-so-admirable!) individuals and events - Sam Hall, Admiral Benbow, and the Jacobites, to name a few. No doubt these versions were sung at a much faster pace and suitable for a boisterous audience. It is an infamous pirate, however, whose name remains linked to this tune, formally referred to as "Captain Kidd." Whatever its origins, the tune becomes a reverent and solemn offering in the hands of Alice Parker (b. 1925), composer, conductor and teacher, born in Boston and now living in Massachusetts. While at Smith College and The Juilliard School, Parker began an association with the late Robert Shaw which resulted in settings of folksongs, hymns and spirituals that are standards in choral literature. Her original works include operas, cantatas, song cycles, works for chorus and orchestra (two of which were commissioned by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra), chamber music, and setting of sacred and choral texts and melodies. As a conductor and teacher, she travels extensively, meeting musicians of all ages and focusing her efforts on what she considers the heart of vocal music: melody. This recipient of four honorary doctorates and several notable professional honors sits on the board of Chorus America, an organization whose mission is "to strengthen choruses and increase application of choral music so that more are enriched by its beauty and power." Alice Parker, American treasure, has done so much toward that end through her own unique talents!

Ron Nelson (b. 1929), composer of choral, band and orchestral works, received Bachelor's, Master's and Doctoral degrees from the Eastman School of Music. On the faculty of Brown University from 1956 to 1993, Nelson was the first musician awarded the University's Acuff Chair of Excellence in the Performing Arts. He has been the recipient of numerous prestigious commissions and, in 1993, took the "Triple Crown" of wind band composition by winning three major competitions with one work, his Passacaglia (Homage on B-A-C-H). His arrangement of "Barbara Allen," from Three Mountain Ballads for women's chorus, was written for the Pembroke College Glee Club.

Phillip R. Dietterich (b. 1931), a life-long Methodist and a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University, the Boston University School of Theology, and the Union Theological Seminary, spent most of his life as Minister of Music at First United Methodist Church in Westfield, New Jersey. His arrangement of "Followers of the Lamb" has been highly popular since its 1977 publication. This Shaker text and tune was first written down in 1847 in New Lebanon, New York, site of the first meetinghouse. Although Dietterich's arrangement includes an optional tambourine part, he admits that this accompaniment would be stylistically incorrect, since Shakers did not allow instrumental music until 1870. But spirit they certainly did allow, with singing, dancing, shaking, running and leaping all used to express the joy of faith and victory over flesh and the devil. Dietterich's description of this tune as a "vital, vibrant, boisterous musical expression of praise" hardly does justice to its realization in performance.

"How Can I Keep from Singing" is an American folk hymn. Tonight's performance features an arrangement by Ron Staheli of the Brigham Young University School of Music, a choral conductor, pianist, clinician, adjudicator, and past president (for Utah) of the American Choral Directors Association.

Kirke Mecham (b. 1925) has written over 250 compositions, primarily choral and orchestral works. His international stature is exemplified by the fact that his opera Tartuffe has been performed over 260 times in Austria and Germany, and has been translated into Mandarin, German, Japanese and Russian. Raised in Kansas, Mecham pursued creative writing at Stanford before turning to music, first at Stanford, then at Harvard. While in Vienna, he met Josef Krips, conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, who championed Mecham's music and premiered his first symphony. Mecham was guest at the 1990 Tchaikovsky International Competition in Moscow and in 1991 was honored with an entire concert of his works performed by the USSR Radio-Television Orchestra. Honors for this San Francisco resident have come from the United Nations, the National Gallery, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Choral Directors Association, and the Music Educators National Conference. Mecham's "Island in Space," a setting of the "Dona Nobis Pacem," the words of Apollo 9 astronaut Russell Schweikart, and the poetry of Archibald MacCleish, was performed by the DeKalb Choral Guild on February 22 & 23, 1997.

In Choral Variations on American Folk Songs, Mecham sees himself as continuing the folk song tradition, one in which tunes are "handed down by memory from singer to singer, from region to region, from generation to generation," with changes and improvements along the way. Says he, "this music is not so much the result of creation as it is of evolution."

"Skip to My Lou" is known in folk music as a "play-party" tune. Mecham describes these as "somewhat sanitized songs…used to furnish the rhythm for group dancing or games…in strict Protestant communities where the fiddle was considered an instrument of the devil and the racier kind of square dancing was prohibited." Play-party tunes were popular in the rural South after reconstruction. Here Mecham expands upon the theme of "stealing partners," with references to fiddle playing that remained popular despite a period of prohibition. Each variation of the tune is a half step higher than the previous until, finally, it comes full circle, back to the "home" key of C.

Mecham's research found few variations on "Let Us Break Bread Together," perhaps, he surmises, because of its religious nature. Folk duo Kim & Reggie Harris, in their workshop "Sing to Freedom: Music and Stories of the Underground Railroad," tell us that this African-American hymn was a "coded call for a secret meeting or gathering in the morning….to discuss issues of concern, plans of escape, or for a time of prayer." Reviewer Edy Braun places its origin in the Georgia Sea Islands around 1825.

"Springfield Mountain" tells the tale of Thomas Myrick of Springfield Mountain (now Wilbraham), Massachusetts, who was engaged to marry Sarah Blake, but was bitten by a rattlesnake in Connecticut on August 7, 1761, and died. The song originally was a somber one, urging listeners to repent and to "be prepared when God doth call." It soon became the subject of parody and many different versions, even one for the music hall stage in the 1830s. Mecham's version contains requisite comic melodrama of the music hall plus an original refrain with a text composed of nonsense syllables, some intended to imitate the banjo.

Charles Ives (1874-1954) was born into a family of social importance in Danbury, Connecticut. His father, George, rejected what were considered to be acceptable mainstream careers in order to became a band leader. After the Civil War, during which he was the Union's youngest bandmaster (and recognized as one of the best), George became the most influential musician in town: cornet player, band director, theater orchestra leader, choir director, and teacher. Not only did he pass on to his son an intense education in European musical tradition, but an experimental attitude toward sound. He is quoted as saying, "It's all right to do that, Charles, if you know what you're doing." Charles, at 14 the youngest salaried organist in Connecticut and, by his adulthood, one of the best in the U.S., started composing at age 13. Intense and independent, he incorporated into his works the sounds with which he grew up: marches, fiddle tunes, church songs, competing bands, popular music, circus music, etc. As a wealthy businessman with only nights and weekends to devote to his art, Ives retired after suffering a heart attack in 1928. It was after this that his reputation began to grow and many of his works, most of them written before 1915, were not published until after his death. As one who radically and forcefully paired European music tradition with the diverse elements of his own culture, Ives is a colossal representative of contemporary music in the United States. "Only there," says Jan Swafford, "could such an isolated paradoxical figure make himself into a major artist."

In "The Circus Band," Ives presents a march to make Sousa proud, one with plenty of rhythmic surprises: changing meters, multi-meters, and notation which provides "virtual" bar lines that vary from part to part. John Kirkpatrick calls it "a strange mating of a boyhood march (dated 1894, originally for piano, full of age-19 high spirits, fully lived) and some retrospective words (added years later, full of age-40s nostalgia for a vanished boyhood)." The parade is coming and we are there!

Samuel Barber (1910-1991) began his musical career as a pianist and a vocalist but it was composition that maintained his interest. Although Barber's works are harmonically unique, he never leave dissonances unresolved and did not choose to follow the modernistic trends of his day. "It is said that I have no style at all," said Barber, "but that doesn't matter, I just go on doing, as they say, my thing." Critics agree that, although he wrote in a variety of styles, it is Barber's melodies, such as those found in the beautiful "Adagio for Strings" and "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," which are truly memorable. His works include three operas, a ballet, numerous orchestral works, concertos for violin, cello and piano, choral and solo vocal works, as well as several piano solos. Barber's single organ work, "Wondrous Love," is a set of variations on a shape-note hymn.

Reincarnations, for a cappella chorus, was written in 1940. This cycle of three songs is based on the poems of James Stephens (1882-1950), a leading figure of the Irish literary Renaissance, which aimed to revive Irish folklore, legends, and traditions in new literary works. Stephens does this by providing a text "after the Irish of [Antoine] Raftery" (1784-1835), a blind traveling bard whose significant body of work is still being translated from the original Gaelic. Legend has it that Raftery, after freeing the fairies from a spell, was offered one wish. Much to the fairies' surprise, Raftery chose the gift of poetry over the gift of sight, ensuring him a long arm of influence through the dissemination of his poetry and the number of Irish pubs that respectfully bear his name. "Mary Hynes," the subject of Barber's first song, lived in County Clare and reputedly died in 1769 at Thoor Ballylee, a local tower and source of inspiration. This young woman's beauty, says Declan Kiberd, "so inflamed Clare countrymen that they strayed into the bog of Cloone." Although Mary was well known (Yeats wrote about her, too), she was not the only one to capture Raftery's imagination. He wrote about several other women as well. In 1820, "Anthony O'Daly," the captain of a violent resistance movement called the "White Boys," was falsely accused of firing at a man, sentenced to hang, and went to the gallows refusing to reveal the names of his fellows. Raftery's song about his hanging, as translated by Douglas Hyde, indicates that the poet actually witnessed the event. "The Coolin" is Gaelic for "the maiden with fair, flowing locks." Though attributed to Raftery, it is based on an Irish tale of unknown origins and exists in many versions.

F. Melius Christiansen (1871-1955) played an immensely important role in the choral history of the United States. In 1903, when this Norwegian immigrant was hired to teach music and direct the band at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, he set about reorganizing the choir, drawing new members from St. Olaf students and faculty. His goal was to improve the quality of choral singing and to reacquaint the Lutheran Church with its rich heritage of chorales and a cappella (unaccompanied) singing. Under his leadership, the choir began to present song services and to tour, expanding its repertoire to include works of J. S. Bach and the Russian and German choral masters. With its inclusion of Norwegian music, the choir also became a source of ethnic identity and pride. "Built on a Rock" is an arrangement by Christiansen of a chorale by Ludvig Mathias Lindeman (1812-1887). Lindeman was a leading Norwegian musician and organist who collected and published almost 2,000 Norwegian folk tunes, thus inspiring composers, such as his friend Jean Sibelius and Edvard Grieg, to incorporate folk music into their own. The text is by N. F. S. Gruntvig (1783-1872), well-known as a Danish clergyman, poet, hymn-writer, historian, politician and teacher.

Daniel Pinkham (b. 1923) earned Bachelor's and Master's degrees in choral composition at Harvard while also preparing for a career as harpsichordist and organist. Among his teachers were Walter Piston, Aaron Copland, Nadia Boulanger, Wanda Landowska, and E Power Biggs. His teaching career began at age 23 at the Boston Conservatory of Music, with subsequent appointments taking him to Boston University, Harvard, the New England Conservatory, and Boston's King's Chapel, where he served as organist and choir director until 1998. Pinkham describes his music as "affective," a quality achieved through the use of titles or narratives with an extra-musical association. "In the Beginning of Creation," for mixed voices and electronic tape, may have been influenced by composer Richard Felciano (b. 1930), whose "Pentecost Sunday," for organ, electronic tape and male voices, was rehearsed by Pinkham in 1970. According to Kee deBoer and John B. Ahouse, Pinkham was "intrigued by the way the tape element took over the role of providing cues and pitches for the chorus, at the same time filling King's Chapel with new and more resonant sounds than were possible with a conventional ensemble."

Rosephanye Dunn Powell, Associate Professor of Music at Auburn University, holds degrees in music from Alabama State University, Westminster Choir College, and Florida State University. She is a recognized authority on the solo vocal works of composer William Grant Still, the subject of her doctoral treatise, and has distinguished herself in concert as an interpreter of Still's works. Since the publication in 1996 of "The Word Was God," Powell's works have been premiered and performed by many choral ensembles, including the Turtle Creek Chorale and the Albert McNeil Jubilee Singers.

"Alleluia," an original composition by Ralph Manuel (b. 1951), earned its composer a place as finalist in the 2001 Newly-Published Music Competition. Manuel, who has written sacred choral anthems, vocal solos and duets, and keyboard arrangements, is a missionary of the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention. According to Hal Leonard publishers, he currently serves in Recife, Brazil, where he teaches music at the North Brazil Baptist Theological Seminary.

Pianist, conductor, clinician, and arranger, Moses Hogan (b. 1957) graduated from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, later studying at the Juillard School and Louisiana State University. As a pianist, he won first place in the 28th annual Kosciuszko Foundation Chopin Competition in New York. He is currently artist-in-residence at Dillard University in New Orleans and, since 1993, has been artistic director of the Moses Hogan Chorale, an outgrowth of the New World ensemble he organized in 1980 to explore choral music. In 1995, he was commissioned to arrange and perform several compositions for the PBS documentary, "The American Promise," and has since recorded and conducted with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. As editor of The Oxford Book of Spirituals, Hogan has contributed to the recognition of the spiritual as an art form, and his own settings of spirituals and original compositions, widely performed and recorded, are now staples among school, community and professional musicians. Hogan's arrangement of "Ride On, King Jesus" was commissioned by Spelman College, dedicated to Dr. Audrey Forbes Manley, then President of Spelman College, and was premiered by the Spelman Glee Club, Dr. Norma Raybon, Director.