A Holiday Celebration!

Program Notes

The planning of a varied and interesting program of Christmas and holiday music is an ongoing challenge to choruses and their directors. We search diligently for something that isn’t necessarily the same, well-known holiday fare. In true “Spectrum” fashion, tonight’s program runs the gamut of the choral repertoire, from the German and Italian High Renaissance/Early Baroque right through the present day.

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, Dutch composer, was esteemed as a teacher of music and as a writer of pleasing vocal and keyboard music of great distinction. So far-reaching was his reputation that a pupil of Sweelinck could almost be guaranteed of a position as organist in service of a European court by merely showing credentials as a student of “Master Jan Pieterszoon of Amsterdam.” He came from a musical family that had for many years been active as organists at the Oude Kirk in Amsterdam. Something of a homebody, he rarely left Amsterdam, living there from early youth until his death. Of his 254 vocal works, his 1619 five-part setting of Hodie Christus Natus Est has justifiably become one of the composer’s most frequently heard choral compositions. Abounding in radiant harmony and delightful meter shifts from triplum to duplum in its early measures, the music soon settles into a rising and falling exposition of the text “Gloria in excelsis Deo,” seasoned with many a joyful repeat of “noe!” that artfully depict the soaring and swooping about of angels flying across the heavens celebrating the birth of their Savior.

Several works on tonight’s program are by American composers, and each of these compositions offers a special means of communicating its message. Stephen Paulus’s Three Nativity Carols adopts familiar carol texts and sets them to a particularly felicitous accompaniment of harp and oboe. Paulus’s vocabulary is straightforward, accessible, and extremely well-thought-out: his use of the oboe is particularly striking in setting the mood of each carol. For several years, Paulus was the composer in residence of the Minnesota Orchestra and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and his gift for cogent expression is evident throughout this delightful group of carols. His passing in 2014 was widely mourned in the musical community.

The Rune of Hospitality was born, unlike most new music today, without a commission or a grant. Iowa composer Alf Houkom was sitting in his easy chair, Christmas-time 1984, reading a book on old Scandinavian runes. Suddenly this rune, of Gaelic origin, “...simply grabbed me,” he says. “In my experience, Christianity has the capacity to be a closed-door faith. This text struck me with its openness, with the possibility for the Christ to come in any place. The music just unfolded, purposefully simple.”*

*From program notes by Brian Newhouse, accompanying American Choral Catalogue CD ACC 121 entitled December Stillness by The Dale Warland Singers.

Harp and oboe—individually—also form the accompaniment of Brent Pierce’s How Still He Rests, and Steve Heitzeg’s little tree. It is fascinating to note how each composer uses one of these instruments to such telling effect.

Brent Pierce’s How Still He Rests opens with the spare sound of oboe and high wind chimes, followed by a bewitchingly beautiful opening solo for soprano. This leads to lovely harmonized variations on this theme for full chorus, gently recreating the Nativity scene at the crèche. Solo oboe then gently rocks the work to its close. Pierce’s publisher proudly boasts that this one work “...sells 20,000–30,000 copies a year worldwide after more than 30 years!” Once heard, this is easily understood.

The British composer Elizabeth Poston, with spare and chaste harmonies, manages to create an almost perfect portrait of what might have been an American hymn from the Shaker tradition, with its fruit-laden Tree of Life “spirit portraits” and quiet, contemplative spirituality.

little tree owes its lack of initial capital letters to its text, written by American poet e. e. cummings, who consistently eschewed their use. Steve Heitzeg’s loving setting of this very personal text is a model of its kind, creating a touching and very inward-looking frame for the nostalgic story in the words of this poignant reminiscence. The concluding “Noel,” which floats upward into dark and starry skies, is particularly memorable.

It has been traditional for brass to play the canzonas and sonatas of Giovanni Gabrieli, though recent scholarship has revealed that other winds, even strings, were also employed in the performance of these works in the composer’s time. There is no denying the brilliant festive sound of modern brass in these works, though when played by early instruments the overall volume and timbre are wholly different. Tonight our performers, well versed in appropriate technique but playing contemporary instruments, have agreed to play in a light, agile style to more accurately echo a sound the composer might recognize.

Welshman William Mathias imbues many of his choral compositions with irresistible rhythmic and melodic excursions and often blurs the lines between what are commonly accepted as sacred and secular styles. A Babe is Born is an appropriate and ideal exemplar.

Palestrina’s magnificent and impressive eight-part setting of the Christmas gradual Hodie Christus Natus Est reflects the intrinsic drama of its text, in which reiterated shouts of “noe!” thrillingly echo back and forth between antiphonal angelic choirs.

Johann Michael Bach—younger brother of Johann Christoph Bach and father of the great Johann Sebastian’s first wife (his distant cousin) Maria Barbera—was a skilled maker of violins and clavichords and a gifted composer. Though not possessed of the great talent generally associated with the Bach name, his exuberant six-part motet Sei, lieber Tag, wilkommen welcoming the New Year bubbles with charm and simple, heartfelt rejoicing. Richard Marlow has noted this work’s effective and “...lively encounter between high trio, bright and transparent, and a lower, more weighty quartet.”

For the longest time, Richard Zgodava’s publisher supported the composer’s wish that his birth year not be revealed. As of 2011, the year Zgodava passed away, that was still the case. The composer’s obituary disclosed much about this composer’s varied career. Here is an excerpt from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

Described by Jerome Hines, noted Metropolitan opera basso, as “not only an excellent pianist—I mean on a world scale—but a sensitive accompanist as well as a friendly and cooperative colleague”, Richard Zgodava pursued a wide ranging career that included solo recitals, guest appearances with symphony orchestras in the United States and England, accompanying, choir directing, composing and voice coaching. [He] grew up in Minneapolis. [...] In 1952, he was a winner in the National Federation of Music Clubs national young artists competition. Soon afterwards he was granted a Fulbright scholarship for study at the Royal Academy of Music in London. [...] Mr. Zgodava also won acclaim for his performances on the public radio series “Music and Man”. He was given the service award of the American String Teachers for his work as accompanist for area instrumentalists and students. For many years Richard Zgodava was the official accompanist for the area Metropolitan Opera Auditions, and he was a primary pianist and harpsichordist for the Bach Society.

And there is much more.

Out of the Orient Crystal Skies exhibits a lively energy, an almost far-eastern-sounding harmonic tang, and a skillful understanding of musical dramaturgy, appropriately peaking at the text “And for the joy of His great birth a thousand angels sing,” then softening for a calm and reverent final few measures.

In true Spectrum Singers Holiday Concert fashion, there’s always room for a bit of well-crafted light music...

Hard to imagine that a 1942 Hollywood film directed by Mark Sadrich (Mark Rex Goldstein) containing a song by Israel Beilin (Irving Berlin) born May 11, 1888 in Mogilyov, Russia [now in Belarus], and died September 22, 1989 in New York City, would result in one of the most beloved songs about Christmas! Holiday Inn offered the premiere of this wonderful song, sung by Bing Crosby to Marjorie Reynolds in the living room of a Connecticut barn soon to become a country inn open only on holidays. This perennial favorite has been expertly and sumptuously arranged for chorus and piano by Anita Kerr.

Noted British composer, arranger, choirmaster, and conductor John Rutter has let his hair down a bit with his cheeky arrangement of We Wish You a Merry Christmas, with echoes of Elizabethan madrigals and a touch of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Boston’s Daniel Pinkham was a musician of protean talent and accomplishment. Organist, harpsichordist, conductor, composer, Pinkham did it all, and did it all extremely well. Pinkham was a member of the New England Conservatory of Music’s faculty from 1959 until his passing in December, 2006 after a brave battle with leukemia. This and his more than four-decade tenure as Director of Music at Kings Chapel have made him familiar to thousands of Boston-area musicians and concertgoers, yet with that familiarity, his music remains fresh and appealing to listeners and performers alike. Pinkham’s Christmas Cantata (Sinfonia Sacra) is among his most well- known and often-performed works. Composed in 1957 for the Chorus of the New England Conservatory of Music and its Director, Lorna Cooke deVaron, it has enjoyed continuous popularity since its premiere performances in December of that year. In 2000/2001 the composer prepared a new edition of the work. He corrected several of the misprints that had crept into the earlier edition and also made some significant changes to the brass parts. It is this new edition which will be played tonight, in its brass quartet with organ version.

Pinkham states the following in his introduction to the new score:

My debt to the Venetian composer Giovanni Gabrieli is enormous. His numerous works for chorus and instruments. (Sinfonia Sacra) have served as models. The present work also at once reflects my enthusiasm for mediaeval plainsong, as can be heard in the opening of the second movement, and for Renaissance dance meters, as can be heard in the finale.

Christmas Cantata begins with an imposing introduction in which the chorus portentously asks the shepherds what they have witnessed. Their excited answer follows with playful syncopation for brass and choir, leading to joyful Alleluias which wind the first movement to its ultimately quiet close. The second movement seems to suspend time with its introductory call-and-response distant trumpet fanfares, which prepare the women’s voices to intone the familiar “O magnum mysterium” text with chant-like flowing melismas. Pinkham’s special gift of creating a telling mood with a minimum of means is very much in evidence. The men then intone “Beata virgo,” joined shortly by the women who with the men develop the concept of the miracle of the virgin birth of Jesus with a growing crescendo leading to Christ’s name, which the composer chooses to sustain for five long measures until slowly melting into a quiet repose. The third movement begins with a jauntily syncopated “Gloria in excelsis Deo,” marked by the composer to be sung “very softly, as if from afar.” This Gloria returns ritornello-like, each time with more insistent energy, between each of the ensuing three verses. Its final return sets up a broadening of tempo and an extraordinary blossoming of sound and harmony leading to the work’s final celebratory Alleluias, with fortissimo volume and enthusiasm urged from all participants.

With this concert, The Spectrum Singers and I offer wishes for the happiest of holiday seasons!

- Program Notes © 2022 by John W. Ehrlich