Remembering Gail B. Poch (1936–2016)

Only three weeks after learning of the passing of Robert Page (of whom I wrote back in August), it was even more shocking to learn of the passing of Gail B. Poch on August 31. That makes three important figures from the choral world—the third was Gregg Smith (1931–2016) in July, about whom I shall write in the coming weeks—leaving us this summer.

Gail was my introduction to the power and potential of choral music well performed. He conducted my very first Pennsylvania Music Educators Association District Chorus at Marple-Newtown High School in January, 1970.

That program included my first exposures as a performer to the music of Jan Sweelinck, J.S. Bach (though in a decidedly inauthentic form), Benjamin Britten, Franz Schubert, Houston Bright, Joseph Canteloube, Ernest Bloch, and Leonard Bernstein; much of which, strangely, I have not had opportunity to perform in any capacity since then. As it turned out, this event also marked the first time I had ever had the opportunity to sing any Jewish choral music of substance—in addition to the Bloch “Silent Devotion & Response (Yih’yu l'ratzon)” from his Avodath Hakodesh (Sacred Service), we also performed Gail’s own arrangement (or, possibly, his edition or adaptation; I was never certain which it was) of the Israeli (?) folk melody Ki mi tziyon. (Bernstein’s French Choruses from “The Lark” didn’t fit that category, of course.)

I went home after the Saturday night concert with a head swimming with sounds I’d never heard or imagined previously. It was at that point that I began collecting scores—of choral festival music at first, but then branching out from there into music by composers whose names I recognized, or pieces that simply looked interesting.

(I also went home that Saturday night having acquired my first serious girlfriend—I a sophomore and she a senior from a neighboring high school—but that story will have to wait for my memoirs...)

And I went home that Saturday night thinking about college (and Temple University) seriously for the first time.

As an undergraduate at Temple, I had two conducting classes taught by Gail, which were wonderfully run. I remember how he managed to teach us the pieces we all were to conduct without doing a single drop of conducting himself.

Aside from those classes, I had little interaction with him other than a staged and choreographed production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Unicorn, The Gorgon, and the Manticore which he conducted and in which I sang; and also when he served as the narrator for a recording by Temple's Concert Choir of Karl Korte’s oratorio Pale is This Good Prince, both in my freshman year at Temple. (!) He was also my examiner for passing advanced Aural Theory by exam.

When I returned for grad school in 1981, Robert Page had moved on to Pittsburgh and been replaced by Alan Harler, but Gail was still very much on the faculty and very involved with the graduate choral conducting program. I had the good fortune to take a modern choral literature course with him and also to be coached privately by him on my second graduate conducting recital. Additionally, he was my supervisor for my graduate assistantship in conducting the second year of my degree program.

At that time, he had begun working on a conducting textbook based on a system of movement analysis and choreographic notation by Rudolf von Labann; our job was to apply what he was working out in actual conducting pedagogy. His pedagogical research and development was collected and finally turned into book form—The Conductor’s Gesture—by his student James Jordan, which is published by, and still available from, GIA Publications.

Gail always lived in the shadow of whoever had the title of Director of Choral Activities at Temple. I think he was, ultimately, seriously under-appreciated and under-acknowledged in his time there. To hear Temple graduates speak of him and their first encounters with him—invariably through high school choral festivals such as the one I described above—it’s clear that Gail was one of the College of Music’s secret weapons for recruitment. That, in itself, is a proud legacy!

I’m certain that veterans of the Reading (PA) Choral Society can tell different, but equally loving stories of working with him. We all miss you terribly; but we can say, confidently, that your memory is for blessing. And thank you—for opening so many young lives and ears to the power and joy of great choral music!

Finally, for those interested: my own performances of the abovementioned Sweelinck and Bloch pieces; from many years later, based on what I learned from Gail’s leadership.

Yet More on That Thin, Erasable Line:Song of Exile (1988)

In my post from August 27, I said that arranging work has led me to wonder, at times: if a piece prominently quotes or utilizes something preëxisting, is that piece an arrangement or an original composition that happens to use pre-existing material?

I wrote previously about my Rhapsody on Anglo-American Ballad Tunes falling into this category. Here, I offer another piece that poses the same question:

Song of Exile (1988) uses the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” as its focal point, each of whose three verses prompt different reactions from the choir. The first two are drawn from Psalm 137 (“By the waters of Babylon…” and “How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”); the third is drawn from Isaiah 32 (coupled with a half-verse from Psalm 31), designed to be a verse of consolation—except that the first verse of the spiritual returns over it, unchanged from the beginning. The piece ends with a Phrygian half-cadence, leaving things unresolved.

Song of Exile was originally written for the choir of Central Baptist Church, Wayne, PA, but has been performed since then thanks to the late Peter Hopkins, former director of music at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Richmond, VA. My first encounter with the Isaiah text dates all the way back to high school and the music of Emma Lou Diemer—specifically, her For Ye Shall Go Out With Joy, a work from the 1960s which contained sounds and a cappella writing that was a watershed experience in terms of my musical thinking.

Back when Peter was in Philadelphia at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church (3rd & Pine Streets, Old City), he once asked me about repertoire around Psalm 137. I suggested Salamone Rossi’s Al naharot bavel (in Hebrew; and, thus far, the only complete setting of Psalm 137 as far as I know, which pulls no punches at the end!), William Billings’ Lamentation over Boston, (a paraphrase of Psalm 137; likely by Billings himself), and Song of Exile.

He chose Song of Exile, presenting it not only in Philadelphia, but also in Reading, PA with the Reading Choral Society, and again during a week-long residency by the St. Peter’s choir at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, UK, in August, 2010 (I was privileged to have been there for that residency). The recording comes from the Evensong sung there on August 27, 2010, where it was sung as the anthem for that service.

Song of Exile is now published by MusicSpoke.com.

Psalm 51 (2000–2001)A Psalm for Another Day Living in Infamy

It was 15 years ago.

It was a Tuesday morning—a bright and beautiful late-summer morning.

I had had plans to get caught up on a bunch of work that day.

Then the news came in about the World Trade Center towers.

And then the Pentagon.

And then a 4th plane crashing in Central Pennsylvania.

Everything ground to a halt. To work seemed like sacrilege.

The last time we had seen anything of this magnitude was back on November 22, 1963.

The single-article issue of Time magazine appeared within the week following, showing us more of the horrors we hadn’t seen on television. The worst for me was the pictures of people jumping from the towers before the towers collapsed.

As it would turn out, the horrors we witnessed that day wound up providing at least a portion of the necessary focus, if subconsciously, for a commissioned work in the weeks and months that followed.

I’ll save the story of how that commission came about for another, more appropriate time. For now:

It was my first commission from anyone outside America: Rita Varonen, director of Chamber Choir Cantinovum based at the Jyväskylä Polytechnik Institut, Jyväskylä, Finland, commissioned my setting of Psalm 51 in Hebrew for SATB div. choir and 11 solo strings (or string orchestra).

I wrote the following program notes for the premiere, which took place on March 29 (Good Friday), 2002 (with additional notes/asides appearing here):

“As both a composer and conductor of music for choruses, my favorite sacred literature has always been the psalms, probably because they are, ultimately, the lyric poetry of the Bible. I have worked with many of the psalms over the years as both a church and synagogue musician, and it is always of interest to me how the same psalm text can have such different connotations for Jews and for Christians. Such a text is Psalm 51, being presented, perhaps for the 1st time in a long time (if ever), in both a Christian and Jewish context in the same program.

“While in the Christian church this psalm is central to the Good Friday liturgy, only 3 verses of this psalm are used in the entire Jewish liturgy, and only as isolated verses in other contexts—Psalm 51, in its entirety, never appears in Jewish liturgy.

“In setting this text musically, I was struck by how much of an ‘emotional roller-coaster’ this Psalm is: King David, in his remorse over his affair with Bathsheba (mentioned in the 1st two verses of the psalm in the Hebrew text—which, to my knowledge, has never been treated by any Christian setting) is by turns sorrowful, penitential, pleading, guilt-ridden, hopeful, and even off-topic. (Some hold that the final two verses were added later on by a different author.) So, while, for example, Gregorio Allegri’s setting (heard on the same program) simply uses two different musical formulas along with Gregorian psalm tones for his entire setting (hence why the young Mozart was able to write it down after hearing it only once—aside from the final phrase, the entire sequence of musical material is repeated five times), I felt obligated to reflect the ever-changing mood of the text in my setting.

The work is, ultimately, a suite of miniatures: atonal passages alternate with simple, tonal passages, often in stark contrast to each other in successive verses. I made use of one specific Jewish prayer mode, the s’licha (penitential) mode/melody, introduced at the beginning by the tenors and basses in canon, and which also occurs in its most direct form in the verse Al tashlicheini mil’fanecha (“Cast me not away from Your presence.”) Also appearing as the setting for the final verse of Psalm 51 proper is the melody for a litany of pleas for help and deliverance drawn which occurs in both the S’lichot service (a pre-High Holy Days service held either at midnight or at dawn that is a penitential “warm-up” for that season) and the Kol Nidrei service for Yom Kippur.

“Another unifying element consists of the single, loud pizzicato notes that appear in unexpected places—musical ‘pangs of conscience’ (which also are designed to assist the choir in a number of their entrances!).

“One other element that may be of interest in this setting is that, because the psalm ends rather inconclusively (at least from a musico-dramatic standpoint), it seemed to me that something needed to follow the final verses, and, unlike Christian composers, I could not simply add a Gloria Patri as an ending! However, I discovered through some research that there are three verses from elsewhere in the psalms that are to be read when one concludes a reading of the entire book of Psalms. They are: Psalm 14:7 (“Oh that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion! When the LORD brings back the captivity of his people, Jacob shall rejoice, and Israel shall be glad.”); Psalm 37:39 (“But the salvation of the righteous is from the LORD; He is their strength in time of trouble.”); and 40 (“And the LORD helps them, and delivers them; He delivers them from the wicked, and saves them, because they have taken refuge in Him.”) These three verses represented exactly the kind of concluding text that I felt the piece needed, and, therefore, constitute the extended conclusion of the work.

“Finally, as I look back over the creation of this work, I know that I had no specific, conscious thoughts about the events of September 11, 2001 during the actual compositional process. Yet, in retrospect, I am certain that those horrific events and their aftermath must have colored my thinking—ultimately, how could they not? Therefore, whatever else its content may reflect, this work also stands as my own small and entirely personal response as a human being and an artist to those horrors.

“I wish to thank Pamela Hitchcock for her invaluable and essential assistance with the Hebrew text, providing interlinear Hebrew-English translations for me, and providing pronunciation models for Chamber Choir Cantinovum; Juha and Elana Hollo for providing interlinear Hebrew-Finnish translations from the Hebrew-English text, and, finally, Rita Varonen and Chamber Choir Cantinovum for asking me to write this work, and for being fearless and willing to present its world premiere this evening.”

While Psalm 51 has yet to be performed here in the US, it was heard—or, more accurately, broadcast—here on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. It was selected to be aired during a 24-hour live broadcast entitled WE REMEMBER SEPTEMBER 11 on WPRB 103 FM (Princeton, New Jersey) at around 4 PM on Sunday, September 11, 2011, hosted by Marvin Rosen (who hosted for the full 24 hours straight!).

I wrote the following abbreviated notes on the piece for a press release for the broadcast:

“The work, which may be the first-ever setting of the complete text of Psalm 51 in Hebrew, was commissioned by Rita Varonen and the Chamber Choir Cantinovum of the Jyväskylä Polytechnik Institut (Jyväskylä, Finland) and premiered there under Rita Varonen's direction March 29 (Good Friday), 2002. It was subsequently performed there on September 15, 2002 for a 9/11 memorial service. (Rita told me that that performance was better than the premiere; but, alas, that performance wasn’t recorded.) The broadcast will be of a recording of the world premiere performance.

“Although the work was not written specifically in response to 9/11, that disaster's aftermath and effects on the US and the world significantly affected the composition of the work. Psalm 51 is, perhaps, one of the most anguished pleas for forgiveness and mercy in all the Bible, and the focus in relation to 9/11 is one of introspection, as in: How did my action or inaction contribute to this catastrophic event? How might I, as an individual, have acted differently before it happened? And how might I act differently to help prevent something like this from happening again?”

My initial statement in the abbreviated notes still astounds me. Surely I’m not the first person to have set the entire psalm to music in Hebrew; let alone with the extra three verses added...

But that’s not the most important question. Not at all.

Those other questions remain open. It all has to do with how we choose to relate to the rest of the world, as individuals and as a larger society.

Lest anyone misread the second paragraph of my amplified notes: I have no illusion that I bear any responsibility for what happened, nor that anything I, alone, could have done would have made any difference.

But humanity, collectively, seems to have a great deal of difficulty looking past surface details to address the root causes of what happens in this world—in many, many areas, not merely social or political. Should we ever learn, collectively, to address those root causes (for both good and bad things that happen), I believe this shall be the ultimate source of human redemption.

A Thin, Erasable Line: Part 2 Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair (1991; rev. 2014)

The word “arranging,” as it applies to music, is abused far too often.

It drives me crazy the way certain brands of press about new music describe a new piece, often for chorus, as “a new arrangement” of [fill in the title of the text]; say, Psalm 150.

This is symptomatic of so many things that it could produce a book-length manuscript. Not the least of these is the notion that no one can possibly be writing new, classically-based music today because, well, aren't those composers all dead now?

Never mind that this is a truly classic (as it were) case of Orwell's double-think: no one would ever question that a new movie has a brand new (= newly composed) symphonic score by John Williams, Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer, or any number of other living composers—but, somehow, if it's something close to home or not out of Hollywood or not on a program by your city's symphony orchestra, etc., etc., it can't possibly be new or original.

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This post’s offering is, indeed, an arrangement—the genuine article; and one of which I’m proud.

I mentioned last time that one of the works that influenced my Rhapsody on Anglo-American Ballad Tunes was another rhapsody, for oboe and strings, by Wayne Barlow entitled The Winter's Passed. It, too, falls into the ambiguous category about which I wrote last time: it quotes two different Anglo-American folk songs at length, but the setting and harmonic language is wholly original.

One of the two folk songs is easily identifiable as “Wayfaring Stranger”—but that one is the “B” theme. The other, the “A” theme, is more pervasive, sounding both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

Back when I worked for Theodore Presser Company in the days when they ran a retail store, I ran across Folk Songs of the Americas (ed. A.L. Lloyd et al) published by Novello (London, UK; out of print; but I’ve seen copies for sale on eBay) some time in 1991. It contained many songs I’d never heard of, but one title I recognized was “Black is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.” I turned to it expecting to see some variation of the familiar melody associated with John Jacob Niles, but: lo and behold, here was the tune that Barlow used in The Winter's Passed!

According to Wikipedia:

“These words are set to two distinct melodies: one of which is traditional, and the other was written by the Kentucky folk singer and composer John Jacob Niles. (Emphasis mine.) Niles recalled that his father thought the traditional melody was ‘downright terrible,’ so he wrote ‘a new tune, ending it in a nice modal manner.’”

This confirms something I’d suspected for a long time. I have no idea why Niles’ father disliked the traditional tune so, unless he was thinking of a different one altogether...

Needless to say, the arranger-half of me got right to work on it, since, to my knowledge, it had never been set chorally (and, as far as I can tell, still hasn’t). I completed a setting for soprano solo, mixed chorus and celtic harp (or keyboard) that summer.

It took until 2014 for it to be premiered, after some substantial revision and refinement. Here it is, sung by the Vocal Ensemble of Community College of Philadelphia under my direction, accompanied by H.L. Smith, II, with soprano soloist Shanice Manley.