Saturday, June 10, 2017

One Work, Two Works, or Three?

Of Nature and Humility (2004; rev. 2006, 2008, 2011)

Psalm 131 (2006)

Nature (2006)

As much as I love polychoral music from any era, only twice have I actually arranged or composed for multiple choirs.

The arrangement, done some years back, was of Lesley Hopwood Meyer’s Hymn On The Nativity (Of My Savior) from 2003, on a text by Ben Jonson. Each verse of the carol ended on a half cadence, making the melody sound incomplete. The solution: Choir 1 sang a harmonized version of the tune as originally written, then Choir 2, coming in on the following verse, took up the melody in that new key, causing it to end on the original tonic. You may listen to it here. (I shall devote a post later this year to the Christmas-card carols of Lesley Hopwood Meyer and my experience arranging over a dozen of them for various choral combinations.)

The one time I composed for double chorus was within a wholly different set of circumstances. In the summer of 2004, I attended a summer workshop for composers of choral music at Lehigh University in upstate Pennsylvania sponsored by the Princeton Singers and their director, Steven Sametz and by Oxford University Press. It was there that I met some new composer colleagues (Stacey Garrop, Valerie Showers Crescenz, Reg Unterseher, and Paul Carey, among others) and spent the week listening to new music/works-in-progress and trading ideas and philosophies in the most stimulating environment imaginable. (I’m also happy to report that a connection was made with what was, at that time, OUP’s US operation. 3 arrangements of mine were published by them—and are still in print!)

When one goes to a workshop such as this, I’ve found it’s always a good idea to have an idea in mind of what one is going to compose before arriving; knowing, of course, that a completely different idea might arise. The idea for the work I’d write up there came from the discovery of a poem by Henry David Thoreau entitled Nature. In reading it over, what immediately came to mind was parallels with Psalm 131 (“Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty” in its most familiar translation; and whose best-known setting is in Hebrew by Leonard Bernstein as the third movement of his Chichester Psalms, a watershed work in my own musical development). So: the plan for the new piece would be to somehow juxtapose both texts.

The original plan was for the psalm to be sung in Hebrew by a soprano soloist, which would be answered by Thoreau’s poem. When speaking of this at dinner the first evening of the workshop, someone (& I don’t remember who!) suggested that each line in Hebrew be followed by a sung English translation—that way the piece would be much easier to follow. Following this excellent suggestion is how the piece turned into one for double chorus.

The music for the psalm begins with decidedly modern-sounding musical vocabulary, but evolves gradually into a more gentle harmonic language. The music for Thoreau’s sonnet, by contrast, is consistently more pastoral-sounding (once again, Randall Thompson’s music was my sound model), except for a knotty fugato on the words “Than be the king of men elsewhere/And most sovereign slave of care.” The two choirs converge at one point toward the end of the piece (“Wait, Israel, upon the Lord”), and they finish together juxtaposing Thoreau’s final wish for communion with Nature with the last line of the Hebrew psalm: “Some still work give me to do/Only be it near to you./Mei-atah v’ad olam (‘From now and forever more’).” (The line above is not, in fact, how Thoreau’s poem concludes—I did a little bit of rearranging of Thoreau’s lines in order to maintain parallel correspondence between the two texts.)

The initial composing of this piece went very quickly—I had it ready to be read by the Princeton Singers within about 24 hours of starting it. They did a magnificent job reading the piece down!

Part of the week’s agenda, aside from reading down composer’s new pieces as they were completed (or as enough of a work-in-progress was completed to make a read-down possible), was to program the first half of the concert that would conclude the week. (The 2nd half of the concert was Healey Willan’s Mass—freshly published by OUP at that time, I think—conducted by Nicholas Cleobury). The judgement of Dr. Sametz and the composer-scholar in residence for the week, Dr. Zhou Long, was that my piece (at that time titled …to be humble…to be free…) didn’t hang together, and therefore was not to be included in the public concert performance.

Well, looking back at that original version from ’04, they were right—disappointing as it was not to have made the final cut. I set about revising the piece after I got home and, early in 2006, came up with a new version of the piece entitled Of Nature and Humility. It was revised slightly in 2008, and again, a little more substantially, in 2011 to fix a note value/time signature proportion issue in the Thoreau music.

But the idea that the piece “didn’t hang together” still bothered me. So, in addition to the revisions on this piece, I also separated the music for each choir into two separate pieces: Psalm 131 for soprano solo with chorus, and Nature for chorus with a short solo for tenor.

On a concert of American Poets/American Composers in the spring of 2006 with my former professional choir, Voces Novae et Antiquae, I programmed the music for the two choirs as separate pieces to open the first half: Psalm 131 followed by Nature; then ended the first half of the concert with Of Nature and Humility. We also encouraged our audiences to give us written feedback about these pieces: did they like the separate works better than the combined piece, or vice versa?

The results were pretty much evenly split: some enjoyed the juxtaposition of texts and musical styles; others preferred them separated.

So now, my dear readers, I pose the same question to you: Do you think the juxtaposition of the texts and music in Of Nature and Humility works? Or do you think the two texts work better as the separate pieces Psalm 131 and Nature?

Listen, enjoy, and, please: talk to me!