How fitting that our closing concert’s title comes from J.R.R. Tolkien: “Now not day only shall be beloved, but night too shall be beautiful and blessed and all its fear pass away.” The quote appears toward the end of The Return of the King, when Frodo, who has endured so much, finally understands and embraces his whole experience, finding beauty in it all. The music we present this concert welcomes the sometimes unexpected beauty of night, when boundaries of time and space disappear in the dark and we venture beyond ordinary life to discover mystery and wonder.
Composer, professor, and church musician John Leavitt (b. 1956) has spent most of his professional life in the Midwest. This background may have given him special insight into “Prairie Waters by Night,” by Carl Sandburg (1878-1967). The poem comes from Sandburg’s 1918 collection Cornhuskers, which, unlike his more famous urban poems, lovingly describes the places and people of America’s heartland. Here, night not only brings an everyday scene to life but endows inanimate objects with human emotions: The moon laughs, willows feel safe to drowse beside their trusted river, and streams remember the rains that created them. Through it all, the piano part ripples like flowing water, while the men and women call back and forth, complementary strands of sound in the natural landscape.
The music of award-winning American composer Greg Bartholomew (b. 1957) is frequently performed across the United States and in Canada, Europe and Australia. Two-time winner of the Cheryl A. Spector Prize in 2012 (for the First Suite from Razumov) and in 2013 (for Summer Suite), the Silver Platter Repertoire Award (for The Tree), and First Place in the 2006 Orpheus Music Composition Competition (for Beneath the Apple Tree), Bartholomew was a 2013 Finalist for the American Prize in Choral Composition. Born in 1957, Bartholomew studied piano at Cornish College of the Arts and trombone at John Muir Elementary School before earning degrees from the College of William & Mary in Virginia and the University of Washington. “And the Wind” is the final piece in a group of three settings of poems from Fletcher LaVallee Bartholomew’s collection entitled, And the Wind: Gnostic Poems 1945 – 1979. Minneapolis native and father of the composer, Fletcher Bartholomew (1918 – 2006) spent his professional life in aviation, sparked by a childhood flight in a Curtis Robin in 1929. His work in aviation started with a job as an inspector in an aircraft factory. He went on to become a test pilot in World War II, serving at the South India Air Depot at Bangalore, India, where he was sent by ship, an experience he always remembered.
Joshua Shank (b. 1980) says he became a composer almost by accident, led by one nourishing experience with music after another, but he thinks of himself more as a collaborator with all who bring a piece of music to life. In “Sleeping Out: Full Moon,” he certainly collaborated brilliantly with English poet Rupert Brooke (1887-1915), who wrote this striking text when barely out of his teens. Both poem and song begin in normal life, on solid ground, but quickly yield to an out-of-body experience that draws the poet into the embrace of the full moon. Entranced, he calls the moon a flameless ecstasy that surrounds him with feminine tenderness and love. He does not need to do anything to experience such overwhelming beauty and bounty—only open himself to cascades of dazzling images and sounds that fill the night.
People who love choral music will likely recognize our next composer—we have sung many of his works, and always with pleasure. Born in Washington State, Morten Lauridsen (b. 1943) grew up in the Portland area. Over the last twenty years, he has become the most widely performed American choral composer in the world. He does most of his composing in an isolated cabin in the San Juan Islands, and his love of nature shines through his work. A fellow musician has described him as “the only American composer in history who can be called a mystic.” His “Sure on this Shining Night,” with words by American poet, screenwriter, and journalist James Agee (1909-1955), comes from Nocturnes. Like Sandburg, Agee personifies the natural world as a place “healed” by the wondrous beauty of a summer night. The words recall those from Knoxville, Summer, 1915, Samuel Barber’s setting of another Agee text: “The stars are wide and alive. They seem each like a smile of great sweetness.” Lauridsen’s effortless-sounding music captures that sweetness and more—a sense of being cherished by the universe, safe and whole.
Stacey Philipps writes music of close, lush harmonies and contrapuntal textures, exploring the timbre of voices and instruments in minute detail and sweeping gestures. A lifelong choral singer, Stacey is an early- and new-music devotee, and she currently sings with the Oregon Repertory Singers. Her vocal interests extend to a love for composing choral music and art song, as well as collaborating with solo instrumentalists and chamber music ensembles. A sometime pianist and frequent dabbler in playing underappreciated instruments – she has an accordion, mountain dulcimer, and ukulele on hand and is pining for a harpsichord, banjo, and viola da gamba – Stacey graduated with a degree in music composition from Portland State University and also holds a degree in philosophy and math from St. John’s College, Santa Fe. In describing ‘Crickets at Dawn,” she says, “I imagine the scene in this poem happening at the end of a long, hot summer night — the kind of warm and drowsy night that is alive with the sound of nocturnal activity, including crickets and a drone of other insects. The cricket sounds in the upper voices of the choir are notated from recordings of live crickets, albeit a few octaves lower. The close dissonances mimic the very slight pitch variations heard in the summertime backyard, and the rhythmic repetition of the chirping crickets starts and stops the way crickets do when other creatures come near. Meanwhile, the lyrical, sleepy melody weaves in and out of the natural sounds of the evening.”
Our longest and most mysterious work might almost be the world’s shortest opera: Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine (2002), by composer Eric Whitacre (b. 1970) and librettist Charles Anthony Silvestri (b. 1965). Whitacre has stated that he and Silvestri started with a simple concept: What would it sound like if a genius were dreaming? Since da Vinci was a man of the Renaissance, both his waking life and his dreams might start with Renaissance music–chords, runs, and even recitatives straight out of Monteverdi. But his dream of flying keeps breaking in, like disturbing sounds from another time. The music teems with complementary opposites: human and machine, air and fire, midnight and dawn. At last, Leonardo leaps into the impossible—and flies! It takes all our voices, spread over 10 vocal lines, to render the amazing sensations of a dreaming man in love with flight.
Intermission
Latvian Eriks Esenvalds (b. 1977) studied at the Baptist Theological Seminary in Riga before deciding to devote himself full-time to composing. A choral singer himself, he has composed many works for vocal ensembles, as well as operas and instrumental pieces, often drawing on religious texts and the folk tales and songs of his native country. “Only in Sleep,” however, sets a haunting poem by American Sara Teasdale (1884-1933). The music begins with a single soprano re-discovering childhood friends when she enters the world of sleep, where night has erased the intervening years. In simple, gentle phrases, she and the choir find the beloved faces of people long vanished—maybe even her own lost child self. After tenderly examining the past, a solo soprano takes up the theme again, only now with folk-like embellishments that seem to float free in the secret world of sleep.
“Watching the Mid-Autumn Moon” is movement III from the larger four movement choral / orchestra work titled “For the Future” (2015), written for Leslie Guelker-Cone in honor of her 20th Anniversary as Director of Choirs at Western Washington University. The poem, by Wendell Berry, addresses the universal cycle of humans living, dying and celebrating under the changing and seemingly eternal moon. Having earned his PhD from the Eastman School of Music, composer Robert Briggs is currently Professor of Music Composition at Western Washington University and Conductor Emeritus of the Whatcom Symphony Orchestra. He studied composition with Peter Maxwell Davies, Samuel Adler, Joseph Schwantner, Eugene Kurtz, and Don Freund.
“One If by Land” recounts Paul Revere’s midnight ride through the Massachusetts countryside to warn colonists of British military actions the next day. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) wrote this popular poem in 1860, shortly after climbing the tower of Boston’s Old North Church (the site of the lantern signal). That year, the issue of slavery was intensifying conflicts between North and South, and Longfellow had long and publicly supported abolitionism. Thus, when the poem appeared in The Atlantic in January 1861, just after South Carolina seceded from the Union, many saw it as referring to the new national crisis—even as a call to arms. This dramatic setting by René Clausen (b. 1953) is the opening movement of “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” and begins with sounds recalling a fife and drum corps and hoofbeats, then the tread of marching men; the middle section conjures up the silent waiting for the signal, as well as the spooky menace of a huge British warship anchored right in Boston harbor. Clausen’s compositions and choral arrangements, both sacred and secular, have received many honors, including a Grammy for his recent recording Life & Breath.
Lisa Ann Marsh’s music is inspired by the beauty of the natural world, the complexity of human emotions and relationships, and the artists she collaborates with. She is a founding member of Crazy Jane Composers, the women composers of Cascadia Composers in Portland, Oregon. Her solo piano and chamber works are frequently performed in the Portland area. Currently she is working on a symphonic poem and an opera in collaboration with director Matt Zrebski. Scenes from this opera were premiered at Iowa State University in 2013. Ms. Marsh is pianist with the Marsh-Titterington Piano Duo and former Principal Keyboard with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra. She is a member of the piano faculty at Portland State University where she also directs the wellness program for musicians.
Inspired by the poem written by Deborah Buchanan that serves as the text, “The Heart’s Constellation” brings the beauty of the night into sound and space.
Eric Whitacre and Tony Silvestri have collaborated on many works, including the almost legendary “Sleep.” Whitacre started with completely different plans for this composition, which he wrote as a setting of Robert Frost’s beloved “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Unfortunately, Whitacre realized too late that the poem was not in the pubic domain and, worse yet, that the Frost Estate would not give him permission to use the text. So he posed his friend Silvestri the challenge of writing lyrics on the theme of sleep while using Frost’s original meter and rhyme scheme; Whitacre now says he far prefers the new words. Whitacre used “Sleep” as one of the first ventures of his Virtual Choir, which allows people from all over the world to record his music on computers and send him the digital files; he then combines these into a simultaneous performance piece that can be shared. As night can erase the hard edges that define our daytime world, so Whitacre has found a way to turn passive listeners into active participants in creating a work of beauty.
– Susan Wladaver-Morgan
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