Holiday Concert, December 1996
Celestial Seasons
by Michael Moore
Celestial Seasons features the music of two of the most significant
composers of vocal music of the twentieth century, Francis Poulenc and
Benjamin Britten. They are represented by what are likely their most
popular and enduring choral works: Poulenc's Gloria and Britten's
Ceremony of Carols.
Francis Poulenc: Gloria
Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) had a rather improbable
rise to musical prominence. With no formal training in composition at
all, he attracted considerable attention with his first work, a
nonsensical novelty piece for baritone, string quartet and winds called
Rhapsodie negre, written in 1917. These rather slender credentials also
earned him a place in Les Six, a group of young French composers whose
music was influenced by the irreverent Erik Satie (who labeled his first
work Op. 62 and titled a later work Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear)
and the absurdist writer Jean Cocteau. Les Six was really a journalistic
creation rather than a defined school of composition, and the composers
were only briefly associated with each other during the 1920's. Of the
six, only Poulenc, Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud had significant
careers in music.
Much of Poulenc's music was colored by his eccentric
personality and eclectic style. He produced film scores and music for
theatrical productions, frequently in collaboration with Cocteau, as
well as a surrealist opera with the memorable title Les Mamelles de
Tirésias (The Breasts of Tiresias) and the ballet Les Biches (The Little
Darlings). Like many a composer before and since, Poulenc's association
with theatrical music earned him the reputation of a less than serious
composer.
It was after the death of a close friend in 1936 that Poulenc
experienced a reawakening of his Catholic faith. He began to compose a
steady stream of sacred choral music which forms perhaps the most
significant part of his musical output, works including the Litanies à
la Vierge Noire (1936), Mass in G (1937), Quatre motets pour un temps de
pénitance (1939), Exultate Deo (1941), Salve Regina (1941), Stabat Mater
(1950), Quatre motets pour le temps de Noël (1952) and the Gloria
(1959).
While the text of the Gloria is taken from the Latin mass,
Poulenc does not so much set the text but rather adds its sounds and
rhythms to his musical palette. Poulenc deliberately contrasts the word
and musical accents, clearly heard in the opening phrase "Gloria in
excelsis Deo." The most idiosyncratic music belongs to the bouncy,
rhythmic Laudamus te, which created quite a bit of controversy and was
denounced by critics as irreverent. Poulenc responded, "In writing it, I
simply thought of those frescoes of Gozzoli in which the angels are
sticking out their tongues and also of those serious Benedictine monks
whom I spotted one day playing soccer." The third and fifth sections
feature the soprano solo in beautiful but quite angular melodic lines
with treacherously wide intervals, lines which are almost mirror images
of each other. The final section is punctuated by restatements of the
opening orchestral fanfare, leading into a wonderful a cappella "Amen"
for the soprano solo (the melody is recycled from his virtuosic Mass in
G) and ending with the most exquisitely lovely melody in the entire
work, appended as a sort of coda before the final "Amen."
Poulenc's
writing was fundamentally tonal, but his concept of key signature was a
fluid one, and his music abounds with sudden changes in dynamic,
rhythmic and harmonic structure. He often works in short musical
phrases, repeating them with subtle variation. Above all, he continually
combines and recombines groups of voices and instruments, affording him
not only a wide variety of musical color but also a sound of wonderful
clarity and precision.
Benjamin Britten: Ceremony of Carols
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) is undoubtedly the
pre-eminent composer of vocal music in the English language, but he too
had an unlikely beginning. A precocious musician who studied as a boy
with Frank Bridge, he had a much less satisfactory experience at the
Royal College of Music studying composition with John Ireland. After
graduation he found work scoring documentaries for the British Post
Office. This brought him into contact with the poet W. H. Auden, who was
similarly employed in writing the narration. Britten became increasingly
despondent over his prospects as a composer in England and depressed
about the growing threat of war in Europe. In 1939, he followed Auden to
America.
Britten's creativity was revitalized in America, but his sense
of patriotism and British identity ultimately overcame his strong
pacifist feelings, and he returned to England in 1942. (After a formal
hearing, Britten was granted conscientious objector status and spent the
war years organizing and performing concerts to boost morale. And as
many a civilian was to discover, remaining in London was often just as
dangerous as being on a battlefield.) It was while on shipboard en route
back to England that he composed A Ceremony of Carols, set for treble
voices and harp. The first performance was given with a women's chorus
in December, 1942.
Britten selected texts based on old English carols
and poems, many anonymous and mostly dating from the 15th and 16th
centuries. Britten conceived of the work as a ceremony, and it opens and
closes with processionals set to the plainsong chant "Hodie Christus
natus est" in unison voices. This chant also forms the basis of the harp
Interlude.
Despite the limited forces at his disposal, Britten achieves
an impressive range of color and texture, making effective use of
unison, canon and homophonic sections and varied and imaginative harp
accompaniments. After the processional comes an exuberant Wolcum Yole!
(No. 2). There is no Rose (No. 3) is a macaronic carol, that is one in
which English and Latin texts are intermixed. The English is set in
close harmony while the Latin phrases are set in a chant-like unison.
That yongë child (No. 4a), which was added later at the time of
publication, features a plaintive, almost melancholy harp accompaniment.
Balulalow (No. 4b) has a harmonic structure which alternates between
major and minor keys at each measure. The most dramatic section is This
little Babe (No. 6) with its martial accompaniment. Britten builds
intensity by moving at each successive verse from one voice to a
two-voice and then a three-voice canon. Britten does a masterful job of
creating a sense of austere cold in No. 8 (In freezing winter night),
heightened by the harp tremolos and the increasingly wide intervals sung
at the beginning of each phrase. A joyful Deo gracias (No. 10), with its
syncopated rhythms, provides a balance to Wolcum Yole!, and the work
ends with a recessional set to the same opening plainsong chant.
Donald St. Pierre: Songs of Sweet Accord
Songs
of Sweet Accord was commissioned for performance at this concert.
Composer Donald St. Pierre provides the following notes:
"This work was
written in the summer and fall of 1996 for the Mendelssohn Club of
Philadelphia (Alan Harler, conductor) as an adult male counterpart to
Benjamin Britten's A Ceremony of Carols. All resemblances between it and
the Britten are purely intentional. When performed as designed, the
composer requests that Songs precede Ceremony so that the uninformed in
the audience may presume Britten was influenced by him.
"Songs of Sweet
Accord is a cycle of settings of American folk-hymns. A 'cycle' because
it tells a story of sorts. 'Settings' because I prefer that word to one
like 'arrangements'. I think it conjures up a jeweler's task: cutting
and polishing something given and placing it where one hopes its
inherent beauty is more readily apparent.
"The texts and tunes are drawn
from our extraordinary musical heritage. I use the word 'extraordinary'
advisedly. When I was younger, I was led to believe that there really
wasn't any American music before 1910 or so. Often that was qualified by
adding the word 'serious': there really wasn't any serious American
music before 1910 or so.
"The idea was that music could (and should) be
divided into two categories: Serious (sometimes called 'cultivated') and
Popular ('vernacular'). One's task was to keep them separate, appreciate
the serious and disdain the popular. Evidence for serious music in our
country would've been the founding of the Puritan Philharmonic Orchestra
some hundreds of years ago. Since there was no PPO, there was no music.
And yet, they sang.
"Now I think some distinction can be useful. For
music, one might borrow from Horace's Art of Poetry. (If you're old
enough, you'll remember that music is a genre of poetry.) The aim of the
poet is to delight or to instruct, or to do both. There's a wonderful
letter Mozart wrote to his father. He talks about what he has just
finished composing, pointing out what will please the amateurs (delight)
and what the connoisseurs (instruct). Child of the Enlightenment that
Mozart was, Horace was in the air for him, and he took as a natural goal
the blending of delight and instruction in his work. I find thinking
along those lines far more useful than thinking about seriousness and
popularity.
"Just as I think the aesthetic is a primary part of being
human, so do I think the spiritual is. The texts for Songs of Sweet
Accord are in a sequence moving from the establishment of music as a
good, through unreflecting enthusiasm, doubt, petition and grace. I
avoided seasonal texts, and hoped to avoid sectarian ones, looking for
those it seemed to me anyone thoughtful might enjoy contemplating."
Carol Settings
The Feast of Carols {the final set in the concert program} features four of the texts from A Ceremony of Carols
in settings by the contemporary English composer John Joubert; the 16th
century composer B. Waldis, a contemporary of William Cornish, who
composed the original setting of Pleasure it is; and Peter Warlock, the
pseudonym of writer and composer Philip Heseltine (1884-1930), who is
perhaps best known for his Capriol Suite, based on 16th century courtly
dances. A Saviour From on High was written by American composer Stephen
Paulus, who has served as composer in residence for the Minnesota
Orchestra under Sir Neville Marriner, for the Atlanta Symphony under
Yoel Levi and Robert Shaw, and for the Dale Warland Singers. The
traditional carols Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and The First Nowell are
heard in wonderful arrangements by Sir David Willcocks, long time
director of the Bach Choir of London.
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