Intermission

• Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990): Chichester Psalms
• Charles Ives (1874-1954): Psalm 90

You have described the program as a single arc, almost as if the whole were itself a musical work.

It is a piece of music created through a collage technique. I think it’s the composer in me.

The program is organized thematically and also in a key scheme, so yes, you could think of these pieces as movements of a larger-scale work. We start off with something that seems like introductory material and end with something that seems like denouement at the end, with the Ives.

You mean the way the Ives finishes?

The way the Ives finishes, yes. Really, the Ives in itself is a microcosm of the whole program. It has moments of tension and moments of release, moments of dissonance and moments of incredible beauty. We have that in the first half of the program as well, going to strange keys and unusual tonalities, but then to very crystalline, typically American open sounds.

Is it an accident that the concert begins with pieces composed when you and Copland were both 26 years old?

Really, most of my compositions were written when I was in my 20s [laughter; Wachner is 33]. I was trying to show Aaron Copland at the beginning of his development, primarily because there are no works of this scope from later in his life. I also wanted to keep the subject matter psalm or psalm-like, so Sing Ye Praises falls into that category. I wanted to show what Americans throughout the 20th century have done when they’ve gone back to a common source, back to the Psalter. Many of the themes that crop up are no different from what Schütz and Monteverdi and Bach dealt with. Our method of text-painting is the same process, but a different realization.

The concert suggests a reason why people find psalms so powerful. Psalms are like a big wagon into which people put whatever is on their mind or happening in their lives – and the psalms work. People find solace or a spiritual connection.

One of the things music does is connect us to a sense of historical trajectory or continuum. The Psalter – particularly because it is Judeo-Christian, not just Christian – can speak to so many people. It does carry a history, because psalms were not written in a vacuum. There was the sadness of Babylonian exile, the great joy at building the temple – so many different experiences, expressing so many human emotions.

When we first read through Ashes, Trevor Weston’s September 11 memorial, I was struck by the images it raised for me – all those dazed, frightened people staggering through the silver-gray ash in Manhattan. The piece seemed to capture the anguish, the loss, the desolation, the unspeakable sorrow. It was like reading T. S. Eliot.

Yes, it is like “The Waste Land.” But it is brilliant how Weston splits the ensemble in two. There is an innocent quality to the semi-chorus, which is placed some distance away from the main body of singers. The semi-chorus gets none of the “I have eaten ashes” text and none of the more poignant dissonance. It is the voice of clarity, the voice of hope, the voice that is reaching out to God or reaching out for some understanding of what’s occurring. But there still is that glimmer of hope – particularly since the semi-chorus finishes the work alone on a hopeful, open chord.

Did you talk with Trevor Weston at the Spoleto Festival U.S.A. when this work was premiered?

Oh yes.

What was it that made him choose this particular text for a 9-11 memorial?

I think it was the actual taste of ashes in the air in Manhattan. There were many commissions after 9-11, but Trevor, since he is so steeped in the Anglican tradition, connected immediately to the psalms. We were students together at the St. Thomas Choir School; we sang through those psalms every week. In a given year, we probably sang every psalm five or six times. So the Psalter was the first place he went. I was a little surprised actually; I’d forgotten that those eating ashes lines were even in the Psalter.

Pairing Trevor’s work to the Randall Thompson Alleluia, performed without pause – when did that idea occur?

I struggled quite a bit putting this program together. Weeks and weeks. I knew which pieces I wanted to have in, but I added Ashes only after I had the program together. Ashes threw the whole program completely off. Originally, this was going to be a program of joyous psalms and, yes, a few contemplative ones and an Out of the Depths I Cry just for balance. But putting in Ashes added both a musical and a socio-political undertone. It affected everything around it. The questions then became What comes before? What comes after? What comes two before Ashes? How would the first half end and the second half begin? How would the remainder of the program be tempered by what the audience experienced in the first half?

Originally, the program was going to end with Chichester Psalms, which was the typical first obvious choice among the original pieces. But Ashes seemed to delineate a darkness versus light imagery through the whole program. My Alleluias, Intercessions and Remembrances is quite jubilant when it begins, but the whole middle section is introspective, dealing with human weakness and sin, praying for understanding and for becoming a decent human being. Howard Thurman’s words, although not from the Psalter, are psalm-like. He was more of a humanist than a strict theologian per se. But that piece has some murky qualities, as if the God-like quality of light has been shrouded a bit. But it gets jubilant again at the end.

And the key scheme for the concert, which you mentioned earlier. Your piece establishes that?

My piece begins in C major but ends in D major. It’s an incredible lift – brass instruments like D major better than any other key. All of Bach’s works with trumpet are in D. Ashes ends in C major and the Randall Thompson Alleluia begins in D major. So connecting those two pieces produces exactly the same sound as what happens in my piece. Further, the Alleluia goes right into the hymn tune “Lasst uns erfreuen” – All Creatures of Our God and King – in my piece, which is also in D. So if the Thompson piece is a foil to the desperation of Ashes, it also leads us into a more festive and communal experience of D major. So the first half is anchored by those two experiences of rising from C to D.

The other works in the middle of the first half also have a certain key relationship. We travel C to D to G, back to C, to F-sharp. Then down a half-step to F, which will get a little bit murky, and then to Ashes. The audience will perceive that the De Profundis does, in fact, drop a half step from Paulus’s Pilgrims’ Hymn, that Ashes continues the feeling, and that the Randall Thompson Alleluia is the balm for all that.

I thought the second half, therefore, needed to end peacefully, with the Ives. It may be ironic that the Ives is construed as a peaceful ending, but it is exactly that. Of the 14 minutes, seven or eight are the most peaceful, sublime music around, and the dissonance at the beginning just falls away.

Have you performed the Ives before?

A few times, yes.

There’s a part about halfway through where the basses are singing about their iniquities and secret sins. They drift lower, appear to mumble, and actually sound as if they have lost their way and don’t know the music. What’s been the audience reaction to that?

Even when it is performed perfectly, it sounds as if the performers are making mistakes all over the place. Often reviewers write that the chorus seemed unsure of itself or that the music seemed to fall apart – when that was exactly the composer’s intent. It’s quite odd. As far as audience reaction, a lot depends on how we approach the performance, in how we sing things that sound obviously wrong. Mistakes, a sense of failure and guilt – that certainly is the composer’s desired effect.

How have your previous performances been received? How have audiences reacted to the Ives?

At Spoleto the Ives was received with unbelievable reverence. While it is a fantastic piece and has a great effect, it also previews all the compositional effects and devices that composers used in the century that followed it. Although it was written in the early 1920s, Ives was already sketching things like bi-tonality in the 19th century. It’s just incredible to think about what he was doing working in a vacuum. I don’t think there is anything happening in any of the other pieces on this program that was not happening already in the Ives. I think the audience will have a feeling of peace and serenity, but I think they will also have gained a perception of having traveled to many different places psychologically and emotionally and coming back to where they started – C major – in a very peaceful way. The concert begins in C and ends in C and travels through a great range of keys, methods of organizing scales, rhythmic invention, choral invention.

The Stephen Paulus piece – I’ve heard it twice in the context of the whole opera. The effect can be one of great weariness – a boatload of exhausted pilgrims at the end of the day. It’s the last thing they sing.

The Paulus is very interesting. First of all, it’s in a very odd key. Nobody really picks F-sharp major.

That’s a difficult key for voices, isn’t it?

It’s always a challenge to keep F in tune, but his choice of key is not problematic – it’s just an unusual choice. It actually has a sharper, brighter energy to it, but at the same time Paulus has a very Russian approach – very thick chords – and that does give it a quality of weariness. I don’t think it is a simple piece. One can hear the whole opera just in this single piece. It is the cornerstone of the first half, because F-sharp is exactly halfway between the C-to-C octave. Composers would call that the axis of symmetry. The Pilgrims’ Hymn is perfect for that place in the program.

It’s halfway through a palindrome?

Exactly. The whole shape of the program is a palindrome, but every movement within the program is a palindrome. The model is how Bach put together disparate movements in different keys. One can perceive the moment-to-moment change of key, but listeners are also aware of the larger arc, of the travel through keys.

I was surprised by the Chichester Psalms. It almost feels natural to be singing in Hebrew. Even if you don’t speak the language, you have a sense that your syllables have meaning. You don’t get that when you sing in French.

To my mind, the easiest foreign languages for English-speaking singers are Hebrew, German and Russian. The sounds are the same; it’s just a matter of achieving a little bit of the accent and knowing where the stresses are. We all know how to do it. It’s actually quite difficult to get people to perform properly in Latin, to keep it pure. French is nearly impossible. Even Italian is quite difficult despite its reputation as the trained singer’s vocabulary. So Hebrew is not as great a challenge. It’s almost as if there were something tribal in our shared memories.

In our rehearsals, we have worked on individual pieces, but we haven’t yet had the chance to perform everything in sequence and experience the relationship of the keys. Could you take us through that scheme again?

We go from C to D in my piece. Then we go from D to G major, so the D that ends my piece acts as a dominant to G and goes very naturally into the Copland. Likewise, the G major flows very nicely back into C for the beginning of the Carlyle Sharpe. Carlyle’s piece begins in C, but he is not using a traditional C to G relationship. Rather, he uses C to F-sharp major. When you combine those, you get what’s now called the Petrushka chord that Stravinsky used. Many contemporary composers use that relationship in much the same way as tonal composers of the 19th century used C and G. G major defines C for them. Carlyle uses the Petrushka chord, but he also uses octatonic scales quite a bit, breaking up the octave into eight equal pieces. There is a symmetry to his piece which makes it natural to go from C, where it ends, to F-sharp major, where the Paulus begins. Going to F-sharp in the Paulus piece will sound as natural as going from the D in my Alleluias to the G in Copland.

Then from F-sharp major in the Paulus, we drop a half-step, going from bright-bright F-sharp major (six sharps) to F-minor (four flats), which is very dark. Going down a half step is the exact same thing that Bach does in the St. John Passion, from F to E, right at the point where it is decided that Jesus will be sent to death. It’s the exact same music, but there is a psychological drop. So six sharps to four flats gets us to Robert Kyr’s De Profundis – Out of the Depths. From F minor, we go to Ashes. But Ashes cuts up the octave differently. It’s not based on thirds and chords in the same way as the Sharpe. It uses minor third symmetry up and down. It ends on a unison C, providing a feeling of stasis to the whole work. Even with the large aleatoric [vocal ad lib] section, it’s a one-pitch world that’s being manipulated. At the end, everything that was blurring the C is pushed away, and the C reveals itself. To go from that to D major is a surprise – but it’s a second-inversion chord, which is quite unstable actually. So when the Alleluia starts, it’s still quite uncertain, and it’s only at the modulation to A when we feel firmly back in the land of tonality. That will feel very comfortable to the audience after the previous three pieces. The first half ends with my All Creatures of Our God and King, which is pretty much standard D major with a few jazz chords, but nothing too foreign.