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Archive The Providence Singers Presents New Music for a New Age | ||||||||
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Julian Wachner (b. 1969) – Sometimes I Feel Alive (1998) | ||||||||
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Morten Lauridsen (b. 1943) – O Magnum Mysterium (1994) | ||||||||
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John Tavener (b. 1944) – The Lamb (1982) and Song of Athene (1994) | ||||||||
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Trevor Weston (b. 1967) – Ma’at Musings (2005 – World Première) | ||||||||
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Henryk Gorecki (b. 1933) – Amen (1975) | ||||||||
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Elena Ruehr (b. 1963) – Cricket, Spider, Bee (1996) | ||||||||
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The Providence Singers Doug Lippincott and Robert Schulz, percussion Barbara Poeschl-Edrich, harp
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Julian Wachner Sometimes I Feel Alive (1998) Sometimes I Feel Alive was commissioned by Allison McMillan, then president of The Providence Singers, to celebrate her husband’s 50th birthday. Wachner composed the cycle, a setting of three love poems by E. E. Cummings, at Tanglewood during the summer of 1998. The first two poems, written when Cummings was a 20-year-old Harvard student, appear in his first book of verse, Tulips and Chimneys (1923). “somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond,” one of Cummings’ best known poems, was included in the 1931 volume, W [ViVa]. The Providence Singers gave the world première of the new work on November 7, 1998, at historic Trinity Church in Newport, Rhode Island, with Wachner conducting. The work went on to win critical acclaim, including first prize in the 2000 Boston Choral Consortium Composition Competition and in the 2001 Cambridge Madrigal Singers Competition. It was performed earlier this month at the American Choral Directors Association national conference in Los Angeles. Texts | |||||||
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Morten Lauridsen O Magnum Mysterium (1994) The Singers last performed music by Morten Lauridsen in November 1998 – his Les Chansons des Roses, settings of French verse by Rainer Maria Rilke. The Chansons were part of a “Poetry in Song” concert that also featured the world première of Julian Wachner’s Sometimes I Feel Alive. Lauridsen’s has become the best-known and most-often performed music of all American choral composers. (Musicologist Nick Strimple has written that Lauridsen has eclipsed Randall Thompson for that honor.) His music is distinctive. Singers who performed the November 1998 concert immediately heard echoes of “Dirait-on” (from Chansons) when they read through O Magnum Mysterium for the first time. Lauridsen’s path to a career in music was also distinctive. Born in Colfax, Wash., and raised in Portland, Ore., he was working as a Forest Service lookout in a remote outpost near Mount St. Helens when he decided to follow his interest in music. He entered the University of Southern California in 1963, studied composition with Ingolf Dahl, Halsey Stevens and Robert Linn, and began a faculty appointment at USC that has lasted more than three decades. (He divides his time between southern California and the Pacific Northwest, where he maintains a cabin on one of the remote San Juan Islands off the Washington coast.) His catalog comprises seven major vocal cycles as well as individual songs and choral works. Two of them – “O Magnum Mysterium” and “Dirait-on” – have become the all-time best-selling choral octavos for Theodore Presser, which has been in business since 1783. Text | |||||||
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John Tavener (b. 1944) – Song of Athene (1994) and The Lamb (1982) John Tavener and his music have been prominently in the public eye and ear for nearly his entire composing career. He was still in his early 20s when his dramatic cantata The Whale received its première at the debut performance of the London Sinfonietta in 1968. The work – a collage that included tape recordings, amplified percussion and a chorus equipped with bullhorns – was an immediate sensation, leading eventually to dinner with John and Yoko and several recordings on The Beatles’ Apple records label. His rise was rapid and success came early. In 1969, he was appointed professor of composition at Trinity College. Major commissions arrived, including one from Benjamin Britten for a full-length opera for the Royal Opera House. He continued to produce new work, though his professional life became crowded. Composition began to take longer and he began to experience dead periods. Tavener had been raised in a musical and religious household – his father was organist at a Presbyterian church in Hampstead – and as a teen-ager he had been introduced to Metropolitan Anthony, head of the Orthodox Church in the West. In the 1970s, his spiritual journey led him to the Russian Orthodox Church, which he joined in 1977, describing it as “a homecoming.” His compositions turned toward religious themes: the Orthodox Vigil Service, the Akathist of Thanksgiving (thought by some critics to be his greatest work), and The Protecting Veil, which re-established his fortunes as a leading 20th-century composer. A recording of The Protecting Veil was at the top of the classical charts in 1992 and won an award for the best contemporary recording. His Song for Athene, which draws its text from Hamlet and the Orthodox funeral service, was commissioned by the BBC. Of that work, Tavener has written, “This work was written in memory of Athene Hariades, who died tragically in March 1993. Her inner and outer beauty was reflected in her love of acting, poetry, music and of the Orthodox Church.” It was first performed on January 22, 1994. A worldwide audience heard the work performed as the recessional at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales, on September 6, 1997, under the title Alleluia: May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. Texts | |||||||
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Trevor Weston (b. 1967) – Ma’at Musings (2005 – World Première) A work for chorus and percussion, commissioned by The Providence Singers Trevor Weston comes from a very traditional musical background. At the age of 10 he entered St. Thomas Choir School in New York City, where he received instruction in voice and piano. With the choir, Weston sang regular Sunday services at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue as well as concerts at Carnegie Hall and Avery Fischer Hall, and he toured England, where the choir performed at Westminster Abbey and King’s College Cambridge. During high school, Weston continued his musical development with organ and carillon lessons in Plainfield, N.J. Composition became his focus at Tufts University while studying with T.J Anderson and completing a double major in music and history. Weston completed his graduate work at the University of California–Berkeley where he studied with Richard Felciano and Andrew Imbrie for his M.A. and Olly Wilson, his primary teacher, for his Ph.D. In 1994, Weston was awarded the prestigious George Ladd Prix de Paris from Berkeley. This award allowed him to live in Paris for two years where he audited classes at IRCAM and composed his dissertation, Biorhythm, a major work for two orchestras. Weston’s music has been enthusiastically received. The Detroit Free Press described his composition Bleue, selected for the Detroit Symphony’s Unisys African-American Composer’s Residency and Symposium reading sessions in 1998, as a “gently syncopated marriage of intellect and feeling.” Gerre Hancock and the Choir of St. Thomas Church performed his Messe Ancienne in 2000 and commissioned him to write a Magnificat and Nunc dimittis in 2001. The Bob Taylor Festival Choir, directed by Robert Taylor, performed The Gentlest Thing in 2001 for the choir’s inaugural season in Arkansas and Oklahoma. Recently, the Charles Ives Center selected Bleue for a performance during the 2002 Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, S.C. He was also commissioned by the Carolina Chamber Chorale to compose Ashes for their concerts during Piccolo Spoleto 2002. The Providence Singers gave the New England première of Ashes a few months later, in November 2002. Six questions for Trevor Weston What, exactly, are Ma’at Musings? Ma’at is something like “wisdom” or “divine order.” The idea of a final judgment – of being judged on how well you led your life, the good things you did – was prevalent in Egyptian theology. In some way, all four movements speak to the idea of divine order, of the best way to live one’s life. How did you arrive at ancient Egyptian texts? I first encountered ancient Egyptian texts as an undergraduate at Tufts University in a course on ancient Egyptian history. The texts, particularly their power, stayed in my mind for decades. When I began to think about this commission, I remembered them. I wanted to find the oldest texts. That led me back to Unas. How did you arrange the texts into the four movements? The two Unas movements are like bookends. They relate to each other and open and close the work. But the other movements also have their relationships. The second and third movements share a literary form – a prayer offering that amounts to a list of desires or a list of virtues. It reminded me of Anglican chant. “To whom shall I speak today,” repeated before each verse, has a liturgical feel. Chanting may be the oldest choral form; it’s probably what people did when they first began to sing – mimicking the sounds of plain speech. The third movement is a response to the heavy complaining of movement two. It’s almost as if Intef is saying that things aren’t so bad – I’m kind to the poor, I try to soothe the angry. Intef’s words are a statement of his good deeds, in line with divine moral order. Even all that power language in the fourth movement supports Intef’s point. Unas is powerful, yes, but he also threatens the evil-doers. The fourth movement has some extraordinary imagery. This may be the first time The Singers has performed the word “entrails.” I wanted at least one fast, loud piece, which turned out to be the fourth movement. The texts I was working with were actually much longer and some of them were gorier than what I ultimately decided to use. The fourth movement is all about power. The music has some references to rap, which seemed to fit. A lot of early rap was about power, about who’s dominant. Those braggadocio raps were a list – like Unas’ – of the rapper’s prowess. I’m not an expert on ancient Egyptian history, but I do recall that Unas was not the most important pharaoh. Can you imagine what Ramses must have been like? Ma’at Musings is for chorus and percussion – not a frequent combination. [Artistic Director] Julian [Wachner] wanted the work to be portable and not to require large instrumental forces. He thought percussion, maybe. It was a new challenge, since I’d never written for chorus and percussion before. At first I was a little worried. I thought the piece – and the chorus – would need more pitched instruments to sustain the work in performance. But I really liked the atmosphere of mystery that the percussion created for the ancient texts. The first movement even has a little flavor of ancient Greek music, with the marimba. That probably came from a Western civilization course I taught in the fall. Ancient texts are foreign to just about everyone. Does that lend the work a more universal appeal? If anything, the ancient texts gave me more musical freedom as a composer. Being so old, they don’t come from a tradition that is recognizable today. But while the texts are ancient, they remain oddly current. “Brothers are mean, hearts are greedy.” That may have been written in the 21st century B.C.E., but we haven’t come very far, have we? Texts *
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Henryk Gorecki Amen (1975) Henryk Gorecki was born December 6, 1933, in Silesia, a part of Poland that sustained elements of three cultures: Polish, Czech and German. “Why do I worship Mozart, Schumann, Schubert, Brahms, Beethoven, Bach?” he once wondered. “... Because at the beginning of my musical education, when I had no idea about music – nothing! – these names were always near me.” He studied composition at the State Higher School of Music in Katowice from 1955 to 1960. After some years in Paris, he returned to the school as professor of composition and, from 1975 to 1979, as its rector. His compositions were known and respected in Poland, but Gorecki was not a well-known composer outside Poland until later in his career. During the 1960s, he and his post-war, Cold-War contemporaries from Eastern Europe became known for radical new work – dissonant, jarring, harsh, loud, brash, intellectual, avant-garde. By the end of that decade, Gorecki had expanded his interest to older music – musical traditions from 13th-century Poland and polyphonic song of the 16th century. His music became more expressive, with richer tonal color. Many critics and music historians view this as a departure from the avant-garde which led to a temporary decline in his position among leading-edge composers. His Symphony No. 3: Chants plaintifs of 1976 is considered by some to be the start of his rehabilitation. About a decade after its première, the work was chosen by the French filmmaker Maurice Pialat for his film Police, the soundtrack of which became a best-selling album, creating new audiences for Gorecki’s music. The Amen to be performed this evening dates from the same period as his Symphony No. 3. It is often dissonant, but also resonant with energy and a profound expressive quality. | |||||||
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Elena Ruehr Cricket, Spider, Bee (1996) This work for chorus, harp and percussion was commissioned by the Marsh Chapel Choir for its Festival of New Music, held Saturday, February 24, 1996, in Marsh Chapel at Boston University. Julian Wachner, then music director at Marsh Chapel and a faculty colleague of Ruehr’s at MIT, conducted the Marsh Chapel Choir and Chamber Orchestra. In program notes for the festival, Ruehr wrote: “As [Emily] Dickinson’s poems can be sometimes obscure, I chose three with either more immediate meanings or with clear visual images. Although these poems were not grouped together by Dickinson, I made a set out of them because of their similarities in using insects as metaphors. In addition, the set makes a cycle that goes from evening to day, from the twilight sounds of Cricket, to the nighttime spinning of Spider, to the midday activity of Bee. Musically, I used two kinds of harmony to create a shift from dark to light, from chords built on an octatonic scale and those coming from the more familiar diatonic set, or major scale. This gives the piece a sound in some ways similar to that of early Stravinsky. Cricket is a straightforward text setting. Spider repeats in cycles that mirror the shape of a web, much as Dickinson’s rhyme and meter suggest that form. In Bee, I tried to evoke the endless expanse of a prairie through a mildly dissonant, buzzing harmony that is repeated in a tight rhythmic canon, making a larger and more complex texture from closely-related smaller units.” Texts
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