Eriksson, Olsson, and Rautavaara-- our nod toward the North.

Chorale will not sing much Scandinavian or Baltic music on its spring concert, nor on its tour of the Baltic countries later in the summer. This is not our norm: we tend to sing a large amount of music from that part of Europe, and really enjoy it. But we assume that audiences in those countries will come to our concerts because they want to hear something new and different, something more typical of an American choir; if they are choral enthusiasts, they are likely to be plenty familiar with music from their own part of the world, already. The choral culture in those countries is highly developed, and tends to express a fierce nationalism-- and I have a feeling it would seem somewhat odd, for us to be singing music which is so personal and political for our listeners. I’d rather listen to them sing it! The regional music we have chosen to sing comes from Sweden and Finland, rather than from the “Baltic countries” of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia (with the exception of Arvo Pärt). And the work listed under the authorship of Swede Gunnar Eriksson is not really by him, or even by a Scandinavian. Komm süsser Tod is the result of many minds’ labor, and defies categorization. Originally, it was the first three lines of a song for solo voice and continuo, which J.S. Bach contributed to Georg Christian Schemelli's Musicalisches Gesangbuch (BWV 478) in 1736:

Komm süßer Tod.  Komm sel’ge Ruh’.  Komm führe mich in Frieden.

Norwegian composer Knut Nystedt (1915-2014) arranged these lines for SATB voices a cappella, as the basis of a larger composition, named Immortal Bach. Gunnar Eriksson, professor of choral conducting at the University of Göteborg, extracted Nystedt’s SATB harmonization, and published it in a collection entitled Kör ad lib, a collection of thirty-three such kernels selected as subjects for choral improvisation. Following Eriksson’s suggestion, Chorale utilizes four principle singers as leaders of their respective sections; the resulting musical experience reflects their individual choices, though the harmonic combinations are anything but predictable.

Otto Olsson (1879-1964) was primarily an organist, and taught counterpoint, harmony, liturgy, and hymnody at the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. Though his preferred idiom was late Romantic, with rich harmonies, wide tessituras, and ardent emotionalism, Olsson’s choral compositions also demonstrate his affinity for Gregorian chant, and an interest in polytonality. Chorale will perform his Latin motet Jesu dulcis memoria, which, though nominally in B flat Major, has alternating sections in D Major, suggesting a modal, folk music background—Edvard Grieg’s footprint in all twentieth century Scandinavian music -- as much as a modern approach to tonality.

Chorale will sing just one short movement from the All-Night Vigil of Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara (b. 1928), Herra Armahda II. In the Orthodox tradition, the All-Night Vigil is a liturgy, including both Vespers and Matins, which prepares participants for a major feast day. Rautavaara, perhaps the best- known contemporary Finnish composer, composed his vigil specifically in memory of St. John the Baptist. His music has a raw, visceral, yet euphoric quality, totally unique in twentieth century a cappella repertoire. Rautavaara responds to what he calls the “unbelievable, naively harsh and mystically profound” texts of this vigil, with music which is strikingly active, varied, pulsating with energy and emotion. This particular movement sets only the words “Lord have mercy,” but serves as an introduction to the composer’s style in the rest of the work.

The Americans

Chorale’s June concert program will include a cappella pieces by American composers Stephen Paulus (1949-2014), Vincent Persichetti (1915-1987), Jean Berger (1909-2002), Morten Lauridsen (b.1943), and Abba Yosef Weisgal (1885-1981).

Abba Weisgal was born in Kikl, Poland, and received his musical training—both as a cantor, and as a composer—first in Breslau, then in Vienna. He served as an officer in the Austrian army during World War I, and then took up cantorial duties in Eibeschitz, Bohemia. He immigrated with his family to the United States in 1921, hoping to become an opera composer. Very soon after his arrival, however, he was engaged as full-time cantor by the Chizuk Amuno congregation in Baltimore, where he remained for more than forty years, utilizing his compositional talent and skills to provide music for conservative and reform worship. His son, Hugo Weisgall (1912-1997), did become a noted opera composer. Sim Sholom is typical of Abba Weisgal’s liturgical works: it combines elements of Eastern European, Ashkenazic Judaism with the reform, German-influenced procedures inherited from such nineteenth-century composers as Salomon Sulzer and Louis Lewandowski.

Morton Lauridsen grew up in Portland, Oregon, in a Danish immigrant family. After graduating from Whitman College, he studied composition at the University of Southern California. Following his graduation in 1967, he joined the faculty at U.S.C., later becoming chair of the composition department. In 1994, he became composer-in-residence for the Los Angeles Master Chorale, conducted at that time by Paul Salamunovich; through this collaboration, his choral works have become widely known and performed; today he is America’s most frequently-performed choral composer. “O Nata Lux” is an a cappella movement from Lux Aeterna, one of seven major vocal cycles Lauridsen has composed. After its premier in 1997, a writer for The Times called it “a classic of new American choral writing” and said “old world structures and new world spirit intertwine in a cunningly written score, at once sensuous and spare.” He utilizes a limited, conservative tonal palette, enlivened by lyrical melodic lines and unusual chord spacings. His music owes a debt to the spiritual minimalist movement, represented by Arvo Pärt and John Tavener, but has an unmistakably American sound—influenced by popular music of the earlier twentieth century.

Vincent Persichetti, a native of Philadephia, was an extraordinarily prolific composer, and the catalogue of his works astonishes with its breadth-- he wrote for piano, organ, wind ensemble, chamber ensemble, big band, symphony orchestra, solo voice, and chorus. He taught theory and composition first at the Philadelphia Conservatory, and later at the Juilliard School, and was editorial director of the Elkan-Vogel publishing house. He was one of the foremost representatives of what has become known as the American academic school of composition, along with William Schumann and Walter Piston. His compositional “voice” is somewhat eclectic-- it is hard to pin down a specific Persichetti sound; rather, he seems to adapt his materials to the instruments or purposes for which his music is intended. His Mass, Opus 84, for unaccompanied voices, commissioned by New York’s Collegiate Chorale in 1960, is a good example of this: based on a Phrygian mode Gregorian chant, it sounds on many ways like a Renaissance a cappella mass, with a nearly constant imitative counterpoint texture of relying on imitative counterpoint as its chief developmental procedure. Most of the Mass has a dark, somewhat cool, detached, introspective sound; the Agnus Dei movement, which Chorale will sing, is, by contrast, ardent and emotionally expressive.

Unlike Persichetti, Jean Berger focused his creative energies almost entirely on vocal and choral music. Like Weisgal, he was originally European—his original name was Arthur Schlossberg, and he was born into Jewish family and grew up in Alsace-Lorraine. He studied musicology at the universities of Vienna and Heidelberg, and received his Ph.D. in 1931. After the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933, he moved to Paris, where he took the French name Jean Berger, and toured widely as a pianist and accompanist. In 1941, he moved to the United States, joined the U.S. Army, and became a citizen. After the war, he held academic positions in musicology at Middlebury College, the University of Illinois, and the University of Colorado. In 1964 he founded the John Sheppard Music Press in Boulder, Colo., and later Denver. As a musicologist, Berger edited several 17th century works and wrote about the Italian composer Giacomo Perti. His compositional output was not enormous; but several of his choral octavos, including The Eyes of All, are among the best-known and most popular American choral works.

Stephen Paulus lived for most of his life in St. Paul, Minnesota, and received both undergraduate and graduate degrees from the University of Minnesota. He composed over 450 works for chorus, orchestra, chamber ensemble, opera, solo voice, piano, guitar, organ, and band; and he held Composer in Residence positions with the orchestras of Atlanta, Minnesota, Tucson and Annapolis. He is best known for his choral music and opera, ranging from elaborate multi-part works and operas with extensive choral scenes, to brief anthems and a cappella motets. Chicago Chorale commissioned a work from him in 2007, entitled And Give Us Peace, which we both premiered and recorded. Pilgrims’ Hymn, which was sung at the funerals of Presidents Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford, is a very successful hybrid: though it functions as a motet, is actually a chorus from his “church opera,“ The Three Hermits. In contrast to the other composers on this “American” list, Paulus never held a “day job”: his entire career was focused on composing and publishing his own music.

Centeno and Pärt, composers

Da pacem Domine, the title of Chorale’s spring concert preparation, is taken from a sixth century Gregorian hymn :

Da pacem Domine in diebus nostris Quia non est alius Qui pugnet pro nobis Nisi tu Deus noster.

Give peace, o Lord, in our time Because there is no one else Who will fight for us If not You, our God.

We chose this theme in response to the constant, tragic strife of which we hear every day—in Syria, in Iraq, in Kenya, in Libya, in Nigeria, in Mexico, all over our globe. No matter what we do with our own lives and careers, day to day, in our relatively safe and stable society, we cannot escape such news, the clamor of war and murder and bloodshed: it dominates most what we see on our television and computer screens, hear about on our radios, read about in our magazines and newspapers. So I have chosen music and texts which respond to this shared situation, providing an island of peace, beauty, and hope. I expect our audience will be as pleased to hear us sing these pieces, as the singers are to perform them.

Chorale will begin and end its concert with settings of the Da pacem text. We will open with a setting by contemporary Spanish composer Javier Centeno, commissioned in 2005 for the First International Meeting of Schola Cantorum in Burgos, Spain. It received its premier performance in the square of Burgos Cathedral, at night, sung by more than 1000 children holding a torch or a lit candle.

I discovered the piece by searching for “Da pacem” on YouTube, and found that it struck just the right tone for our concert. Composed in a straightforward, homophonic style, it has a brooding, emotional tone that I find very appealing—though simple in concept, it manages to evoke deep, complex feeling and reflection. I proceeded to contact Mr. Centeno through an internet search. He very obligingly gave us permission to perform his piece, in what I assume will be its first North American performance.

Mr. Centeno is currently professor on the Teaching Faculty of Burgos University as well as the Department chairman of Didactics of Music Expression.   He has performed as a tenor all over Spain as well as in France, Italy and England, principly in oratorio and baroque opera. He performs frequently with such ensembles as the Arianna Ensemble, Grupo de Música Antigua de la Universidad de Valladolid, and Fundación Excelentia. He has conducted the choir of the University of Burgos and has lectured on choral conducting and vocal technique.

Our concert’s final group will include another setting of the Da pacem text, this one by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, composed in 2004. Pärt and his music need little introduction or comment from me-- he is the most performed contemporary composer in the world. This setting, composed in Mr. Pärt’s trademark minimalist style, is quite unlike Mr. Centeno’s—rather than the traditional melody and harmonic accompaniment one finds in the latter, it displays the compositional device Pärt has called tintinnabuli, characterized by simple harmonies and single, unadorned notes suggesting triads and reminiscent of ringing bells. Like Centeno’s piece, it is dark, brooding, evocative of far more feeling and experience than its relatively passive texture would suggest.

Da pacem Domine

Having laid our St. Matthew Passion to rest, Chorale now moves on to our spring project, Da pacem Domine. This will be a radical departure from the other concerts of our 2014-15 season: whereas both of them consisted of single works, with orchestral accompaniment, presented in grand venues, our current preparation consists of sixteen contemplative a cappella motets, sung in the appropriately intimate, live acoustic of St. Vincent DePaul Parish, in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. I have planned this concert as an opportunity for the singers to work on a genre of repertoire which would challenge them to listen and polish in a somewhat more exacting manner, than they do with accompanied music, which requires larger and more theatrical effects. The a cappella discipline is good for us, and we enjoy the subtle, many-faceted beauty of this music.   We also need this time to prepare for our July tour of the Baltic countries, which will be undertaken by a smaller subset of the group, and which by definition requires a cappella repertoire. After the tutti forces sing the program in concert, June 13, that subset will reconvene for three weeks, and prepare the same music as a chamber choir. I have been challenged to select repertoire appropriate to both ensembles-- and in some ways it is the larger group that has the harder job. I am also challenged to select music which will be interesting and satisfying to two very different audiences: our Chicago audience, and the audiences we will sing for in Europe.

One of my guiding principles, in selecting the program, has been to showcase contemporary American composers. I assume this music will be of special interest to European audiences, and I have sought a representative sample—not just because it is American, but because I like it, and because the music and texts fit our theme. We will sing pieces by composers Stephen Paulus, Vincent Persichetti, Jean Berger, Morten Lauridsen, and Yosef Weisgal-- pieces which reflect several different strains of American choral composition, but which share in common a skillful approach to writing for unaccompanied voices. I also chose music from the part of the world in which we will be touring-- pieces by Swedes Gunnar Eriksson and Otto Olsson, Finn Einojuhanni Rautavaara, and Estonian Arvo Pärt.   I suspect our European listeners will be familiar with their own music, will be happy with the way in which it is performed “at home,” and will not be as interested in hearing us do it, as they will be to hear us perform our own music—so I have been somewhat sparing in those choices.

I also do not want to limit us to contemporary music for this particular preparation. We will sing a concert of music composed within the past fifty years, based upon the ideas and procedures of “spiritual minimalism,” next season, in honor of Arvo Pärt’s 80^th birthday; but for this current program I wanted something looser, with more variety and a broader appeal. Something that might be more familiar and appealing to a general audience (assuming that a general audience is interested in listening to an entire concert of sacred a cappella choral music!). So we will sing motets by Heinrich Schütz, Anton Bruckner, and Henry Purcell, and a chorale by J.S. Bach, all of which fit our theme and are appropriate to our forces.

Our remaining pieces, by Javier Centeno Martin, Philip Stopford, John Tavener, and Bob Chilcott, and not exactly random: they are thematically appropriate and fit the overall sound and tone of the concert, providing colors I feel we need to make a unified whole out of a collection of smaller works.

I’ll write more about our actual theme, Da pacem Domine, next week. For now, though, you should put us on your calendar and plan to attend our concert of extraordinarily lovely music. June 13, 8 PM, St. Vincent De Paul Parish.