CAE is extremely fortunate to have Susan Wladaver-Morgan as both one of our singers and the author of our concert program notes. We invite you to read her notes for our upcoming February concerts (now in less than two weeks!), to give you even more of a taste for the great music we have in store for you. Remember that tickets can be purchased at our website ahead of time for a reduced rate.
We also invite you to tune in to All Classical 89.9 FM tonight from 6-7pm for Northwest Previews, where our concert will be one of the features, along with an interview by David De Lyser, the conductor of this concert.
We look forward to seeing you soon!
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Peace, Love, and Music
For our third concert in the Guest Conductor Season, we welcome Dr. David De Lyser to the podium. Anchored by The Peaceable Kingdom by Randall Thompson, the concert presents lyrical choral compositions by twentieth-century American composers that focus on two themes that have inspired great poetry as well as great music—love and peace.
We begin with a set of madrigals by Emma Lou Diemer (b. 1927). Starting as a church organist at age thirteen, Diemer earned advanced degrees from Yale and the Eastman School of Music, where she studied composition. She has composed in many genres, including music for choir, chamber groups, piano, and organ, performing some of her own organ works at the National Cathedral. Based on songs from three different Shakespeare comedies, the madrigals embody different aspects of love: cajoling (“O Mistress Mine” from Twelfth Night), longing (“Take, O take those lips away” from Measure for Measure), and cheerful cynicism (“Sigh no more” from Much Ado About Nothing).
“The Divine Image,” set by Joshua Shank (b. 1980), comes from Songs of Innocence by William Blake (1757-1827), painter, engraver, poet, and mystic. The deceptively simple lyrics, with their hypnotic repetition of four words, ponder the mystery of how the divine manifests in human form as qualities that all of us, at our best, share and should treasure in each other. The youngest composer ever to win the Student Composition Prize of the American Choral Directors Association, Shank wrote this gently yearning setting in 2002, inspired in part by Brahms.
Laurie Betts Hughes (b. 1977), who received her doctorate in music from the University of Washington last year, has an abiding love of folk music. This explains her arrangement of the Irish ballad “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” collected by Robert Dwyer Joyce (1836-1883). The song fits neatly into both themes of our concert, for it tells of a young man preparing to join the Irish Rebellion of 1798, bidding farewell to his sweetheart, losing her to a sniper’s bullet, and reflecting on the tragedy of “blood for blood without remorse.” Betts’s use of duplets in the women’s voices against triplets in the piano part creates the effect of shimmering grain while skillfully juxtaposing the violence and grief of the story with the beauty of the scene.
Samuel Barber (1910-1981) too created gorgeous atmospheric effects in “To Be Sung on the Water,” based on a haunting poem by American Louise Bogan (1897-1970), capturing the rocking of a boat and the ever-shifting light. Barber and Bogan make a good match, sharing a formal approach and the ability to compress deep emotion into a compact space. Bogan came of age at the height of free verse and confessional poetry, but her own work used mysterious imagery in exquisitely rhymed forms; Barber created large works, including operas and symphonies, but his brief songs often have more power as well. Here the alternating surges of men’s and women’s voices, the repetition of key short phrases, and even the uncertainty about what is happening to the lovers all mirror the ebb and flow of love itself.
The Peaceable Kingdom (1936) by composer and educator Randall Thompson (1899-1984) may surprise many listeners. Inspired by a painting by Quaker Edward Hicks (1780-1849) that depicts the biblical passage in which the lion and lamb co-exist in peace, Thompson, after studying the entire book of Isaiah, chose to set several verses that depict God’s wrath—indeed, the apocalypse in which the wicked meet their doom before the coming of God’s kingdom. Although the work ends with a glorious chorus of thanksgiving, what precedes it is far from peaceful. Why did Thompson choose such painful passages? He may have feared the coming of another war; he did follow world events closely and stated that he wrote his popular “Alleluia” right after the fall of France in 1940, for it put him in mind of the book of Job. Alternatively, he may have done so on artistic grounds, using contrast to heighten the joyful conclusion and creating striking depictions of suffering, devastation, and grief along the way—certainly more dramatic than twenty minutes of cheerful images!
Eric Whitacre (b. 1970) offers a much clearer statement in “This Marriage,” based on verses by the Persian writer, jurist, and Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273). Since studying at Juilliard, Whitacre has produced dozens of serious choral works that are at once musically dense and accessible. He wrote this piece for his wife for their seventh wedding anniversary, and here the music is simple and direct; all the voices phrase together, move together as one, and when he says “I am out of words,” the words stop and only music remains.
Like Thompson, Daniel Pinkham (1923-2006) chose texts from the Old Testament for his Wedding Cantata, this time from the Song of Songs. Pinkham studied composition with Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, and Nadia Boulanger, but his clear straightforward style sounds like no one but himself. Although he worked in virtually every genre, he composed much of his work for sacred occasions and church services. The cantata’s four movements present a dance to celebrate a couple’s commitment to each other; a canon like a wedding ring braided of many strands; alternating choruses of women and men rejoicing in the sensuality of marriage; and a brief chorale of blessing.
The next three pieces sing of remembered love. Choral director Eric William Barnum (b. 1979) perfectly caught the surprise, excitement, and warm gratitude of “Jenny Kiss’d Me” by James Leigh Hunt (1784-1859), a central figure in the great British literary generation that included Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle, whose wife Jane was the Jenny of the title. Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), whose poem “Echo” Norman Dello Joio (1913-2008) adapted in “Come to Me, My Love,” had family connections with that literary circle as well. The dark chords in the accompaniment match the sadness that one could read as love disappointed or love cut short. By contrast, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, set by Robert H. Young (1923-2011), professor of music at Baylor University, begins in self-loathing but ends in strength and hope by recalling the love of a faithful friend.
Our newest work is “Peace,” published last year by Aaron Pike (b. 1984), who premiered his first major composition, Omaha Beach, at age seventeen. He chose the text for “Peace,” by British playwright Louis N. Parker (1852-1944), from a memorial in London’s theatre district to “actors, musicians, writers and workers for the stage” who died in the Great War (1914-1918), reminding theatre-goers in search of entertainment of what others have sacrificed for peace. The dignified setting induces a thoughtful meditation on the text.
“The Lighthearted Lovers” by Kirke Mechem (b. 1925) is quite different from his deeply personal Earth My Song that we presented last fall, but far more amusing. It comes from a song in Amphitryon by John Dryden (1631-1700), a Restoration comedy about sexual morality. The song too spoofs fidelity, with both the men and women using conventional romantic language to confess their own complete lack of faithfulness; the sopranos even throw in an over-the-top cadenza for added mockery. Ah well, the course of true love never did run smooth.

