Kindling the Flame

Chicago a cappella

Amy Conn, Kathryn Kamp sopranos
Valerie Glowinski, Amy Pickering, mezzos
Harold Brock, Trevor Mitchell,  tenors
Matthew Greenberg, Aaron Johnson, baritones
Jonathan Miller, bass and artistic director

Madrigal Ensemble of the Chicago Children's Choir
Josephine Lee, Artistic Director

Program

I N T E R M I S S I O N

INTRODUCTION

Every Chicago a cappella concert is by necessity a product of its artistic staff and their individual lives. This concert draws on my own personal history more fully than most, because it is the first-ever collaboration between the adult ensemble I founded ten years ago and the youth ensemble in which I spent ten formative, powerful years. Fortunately, I happen to be living and working in the same metropolitan area in which I grew up. Also fortunately, the Chicago Children’s Choir still exists and is going strong.  Such circumstances, combined with a warm and enthusiastic relationship between our organizations, have made possible this artistic collaboration between Chicago a cappella and the Chicago Children’s Choir. 

Chicago a cappella would not exist if I had not spent the last ten years of my musical youth in the Chicago Children’s Choir, sitting literally at the elbow of its founder, Rev. Dr. Christopher Moore, and singing a dazzlingly eclectic mix of repertoire from the moment I walked into the CCC at the age of nine. I had a pretty good voice and worked pretty hard. By the time I was twelve, I had sung boy soprano solos in both the Bernstein Chichester Psalms and in a complete staged version of Bernstein’s Mass.  As a second-alto chorister, I  sang Renaissance works, modern American scores and folksong settings, and great music by Haydn, Bach, Brahms, and Mozart, not to mention countless spirituals. But something was unique about the CCC in those days, a quality that to this day most American children’s choirs lack: Chris Moore understood the power, social as well as vocal, of keeping young men in the choir after their voices changed. Then, as now, the CCC boasts a powerful men’s section, giving the CCC the rare capability of singing true mixed-choir music and, perhaps more importantly, giving the youngest males in the training choirs a set of role models to emulate.

It was as a young bass, at the age of fifteen, on tour over spring break, then I first had the thought, “I’d like to do this all the time when I grow up.” It was a compelling vision, fueled by splendid repertoire, spirited singing, and the fellowship of other kids who lived to sing.

While it took half a dozen private voice teachers to provide me with a solid sense of vocal technique—a sensibility which infuses all of Chicago a cappella’s singing, due to the caliber of singers who make up the professional group—the other half of CAC’s success is the actual music we sing. I am grateful for compliments about the music that CAC sings, but I wasn’t born knowing how to program a great concert. Chris Moore is probably still the most brilliant programmer of choral concerts I have ever known, and I strive to emulate his example in my own work. Since he died before Chicago a cappella came into existence, he never had the chance to hear what a professional ensemble could do with his brand of sensibilities about repertoire, but I dare to hope that he would have liked what we’ve done.

On today’s program, you’ll hear a typical Chicago a cappella-style mix of repertoire, with a healthy focus on recent music, both from classical and pop traditions. I want to point out that this is the first time CAC has ever hosted another ensemble to be the guest on our own series. We are thrilled at the caliber of musicianship that the young singers of the CCC Madrigal Ensemble bring to this enterprise. Rehearsing the combined group of more than two dozen singers has been a true pleasure. I am often told that Chicago a cappella by itself sounds like a choir of 24 voices, but it’s especially nice to take our regular sound and augment it with many more people, resulting in a big, powerful sound.

As Garrison Keillor said in a now-famous speech to Chorus America, choral music and choral singing are, at their core, spiritual endeavors, creating a kind of community like no other.  Whether the music is religious, or a love song, or atmospheric or funny, there is a quality of humanity that yearns for deep connection with other human beings, and that yearning can be fulfilled in remarkable ways when people gather to sing.  I hope that the flame which was lit in me many years ago, and which shines in all of us here on stage, makes its way to you during the course of this concert, inspiring and kindling something true and remarkable for you.  Thank you so much for being here.

—Jonathan Miller

NOTES ON THE MUSIC, with texts and translations 

Among the most beloved plainchant melodies are the four Marian antiphons, sung daily at Compline, the final service of the day. The antiphons are Alma redemptoris Mater, Ave Regina caelorum, Regina caeli laetare, and this one. The first two phrases have parallel melodies with essentially the same shape. The next two lines also have parallel melodies, echoing the similar nature of their opening words:  "To you we cry / To you we sigh." From there the melody becomes more angular and irregular, as the prayer takes on an increasingly personal and pleading tone.

David Wikander:  Kung Liljekonvalje

This is one of the most beloved of all Swedish choral pieces, on a poem by Gustaf Fröding (in turn one of that country’s best-loved writers). It was published right after World War II by David Wikander, who spent most of his life devoted to the Lutheran Church in Sweden. Stig Jacobsson has written, “David Wikander worked for many decades as a church musician, and this left its mark on his achievement as a composer. . . . Wikander’s secular choral songs are distinguished by the rare skill of their part writing, and by a lyrical, romantic and typically Scandinavian tonal language which has helped to make them an indispensable part of our cultural heritage. Dofta, dofta vit syrén, Förvårskväll and above all Kung Liljekonvalje belong to the favorite repertoire of Swedish choirs and have almost acquired the status of folk songs.” Fröding’s poem creates its own complete fairyland-world, whose visual details find a remarkable complement in Wikander’s skillful setting. The composer’s gift for melody permeates the work.

The composer writes: “Pleasure brings together the sounds of Celtic mouth music with those of jazz scat singing.” The tune is really conceived as an instrumental piece in its overall feel, yet it was written for the human voice. The nonsense syllables convey their own sound and this meaning. Depending on the combinations of sound, the lines become jazz riffs or take on a more “legit” quality, and the music is excitingly idiosyncratic.

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Claude Debussy:  Quant j’ay ouy la tabourin (from Trois chansons)

The other two of these Trois chansons (Three songs) were done in 1898, but this one wasn’t written until ten years later. All are on texts by Charles d’Orléans.  The Spanish influence seems to stem from the single word “tabourin”; around the same time, Debussy was working on the three orchestral movements he called “Ibéria” (“Spain”) that went into the larger work, Images. Here, the choir’s largely staccato lower voices act as a Mediterranean backup band for Kathryn’s lush, legato solo. Make no mistake; the narrative voice of the poem is being well pleased indeed.

The Four Shakespeare Songs were premiered in 1985 in Helsinki.  The composer’s notes are interspersed here with the poetry.

Come away, come away, death,
  And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away, breath;
  I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
  O prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
  Did share it.

Thrice the brinded cat hath mew’d.
Thrice and once, the hedge-pig whin’d.
Harpier cries:—’tis time! ‘tis time!
Round about the caldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.—
Toad, that under cold stone,
Days and nights has thirty-one;
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot!
     Double, double toil and trouble;
     Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and owlet’s wing,—
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
     Double, double toil and trouble;
     Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

Scale of dragon; tooth of wolf;
Witches’ mummy; maw and gulf
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark;
Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark;
Liver of blaspheming Jew;
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse;
Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips;
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,—
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,
For the ingredients of our cauldron.
     Double, double toil and trouble;
     Fire burn, and caldron bubble.

By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
     Open locks, whoever knocks!

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—trans. John Bryan

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 Salvation is created in the midst of the earth;
 O God, O our God.
 Alleluia.

A native of Guangzhou, China, Chen Yi was born into a family of doctors with a strong interest in music. She began violin and piano at the age of three. When the Cultural Revolution overtook China in the 1960s, she tried hard to continue her music studies, practicing violin at home with the mute attached. She was sent for forced labor into the countryside for two years and took her instrument along.  When she was 17, Chen returned to her home city and served as concertmaster and composer with the Beijing Opera Troupe. In 1986, at the Beijing Central Conservatory, Chen became the first woman in China to receive the degree of Master of Arts in composition. That same year she came to the United States for further musical studies, receiving her doctorate from Columbia University. She has served on the composition faculty of Peabody Conservatory and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and since 1998 she has been the Cravens/Millsap/Missouri Distinguished Professor in Composition at the Conservatory of the University of Missouri at Kansas City.

Chen Yi has received numerous awards and prizes, including the prestigious Ives Living Award (2001-2004) from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as the ASCAP Concert Music Award, and the Lili Boulanger Award.  Ms. Chen has been commissioned to compose for the Cleveland Orchestra, the Central Philharmonic of China, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Yehudi Menuhin, Yo-Yo Ma, Evelyn Glennie, the San Francisco Girls’ Chorus, and Carnegie Hall.

Chen Yi writes: “The poet Su Dongpo (1036-1101), who also went by the name Su Shi, was a great civil servant and one of the literati of the Song Dynasty. He was educated by his mother. In the highest Imperial examination his composition caused the chief examiner to grow jealous.   At court his honesty soon made him enemies who contrived to exile him or make him take outside posts. Wherever he went, he left indelible marks of his character, either in public works or literary associations. A philosophic mind allayed his bitterness, even when banished to places as remote as Hainan Island. His genius was such that, equally in prose or verse or song or drawing or calligraphy, his work was first-class, a feat unapproached by any other Chinese artist in history.”

About this piece, the composer writes: “My composition The West Lake for mixed chorus features 9 voices, specifically written for Chicago a cappella. I’ve designed a texture of multi layers with fragmented pitch materials sung in the beginning, the middle and the end of the piece, in which I used music sonority to imagine the brimming waves on the beautiful lake. The text sometimes is sung polyphonically, sometimes in chorale form. The melodic design is in Chinese opera-singing and reciting style.”

Shui Guang Lian Yan Qing Fang Hao;
Shan Se Kong Meng Yu Yi Qi.
Yu Ba Xi Hu Bi Xi Zi;
Dan Zhuang Nong Mo Zong Xiang Yi.

rhymed translation:

The brimming waves delight the eye on sunny days;
The dimming hills give a rare view in rainy haze.
The West Lake looks like the fair lady at her best
Whether she is richly adorned or plainly dressed.

I  N  T  E  R  M  I  S  S  I  O  N

The original Salve mater misericordiae is a plainchant setting, used in the Liturgy of the Hours on the feast of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (November 21).  Tim Sarsany’s setting is both lush and spare, with a solo opening in the tenors and harmonies that blossom into as many as eight parts.

Erik Satie, arr. Gunnar Eriksson:  Elégie
Satie was a deeply influential figure in Parisian cultural circles. As Patrick Gowers has noted in the New Grove, “He is best remembered as the composer of music which is deliberately modest and inconsequential, and of bizarre titles. However, he was a harmonic innovator in his earlier pieces, where unusual progressions are presented with quasi-archaic simplicity. . . . he had an important influence on composers as various as Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc and Cage.” 

Paul Simon needs no introduction, and this tune comes from his groundbreaking Graceland album, which he recorded with Ladysmith Black Mambazo.  The piece occupies a special niche between the Western-composed pop song and the oral-tradition singing of South Africa. 

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trad. South African:  Zadliki’indonga Jericho
This tune comes from the oral tradition of South African choral singing. It was taught by ear to members of the Chicago Children’s Choir on the CCC’s first tour to South Africa, and the tune has been passed on through the CCC’s own oral traditions to today’s Madrigal Ensemble.

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