Program Notes (Friday, May 8, 2009 @ 7:30pm)
Britten: The Company of Heaven
4th Grade Classes, 2009: Wrens and Robins; The Caterpillar
Andy Vores Natural Selection
First performance
Benjamin Britten Psalm 150
J.S. Bach
Cantata BWV 50
Notes by David Hoose
This Cantata Singers year culminates with many of our musical commitments vibrating around and with each other: this season’s composer of focus, new music and—well, what shall we call it?—future music. Britten, Vores and Classroom Cantatas, Cantata Singers fifteen-year old innovative education program, unite in a grand celebration of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Which is yesterday and which is today is, of course, never obvious in the life of Cantata Singers, since for us, Bach is as vital and living as Vores. But when all the elements come together, whether on this one night or (as they do year after year with Cantata Singers) in less public but ongoing ways, the possibilities of music’s power become palpable. Here, tonight, is a glimpse of our mission:
Through vital performances of works old and new, familiar and unfamiliar, the Cantata Singers shares and engages with the community the power of music to enrich the human spirit.
Benjamin Britten considered it his, and any composer’s, duty “to speak to or for his fellow human beings.” In our work, we work to help all those composers yesterday’s, today’s, tomorrow’s—fulfill that rich responsibility.
Benjamin Britten: Psalm 150, op. 67 (1962)
Composed for children, both singers and instrumentalists. Britten, like his contemporaries Vaughan Williams and Holst, held strongly to a belief that music for amateurs could be—must be—of as high an order as that for professionals. In their music for children to listen to (Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra being one of the most compelling examples) or to perform, they neither condescended nor compromised their own aesthetic standards. Even a work as modest as his Psalm 150, music Britten wrote for the centenary of his own preparatory school, shows the same care that he invested in grander and more public projects. His use of uneven phrase lengths, irregular meters, ingenious harmonic turns, clashing and satisfying dissonances, all expressive tools that less thoughtful and skilled composers might avoid or use in obvious ways, challenge the young performers and delight the listeners, young and old.
Britten composed much music that included children as performers, including the very dark Turn of the Screw and Death in Venice, as well as St. Nicholas, but his Psalm 150 is unusual in the possibility that all the performers can be young people. Well aware of how unpredictable, from year to year, the school’s pool of young musicians may be, he made the requirements for the piece so flexible as to accommodate practically any available ensemble—just so there are singers and some instruments—strings, keyboard, wind instruments, or most anything. Not even the trumpet of the psalm is absolutely necessary. (At this writing, I can’t tell you what the singing and playing ensemble will be on this occasion!) That from such modest means, Britten could create such sophisticated and engaging music is amazing, and it is hard not to notice that the effect of this setting of Psalm 150 is utterly in inverse proportion to its brevity.
Andy Vores: Natural Selection (2008)
Note by Andy Vores
Natural Selection is a work of celebration—celebration of the natural world and of Charles Darwin, whose 200th birthday is in 2009. Darwin’s extraordinary insights have helped us see the natural world’s variety, abundance, and wonderful strangeness from a fresh viewpoint, and they have helped us understand in a new way the forces that direct life. I wanted, too, to add my voice to those counteracting ‘creationism,’ but without being disdainful of the faith, which may support it. Indeed, Darwin himself, at least at the time of writing the passage that I’ve set, saw evolution as the way God had chosen for the natural world to unfold.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti and Charles Darwin were contemporaries, but they lived very different lives. Hopkins was a troubled Jesuit priest whose deliriously colorful “sprung rhythms” sound like nothing else from Victorian England. Rossetti’s ill-health constrained her throughout her life; her poetry, simple on the surface and often courting unconventional social and political ideas, was written largely for children or has a devotional cast. And Darwin, during his five years as naturalist for HMS Beagle, came to realize the ways inheritance directs the proliferation of species on earth. Yet there is a joy in observation that all three share.
A delightful part of the composing of Natural Selection for Cantata Singers has been the opportunity to work with students of the Neighborhood House Charter School.
These children, as part of the Classroom Cantatas program, set to their own music the same poems by Christina Rossetti that are at the center of my own work, and I then took their young melodies as the basis for my own setting.
I like that all of these texts are excited about the richness and unending busyness of nature, and I hope that my music conveys some of this pleasure.
Andy Vores is the Chair of Composition, Theory, and Music History at Boston Conservatory, and composer of Natural Selection,Cantata Singers’ latest commission to be premiered in May 2009.
Benjamin Britten: The Company of Heaven (1937)
Cantata for radio, composed for soprano and tenor soloists,
speakers, chorus, organ, string orchestra and timpani.
Radio plays, broadcasts of concerts and syntheses of music and drama were commonplace in pre-war England, and their popularity rose even more when the BBC suspended its television transmission during the War. When television re-emerged, it began to rival radio and soon supplanted it as the primary means of mass communication. But the heyday of such collaborations between broadcaster, musician, poet and composer had left a rich heritage of works, the likes of which would never be repeated. This relationship was an unusual one, even for its day. The composer William Alwyn described it:
When working on a feature the collaboration between writer and composer was close and intimate—both script and music were carefully worked out from the inception of the subject—unlike films where the composer was usually shown the finished film and then asked to write the music. Also the composer was encouraged to experiment and to use instrumental or vocal combinations which gave one a further zest for work.1
Although Britten eventually became annoyed with the project to create The Company of Heaven, not being able to see its point and perhaps unsympathetic with what was an overtly religious tone, he did find the words that he was setting, and the prospect of working with excellent singers and instrumentalists, quite appealing. He wrote in his diary that the orchestra said “that it’s the best incidental music they’ve ever played.” And he was writing music for two first-rate soloists, soprano Sophie Wyss and, for the first time, the man who would become his life partner, Peter Pears. In his simple and luminous setting of Bronté’s “A thousand thousand gleaming fires,” Britten already seems to understand the subtle nuance that Pears could bring to the simplest of lines, the simplest of rhythms.
The disparate texts, from the Book of Revelation to Milton’s Paradise Lost, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christina Rossetti, Emily Bronté, William Blake, John Bunyan and Theodosius, were assembled by Richard Robert Ellis. Their enormous variety religious and secular, poetry and prose, narrative and reflective, old and new, threatened utter incoherence. But Britten brought to his task a sharp ear, careful musical thought, and a sense of large design that lets the whole flow with surprising ease. His solutions are the consummate ones we hear throughout his broad span of compositions, modest or grand, from the tiny Psalm 150 to the enormous War Requiem: a skillful imbedding of the material with a kind of DNA that leads our ear to find the connections that may not, on the surface, be evident. The reach from the opening sinewy music of ‘Chaos,’ to the noble statement of “Ye watchers and you holy ones” is just that, a reach, and not a leap. At every step, we can feel the process of transformation tying all corners of the work together.
The Company of Heaven, Britten’s second composition of incidental music for radio, was designed for broadcast on September 29, 1937—Saint Michael’s Day—and images of angels and of war with Satan abound. Unlike the Bach cantata on this same program, The Company of Heaven plunges us into the middle of the war, first the Fall of the Angels, their ejection from Heaven, and the battle with the devil; and then the second war between Michael and Satan, the war in Heaven depicted in the Book of Revelation. Taking youthful advantage of the scenes’ dramatic possibilities and the words’ vivid images, Britten gave us an endearing work of enduring vigor
and freshness.
1. Philip Reed, “A Cantata for Broadcasting: Britten’s
‘The Company of Heaven’”, (The Musical Times, June 1989).