Singing and Soaring

Saturday, October 12, 2019, 7:00pm
BROADMOOR COMMUNITY CHURCH
315 Lake Ave, Colorado Springs, CO 80906
See VENUES page for directions and accessibility

Sunday, October 13, 2019, 2:30pm
FIRST CHRISTIAN CHURCH
16 E Platte Ave, Colorado Springs, CO 80903
See VENUES page for directions and accessibility

Pre-concert talk with Donald Jenkins, Conductor Emeritus of the Colorado Springs Chorale, begins 45 minutes prior to the performance.

Colorado Vocal Arts Ensemble – Colorado’s finest chamber choir – joins the Chamber Orchestra for an incredible program celebrating the poetry of Robert Frost and Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s brilliant Te Deum, famous for its Prelude, Marche en rondeau.   Timothy Hsu, Artist-in-Residence at Colorado State University-Pueblo, sings from the highest altitudes in Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending.  This will be a not-to-be-missed collaboration!

Randall Thompson Ye Shall Have a Song (from the Peaceable Kingdom)
Colorado Vocal Arts Ensemble
Randall Thompson Frostiana
Colorado Vocal Arts Ensemble
Ralph Vaughan Williams The Lark Ascending
Timothy Hsu, violin
Marc-Antoine Charpentier Te Deum
Colorado Vocal Arts Ensemble

PROGRAM NOTES by Mark Arnest

Overview: Randall Thompson
Born April 21, 1899, New York City, New York; died July 9, 1984, Boston, Massachusetts
Work Composed: 1959 (piano accompaniment), orchestral version 1965

Like his illustrious colleagues John Rutter and Morten Lauridsen, Randall Thompson is known almost entirely for his choral music. In Thompson’s case, it’s impossible to know how much of this was personal inclination and how much was a response to his audience. In his earlier years, he composed a good deal of effective instrumental music, and his Symphony No. 2 of 1931 is still occasionally played (and deservedly so); but his choral music is what got people’s attention, and after 1949 Thompson virtually abandoned instrumental music.
Thompson’s life centered on academia. As a youth he attended the elite Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, where his father was an English teacher. His undergraduate studies were at Harvard, followed by a year studying with composer Ernest Bloch. He taught choir at Wellesley College; received a doctorate in music from the Eastman School of Music; and spent the rest of his career teaching music at the Curtis Institute of Music, the University of Virginia, and at Harvard University. His students included such illustrious figures as Leonard Bernstein and Frederic Rzewski, and he became known as “the dean of American choral composers.”
The plainness of Thompson’s life and art makes him an ideal person to set to music the poetry of Robert Frost (1874-1963), which is generally straightforward and devoid of fancy allusions. (The exception is the reference to “Keats’s “Eremite” in the last song: Here Frost makes explicit the relation between his poem and Keats’s Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art, in which a star is compared to a sleepless hermit, watching the world “with eternal lids apart.”
Frostiana was composed to celebrate the 1959 bicentennial of the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, where Frost lived and taught for a number of years. The texts – chosen with Frost’s help – are taken from several volumes of Frost’s poetry, and while they are nicely contrasted in character, Thompson doesn’t force them into some sort of cycle. The men and women join forces in only three of the songs: the first, the last, and the middle. The men are featured in the second and sixth songs, and the women in the third and fifth.
The first song – the famous The Road Not Taken – sets the work’s tone. The modal harmony is clearly of the 20th Century, but not in any way aggressively modern. The slow, steady tempo suggests trudging. The music is strophic – that is, the same for each verse – with slight alterations, such as a delicate suspension on the word “sigh” in the final verse. The text-setting is generally one syllable per note, but in the last line of each verse Thompson extends a single syllable over several notes for added emphasis: “To where it bent in the undergrowth”; “Had worn them really about the same”; “I doubted if I should ever come back”; “And that has made all the difference.” Following this last line, there is a brief glimmer of a major key, but Thompson repeats the line and the music falls back to minor. In this respect the composer takes two roads where the poet takes only one.
The Pasture, led by a wistful solo clarinet, is pastoral and rhythmically supple. Come In features birdsong representing the thrush, and the musical language is more complex, befitting this dark, ambiguous poem. The Telephone is a charming conversation between a man and a woman, suggesting something deeper than a mere flirtation but not yet passionate. A Girl’s Garden, cheerful despite its minor key, is reminiscent of folk song. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening is atmospheric, with the orchestra coming to the fore between verses and in a postlude. The sublime final song, Choose Something Like a Star, is arguably the best in the set. The text-setting is masterful, though sometimes awkward for the singers, with an especially cruel soprano part. Two examples are the musical ascent on the word “height,” and Thompson’s placing the climax on the the word “choose” in the penultimate line.
Thompson has never been a particularly popular composer; but neither has his music ever disappeared from programs. The secret of his quiet durability is the craftsmanship and sensitivity to words that he always brought to his music.

1. The Road Not Taken (1916)
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.


2. The Pasture (1914)
I'm going out to clean the pasture spring; 
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away 
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may): 
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too. 
I'm going out to fetch the little calf 
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young, 
It totters when she licks it with her tongue. 
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

3. Come In (1943)
As I came to the edge of the woods, 
Thrush music – hark! 
Now if it was dusk outside, 
Inside it was dark. 
Too dark in the woods for a bird 
By sleight of wing 
To better its perch for the night, 
Though it still could sing. 
The last of the light of the sun 
That had died in the west 
Still lived for one song more 
In a thrush's breast. 
Far in the pillared dark 
Thrush music went — 
Almost like a call to come in 
To the dark and lament. 
But no, I was out for stars; 
I would not come in. 
I meant not even if asked; 
And I hadn’t been.

4. The Telephone (1920)
“When I was just as far as I could walk
From here to-day,
There was an hour
All still
When leaning with my head against a flower
I heard you talk.
Don’t say I didn’t, for I heard you say--
You spoke from that flower on the window sill--
Do you remember what it was you said?”
“First tell me what it was you thought you heard.”
“Having found the flower and driven a bee away,
I leaned my head,
And holding by the stalk,
I listened and I thought I caught the word--
What was it? Did you call me by my name?
Or did you say--
Someone said ‘Come’—I heard it as I bowed.”
“I may have thought as much, but not aloud.”
“Well, so I came.”

5. A Girl’s Garden (1916)
A neighbor of mine in the village
    Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a girl on the farm, she did
    A childlike thing.
One day she asked her father
    To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself,
    And he said, “Why not?”
In casting about for a corner
    He thought of an idle bit
Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,
    And he said, “Just it.”
And he said, “That ought to make you
    An ideal one-girl farm,
And give you a chance to put some strength
    On your slim-jim arm.”
It was not enough of a garden,
    Her father said, to plough;
So she had to work it all by hand,
    But she don’t mind now.
She wheeled the dung in the wheelbarrow
    Along a stretch of road;
But she always ran away and left
    Her not-nice load.
And hid from anyone passing.
    And then she begged the seed.
She says she thinks she planted one
    Of all things but weed.
A hill each of potatoes,
    Radishes, lettuce, peas,
Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,
    And even fruit trees
And yes, she has long mistrusted
    That a cider apple tree
In bearing there to-day is hers,
    Or at least may be.
Her crop was a miscellany
    When all was said and done,
A little bit of everything,
    A great deal of none.
Now when she sees in the village
    How village things go,
Just when it seems to come in right,
    She says, “I know!
It’s as when I was a farmer——”
    Oh, never by way of advice!
And she never sins by telling the tale
    To the same person twice.

6. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening (1923)
Whose woods these are I think I know. 
His house is in the village though; 
He will not see me stopping here 
To watch his woods fill up with snow. 
My little horse must think it queer 
To stop without a farmhouse near 
Between the woods and frozen lake 
The darkest evening of the year. 
He gives his harness bells a shake 
To ask if there is some mistake. 
The only other sound’s the sweep 
Of easy wind and downy flake. 
The woods are lovely, dark and deep, 
But I have promises to keep, 
And miles to go before I sleep, 
And miles to go before I sleep.

7. Choose Something Like a Star (1943)
O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud--
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says, ‘I burn.’
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats’ Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

Overview: Ralph Vaughan Williams
Born October 12, 1872, Down Ampney, England; died August 26, 1958, London, England
Work Composed: 1914 (piano accompaniment), orchestral version 1921

The other works on this program have texts. Although The Lark Ascending does not, it was inspired by one: George Meredith’s 1881 poem of the same name. At the head of the score, Vaughan Williams appended 12 lines of Meredith’s 122-line poem:
He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.
For singing till his heaven fills,
‘Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup
And he the wine which overflows
to lift us with him as he goes.
Till lost on his aerial rings
In light, and then the fancy sings.

The composer’s wife Ursula wrote that Vaughan Williams had used the poem only as inspiration, and “had made the violin become both the bird’s song and its flight, being, rather than illustrating the poem from which the title was taken.” The bird in question is the Eurasian Skylark, and though its actual song is less euphonious then Vaughan Williams’s idealized version, its easy to hear how its extravagance would inspire a poet.
The Lark Ascending is one of the most popular pieces of classical music in the world, and in England, probably the most popular. Its familiarity – and its influence, along with the other Vaughan Williams works that changed the course of English music – can blind us to its originality. But when it was premiered in 1914, the only recently resuscitated world of English music was dominated by the Romanticism of Edward Elgar, harmonically more chromatic and rhythmically more straightforward. Vaughan Williams, who only found his voice as a composer in his late 30s, swept this away with his plain modal harmonies, his rhythmic suppleness, and his allusions to English folk song (though The Lark Ascending contains no actual folk songs).
The piece falls into three broad sections. The first begins and ends with the violin’s slow ascent; the second is more obviously folk-song-like; and the third, which grows directly out the second, is in a more flowing 6/8 meter, and leads back to the final restatement of the violin solo with which the piece began. The solo part is difficult, but always serves Vaughan Williams’s musical vision and never for a moment seeks to impress us. The quiet boldness of the ending, with the solo violin fading to silence, is as striking today as it was a century ago. Just as impressive is the rhapsodic form, or rather, seeming lack of form: The piece unfolds like a gigantic collective improvisation, as if the soloist and orchestra were inspired by one another.

Overview: Marc-Antoine Charpentier
Born 1643, Paris, France; died: February 24, 1704, Paris, France
Work Composed: ca. 1690

In the history of classical music, the 17th Century is an outlier. In all the other arts, it’s one of European culture’s high points. In English literature alone it begins with Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, ends with Swift and Congreve, and has Milton and Dryden in between. Merely listing the century’s great painters would fill up this program book, and it’s nearly as rich in sculpture and architecture.
But music? For the most part, it’s the century-long gap between the glories of the late Renaissance style of Palestrina and William Byrd and the Baroque magnificence of Handel, J. S. Bach, and Vivaldi.
The reason for this gap is the historic change in style brought about by the early operatic composers, and in particular Claudio Monteverdi. Prior to Monteverdi, art music was fundamentally polyphonic: In a piece of Renaissance choral music, although the voices may be related to one another, none takes precedence over the others. Monteverdi perfected a new, more hierarchical approach to music, with a melody, a bass line, and an accompaniment. This fact cannot be overstressed: The biggest change in the way we hear music in the past 1000 years occurred in the 1600s. Any music with a melody, a bass line, and an accompaniment – a category that includes virtually all contemporary popular music – stands in a direct line of descent from Monteverdi’s aural revolution.
For composers in the 17th Century, this meant they were coming of age at a time when there was no widely accepted style. The old style was dead, and the immature new style required a composer with the sheer imaginative force of Monteverdi to pull off. Around 1680, composers in Italy developed a system of tonality that once again enabled composers to write coherent large-scale works, but the period before that is full of experiments and dead ends.
That is not to say that there isn’t some very beautiful 17th Century music; and vocal music, which had a text to help composers organize things, is the century’s richest creative vein.
Charpentier’s magnificent Te Deum is wonderfully illustrative of its period. The 11 sections are short – the longest, the rapturous trio Te per orbem terrarum, is a bit over three minutes – and even within those sections there are frequent changes of tempo, mood, and texture: The expressive and rhythmic groove that we associate with high Baroque music is not here yet. Pithy melodic motives are passed from voice to voice, and the not-yet tonal harmony is restless, frequently venturing off into unexpected places.
So far, all of that could be Monteverdi. What Charpentier adds of his own is first a natural sense of grandeur, and second a masterful use of the instrumental and vocal ensembles. The grandeur is evident from the opening prelude, a piece so catchy that it was chosen in 1954 as the European Broadcasting Union’s theme music and which has become familiar worldwide. (Charpentier’s Te Deum had only been rediscovered the previous year, having not been performed for the preceding 250 or so years.) But the prelude is far from the only section of the Te Deum with a grandiose, martial character. Charpentier was evidently inspired by the piece’s key, D major – a key Charpentier described as “bright and very warlike.”
Charpentier’s mastery of ensembles is more subtle. Only two of the eleven movements feature the same combination of choir and soloists, and even these two choir-only movements – the martial Pleni sunt caeli et terra and the triumphant Aeterna fac cum sanctis tuis – are contrasted in mood. The ensembles are not chosen at random, but designed to fit the character of the 4th Century text. This variety of rapidly shifting moods and colors makes the work dazzling. The world that Charpentier encapsulates in the Te Deum retains its power to enchant and amaze.

Latin text
Translation from the Book of Common Prayer
Te Deum laudámus: te Dominum confitémur. 
Te ætérnum Patrem omnis terra venerátur. 
Tibi omnes Angeli; tibi cæli et univérsae potestátes. 
Tibi Chérubim et Séraphim incessábili voce proclámant: 
Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Dóminus Deus Sábaoth. 
Pleni sunt cæli et terra majestátis glóriæ tuæ. 
Te gloriósus Apostolórum chorus; 
Te Prophetárum laudábilis númerus; 
Te Mártyrum candidátus laudat exércitus. 
Te per orbem terrárum sancta confitétur Ecclésia: 
Patrem imménsæ majestátis; 
Venerándum tuum verum et únicum Fílium; 
Sanctum quoque Paráclitum Spíritum. 
Tu Rex glóriæ, Christe. 
Tu Patris sempitérnus es Fílius. 
Tu ad liberándum susceptúrus hóminem, non horruísti Vírginis úterum. 
Tu, devícto mortis acúleo, 
aperuísti credéntibus regna cælórum. 
Tu ad déxteram Dei sedes, in glória Patris. 
Judex créderis esse ventúrus. 
Te ergo quǽsumus, tuis fámulis súbveni, 
quos pretióso sánguine redemísti.
Ætérna fac cum sanctis tuis in glória numerári.
Salvum fac pópulum tuum, Dómine, et bénedic hæreditáti tuæ. 
Et rege eos, et extólle illos usque in ætérnum. 
Per síngulos dies benedícimus te. 
Et laudámus nomen tuum in sǽculum, et in sǽculum sǽculi. 
Dignáre, Dómine, die isto sine peccáto nos custodíre. 
Miserére nostri, Dómine, miserére nostri. 
Fiat misericórdia tua, Dómine, super nos, quemádmodum sperávimus in te. 
In te, Dómine, sperávi: non confúndar in ætérnum.

We praise thee, O God : we acknowledge thee to be the Lord.
All the earth doth worship thee : the Father everlasting.
To thee all Angels cry aloud : the Heavens, and all the Powers therein.
To thee Cherubim and Seraphim : continually do cry,
Holy, Holy, Holy : Lord God of Sabaoth;
Heaven and earth are full of the Majesty : of thy glory.
The glorious company of the Apostles : praise thee.
The goodly fellowship of the Prophets : praise thee.
The noble army of Martyrs : praise thee.
The holy Church throughout all the world : doth acknowledge thee;
The Father : of an infinite Majesty;
Thine honourable, true : and only Son;
Also the Holy Ghost : the Comforter.
Thou art the King of Glory : O Christ.
Thou art the everlasting Son : of the Father.
When thou tookest upon thee to deliver man : thou didst not abhor the Virgin's womb.
When thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death : 
    thou didst open the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.
Thou sittest at the right hand of God : in the glory of the Father.
We believe that thou shalt come : to be our Judge.
We therefore pray thee, help thy servants :
    whom thou hast redeemed with thy precious blood.
Make them to be numbered with thy Saints : in glory everlasting.
O Lord, save thy people : and bless thine heritage.
Govern them : and lift them up for ever.
Day by day : we magnify thee;
And we worship thy Name : ever world without end.
Vouchsafe, O Lord : to keep us this day without sin.
O Lord, have mercy upon us : have mercy upon us.
O Lord, let thy mercy lighten upon us : as our trust is in thee.
O Lord, in thee have I trusted : let me never be confounded.

Program Notes by Mark Arnest

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