Notes From the Podium
David Griggs-Janower’s thoughts regarding Albany Pro Musica’s current concert.
The centerpiece of this concert will be a work by Morten Lauridsen, also titled Lux Aeterna, on sacred Latin texts about light. Lauridsen, one of the most-often performed composers in this century, has been called by musicologist Nick Strimple “the only American composer in history who can be called a mystic, [whose] probing, serene work contains an elusive and indefinable ingredient which leaves the impression that all the questions have been answered…”
This multi-movement work for chorus and chamber orchestra speaks to the transformative power of light. It’s been said about this piece, that what connects the five movements is not a liturgy; rather it is the reference in each to light, and God as the source of that light. One might view the collective movements as moving the listener from darkness into light, from sorrow into healing. Some even feel the piece has restorative powers.
The remainder of the program was chosen to compliment the sense of transformation from darkness to light. Albany Pro Musica will also perform Brahms’ wonderful brief motet, Geistliches Lied, and Latvian composer Peteris Vasks’ Dona Nobis Pacem, a work yearning for peace. This piece, for strings and chorus, is written in a style reminiscent of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings/Agnus Dei, which inaugurated our Cathedral Collaboration series two years ago, and contains all the beauty and intensity of that great work.
The Cathedral of All Saints Choir of Men and Boys will share the spotlight (I’m attempting a pun here!) with five liturgical songs about light, including Eric Whitacre’s Lux Aurumque, Sowerby’s Eternal Light and Charles Wood’s Hail, Gladdening Light.
NOTES
Geistliches Lied
Brahms composed music of many kinds, for piano, orchestra, chamber ensembles, solo singers, chorus, and so forth, and for concert hall as well as for church, and his church music was both unaccompanied and accompanied. Much of his church music – his motets – has direct stylistic connections to the music of Renaissance polyphony and of Bach, which he greatly studied, resulting in lots of counterpoint in his music in general and in his church music in particular. Sometimes I feel he studied Bach and counterpoint a bit too much!
His Geistliches Lied (Sacred Song) was written in 1856, though it was published later, when he was 23 years old. It is for mixed chorus and organ, and it is a little gem, and seems to me to foreshadow the German Requiem a decade later. It is lyrical, and idiomatic in its somewhat austere “contrapuntalness”, if I may invent that word. The liner notes of the North German Radio Chorus state that this work and the op. 37 motets for women’s voice began as counterpoint exercises.
The form of the piece is ABA plus coda (Amen). The music is in strict counterpoint and could be used in a music theory class; it is a double canon at the 9th. In English, that means that the sopranos and tenors are in canon a 9th apart (an octave plus a note), and the altos and basses are in a different canon, also a 9th apart, and the organ interludes also have canonic 9th figures. The middle section is sounds less like a complex double canon because the voices enter in the more “normal” order of S-A-T-B but in fact the canons are maintained. The “Amen,” still in canon, is glorious, absolutely glorious, and here we hear the foreshadowing of the Requiem most clearly. The message of the piece: “Be at peace, for what God wills for you is best.”
Dona Nobis Pacem
I learned about Peteris Vasks and this piece from a CD titled Baltic Voices I, by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, and it’s a wonderful CD. The liner notes say that “Vasks, Latvian…studied double-bass at the Lithuanian State Conservatory and, later, composition at the Latvian State Conservatory, and for the earlier part of his career made his living as an orchestral double-bass player.” However, Wikipedia says that “Vasks was born into the family of a Baptist pastor. He trained as a violinist at the…Latvian Academy of Music, as a double-bass player…at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, and played in several Latvian orchestras before entering the State Conservatory in Vilnius in the neighboring Lithuania to study composition…as he was prevented from doing this in Latvia due to Soviet repressive policy toward Baptists. ..[He] is now is one of the most influential and praised European contemporary composers.”
The liner notes continue: “As a composer, Vasks stems from the Polish school of the 1960s, especially Lutoslawski, though one can hear other echoes too, including [Arvo] Pärt. Vasks’ voice is essentially lyrical and seems to arise from a basically meditative disposition which is nonetheless quick to build into emotional climaxes.”
A website on Latvian composers says that “The music of Latvian composer Peteris Vasks and each individual work is a ‘message.’ Vasks resolutely addresses, preaches, advocates, therefore his music is not classical but programmed in a literary sense: in conjunction with an idea, a moral and emotional frame of reference.” And perhaps we can hear some of that in this piece.
I like these descriptions, though I only know this one piece of his. I have told the choir that this piece feels to me like Samuel Barber’s Adagio/Agnus Dei meets Arvo Pärt, Henryk Górecki and Einhorn’s Voices of Light, which Vasks probably never heard. I don’t know about Lutoslawski, though I gather his influence, and Penderecki’s, is found mostly in Vasks’ earlier works.
Jerome Hoberman of the Hong Kong Bach Choir adds: “Dona Nobis Pacem was completed and first performed in 1996. Its original motivation came from a request by his father, a minister, that Vasks should create a setting of The Lord’s Prayer simple enough so that the congregation could sing it. His father had died by the time Vasks felt sufficiently mature as a composer to attempt such a task, so Dona Nobis Pacem became not only a prayer for ‘inner and outer peace’ (in Beethoven’s words) but also a memorial to his father. For Vasks, who has always felt strongly about environmental issues, “dona nobis pacem” is the overarching prayer, his concept of ‘peace’ embracing not only mankind – individually and communally – but entire physical universe.”
Lux Aeterna
In his preface to the published choral score, Morten Lauridsen wrote, “Lux Aeterna was composed for and is dedicated to the Los Angeles Master Chorale and its superb conductor, Paul Salamunovich, who gave the world premiere in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Los Angeles Music Center on April 13, 1997. The work is in five movements played without pause. Its texts are drawn from sacred Latin sources, each containing references to Light. The piece opens and closes with the beginning and ending of the Requiem Mass, with the three central movements drawn, respectively, from the Te Deum (including a line from the Beatus Vir), O Nata Lux and Veni, Sancte Spiritus.”
“The instrumental introduction to the Introitus softly recalls motivic fragments from two pieces especially close to my heart (my settings of Rilke’s Contre Qui, Rose and O Magnum Mysterium) which recur throughout the work in various forms. Several new themes in the Introitus are then introduced by the chorus, including an extended canon on Et Lux Perpetua. In Te, Domine, Speravi contains, among other musical elements, the cantus firmus Herliebster Jesu (from the Nuremburg Songbook, 1677) and a lengthy inverted canon on fiat misericordia. O Nata Lux and Veni, Sancte Spiritus are paired songs — the former the central a cappella motet and the latter a spirited, jubilant canticle. A quiet setting of the Agnus Dei precedes the final Lux Aeterna, which reprises the opening section of the Introitus and concludes with a joyful Alleluia.”
The Cathedral Choir of Men and Boys will perform these liturgical pieces on the subject of light:
Eternal Light (1958) ~ Leo Sowerby (1895-1968)
Lux Aurumque ~ Eric Whitacre (b. 1970)
Hail, Gladdening Light ~ Charles Wood (1866-1926)
Richte Mich, Gott, op. 78, #2 ~ Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847)
Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies ~ T. Frederick H. Candlyn (1892–1964)
At least one of these composers has a significant local connection. Thomas Frederick Handel Candlyn was an English-born organist, composer and choirmaster with many local connections. In 1915 he was offered the position of organist and choirmaster at St. Paul’s Church, Albany, where he remained for twenty-eight years. During his years in Albany, Candlyn taught at the New York State College for Teachers (now the University at Albany), as Instructor from 1921 until his appointment as Assistant Professor starting with the 1935-1936 school year. He served for a time as chair of the music department and received an honorary Doctorate of Pedagogy (Pd.D.) from the College in June 1927. Candlyn edited the compilation The Songs of New York State College for Teachers, published in 1923. He founded the Albany Oratorio Society and conducted the Mendelssohn Club of Albany during its 1939-1940 and 1940-1941 seasons.
Having conducted the Mendelssohn Club briefly, performed many concerts at St. Paul’s, and taught at the “NY State College” for thirty one years, I can’t help but feel a slight kinship to Dr. Candlyn, some of whose works I conducted in my time at First Presbyterian Church in Albany.
~ David Griggs-Janower
