Journey Home

DIRECTOR'S NOTES

It’s so good to be with you all this afternoon. After a year and a half spending more time in our physical homes than ever before, we’ve never been more homesick for our musical home: the concert hall. Zoom and its grids of talking heads allowed us to see each other. It made meetings and casual conversation (clumsily) possible. But it didn’t allow us to sing, together, to form an ensemble. The telepathic communication that arises from shared pulse and the unification of energy and intent into a single artistic expression are impossible to achieve via internet-based platforms. Several weeks ago, for the first time since March of 2020, we gathered for in-person rehearsal. The hard but satisfying work of preparing a concert began, animated by our eagerness to be back here. As we journeyed closer and closer to the concert moment, the thirst in the soul quenched only by the release of live, communal performance grew more and more acute. Now on the brink of my first live performance in quite some time, I’m emerging from the pandemic reassured that the laptop will never supplant the concert hall. I’ve never taken the specialness of my musical home for granted, but there’s nothing so effective as a global pandemic’s proscribing its existence to remind you of how precious, and invigorating, it is.

I assembled this program, Journey Home, to remind the singers of Princeton Pro Musica how to sing together and to remind us all why we love to experience choral music in the first place. The various selections shelter us in some sense of home. Excerpted movements from two consoling Requiems and Lauridsen’s Sure on this Shining Night offer us a chance not only to return to the safe haven of familiar repertoire from recent seasons, but also to lighten the sorrow carried by the multitudes who in the course of this global pandemic have lost loved ones, lost cherished ways of being, or languished in the darkness of isolation. Several other selections afforded us the opportunity to learn new repertoire and re-engage the part of the Princeton Pro Musica experience that is exploration.

The first two pieces share a similar inspiration, a type of music often considered the home base or starting point of much of Western classical choral music: chant. Sir John Tavener’s Song for Athene and the Kyrie from Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem trace the contours of the chants of the Orthodox and Catholic churches, respectively. Duruflé’s Kyrie quotes chant directly, first in the choral bass entry and later, in long tones, in the organ. Tavener’s chants alternate between major and minor modes while growing in intensity, reflecting its text, which, in its last line, transforms sorrow into joy: “Weeping at the grave creates the song. Come, enjoy rewards and crowns I have prepared for you.” Where Tavener and Duruflé’s pieces remind us of the essential, vocal quality of melody, Moses Hogan’s arrangement of I Can Tell the World reminds us of the irrepressible joy of melody’s complement, rhythm.

Though he typically writes in response to a commission, John Rutter’s Requiem began as a memorial project for his father: “it was just something I felt I wanted to write…to remember him in music and preferably in a way that he might have enjoyed and appreciated. It was particularly important in this case to write something that could be appreciated by people everywhere.” Rutter certainly succeeded in that endeavor. He notes that the Requiem has “continued to be performed all over the world, including in countries where there’s not a strong Christian tradition, for example in Japan. I think the experience of which the texts speak, of bereavement and loss, of desolation turning into consolation, I think those must touch some sort of a nerve.” I have always admired Rutter’s unabashed attitude about the directness and appeal of his music and deeply respect his superb skill as a melodist, his brilliantly subtle manipulation of harmony, his sincerity with text setting, and his general craftsmanship. The Requiem is perfectly gentle, luminous, and tuneful.

Brahms’s Wie Lieblich, the fourth movement of Ein deutsches Requiem, is the apex, in that work, of a seven-movement arc. Its key, meter, texture, dynamic, and general lilt are meant to elevate it above the earthen sounds at the endpoints of that arc, as though it were accompanying an otherworldly waltz whose dancers spin weightlessly in a state of untroubled blessedness. For a chorus like Pro Musica, deeply experienced in the 19^th-century choral-orchestral repertoire, any performance of this movement feels like a return to the comforts of home, and, indeed, our first few passes in rehearsal felt like an out-of-body dance together, as we conjured choreography from the depths of our collective conscience, many not even looking at their scores as the familiar flowed among us once again.

Whereas some of the pieces on today’s program only allude to the comforting, grounding nature of the act of singing, Elaine Hagenberg’s impassioned setting of Sarah Teasdale’s Refuge celebrates it explicitly. The composer says, of her piece: “For me, singing has often been an expression of joy, but also a comfort during times of uncertainty or fear. In ‘Refuge,’ the piano frantically races out of control as the cello becomes the voice of heartache and despair. As the poetry unfolds, the choir sings of crushed dreams, confusion, and a yearning for help. But through singing, we can turn our eyes from the surrounding darkness, and lift our voices to offer comfort, beauty, and hope.” Sarah Brumfield’s arrangement of No Time is born of that most ancient of human homestead gathering places: the campfire. This summer, as it became clear that we might return to rehearsal, I found myself drawn to this piece most of all, as its refrain, “no time to tarry here, for I’m on my journey home,” matched my own alacrity and eagerness for a fall season full of singing. Johnson’s Lift Every Voice and Sing, the Black national anthem beloved, treasured, and well known by millions, proudly reaffirms the community building power of singing, of lifting each and every voice in song.

Our time away from the concert hall gave us time to appreciate in absentia the significance of what we do there. If you’ll abide some philosophizing, I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to claim that the widespread and near-complete shutting down of live communal musical experiences a year and a half ago shut down an essential, elemental part of the human experience. We’ve been building community through musical experiences for millennia. Ancient Greek philosophy and culture appreciated the psychagogic potential of music, which is to say music’s capacity to imitate, represent, or even influence moral qualities via its combination of word, melody, and rhythm. Plato avowed that the harmonic ordering of the universe could be instilled in the soul via music because of the soul’s structural analogies with musical tuning and harmony. In Phaedo, a dialogue on the nature of the soul, he suggests how the soul could thusly be “tuned:”

A man must not suffer the principles in his soul to do each the work of some other and interfere and meddle with one another, but he should dispose well of what in the true sense of the word is properly his own, and having first attained to self-mastery and beautiful order within himself, and having harmonized these three principles, as we usually do with the three boundaries of musical harmony, i.e., the lowest, the highest, and the mean, and all others there may be between them, and having linked and bound all three together and made of himself a unit, one man instead of many, self-controlled and in unison, he should then and then only turn to practice.

To put it another way, the deep satisfaction we feel upon hearing a perfectly tuned chord—in which compatible individual pitches, sung simultaneously, yield a sonority greater and more beautiful than the sum of its parts—echoes a soul in beautiful order resonating with the universe.

From there, with the soul so ordered, society can be ordered in the model of harmonious music making. In a later work, Laws, Plato’s prescription for the legislation and social structure of a new colony on Crete, he advocates for music education as a necessary element in creating an orderly and flourishing society, as, for him, the most effective means for educating and bringing order to society is provided by choreia, the practice among the Greeks of choral singing and dancing in honor of the gods. As he dives into some theoretical fundamentals of education he notes:

Almost without exception, every young creature is incapable of keeping either its body or its tongue quiet, and is always striving to move and to cry, leaping and skipping and delighting in dances and games, and uttering, also, noises of every description. Now, whereas all other creatures are devoid of any perception of the various kinds of order and disorder in movement (which we term rhythm and harmony), to men the very gods, who were given, as we said, to be our fellows in the dance, have granted the pleasurable perception of rhythm and harmony, whereby they cause us to move and lead our choirs, linking us one with another by means of songs and dances; and to the choir they have given its name from the “cheer” implanted therein.

At first I disagreed with Plato about “all other creatures.” Flocks of birds awe us in their graceful, coordinated flight. Schools of fish mesmerize us with their effortlessly synchronized swimming. But as we’ve embarked on this journey home as a group, working hard in rehearsal to be ready to reunite with you, I’ve found myself appreciating, in a visceral way, the unique phenomena at play in a chorus. As Plato notes, it’s deeply pleasurable to perceive rhythm and harmony. But it’s more than that. I’ve been reminded that in an atomized, online work world (especially now), a weekly trip to rehearsal was and is, for many, easily the most social and communal moment of the week. More significantly, it is for some the moment of most profound and determined cooperation with others, of insinuating oneself into a greater whole. In this way, choral singing is a powerful antidote to polarization. Groups of human beings, gathered in song, can find common pulse and purpose, listen to each other, breathe together, and, ultimately, move each other. After hours (and hours) of digital audio editing, I can reassure you that there remains something remarkable and irreplaceable about the power of music to coordinate us. Plato’s point, in Laws and elsewhere, is that there’s something distinctly human, and distinctly valuable, in our ability to perceive and take pleasure in that power.

And that’s where you, our audience, come in. Our own Dee Dee Miles captured the essence of home as ethos, not a structure, when she reminded me: “It’s not home until you can invite someone in.” The actuality most antithetical to the choral art during the pandemic was that our online-only efforts prevented us from directly sharing the fruits of our labors with you, our listeners, our cohabitators, together in our musical home. More than anything, we have yearned to bridge the distance and isolation of this last year and a half by having our music reach your ears directly, not via wi-fi but via real, physical vibrations. While I can’t reasonably expect that our performance will re-order your soul, I sincerely hope that some musical moment experienced today reminds you, palpably, happily, of what a joy it is to be human, alongside others, and what a pleasure it can be to immerse in one of the most meaningful manifestations of humanity: music.

Welcome back. Welcome home.

Ryan James Brandau, Artistic Director
7 November 2021

PROGRAM

Song for Athene                                   
John Tavener (1944-2013)

Kyrie from Requiem                             
Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986)           

I Can Tell the World                               
Traditional Spiritual, arr. Moses Hogan (1957-2003)

Requiem 
John Rutter (b. 1945)

I.      Introit
III.    Pie Jesu
IV.   Sanctus
VI.   The Lord is my Shepherd
VII.   Lux Aeterna

Noël McCormick, soprano

Refuge 
Elaine Hagenberg (b. 1987)

Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen   
from Ein Deutsches Requiem       
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
Adap. Ryan James Brandau

Sure on This Shining Night
Morten Lauridsen (b. 1943)

No Time                                               
Traditional, arr. Susan Brumfield
Adap. Ryan James Brandau

Lift Every Voice and Sing                       
J. Rosamond Johnson (1873-1954)
Arr. Roland Carter (b. 1942)

Chorus

SOPRANO
Rose Ananthanayagam, Gail Balog, Stephanie Brown, Rebecca Carroll, Dorothy Cassimatis, Sally Chrisman, Hari Kanta Didi-Ogren, Sandra Black Duffy, Christine Elsner, Angel Gardner, Amelia Gruber, Candus Hedberg, Jan Johnson, Carol Johnston, Kathy Korwin, Maureen Kyle, Teri Lindstrom, Carol K. McCollough, Noel McCormick, Marjorie Morse, Sandra Noyelle, Christina Pantelias, Caroline Phinney, Jody Stebbins, Marilee Thompson, Peggy Waldron, Norah Wasden, Tasneem Yusufali

ALTO
LaVerna Albury, Erica Townsend Appel, Brenda Berger, Janet Breslin, Elly Sparks Brown, Elaine R. Clisham, Libby Crowley, Lisa Dacuk-Julius, Linda Gardner, Louise Gross, Ellen Harrison, Joyce Irwin, Olga Kronenberg, Carolyn P. Landis, Susan Metz, Dee Dee Miles, Kim Elaine Neighbor, Jean Parsons, Janet Perkins, Fran Perlman, Ellen Petrone, Karen Repka, Susan Sumutka, Ravenna Taylor, Becky Worrell

TENOR
Samuel Denler, Wolfgang Elsner, Billy Ford, Gary Gregg, Daniel Kanhofer, Jason Matthews, Michael McCormick, Fred Millner, Larry Parker, Dudley Rice, Ralph Slaght, Dan Spira, Martin Wheelwright

BASS
Charles Appel, Dennis Balodis, Max Brey, John Couch, Bruce B. Duffy, Richard Farris, Jacques Lebel, Kenny Litvack, Lucien S. Marchand, Bernard J. McMullan, Gerald Metz, Brian Newhouse, Gahan Pandina, Robert Phinney, Michael Stebbins, Charles A.M. Tompkins

TAVERNER CHAMBER CHORUS
Stephanie Brown, Angel Gardner, Mia Gruber, Maureen Kyle, Noël McCormick, Norah Wasden, Brenda Berger, Janet Breslin, Joyce Irwin, Sue Metz, Kim Neighbor, Sam Denler, Mike McCormick, Jason Matthews, Maxwell Brey, Kenny Litvack