Shout for Joy

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DIRECTOR'S NOTES

Now that we’re back in the Princeton University Chapel, at long last, I’m delighted to be able to present Shout for Joy. Two years on, the music on this program feels more urgent than ever, as it creates space for consolation and renewal in Duruflé’s Requiem, and an opportunity in the works by Ešenvalds and Hailstork to shout out our unfettered joy in being able to make music together again, for you.

I’ve always loved this time of year, when the light of the sun, glowing warmer and fuller with each passing day, empowers the renewal of life all around us. For as long as the sun has warmed our existence, the parallel binaries light-dark and life-death have had psychic, spiritual, and symbolic significance. It comes as no surprise that imagery and symbolism of light and dark pervade sacred and secular myth from the sun deities of polytheistic pantheons to Star Wars. Homer’s Odyssey imagines the gods’ home, Olympus: "Here no wind beats roughly, and neither rain nor snow can fall; but it abides in everlasting sunshine and in a great peacefulness of light, wherein the blessed gods are illumined for ever and ever." Light imagery appears in countless Christian texts. The fourth-century Bishop of Milan, Ambrose, wrote in De Bono Mortis (“On the benefit of death”):

We shall go…where there are no clouds, no thunderbolts, no lightnings, no windstorms, nor darkness or evening, no summer or winter will change the weather, no cold, no hail, no rains...there will be no need of this sun or the moon and there will be no stars: just the glow of God will shine.

Just as Homer and Ambrose imagined godly glow undimmed by encroaching darkness, the authors of the Roman Catholic Requiem (Mass for the dead) envisaged the soul’s repose in a paradise of eternal rest (requiem aeternam) where perpetual light (lux aeterna) bathes the company of saints in its everlasting warmth. Of the various musical works that convey that lux, I can think of few whose musical characteristics do so more beautifully than the Requiem setting by the 20th-century French composer Maurice Duruflé.

Most prominent among these characteristics, perhaps, is melody. Duruflé spent his childhood learning and working in the cathedral of Rouen, and his Requiem incorporates the ancient melodies that underpinned his day to day activities—mystical liturgies carried on the supple contours of the Gregorian chants filling the cavernous, perfumed interiors of its Gothic structure. Whether sung note-for-note by the choir, presented as a cantus firmus by the orchestra, or merely implied, the ancient plainchant melodies of the Requiem Aeternam guide the entire composition. Duruflé brilliantly bends all musical parameters towards their essential qualities, taking great care, for instance, in his words, to “reconcile . . . the Gregorian rhythms . . . with the demands of modern meters,” so that the flowing quality of chant suffuses the whole.

His handling of the other musical elements demonstrates similarly consummate craft. Just as waves of light passing through the prismatic glass of Sainte-Chapelle or bouncing off the opalescent oils on Monet’s canvases refract into dazzling arrays, the waves of sound summoned by a performance of Duruflé’s score reflect a rich palette of harmonic colors. The modal harmonies arising from the plainchant foundation of the Requiem, lacking strong leading-tone tendencies, allow sonorities to shift kaleidoscopically, one into another, unresolved. The opening of the work, for example, doesn’t proclaim a major or minor key, as a curtain-raising overture might. Rather, the Dorian mode seems to emerge like incense, as the noodling viola and cello lines slide past and over each other, curling around the smooth arcs of the tenor and bass melody. Duruflé blends brilliant organ registrations and imaginative scoring for strings, trumpets, timpani, and harp into all sorts of shades and timbres.

To those familiar with Classical- and Romantic-era Latin Requiem settings, Duruflé’s may appear incomplete. The Dies Irae sequence, whose vivid depictions of the soul’s judgment on “that terrible day of wrath” famously begat the thundering drums, shrieking piccolos, and obstreperous brass of Verdi’s and Berlioz’s Requiems, is absent. Duruflé left it out, save the last stanza, the sweet Pie Jesu, which he sets for mezzo solo and cello. Judgment Day turns up within the Libera Me’s plea for deliverance (“Deliver me, O Lord, from death eternal on that fearful day”), and Duruflé capitalizes on the dramatic potential of the text’s shift to first-person by scoring it for baritone solo, urgently but not theatrically. While other Requiems end with the Libera Me’s lingering uncertainty, Duruflé appends an In Paradisum, whose text, bidding the angels receive the soul in paradise, offers assurance—and symmetry, ending the work on the same word with which the opening Introit began: requiem (rest).

This is not to say the Requiem lacks musical heft or ignores earthly concern. Duruflé powerfully deploys brass, organ, and timpani to marshal sumptuous climaxes in the Sanctus, and the “deliver them from the lion’s mouth” outcry in the Domine Jesu Christe and evocation of terror in the Libera Me are potent. He clarified:

This Requiem is not an ethereal work which sings detached from worldly anxiety. It reflects, in the unchangeable form of the Christian prayer, the anguish of man facing the mystery of his last ending. It is often dramatic, or filled with resignation, or hope, or terror, like the same words of the scripture used in the liturgy. It tries to translate the human feeling in front of their terrifying, inexplicable or consoling destiny. It represents the idea of peace, of faith, of hope.

The distinctive nature and emphasis of the work crystalizes in its final movement—a soundscape of sublime radiance and tranquility—a reverie, almost, conspicuously unafraid of hell and eternal damnation. (How different a last impression from the fearful muttering soprano in the final seconds of Verdi’s Requiem!) Duruflé calls his In paradisum “the ultimate response of faith to all the questions by the flight of the soul toward paradise.”

Faced with the long nights of winter, the pangs of loss and grief, or horrendous brutality and violence darkening humanity around the globe, we might hope for light—physical or spiritual. Rarely is it manifested more effectively than in this jewel of a Requiem.

Of the newer compositional voices on the scene in the last two decades, one of the freshest and—quickly—most beloved is that of the Latvian Ēriks Ešenvalds. Several seasons ago, Princeton Pro Musica delved into his multilayered, mystical work Passion and Resurrection. The Te Deum on today’s program is something entirely different. From 2011 to 2013 he was Fellow-Commoner at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he worked closely with that institution’s top-notch choir and its director, Stephen Layton. During that period, he refined and distilled his already-appealing musical style into something even more direct and affecting. I appreciate composer Gabriel Jackson’s summation: Ēriks Ešenvalds is a dreamer, he gazes up and dreams—of eternity, of paradise, of that better world onto which music can offer a magical window, and he shows us that better world with rare beauty and spiritual integrity.

The jubilant Te Deum we’re featuring on Shout for Joy was written for the installation of a new master at Trinity College, Cambridge, and is, in Ešenvalds’ estimation, a “re-imagining of an Anglican tradition, that of ceremonial music for a grand occasion.” Insistent brass fanfares, rumbling timpani, sweeps of harp strings, and big splashes of sound from choir and organ alike herald something grand, indeed. But Ešenvalds beautifully counterbalances the bombast in the extended middle section, which nestles a beguilingly simple tune in a lulling harp ostinato atop a pedal tone in the organ.

The American composer Adolphus Hailstork recently celebrated his 80th birthday. Over the course of his career, he’s enriched the repertoire of a variety of genres, from opera and symphony to chamber music and choral works, with expertly crafted compositions. And he’s still active! A new requiem cantata, A Knee on the Neck, written in response to the killing of George Floyd, premiered several weeks ago. The Los Angeles Philharmonic premiered a new orchestral piece in 2021, after which conductor Thomas Wilkins deemed him the “dean of African American composers.”

It’s hard to describe his musical style definitively using a word or two. He admits: “I’m pretty eclectic; I’m multistylistic. All the names you want to use, they all fit.” He elaborated in an interview:

I like to tell people that I’m a cultural hybrid and sometimes it’s agonizing. Sometimes I feel like I was hanging by my thumbs between two cultures. And then I just said to myself — after years of this, I said: Look, I accept myself as a cultural hybrid, and I know I have trained in Euro-classical skills and I also am very interested—and since I went to school in an African American college—I am aware of that culture too. And I use them both.

Our program features “Shout for Joy,” an exuberant festival anthem for choir, brass, strings, organ, and percussion that draws inspiration from Hailstork’s early training as a choirboy in an Episcopal cathedral. He mused: “Thirty years ago, or so, it dawned on me that I was strongly influenced by my experience in the cathedral, and I started piano there, I learned organ there, I learned to read music there. And the cadences, the melodic inflections, etc. were very strongly influenced by that.” He recalled, of “Shout for Joy,” in particular:

We used to have choral festivals at the cathedral [like the ones that have been traditional in England since the 1700s] where the boys and men’s choirs from Toronto, and another one in Albany, [would] all get together and have these fantastic choral programs that would start off with fanfares with brass and timpani and all of that, and then we’d do these big choral anthems. And that’s exactly why I subtitled that piece “The Bank Street Festival Anthem,” because it was directly influenced by my experience as a kid in the cathedral.

These second and third pieces on the program today are grand, festive pieces for celebration. What occasion are we marking? What are we celebrating? I, for one, can think of no more uplifting capstone to the season and to the return to live music making than this: to gather in such a magnificent space, open our ears and minds to each other, feel this music shake our bodies with acoustic power and stir our hearts with grandeur, and experience a collective moment, as a community.