What’s With All the Rockin’ Goin’ on in Jerusalem?

Image by krystianwin from Pixabay

Warning: Thickets of parsing through a song’s lyrics word by word ahead. Enter at your own risk!

Let me start by quoting myself from the post “How Did We Get the Spirituals?”—

The simplified explanation of how Black spirituals came about goes like this: slaves heard about Christianity after arriving in the US and, especially on the southern plantations, came up with sung versions of those teachings that gave them hope of a better life, expressed their longings for deliverance, and often served as rhythmic work songs.

There’s the added wrinkle that the spirituals are true folk songs; that is, they were not originally written down but were passed down orally. Thus there are always multiple versions of any spiritual. Here’s a good explanation of how the process of transcribing the spirituals, but indeed any folk music, worked, as described in an article about the efforts of John W. Work III, a scholar and teacher at Fisk University in the early 1900’s:

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A Bouquet of Roses from Morten Lauridsen

Image by Andreas Lischka from Pixabay

Lauridsen and His Love of Poetry

Choral composers are always on the hunt for suitable texts. Unless you’re writing something along the lines of the “Humming Chorus” from Madame Butterly or Rachmaninoff’s “Vocalise,” you have to find suitable words. As I’ve outlined in other material, choral texts can have many sources: You may be commissioned to write a piece with the proviso that you use a certain text, or you may love a certain poem and decide to set it to music, or you may have an idea for a melody and look for words that fit, or you may ask someone to write the text for you, or you may write it yourself.

For Morten Lauridsen there hasn’t been any question about where to find his texts: his deep love of poetry has led him to compose eight vocal cycles setting poetry drawn from a wide range of languages and time periods. He reads poetry every day, and back when he was teaching music classes at the University of South California he was famous for starting every class by reading a poem. He said in an interview that “I read so much poetry, and if I find a poem by a poet that interests me, then I’ll go out and buy his complete works, and read that. . . . The same thing happened with Rilke, and I was astonished to find that at the end of his life he wrote four hundred poems in French!  I had no idea of this because he’s so well known for the German poetry.”1

Before I get to the poems that comprise Lauriden’s rose cycle, let me reiterate what I’ve said several times in these posts and will almost certainly say again: that poetry can’t be boiled down to a specific set of meanings. If you could just summarize a poem with a few sentences and get everything from the poem into those statements, what would be the point of writing the poem in the first place? This caveat is especially true in a discussion of lyric poetry, that is, poetry that doesn’t tell a story but instead evokes a mood or expresses an emotion. So it is with Rilke’s poems about roses: the flowers were favorites of his, with their layers of petals overlapping a hidden center. Note that I didn’t say roses were a favorite “symbol” for Rilke. The flowers don’t “stand for” something but are only themselves: beautiful and enigmatic, self-sufficient and yet inviting contemplation and appreciation. I ran across some excellent program notes that give this insight: “Of course, all of these texts are not merely naturalistic paeans, but love songs: as each rose bears its own personality, so does a lover.”2

Let’s get to the poems themselves. Note that I’m using my own translations for the poems, as I didn’t like any that I found online. Quelle effronterie, n’est-ce pas?

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A Problematic Musical with a Stormy Theme Song–“When You Walk through a Storm”

Image by Simon from Pixabay

Would a musical be produced today that’s built around the idea of sticking with an abusive spouse no matter what and to some extent normalizing the abuse? Could it include the line, “Has it ever happened to you? Has anyone ever hit you — without hurtin’?” To which the answer is yes: “It is possible, dear, fer someone to hit you — hit you hard — and not hurt at all.” And that line is delivered from a mother to a daughter, thus paving the way for perpetuating the cycle of abuse. Honestly! The musical is Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1945 Carousel, and it’s an odd duck, often labeled as a “problem” musical or even as “the wife-beater musical.” Billy Bigelow, said wife-beater and main villain, echoes other characters in popular theater such as Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire and John Wayne’s character in the film McLintock!, to name just a couple, who hit their wives and not only get away with it but whose wives respond lovingly. (I am horrified by the spanking scene at the end of McLintock!, and apparently it’s not the only such scene in the movie.) When he’s asked about his abuse by the Starkeeper, head man in heaven’s waiting room, Billy Bigelow says he does not beat his wife. “I wouldn’t beat a little thing like that — I hit her,” he explains. But to answer the question I posed at the beginning of this paragraph: Yes, indeed, Carousel is performed today, sometimes with the problematic lines cut and sometimes with them included. One production compromised by having the dead Billy shake his head “No!” in response to the “not hurt at all” line. That’s perhaps the best way to deal with the issue, since just cutting those few lines in no way erases the overall arc of the plot. Indeed, Carousel was considered groundbreaking at the time of its original production because of its anti-hero lead male character and its tragic plot. Rodgers and Hammerstein had already broken new ground in their first collaboration, Oklahoma!, which used the songs to advance a well-developed plot, and Hammerstein had included controversial ideas about racism in his collaboration with Jerome Kern for Show Boat.

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Three Jewels from Three Bach Masterpieces

Overview

There are over 1,000 Bach compositions that we know of, and that number doesn’t include the manuscripts that may have been lost after his death. (Reports of his compositions being used to wrap cheese, or as insect-repelling wrappers on trees, or indeed as kindling, are almost certainly apocryphal.) Like Mozart, Bach’s output was so prodigious that, ironically, he’s known best for relatively few of them. Once pieces become part of an established repertoire they tend to get re-programmed frequently. (If I have to sit through one more performance of Mozart’s Eine Kleine Natchmusik I think I’ll lose my mind.)

My own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale in the Denver area, programmed a concert with three fairly well-known but not overdone works in a concert centered around the theme of “Hope’s Journey.”1 Although I have no idea what the thinking process was for the artistic committee’s choices, we’re doing a piece from a cantata, an oratorio, and a full-blown mass. I’ll take up the definition of each as I discuss the piece.

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Two Hagenberg Hits

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My own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, has performed quite of few of Elaine Hagenberg’s choral compositions, and we were privileged to be part of the original commissioning consortium for her first extended work, Illuminare. She burst on the classical choral world in 2013 with “I Will Be a Child of Peace,” an arrangement of a Shaker hymn, and hasn’t looked back since. (When Ms. Hagenberg came to one of our final rehearsals for Illuminare she graciously submitted to some Q&A, and of course one question was “How did you get started composing?” She said she’d always had a lot of hobbies and decided to try composing. Well . . . I think her getting started as a composer was a little more challenging than, say, trying out that first crocheting pattern. But we were all charmed by her self-deprecation.)

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When Will the “Great Day” Occur?

Well, it’s complicated.

“Great Day” is a spiritual, meaning that it falls into the category of true folk music, a genre that starts out with oral traditions and only later involves writing the words down. By the time a true folk song is committed to paper it almost always has multiple versions. And why do I keep using the word “true”? Because there are many songs written “in the style of” a folk song that aren’t truly so since they have a known, single author. In the case of this version of the piece (which my own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, will be performing in March 20241) there is an arranger, Warren Martin, but no composer or lyricist, so we seem to be in the “true folk” category. In my signature bopping around the Internet looking for clues I’ve found a number of sites that have published the lyrics, but there are none that try to unpack the layers of meaning contained in them. So I’m venturing out on my own here. If you’d like to read a general discussion of spirituals and their origins, I’d recommend that you read an earlier post on this website, “How Did We Get the Spirituals?

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Beethoven’s Only Opera and Its “Prisoners’ Chorus”

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Ludwig von Beethoven wrote only one opera, Fidelio, and it cost him so much vexation as he worked on it, and re-worked it, and re-worked it yet again, that he said he would never write another one. And he kept his word. The history and background of this work, therefore, is long and complicated, well beyond the scope of this post that focuses on just one chorus from the work. But here’s a brief overview:

We know that Beethoven was quite taken with the (supposed) ideals of the French Revolution: liberty, equality, and brotherhood. This rather diffuse and wayward event began in 1789 with the storming of the Bastille prison, progressed through the establishment of the French Republic which rapidly devolved into the Reign of Terror, and then eventually resulted in the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte to power. By 1799 Napoleon had declared himself dictator, and he would be crowned Emperor 5 years later in 1804. By 1805 he was ruler of all Europe, including Austria. In the midst of all this drama and trauma Beethoven had become interested in a French play titled Léonore, ou l’Amour Conjugal (Leonora, or Marital Love). The play couldn’t be set to music directly, of course, so Beethoven needed a librettist. He also needed government approval in order for his opera to be staged publicly, and an opera set in France and having as its theme the evils of political oppression wasn’t going to fly with the Napoleonic government that was in place at the time. So the setting was shifted to Spain, and the emphasis was shifted to the heroine’s faithfulness to her imprisoned husband and away from that thorny issue of civil rights. There were three versions in the end: an unsuccessful 1805 three-act premier, then a trimmed-down two-act version the next year, and a final revision in 1814 as the Congress of Vienna was meeting to decide the future of post-Napoleonic Europe. This last included an additional choral ending that emphasized more clearly the significance of the newly liberated prisoners. That chorus, however, is not the subject of this article and is indeed never called the “Prisoners’ Chorus.” Instead, it’s the chorus at the end of Act I which describes only a brief liberation before the prisoners are hustled back into the prison which was given that title. And, speaking of titles, it is accepted practice to call only the final version of the opera Fidelio, with the earlier ones bearing the name of its heroine Leonora.

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Gwyneth Walker as Poet and Composer in “Refuge”

Image by Aline Berry from Pixabay

I am reminded of this quotation: “It is not enough to be right. You must prevail.” Let me rephrase that wording to fit here: “It is not enough to be creative. You must be heard.” Gwyneth Walker certainly fits into that principle, as she has become a successful composer first through talent (of course) but then through sheer hard work and business savvy. She has a very interesting website that includes some of the interviews and lectures she’s given over the years, and I was especially struck by her essay “Yes, This Is a Business!” The entire piece is well worth reading; here I’ll quote just one definitive statement: “I feel that a composer cannot live in his/her own world entirely. Music is a communicative and social language. It requires composers, performers and audiences. And all three need each other.”

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A Staid British Hymn Crosses the Atlantic and Becomes a Rollicking American Folk Favorite

 

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

What started out as a beautiful but, as far as I’m concerned, a little stuffy, hymn for the Christian church feast day of Epiphany, written by the Anglican bishop Reginald Heber and published in 1811, underwent a sea change after it voyaged to America. It acquired a new tune via the shape-note tradition that was developed in the mid-1830’s and became especially popular in Appalachia. (You can read a bit about shape-note singing in my post A Rich American Tradition in “Hark! I Hear the Harps Eternal”) It also acquired a new first verse, with the original first verse becoming the refrain, at least in some versions. So I’ll start with the newly-purposed refrain:

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What on earth is going on in the “Coventry Carol,” with all the mournfulness and killing of children?

 

Pieter Bruegel the Elder – Massacre of the Innocents – Google Art Project

When people first realize what the words to this carol are actually saying, they tend to be puzzled and/or outraged. I remember clearly someone in my own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, saying, “What on earth is going on with those kids being murdered?” Well, I can’t blame him. While I do love the song myself, it certainly can’t be said that it fits the stereotypical cheery Christmas template. The haunting melody is paired with a text that describes a horrible scenario: Herod the King commanding all young children in Bethlehem to be killed. Here are the relevant two verses that spell out the story:

O sisters too, how may we do
For to preserve this day
This poor youngling for whom we sing,
“Bye bye, lully, lullay”?

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