Concord Chorus Winter Holiday Concerts
Program Notes
One of the great figures of the musical Renaissance, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525/26–1594)
perfected the florid Franco-Flemish polyphonic style early in his career. But in response to the Council of
Trent’s 1562 proposal that church singing “be calculated not to afford vain delight to the ear, but so that
the words may be comprehensible to all,” he expanded his compositional language with rich and varied
homophonic textures that allowed for greater textual intelligibility. In the five-voiced Advent motet Rorate
coeli, which presents the image of falling rain producing earthly fruit as a metaphor for a heavenly savior
bringing salvation to mankind, Palestrina employs limited motivic imitation, textual repetition, and
contrasting homophonic textures to create fluid and vibrant music that communicates the words with
crystal clarity.
Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706), of Canon fame, is considered to be one of the most innovative composers
of the German Baroque. In his first position as deputy organist at Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral, he was
exposed to the elaborate liturgical music of south German and Italian composers. Some two decades later,
he returned to his native Nuremberg as organist at St. Sebaldus Church and used these Catholic musical
customs to enrich the Lutheran Vespers service there. The musical high point of Vespers is the Magnificat,
consisting of the Virgin Mary’s words to her cousin Elizabeth. Pachelbel’s Magnificat in D for four voices
and continuo contains a wealth of musical ideas inspired by a close reading of the text. In six minutes of
music, there are no fewer than six changes of tempo, meter, texture, and mood, each designed to
maximize contrast and variety. The “Fecit potentiam” section is notable for its use of an ancient Magnificat
chant as a kind of cantus firmus. The combination of the sopranos singing the chant in long notes over
active and powerful chords in the other voices projects the strength of the Lord’s arm to scatter the
proud.
The choral music of Randall Thompson (1899–1984) has been performed more often than any of his
American contemporaries, due in large part to the enormous popularity of his Alleluia. His Glory to God in
the Highest of 1958 employs dramatic musical contrast to highlight the juxtaposition of heaven and earth.
Exuberant, diatonic, mixed meter music conveying angelic praise surrounds a tranquil, chromatic, steadily
descending passage (without sopranos) expressing earthly peace.
The short hymn setting Jesu dulcis memoria is a bit of a mystery. The work’s only sources date from the
nineteenth century, not from the time of its supposed author, the Spanish Renaissance composer Tom s
Luis de Victoria (1548–1611). Indeed, the motet is at odds stylistically with Victoria’s oeuvre, and its
expressive use of harmony is a modernism more typical of composers on the cusp of the Baroque era, such
as Claudio Monteverdi, a generation later.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Dominick Argento (b. 1927) is one of America’s greatest living
composers of vocal music: opera, choral works, and song cycles. In 1963, he and the stage director and
librettist John Scrymgeour founded the Center Opera Company (now Minnesota Opera) in the Twin Cities,
inaugurating it with their latest collaboration, The Masque of Angels. In this one-act opera, a group of
angels is sent to earth to encourage a tentative romance between a young man and woman. The opera
features elaborate choruses such a Gloria, whose text, drawn from the Mass Ordinary, makes reference to
another meeting of heaven and earth—the angels’ announcement of Christ’s birth to the shepherds. In
the Gloria, twentieth-century scales, harmonies, and rhythms are combined with all the formal and stylistic
elements of a Baroque fugue, including expositions, episodes, stretto passages, pedal points, and
melismatic writing.
This season marks the seventieth anniversary of the Concord Chorus, which was formed in the fall of 1945
to perform Johannes Brahms’s Ein deutsches Requiem the following May in memory of those who died in
World War II. One of the chorus’s founding members was the composer, educator, and pianist Katherine
Kennicott Davis (1892– 1980), who taught at Wellesley College, the Concord Academy, and Philadelphia’s
Shady Hill Country Day School. She composed many of her more than six hundred works for the school
choruses she conducted but is best known for writing “The Little Drummer Boy.” In Great is the Lord our
God, Davis elevates the early American hymn tune “Southwel New” to the level of a Bach chorale.
(Composed in 1721 by Thomas Walter [1696–1725], minister at the First Church of Roxbury, “Southwel
New” is thought to be the first musical composition written in America.) With its flowing organ triplets and
solemn choral statements (refashioned from Walter’s original three-part setting), Great is the Lord our
God is an homage to Johann Sebastian Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. In Amazing Grace, an altogether
freer arrangement of an 1830s American hymn, the voice of Davis as a composer with an ear for textural
contrasts and dramatic harmonic surprises is clearly heard.
The large body of German protestant hymns, known as chorales, formed the bedrock of the sacred music
of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750), who inventively incorporated their melodies into his organ music,
passions, cantatas, and motets. In O Jesu Christ, meins Lebens Licht, composed in 1736 or 1737, the chorale
melody is presented in straightforward fashion by the sopranos in long notes and accompanied by more
active counterpoint, derived from the same melody, in the altos, tenors, and basses. Because of an
optional repeat in the score, which would provide a way of singing multiple verses of the hymn, it is
thought that this peaceful motet was originally intended to accompany a funeral procession.
A retrospective composer living at a time of artistic transition, Felix Mendelssohn (1809– 1847) wrote in a
style influenced by Romanticism, Classicism, and, especially in his choral works, the Baroque. He revered
Bach and Handel, studying and conducting their music on many occasions. In particular, he sought to
revive the oratorio as a genre, writing his masterpiece Elijah near the end of his short life for a Birmingham
music festival in 1846. With a libretto assembled, like Handel’s Messiah, from Biblical verses, Elijah portrays
episodes from the life of the Old Testament prophet, especially his triumphs over the heathen rulers of
Israel. Mendelssohn took Handel as his model in employing a wide variety of choruses in his oratorios,
and He, Watching over Israel, an angelic lullaby to a despairing Elijah, exhibits a characteristically Handelian
construction. Musical motives setting “He, watching over Israel” and “Shouldst thou, walking in grief”
receive imitative treatment separately before being contrapuntally combined. The contrast between the
serenity of the voices and the continuous activity of the accompaniment is symbolic of a sleeping Israel
protected by a vigilant God.
The popular English choral composer John Rutter (b. 1945) is also celebrating his seventieth birthday this
year. In his Nativity Carol from 1963, the use of three-bar phrases in the verses is an ingenious way of
generating gentle musical tension in this otherwise soothing lullaby.
British coronations were relatively small family affairs until that of King Edward VII in 1902, which was
intentionally designed to put the utter majesty, power, and dominance of the British monarchy and nation
on full display to the rest of the world. Hubert Parry composed his stately anthem I Was Glad for the
occasion accordingly. The text, drawn from Psalm 122, speaks of the unity, peace, and prosperity of
Jerusalem, here understood to stand for Britain. Psalm 122 being the traditional processional for
coronations, Parry’s setting was meant to accompany the entrance of the king into Westminster Abbey.
But Parry records in his diary that the conductor “made a sad mistake . . . and seemed to lose his head.”
Adding: “Finished the whole anthem before the king came in at all, and had to repeat all the latter part
when he did.” This did nothing to diminish the work’s appeal, which has endured. It has been performed at
every coronation since.