directed by Dr. Fredrick Lokken

Email us: BellevueChamberChorus @yahoo.com

December 2007: Christmas in America

Program

Make We Joy   Edwin Fissinger (1920-1990)

A Virgin Unspotted    William Billings (1746-1800)

While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks by Night    Billings

Hail the Blest Morn!   arr. William Walker (1809-1875)

There Is No Rose of Such Virtue  Robert Young (b.1923)

Adam Lay Ybounden Kevin Siegfried (b.1969)

O magnum mysterium Morten Lauridsen (b.1943) 

Selections by Cascadia Brass

Music of Daniel Pinkham (1923-2006)

Evergreen

Christmas Eve 

Glory Be to God

INTERMISSION

Huron Carol traditional, arr. Dale Warland

Louise Baldwin - flute

Glory to the Newborn King traditional, arr. Robert L. Morris

Hail, Mary! William Dawson (1899-1990)

A Christmas Carol Charles Ives (1874-1954)

Some Children See Him Alfred Burt (1920-1954)

Bright, Bright the Holly Berries Burt

Selections by Cascadia Brass

Music of Daniel Pinkham

A Cradle Hymn

Christmas Cantata

I. Quem vidistis, pastores?

II. O magnum mysterium

III. Gloria in excelsis Deo

Keith Ruby, organ and piano

Notes

Welcome to our celebration of Christmas in America!  Our program features a wonderful variety of American holiday music ranging from colonial era carols, to spirituals, to exciting and beautiful 20^th-century and contemporary works.  We also pay special tribute to composer Daniel Pinkham, who died last December, by performing several of his marvelous Christmas pieces.

We open with the stirring Make We Joy (1978) for chorus, handbells, and percussion, by Edwin Fissinger, long-time director of choirs at North Dakota State University.  Setting a  15^th-century text, Fissinger evokes the sounds of medieval music with parallel harmonies  and chant-like melodies.

Make we joy now in this feast in quo Christus natus est [in which Christ is born]. Eya!

A Patre unigenitus [the only begotten son of the Father] through a maiden is come to us.

Sing we of him and say “Welcome! Veni, Redemptor gentium” [come, Redeemer of the nations].

The ruggedly energetic sounds of early American music characterize the next three pieces.  Considered now the foremost musical representative of the colonial era, William Billings was a poor, uneducated Boston tanner by trade, blind in one eye, with a short leg and withered arm, hopelessly addicted to chewing tobacco, and guilty of what a contemporary called “an uncommon negligence of person.”  Yet he kept company with such prominent figures as Samuel Adams and Paul Revere.  Largely self-trained in music, Billings began teaching choral singing and composing as a young man.  His New England Psalm-Singer (1770), engraved by Revere, was the first published collection of music entirely by an American, followed later by five more volumes of choral works.  Billings’ idiosyncratic style is heard in the four-square harmonies of A Virgin Unspotted (where the melody lies in the tenor part), and in the vigorous fuging tune While Shepherds Watched.   

Though Billings’ songs lost popularity in Boston later in his life, some gained new life in the rural South via shape-note hymnals like The Sacred Harp.  A leading figure in the development of that singing tradition, “Singin’ Billy” Walker published another of the early shape-note hymnals, The Southern Harmony, in 1835, from which comes his rousing Hail the Blest Morn!  The tune, again in the tenor voice, was probably a traditional one in the Calvinist churches, which Walker sets in the starkly simple style that reflects the kind of harmonies the singers of the time might have improvised.

Ancient liturgical and medieval texts once more provide the inspiration for the following group of contemporary pieces.  Robert Young, long associated with Baylor University, offers a beautifully lyrical version of There Is No Rose of Such Virtue (1980).  Kevin Siegfried’s Adam Lay Ybounden (written for Boston’s The Church of the Advent in 2004), builds slowly to its joyous climax with simple melody lines, primarily in the alto voice, surrounded by glorious harmonies.  Morten Lauridsen’s gorgeous setting of  O magnum mysterium (1994) has quickly become one of the most performed recent American Christmas pieces.  Its lush harmonies and long, majestic phrases combine to create what the composer calls “a quiet song of profound inner joy.”

There is no rose of such virtue as is the rose that bare Jesu: Alleluia.

For in this rose contained was heaven and earth in little space:

Res miranda. [a thing of wonder]

By that rose we may well see that He is God in persons three:

Pari forma. [equal in form]

The angels sung the shepherds to: Gloria in excelsis Deo! Gaudeamus.

[Glory to God in the highest!  Let us rejoice.]

Leave we all this worldly mirth and follow we this joyous birth:

Transeamus. [let us go]

------------------------

Adam lay ybounden, bounden in a bond.

Four thousand winter thought he not too long.

And all was for an apple, an apple that he took,

As clerkes finden, written in their book.

Ne had the apple taken been,

Ne had never our lady a-been heavene queen.

Blessed be the time that apple taken was,

Therefore we moun singen: Deo gratias!

                        -------------------------

O great mystery and wondrous sign,

that animals should see the birth of the Lord, lying in the manger!

Blessed is virgin, whose womb was worthy

to carry the Lord Jesus Christ. Alleluia!

Daniel Pinkham was one of the most prolific and versatile American composers of the late 20^th century.  He spent nearly his entire professional life in the Boston area, where he taught at Boston Conservatory, Harvard, the University of Boston, and the New England Conservatory, and was Music Director of Kings Chapel for 42 years.  An accomplished performer on piano, organ, harpsichord, and carillon, Pinkham composed for all those instruments, and also extensively for chorus and solo voice.

Among his numerous choral compositions for the church, Pinkham’s Christmas music is some of his most endearing.  Both Evergreen (1974), for bells, organ, and unison chorus, and the a cappella Christmas Eve (1956) are beautifully simple and introspective settings of poignant, picturesque verse by Harvard-based poet Robert Hillyer (1895-1961).  Glory Be to God (1966), on the other hand, demonstrates the composer’s more extroverted side in a rhythmically exciting work for double chorus and brass.

Huron Carol (also known as ‘Twas In the Moon of Wintertime) could legitimately be called the first Canadian, or even North American, Christmas carol.  In 1643, Jean de Brebeuf, a Jesuit missionary to the Huron Indians in French Canada, penned the text in the Huron language and joined it with an old French folk song.  Using the Huron name for God (“Gitchi Manitou”, or Great Spirit) and using other images familiar to that culture, Brebeuf instinctively practiced what modern missiologists would now call “theological contextualization”.  After generations of oral transmission among the Huron people, it was later written down and translated into French and eventually English.  It receives in this arrangement a typically lovely setting from American composer/conductor Dale Warland.

The African American musical tradition has contributed many beloved pieces to the Christmas repertoire. Robert Morris, currently on the choral faculty at Macalaster College in St. Paul, provides a subtly stirring rendition of the spiritual Glory to the Newborn King.  William Dawson, often called the “dean of African American choral composers”, led the Tuskegee, Alabama, Institute Choir from 1931-1956, which he developed into an internationally renowned ensemble performing traditional spirituals, many in his own marvelous arrangements.  Hail, Mary! is one of Dawson’s original compositions, clearly based on the spiritual tradition, though more expansive and complex in scope.

Charles Ives was one of the most unusual figures in American music history.  Businessman by day and composer by night, his vast output, much of which was not heard until his virtual retirement from music and business in 1930, gradually has brought him recognition as the most original and significant American composer of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Ives developed his unique musical expression through such innovative means as bitonalism, polyrhythms, quotation, and unusual musical juxtapositions.  The gently lilting A Christmas Carol is one of his early pieces, originally written for solo voice and piano around 1894, when Ives was a student at Yale and organist at New Haven’s Center Church.  Conservative as compared to his later music, its peculiar rhythmic syncopations still display some of the composer’s idiosyncratic style.

In 1922, Epsicopal minister Rev. Bates Burt began a family tradition of creating Christmas cards with original carol texts and music, and sending them to other family members and parishioners in Pontiac, Michigan.  For the card in 1942, Bates enlisted his son, jazz musician Alfred Burt, to compose the music, which he continued to do for several years thereafter.  After the elder Burt died in 1948, the tradition continued with family friend Wilha Hutson, also the organist at Burt's church, writing the texts, including Some Children See Him (1951), and Bright, Bright the Holly Berries (1950). 

Of the fifteen carols Alfred composed, only one was performed outside Burt’s immediate family during his lifetime, at a famous Hollywood holiday party with some of Burt’s jazz buddies in 1952.  Thus began the carols’ growing public exposure and acclaim, which continued after Alfred’s death in 1954 with recordings by such popular artists as Tennessee Ernie Ford, Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians, and Nat King Cole.  Now, “The Alfred Burt Carols”, as they are collectively known, have become an indelible part of the American Christmas music canon.

Daniel Pinkham’s A Cradle Hymn was composed for the annual Christmas Carol Services at Harvard University in 2006.  With a text by the eminent English hymnodist Isaac Watts (1674-1748), the gently rocking rhythms contrast with rather acerbic harmonies to set the human and divine cradle scenes.  The piece was premiered on December 17; Pinkham passed away the day after that first performance of his final completed piece.

The festive Christmas Cantata (1957) for chorus and two brass quartets (one replaced here by organ), has long been Pinkham’s most well known and popular work, and for good reason.  Subtitled Sinfonia Sacra to honor its Renaissance polychoral inspiration, the exultant rhythmic flourishes of the outer movements frame a more meditative, medieval-sounding middle movement.  The Chorus is pleased to perform this American masterpiece on the 50^th anniversary of its composition as the finale to Christmas in America.

I. What have you seen, shepherds?  Speak to us, and announce what has appeared on

     earth.  We saw Him born, and choirs of angels praising the Lord.  Alleluia!

II. O great mystery and wondrous sign,

     that animals should see the birth of the Lord, lying in the manger!

     Blessed is virgin, whose womb was worthy

     to carry the Lord Jesus Christ. Alleluia!

III. Glory to God in the highest and peace on earth to those of good will.

     Let all the earth rejoice in God, and serve the Lord with gladness.

     Enter into His presence with joy and exultation. 

     Know that the Lord is God; it is He that hath made us, not we ourselves. 

     Hallelujah!