For choral musicians, the month and a half encompassing Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany is often one of the busiest times of the year. Church services, Christmas concerts, and caroling all whip up a flurry of well-loved music and traditions. Follow The Star aims to match this boisterous, overflowing tide of Christmas favorites with calm moments of reflection fit for the end of the old year and the start of the new. We hope contrasts between solitary voices and choral forces, between minimalism and contrapuntal complexity, and between movement and stillness enrich your holiday as Christmastide comes to an end.
Hildegard von Bingen, a Catholic mystic from Germany’s Rhineland, is best known today for her theological writings, musical compositions, and medicinal treatises. She was born at the end of the eleventh century to a minor noble family and joined a cloistered community of nuns attached to the Disibodenberg monastery while still a child. Throughout her life, she experienced mysterious visions. Hildegard recorded many of these visions in her three works of mystical theology and in her remarkably well-preserved corpus of nearly four hundred letters. She also served as abbess for multiple monasteries, practiced herbal medicine, developed a constructed language and alphabet, and composed sixty-nine extant songs and the earliest known morality play.
The first piece on our program is an arrangement of Hildegard’s votive antiphon Laus Trinitati by American composer Felicia Sandler. Sandler is Professor of Music Theory at the New England Conservatory and an expert in Ghanaian music. She describes Hildegard as a ‘kindred spirit’ for many seekers of our time, with an expansive understanding of God not limited by exclusively masculine or feminine traits. In ‘Laus Trinitati,’ Hildegard praises the Holy Trinity, the ‘sound and life and creatress of all things.’ Sandler sets Hildegard’s melody in a complex texture which evokes both the angelic host’s unceasing hymns and the multilayered polyrhythms of West Africa. The second Hildegard piece on our program, Spiritus sanctus vivificans, creates a more reserved, contemplative soundscape than Sandler’s arrangement, preserving Hildegard’s original text and melody in a solo soprano voice.
From medieval Germany, we move to Georgian England and the poetry of William Blake. Blake’s prophetic paintings and prose have influenced artists and composers for generations – Britten and Tavener’s twentieth-century settings of his work have proven especially popular. However, Blake’s first book of poetry, written in his adolescent years as an engraver’s apprentice, was never intended for public consumption. English composer Gabriel Jackson sets the sixth poem from Blake’s 1783 Poetical Sketches with To Morning, which implores the Virgin Mary as intercessor to let Christ’s light break forth as the new day. Jackson’s dazzling homophony conveys a sense of conviction and radiant joy.
Les anges dans nos campagnes —better known to American audiences as ‘Angels We Have Heard on High’—was first published in Louis Lambilotte’s 1842 Choix de cantiques sur des air nouveaux. Some researchers propose that the carol originated in the south of France during the seventeenth century. James Chadwick, the Catholic bishop of Hexham and Newcastle, first translated ‘Les anges’ in 1860 as ‘The Angels we have heard on high.’ An unknown editor revised his translation in 1862, removing a syllable from each line and creating the text known to many of us today. The inspiration for German organist Tobias Frank’s 2007 arrangement of ‘Les anges’ came from a summer vacation spent in Paris, when he heard a lone singer humming the tune to herself out of season in one of the city’s ancient churches. Frank’s style is intimate and inviting, with a harmonic palette influenced by the English and French choral traditions.
The Great Advent Antiphons feature prominently across our program. Traditionally, monastics would chant these prayers at evening prayer before reciting the Magnificat. There is one antiphon for each day from December 17 to December 23. Today, these antiphons are most likely to be familiar from their paraphrase in the verses of ‘O Come, O Come Emmanuel.’ They are the oldest liturgical texts on the program by far, with our earliest known references for them dating to the sixth century. American organist and composer David Hurd sets the fourth antiphon, O Clavis David, in a bright idiom with individual chant-like lines interspersed throughout. Hurd distributed this piece and his other composition on our program as Christmas presents to his friends and supporters in December 2020 and 2022, respectively.
Married songwriters Jill Jackson-Miller and Sy Jackson premiered Let There Be Peace on Earth in 1955 with a group of Long Beach, California high school students. The song’s memorable melody and lyrics contributed to its international success at the height of the Cold War. American composer James L. Turk originally arranged ‘Let There Be Peace’ for the U.S. Navy Band Sea Chanters. Years later, he revised this arrangement while serving as Director of Choral Music at DeMatha Catholic High School, where it was premiered by many of Lux’s founding members. Turk’s arrangement skillfully builds and relieves tension through jazz-inflected harmonies, suggesting both the desperation of the text’s wish for peace and its final fulfillment.
The brothers James, John, and Robert Wedderburn were sixteenth-century writers known for their roles in the Scottish Reformation. Their poem ‘I come from heuin [heaven] to tell’ was first published posthumously in the 1567 Compendious Booke of Godly and Spirituall Songs. The Wedderburns fiercely advocated for Luther’s new vernacular Christianity and translated many of the German theologian’s hymns into Scots. These new texts were to be sung to well-known Scottish melodies so as to increase their adoption among the Scottish laity. ‘I come from heuin’ is a translation of the well-known Lutheran Christmas carol ‘Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her.’ The Compendious Booke, written in Scots, notes that the hymn is to be sung to the tune of a ‘balulalow’ or, in English, a lullaby. English composer Oliver Tarney thus uses a lilting, rocking gesture throughout his Balulalow,’ which sets the thirteenth and fourteenth verses of ‘I come from heuin.’
We finish the first half of today’s music with two more pieces. San Francisco-based composer Eric Tuan sets a little-known Marian antiphon in his Ave Dulcissima Maria – Lux’s performance on Friday will be the piece’s East Coast premiere. Tuan’s composition contrasts soaring melodic motives with restrained moments of quiet comfort, appropriate for this concise and delicate text. The second piece by Oliver Tarney on our program, The Wise Men and the Star, sets poetry by English writer Lucia Quinault, Tarney’s colleague at Winchester College. Though published only five years ago, ‘The Wise Men’ has quickly found a place in many ensembles’ Christmas repertoires. Its steady, alluring pulse invites audiences to follow the choir through Quinault’s retelling of the Magi’s visit on Epiphany (which this year is celebrated on January 7.)
The second half of our program begins with the sixth of the Great Advent Antiphons, O Rex Gentium, which invites Christ as the ‘king of nations’ and ‘cornerstone’ to ‘come and save mankind, whom [He] formed of earth.’ David Hurd’s setting of the text is fittingly regal and opens with an almost brassy fanfare, molding pliable voices towards the end of the piece as if they were clay. English composer Cecilia McDowall’s Now May We Singen is similarly lively. Many choirs both in the United Kingdom and internationally perform McDowall’s works, which frequently take stylistic cues from the music of medieval England. ‘Now May We Singen’ is no exception—researchers found this text in a fourteenth-century parchment roll housed in Trinity College, Cambridge’s library. Richard Runciman Terry published these verses along with other ancient texts in his 1933 Two Hundred Folk Carols. McDowall’s composition preserves the jubilant atmosphere of a medieval Christmas celebration by way of its highly syncopated rhythms and at-times archaic harmonies.
The centerpiece of our program tonight is Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s Sieben Magnificat-Antiphonen, which premiered in 1998 as a commission for Berlin’s RIAS Kammerchor. Pärt is one of the world’s most performed living composers. His early career was marked by international acclaim as part of the burgeoning Soviet avant garde as well as by conflict with state censors. These disputes came to a head in 1968 with the first performance of his overtly religious ‘Credo’ — the piece’s domestic success disturbed authorities to the point of instituting an informal, multi-year ban on the ‘Credo’ and Pärt’s work generally. Pärt confronted this career-altering nadir with nearly a decade of personal study on early Renaissance polyphony and Gregorian chant. Pärt came out of this musical exile with a radically altered compositional technique which he called tintinnabuli (‘little bells,’ in Latin). This style debuted in Pärt’s 1976 Für Alina, and he has employed it in all of his compositions since, including the ‘Sieben Antiphonen.’
In theory, tintinnabuli is quite simple. One melodic voice outlines a mostly stepwise diatonic line, while a second voice arpeggiates a triad in conjunction with the first voice’s movement. The rules for each voice persist throughout the entirety of a composition, which lends Pärt’s music a sense of constancy and predestination. These voices are often accompanied by drones on the first and fifth scale degrees and additional melodic and arpeggiating voices, set in contrary motion with the first pairing.
The overall effect aims at dissolving the border between melody and harmony and producing an inseparable unity of sound. Pärt is famously devout and has written of his music as a symbolic representation of the human condition, meandering through life’s tribulations accompanied by the eternal presence of God. The ‘Sieben Antiphonen’ are not only a splendid introduction to this style but also a remarkable exposition of the means by which it can be subtly altered to effect diverse musical experiences. Pärt’s singular dedication to text is also readily audible in this set, wherein Pärt attends to each antiphon as an individual unit while capturing a progressive sense of expectation, longing, and redemption.
We close with an old favorite featured on Lux’s Christmas album, My Lord Has Come. Some audience members may know that, for many years, Silent Night was attributed to various composers, including Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert. The true origins of this beloved Christmas carol are far more outlandish. Joseph Mohr, an Austrian priest, wrote the 1816 poem ‘Stille Nacht’ while still a young man living in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. He visited his friend Franz Xaver Gruber in the small city of Oberndorf on December 24, 1818. Mohr showed Gruber his poem that afternoon, and Gruber composed a melody and accompaniment for it just a few hours before Christmas Eve mass began. John Freeman Young, pastor at Trinity Church, Wall Street, first published his English translation in 1859. English composer Jonathan Rathbone’s arrangement of ‘Silent Night’ adds lush, dramatic harmonies to the original’s unforgettable melody. (It also uses an alternate translation of the third verse only, written by the English composer and pianist Elizabeth Poston.) We hope you find it a fitting farewell to this program and to the Christmas season.
