A Timeless Text Set by a Timely Composer—Elaine Hagenberg’s “Alleluia”

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Image by DEZALB from Pixabay

One of the greatest pleasures for me in writing these music posts lies in finding out about choral composers who are active today. Yes, it’s always rewarding to find out more about the creative geniuses of the past, and I’m typically surprised when diving into the life of someone such as, say, Antonio Vivaldi or Robert Schumann. So fascinating! But guess what? I can’t go onto those guys’ websites and use the contact form. I can’t message them on Facebook. It’s very gratifying to get info straight from the composer’s mouth, as it were, as I’ve been privileged to do a number of times.

So I was pleased to find out that we’re singing a piece by Elaine Hagenberg for the October 2021 concert of the Cherry Creek Chorale, my beloved community choir. Our conductor, Brian Leatherman, had told us previously that a consortium of choirs had commissioned a 20-minute piece from Hagenberg which will be premiered in May 2022, but I didn’t know until the music list came out that we were also performing an already-published short work of hers. The title led me to believe that we were singing the Randall Thompson version, which we have done before and which is seriously, seriously great. But so is the Hagenberg piece! My take, as a totally underqualified music analyst, is that Thompson is . . . sturdier? And Hagenberg more . . . lyrical? Or is that too gender stereotypical? What I think is really interesting is that Thompson’s piece is more than double the length of Hagenberg’s but that he uses only the single word “alleluia,” while Hagenberg has a middle section in which she uses text from St. Augustine. Very different approaches, totally masterful results.

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Is There Actual History in the Song “With a Hundred Pipers”?

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Prince Charles Edward Stuart. Eldest son of Prince James Francis Edward Stuart. Painted by William Mosman around 1750; accessed via Wikipedia.

I’ve written about the history of conflict between England and Scotland in several other posts, but if you’re coming to this material without having read those a bit of background is in order. Scotland and England fought each other for centuries, but it looked as though things were settled in 1603, when Queen Elizabeth I died and left no children, naming the king of Scotland, her cousin James Stuart, as her heir. He became James I of England and in theory united the countries. (He is perhaps most famous for commissioning the King James Bible.)

Alas, relations between the two countries did not remain peaceful. A big bone of contention was religion, even though both countries were Protestant. Charles I, James’ son, riled the Scots by his determination to control Scottish church government. England was also determined not to go back to the Roman Catholic church. In 1688 James II, who was James I’s grandson, was kicked off the throne over this very issue. He had converted to Roman Catholicism before becoming king, and his second wife was French and Catholic.  But his first wife had been Protestant and English and his two daughters from that marriage had been raised Anglican. So the English kept their fingers crossed that he wouldn’t have any sons from this second wife. A male heir would automatically take his place at the front of the succession line, but James was 51 when he became king and his wife had a long history of miscarriages and stillbirths. So what could possibly go wrong? Well, as it turned out, a lot. James’ wife did indeed finally produce a surviving son, and a Catholic dynasty seemed in the offing. England rose up against him and offered the throne to Mary of Orange, the eldest daughter of James’ first marriage, and her husband William. (“Orange” is a region in The Netherlands.)

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How do we know that “She Moved Through the Fair” is a true folk song?

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Image accessed via the “Why Donegal?” Facebook page; no source given.

We know this because it has so many different versions, points of origin, and people claiming to have had a part in its creation. Any time you have a song that simply refuses to be pinned down, rest assured that it can truly be categorized as “folk.” If there is a known author, then the most you can say is that the piece is “in the style of” a folk song. I have been fascinated to read the Wikipedia article on this piece; the various claims and counterclaims are so multi-branching that they almost form a spider’s web.

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The Shakers’ Simple Music Inspires Dance and Song

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By Unknown author – Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons. Shakers dancing.

It seems a little unfair that the word “Shakers” nowadays calls up only a furniture style and, probably, the tune “Simple Gifts,” when this religious group had such a long and fascinating history. Honestly, the Wikipedia article about them is well worth a read if you’re at all interested in early American history and/or revivalist religious movements.

I’m going to get into Shaker music, but I do need to explain their beliefs and practices a bit in order to do so. This sect, which got its start in Britain around 1750, was a fascinating mixture of strict rules on the one hand and ecstatic outbursts on the other. Absolute celibacy was required for full membership; the sexes were housed separately and could not even shake hands or pass one another on the stairs. (I’m assuming the latter rule was in place because the staircases were so narrow.) They also lived communally and were strict pacifists. Yet their worship services were a mixture of music, dancing, and manifestations of spirituality that included twitching, jerking, and shouting, usually in some type of unknown language. (Those outward physical actions gave the group their name; originally they were called the “Shaking Quakers” and were an offshoot of the original Quakers.) They had to let off steam somehow, I guess. In spite of all the kerfuffle, though, the music itself was very plain, with no musical instruments used for accompaniment and no harmonies, just the melody. You can do a lot with a little; as our friend Wikipedia says:

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How Did the Moody Robert Schumann Come to Write the Spritely “Zigeunerleben”?

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Image by William Adams from Pixabay–these are obviously costumed actors/dancers, but they are quite true to the Romantic idea of this people group.

In May 2013 the community choir to which I belong, the Cherry Creek Chorale, performed a concert with the title “Isn’t It Romantic?” One of the pieces was the rousing song “Zigeunerleben” by Robert Schumann. I got a little tickled with myself when I realized later that not only did I not read a translation of the text in preparation for the concert, having only a vague idea that it was something about gypsies, but I also assumed that the song was by Robert Schubert. (The confusion of Schubert and Schumann is very common; East Germany issued a commemorative stamp in 1956 that had a picture of Schuman against a backdrop of music by Schubert; the stamp had to be re-issued in corrected form.) But during some later work on Johannes Brahms, who was closely associated with the Schumanns, I realized that Robert was a fascinating study unto himself. There’s no way I can do justice to the whole complicated story of this complicated man, so let me attempt to explain how he came to write this song.

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How Many Isles of Innisfree Are There?

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Image by ponderconnect from Pixabay

Good question! Do you mean the place, the actual isle or island? Or do you mean the song? Or perhaps the poem? As you can see, it’s complicated.

Let me start out with the poem that William Butler Yeats wrote in 1888, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree.” Since it’s only 12 lines I’m going to quote it in full here:

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

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Copland Struggles to Put the Struggles of a Poor Farming Family On Stage

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Image by Colin Ross from Pixabay

As you know if you’ve read many of the posts on this site, I love tracking down the origins of creative works. So “The Promise of Living” from Aaron Copland’s opera The Tender Land has provided me with a number of rabbit trails to pursue in this regard. My choir sang it several years ago as the finale to a concert, and while I didn’t manage to squeeze in a post about it then it’s been on my list of Intriguing Pieces To Discuss.

On the surface the words would imply that this is a harvest/Thanksgiving piece, and indeed some program notes or even sheet music characterize it as such. Here’s how it starts:

The promise of living with hope and thanksgiving
is born of our loving our friends and our labor.

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How Ralph Vaughn Williams launched his career into the Unknown Region

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I have to say that I hadn’t realized what a fruitful source of lyrics for choral music Walt Whitman has been until I started writing this article. My own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale in the Denver area, has sung a couple of other pieces besides this one with lyrics by Whitman over the years that I’ve been involved with the group. (You can read about them here and here–you’ll have to scroll down to read about the Whitman poem in that second article.) His poetry is so open, fresh and enthusiastic that music seems like a logical next step in presenting his work. About five hundred composers have written about twelve hundred works rooted, in some way, in Whitman, and the use of his poetry has only grown over the years.

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A Rich American Musical Tradition in “Hark! I Hear the Harps Eternal”

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Image by falco from Pixabay

There’s approximately ONE TON of information that I could include in this article, ranging from Gregorian chant to early American shape-note singing to the great Alice Parker and her arrangements for the Robert Shaw Chorale, of which “Hark” is one of many. I’m going to rein myself in at least somewhat, though, fascinating as all of this is.

Let me just briefly say first of all that we haven’t, of course, always had the musical notation that we have today, nor have we had the mathematical theory behind it. The Greek mathematician Pythagoras is the one who came up with at least the basic ideas of how pitches work. (So he wasn’t just about triangles.) He figured out that a plucked string vibrated at a certain frequency, or pitch, and that a string half that length vibrated an octave above it. In other words, the same note, but higher. I guess one of these days I’ll have to read up on how he figured all of this out, if indeed we have any info about that process at all. Then, as far as we know, it took only about 1500 years for the notation system of today to get its start, in connection with what we call “Gregorian chant,” used in services of the Roman Catholic Church. But this system didn’t really specify pitches but only direction of pitches—up or down. Someone who knew the melody had to teach the monks or nuns or whatevers the actual tune. The music, an oral (or aural) medium, had to be passed down orally, that is, by memory. But that idea shouldn’t be terribly strange to us, as we know that verbal material was also passed down orally. Ancient poets and bards who didn’t have access to writing recited long stories that they had learned “by heart.”

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A Smaller Version of the Brahms “Requiem”–“Nanie”

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“Orpheus and Eurydice” by Anselm Feuerbach, accessed via Wikimedia Commons, public domain

It has been fascinating to read about the life of Johannes Brahms, and his late composition “Nänie,” written over the course of a year from 1880-1881, is a good example of how he viewed relationships. This piece comes well over a decade after his Eine Deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) was finally completed in 1869, but both that major work and this single piece are focused on the theme of consolation for those who are mourning a death. (As I write this article in early February 2021 I’m planning to make my next project in book form to be on the Requiem. This is therefore a good warmup! If the subject of the Requiem intrigues you, be sure to check back on this website for updates. And of course the best way to be sure you do that is to subscribe to the blog. Go to the sidebar to do that.)

“Nänie” was written to honor the memory of Brahms’ friend Anselm Feuerbach, a painter who died at the tragically young age of 50. Brahms knew Feuerbach because of his own interest in art; he had a circle of friends who were painters, among them Feuerbach. In fact, the painter’s style was compared to that of Brahms: both were interested in severe classical restraints on personal emotion. Feuerbach’s paintings were focused primarily on Classical themes and subjects, so when he died Brahms’ choice of text illustrated the painter’s style as well as his own. The piece was dedicated to Feuerbach’s stepmother Henriette; more about her below.

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