In Praise of Mary

March 14-16, 2008

Program Notes by Sanford Dole

The bread and butter of a choir that presents classical concerts is sacred music, because Western composers, over the past 600 years or so, have produced so many beautiful works for religious ceremonies from which they can choose. In the course of a concert season, I do try to strike a balance between secular and sacred, and our June program of American music will be predominantly settings of secular poetry; but focusing on one specific subject within the great body of church music made an ideal theme for tonight’s a-cappella concert.

As suggested by its title — “In Praise of Mary: An Incomplete Musical History of Marian Devotions” — tonight’s program is a survey of the evolution of choral music comprised of musical settings of prayers to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Marian anthems have been so widely popular with composers that you will hear examples from all the major eras in Western music and from many nationalities as well. As you might expect, we will present several settings of the Ave Maria and the Magnificat, but I have tried to suggest the breadth of this subject by including a number of less familiar prayers as well. We hope to delight you with old favorites as well as some wonderful new discoveries from the world of choral music.

The concert proceeds in chronological order for the most part, but we begin with the second oldest piece, simply because the jaunty Ave Regina cœlorum for three voices by Guillaume Dufay makes for an ideal program opener. Dufay was a Franco-Flemish composer of the 15th century, right at the cusp of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Note how freely his harmonic language moves in and out of different modalities. Another striking difference from the practice of the later Renaissance is that this piece is mostly homophonic. While the parts do sometimes move in contrasting rhythms, the music generally proceeds as a series of block chords.

Legend credits Pope Gregory the Great of the 6th century with the codification of Gregorian chant, hence the name “Gregorian,” but scholars date the sources for these monophonic songs two or three centuries later than that. Even so, Gregorian chant is more than a thousand years old, and throughout those years priests, nuns, and monks have sung this official music of the Roman Catholic Church daily. The example we offer is Ave Maria, the most familiar of all Marian chants.

Even as the Renaissance composers of the 16th century moved away from monody and homophony to develop an elaborate polyphony, layering four, five, or more independent voices on top of each other, they could not help but be influenced by the ubiquitous melodies of the traditional chants. To illustrate that connection, we segue directly from the Gregorian chant into a well-known Ave Maria by Tomás Luis de Victoria that is largely based on the chant tune. After training for the priesthood at a monastery in Rome, where he apparently studied with Palestrina, Victoria returned to the court in Madrid at the age of 38 and came to be hailed as the most famous composer of the Spanish Renaissance by devoting himself to sacred music of astonishing diversity and virtuosity.

A particularly fine example is Victoria’s Salve Regina for six voices. Notice the first four notes (D-C-D-G), which are sung by the tenors on the word “Salve” (“Hail”) and immediately echoed by half the altos and then half the sopranos. Shortly afterward the rest of the sopranos take up the four-note figure in notes twice as long and sing it over and over as a sort of cantus firmus. In an astounding feat of composition, Victoria incorporates a second recurring motif as well, a plaintive, falling phrase in a minor key to the text “Mater misericordiæ” (“Mother of mercy”). Right after the first cantus firmus statement of the “Salve” motif, the rest of the altos sing the “Mater misericordiæ” motif. They repeat it twelve times in all. The density of the six-part texture with four lines imitating each other and revolving around the two repeated figures makes it hard to distinguish every repetition, but you will certainly notice that the two motifs do keep reappearing. After an interlude for the four women’s parts comes a final flourish with all six parts imitating each other in close canon.

The Renaissance was a golden age of choral music all over Western Europe. In England, where music developed somewhat inde­pendently of the continent, the most prominent of Victoria’s contemporaries was William Byrd. As the resident composer at Queen Elizabeth’s Chapel Royal, Byrd wrote grand anthems in English for the Church of England. As a devout Catholic in a time when any allegiance to Rome was considered traitorous, he also wrote more intimate masses and motets in Latin for private worship services in the Roman rite. His Ave Regina cœlorum is one such motet, in which the forward motion provides a delightful flow from start to finish.

We come next to two centuries, from the mid-1600s to the mid-1800s, that presented a challenge as I was choosing pieces for this a-cappella program. Almost by definition, music for choir from the Baroque and Classical periods has instrumental accompaniment. Unwilling to skip all that great music, I decided to select a piece I particularly like from each period and adapt it for unaccompanied chorus.

Born in Denmark in 1637, Dietrich Buxtehude made a name for himself at various churches in Germany. His final post at the Marienkirche in Lübeck afforded him the independence to develop his own style. Both his music and the autonomy of his career served as a model for such later Baroque masters as Schütz, J. S. Bach, Handel, and Telemann. Tonight you will hear a somewhat stripped down version of his Magnificat. The original is for five voices, two violins, and basso continuo. My adaptation adds a sixth vocal part and cuts all the instruments. In passages with one or two vocal parts over an instrumental bass line, you will hear the basses singing what had been the cello part and, as needed, other voice parts filling in harmonies not found in the original voice parts. I had to remove three short instrumental ritornellos altogether but was able to leave the full chorus sections in their original form.

I picked the Ave Maria by Franz Schubert, or Ellens dritter Gesang as it was originally titled, to represent the Viennese Classical period. In creating a choral treatment of this much-loved song for solo voice and piano, I took a cue from my past experience singing with Chanticleer and other a-cappella ensembles whose repertoire includes pop arrangements with voices imitating instruments. Sopranos and altos supply the running notes of the piano accompaniment, and basses plunk out the simple bass line, while the tenors sing the melody. The opening words “Ave Maria” may have led to the idea of fitting the whole Latin prayer to Schubert’s song, and that is how it is most commonly heard today. We, however, will sing the original lyrics, an excerpt from The Lady of the Lake, which was enormously popular throughout Europe. Using Adam Storck’s German translation of Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem, Schubert set three songs of the heroine Ellen Douglas. The third is her prayer to the Virgin Mary from the Goblin’s Cave, where the divided loyalties of Ellen’s father during a Highland uprising against the Scottish crown have forced them to hide.

To capture the spirit of the Romantic Age, we perform three songs by Johannes Brahms, who throughout his life created many choral works, both sacred and secular. Early in his career, he co-founded and directed a 40-voice women’s choir, and it was for the Hamburger Frauenchor that he wrote the Marienlieder in the manner of German folk songs. When the contralto parts proved to be too low, tenors were added for the premiere. Subsequently, Brahms republished the complete cycle of seven songs for mixed choir, and our selections come from that later version.

Known primarily for his large-scale symphonies, Anton Bruckner was a church organist all his life and wrote a good deal of sacred music for choir with and without accompaniment. Today, his masses appear regularly on the programs of large choruses, and smaller choruses and church choirs frequently perform his a-cappella anthems. Tota pulchra es is an interesting hybrid. The motet, which features a tenor solo introducing each line of text, is largely a cappella, but the score calls for an organ that plays only at a few climactic moments. In my zeal to represent this great Romantic composer and include a less familiar text, I have adapted the piece to incorporate the organ part into the choral texture.

After Brahms and Bruckner, we move into the 20th century. Not enough time has passed for music historians to give this period a catchy name or even fully categorize the great music created in those 100 years. My own analysis would suggest that there was a dark period mid-century during which many composers were too serious and more concerned with how music looked on the page than how it sounded in performance. Their academic explorations of 12-tone serialism and chance techniques unfortunately instilled in many listeners an aversion to all “modern” music, and I will not subject you to any of those compositional exercises. Relations between composers and audiences began to improve in the late 1970s with the rise of neoromanticism and minimalism so that today, as in prior eras, the prospect of fresh new music can again excite music lovers. This evolution leads me to think of the 20th-century works on our program as divided into two sets. The first set comes from two composers writing in the early 20th century, and the other consists of pieces written toward the end of the century by three composers still active today.

In less than two weeks in 1915, Sergei Rachmaninoff composed a complete setting of the All-Night Vigil from the Russian Orthodox liturgy, and it has become one of the most beloved a-cappella choral works in the repertoire. Ten of its fifteen movements make use of traditional Orthodox chants. Bogoroditse Devo, however, is one of the other five, in which even the melodic material is completely original. The text in Church Slavonic, as the English translation might suggest, corresponds closely to the Latin Ave Maria.

Francis Poulenc was a member of Les Six, a loose confederation of French composers inspired by Igor Stravinsky, Eric Satie, and popular forms of French music, but the music of this “sophisticated eccentric” is unlike that of the others. In the 1920s and ’30s Poulenc created a series of instrumental works in a neoclassic vein. Then after the death of a friend reawakened his Catholic faith, he became one of the great religious composers of the century. Salve Regina displays his fondness for homophonic textures that incorporate short, repeated phrases.

Prior to moving to Mountain View two years ago, Frank Ferko worked for 30 years in and around Chicago. Born in Ohio, Ferko holds a doctorate in music composition from Northwestern University and is a scholar of the music of Hildegard of Bingen and Olivier Messiaen. He was composer in residence for the Dale Warland Singers for several years, and his choral and orchestral works are widely performed. He composed Six Marian Motets, of which we sing three tonight, in 1996 for the eight-voice choir of St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Chicago. The English texts are taken from the Eastern Orthodox liturgies for various festivals honoring the Virgin Mary. I am pleased to present Ferko’s dynamic music to our audiences.

As the Bay Area is so rich in talent, I also wanted to include a short gem by another local composer, David Conte, a professor of composition at San Francisco Conservatory and also a friend and colleague. In his Ave Maria, commissioned by Chanticleer in 1992 and dedicated to the composer’s mother, you will hear that he has set the text with fairly simple rhythms and splendidly rich harmonies.

We close tonight’s program with music of John Tavener, born in London in 1944 and a leading choral composer for many years now. Tavener joined the Russian Orthodox Church in his 30s, and its theology and liturgical traditions became a major influence on his work. This is evident in his Magnificat, commissioned by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, in 1986. A composer’s note in the score states, “In the Orthodox service of Matins, the Magnificat contains the refrain ‘Greater in honor than the cherubim’ in between each verse. The Dean of King’s College encouraged me to use this, feeling that it would add richness to the Anglican rite.”

Thank you for attending tonight and supporting the performance of live music. We hope you enjoy the diversity of our selections and that you can perhaps broaden your musical horizons and learn a little at the same time. We look forward to seeing you again when we present “American Treasures” in June.