[ Charis Home page | Charis Schedule ]

Charis Chamber Voices

directed by
Susanne Peck
Presents

Date:	Saturday, 13 November 1999
Time:	8:00 PM
Place:	South Presbyterian Church, Dobbs Ferry, NY
Date:	Sunday, 14 November 1999
Time:	4:00 PM
Place:	Bedford Presbyterian Church, Bedford, NY

Press Release

Goin' Home

To begin a new life, to renew the spirit, to achieve a heavenly reward - these were the unshakeable goals of the early American colonists, who endured untold hardship and instability in exchange for the chance to settle in the New World. This ideal of beginning again, of recreating ourselves and our environment both physically and spiritually, has been a constant in both sacred and secular American music from its earliest psalm tunes. Passages representing both the burdens and rewards of the pioneers' quest for religious renewal infuse American hymns and folk songs with images of pain and hope. It is, in short, the music of Americans willing to face pain, instability, and death in exchange for entrance to the New World and, ultimately, to the Kingdom of God. The program will also feature the world premiere of three works by New York composer Julie Dolphin. The concerts will take place on Saturday, November 13, at the South Presbyterian Church of Dobbs Ferry (8 p.m.) and on Sunday, November 14 at Bedford Presbyterian Church (4 p.m.). Tickets are $15 for adults, $10 for students and senior citizens. For additional information, please call 914-931-6575.

Charis is an auditioned 24-voice vocal chamber ensemble directed by the versatile solo and chamber singer Susanne Peck. An experienced voice teacher and an accomplished musician with a natural gift for conducting, Ms. Peck's ability to select interesting and harmonically rich music continues to attract singers and music lovers throughout the tri-state region. Photos (such as this one of Susanne Peck) are available upon request.

Concert Order

Program notes

The sea chests of the pilgrims who came to America in the seventeenth century contained those possessions most precious to them: their Bibles and their hymnals. Over time, the music these settlers brought with them from their motherlands was transformed, and new songs appeared that reflected both the hope and promise of life in their new home, as well as the harsh realities of their struggle to survive. This paradox was keenly felt at harvest time, when the rejoicing for the crops that had been put by was always tempered by the knowledge of the cold, killing season ahead. But for these people of faith, death was not a thing to be feared but a reward to be welcomed because it opened the gates of Heaven. If pilgrims would not be Goin' Home from the fields to the warmth and safety of their houses, they would be Goin' Home to God. From these early roots grew a new musical voice that became recognized as distinctly American, incorporating the songs of many people and growing as varied and vast as the New World itself. It is the strength and spirit of this American voice that we celebrate in our program today.

Our program opens with Invocation, a psalm tune from William Billings's collection The Continental Harmony, published in February of 1794. Born in Massachusetts, with vision in only one eye and withered arms and legs of uneven length, Billings became America's first great composer and first professional musician. But Billings set an unfortunate precedent for successive generations of musicians: he died a pauper and was buried in an unidentified grave at Boston Common. As in most psalm tunes of this period, Invocation features the melody in the tenor part. In practice, a few sopranos would usually join the tenors in singing the melody, while a few tenors would double the top voice, imparting a rich, six-part texture to a seemingly simple four-part hymn. The Traveller, a religious ballad, dates back to at least 1804, when it was published in The Christian Harmony.

Abraham Wood, the composer of Brevity, was a drummer boy during the Revolutionary War. A native of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Wood also composed an elegy on the death of George Washington. While written in a simple, homophonic style, Brevity makes use of subtle harmonic dissonances for expressive effect (note, for example, the cross-relation during the second half of the word "evening"). Stephen Jenks, the composer of Decay and Sorrow's Tear, was also a native of Massachusetts and the compiler of The Delights of Harmony (Dedham, Massachusetts, 1805). Decay is typical of an American fuging-tune in its ABB form. As is traditional, the A section is set homophonically (that is, in a block chordal style), while the B section begins with a brief section of imitation ending in a homophonic cadence. The text for Amanda is by Isaac Watts from his Psalms of David Imitated in the Language of the New Testament, which appeared in 1719 (the first American edition was published in Philadelphia in 1729 by Benjamin Franklin). Watts was one of the most popular poets of eighteenth-century America and a favorite of the composers of the New England Singing School tradition. Amanda, enormously popular around the beginning of the nineteenth century, appeared in dozens of tune books.

Charles Ives (1874-1954) has been recognized as one of the most original and significant American composers of the early twentieth century, yet his work went virtually unheard until well after his retirement. Realizing early on that his music was too unconventional to provide him a living, Ives became a businessman and chose to compose primarily for his own pleasure. His output was vast and was eventually recognized, earning him a Pulitzer Prize in 1947. Crossing the Bar was probably written in 1891, when Ives was only 18 or so, and while the simple chordal settings of the text are quite different from the mature, iconoclastic style of the composer, it does foreshadow his later harmonic wanderings. The text is one of the most popular poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), said to have been written on the back of an envelope while the poet was crossing the Solent River in southern England.

I'm Goin' Away is a variation of the southern folk song, Who's Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Feet? The famed folk-song historian Alan Lomax observes that the songs in this group were "for a restless, traveling people." Belonging to the category known as primitive work chant, Shenandoah is actually a sea chanty. It probably began as a voyager song on the rivers west of the Mississippi and became a favorite of cavalrymen who fought the Indian Wars of the late nineteenth century. The title comes from the Iroquois word for a valley in Virginia. The Irish anti-war folk song Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye is thought to be the forerunner of the war-glorifying American folk song, When Johnny Comes Marching Home. (The latter was published in 1863 by a "Louis Lambert" which turned out to be a synonym for Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore, bandmaster of the Union Army and native son of Ireland.) With a melody dating back to the bloody Crimean War (1853-56), the original song contains lyrics that describe the ravages of battle in blunt terms, with such phrases as "You haven't an arm or a leg/You're a hopeless shell of a man with a peg."

Randall Thompson (1899-1984) once wrote, "a composer's first responsibility is and always will be to write music that will reach and move the hearts of his listeners in his own day." This respect for the audience as well as the performer makes Thompson's music as rewarding to sing as it is to listen to, and it helps explain why he is one of the most widely performed twentieth-century American choral composers. His was a decidedly American voice, so it is fitting that Thompson was commissioned by the town of Amherst, Massachusetts, for its bicentennial, to set to words the music of that decidedly American poet, Robert Frost (1874-1963). The completed Frostiana premiered in 1959 with the composer conducting and the poet in the audience. It is said that Frost was so enthusiastic about the performance that at the end he jumped from his seat and shouted, "Sing that again!" We close our program with two selections from the Frostiana songs, The Road Not Taken and Choose Something Like a Star. The two poems were published in 1916 and 1947, over 30 years apart, yet they reflect the common theme (one of Frost's favorites) of linking the pastoral with the philosophical. Thompson's graceful, moving settings make the pieces particularly powerful and memorable.

All Is Well was published in The Sacred Harp, a key source for the southern tradition of "shape-note" singing. The shape-note phenomenon, still carried on to this day, began in the late eighteenth century as a way to teach common folk how to sing in harmony. The name itself was derived from the notation, which had four different shapes of noteheads, with each shape representing different positions of the notes of the scale. As the movement grew and expanded, it became a social phenomenon as well as a lesson in singing, and incorporated many aspects of folk music. T.J. White, who arranged this version of All Is Well, compiled many of the nineteenth-century editions of The Sacred Harp and was largely responsible for keeping the shape-note style of singing alive through the nineteenth century. Little is known about the origins of our version of Hatfield, though the text has been frequently used by many New England composers, including Billings. This version was found by Joel Cohen buried in a Newburyport, Massachusetts library. It is easy to recognize the influence of folk music in the lively rhythms of Jeremiah Ingalls's Harvest Hymn. Ingalls was seemingly conflicted about the influences of secular music, however. After a Sunday afternoon session of playing instruments and leading his sons to engage in a "boisterous march," Ingalls is quoted as declaring, "Boys, this won't do. Put away these corrupt things and take your Bibles." Another New Englander, Ingalls was also the compiler of The Christian Harmony (Exeter, New Hampshire, 1804).

Daniel Read was not only the composer of Newport , but a storekeeper, an ivory-comb manufacturer, a tune collector, and the publisher of America's first musical periodical, The American Musical Magazine. Fare You Well, My Friends, from Billings's 1794 tune book The Continental Harmony, is structurally more complex than many of his earlier tunes, as it features overlapping solo lines alternating with homophonic cadences. The composer's first collection of music contained 188 psalm tunes, including Africa. Titled The New England Psalm, it was published in December of 1770 when the composer was 24, and featured a frontispiece engraved by Paul Revere.

It is our great good fortune to add the talents of Julie Dolphin to our choir as both singer and "composer-in-residence." Ms. Dolphin (b. 1954) has been performing and composing in many idioms, as well as teaching for many years, focusing recently on vocal works. Her settings of texts by Federico García Lorca, Teresa of Àvila, Robert Frost, Dorothy Parker and others, have been performed at the Dennis Keene Choral Festival, Manhattanville College, the Church of St. Theresa and elsewhere. For our program, she has contributed arrangements of three American folk songs. Hallelujah, I'm a Bum has been attributed to Harry Kirby McClintock (1882-1957), the composer of that other classic tune glorifying hobo life, Big Rock Candy Mountain. The coy and playful Common Bill comes from a collection of folk songs compiled by the poet Carl Sandburg, and Poor Wayfaring Stranger is an example of the "white spiritual" known as the "religious ballad" that grew from revivalist meetings where converts sought to witness their faith in narrative song. Ms. Dolphin's work will be featured on an upcoming CD to be recorded by Charis early next year.