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The arranger of the Dutch folk tune "King Jesus Hath
a Garden" was an Anglo-Irish composer and teacher of composition, deeply
interested in folksong and early English music, who played a central role
in the 20th-century English musical renaissance. Charles Wood (1866-1926)
held teaching positions at the Royal Conservatory of Music, London (where
his important students included Herbert Howells), and at Cambridge University,
where he composed the chimes for the clock of Gonville and Caius College
and eventually succeeded Sir Charles Stanford as professor of music. While
at Cambridge he taught Michael Tippett and Ralph Vaughan Williams, who
said of his teacher's attitude toward composition that he was "rather
prone to laugh at artistic ideals, and... [gave the impression that] composing
was a trick anyone might learn if he took the trouble." Wood is now chiefly
remembered for his fine Anglican service music.
The beautiful and melancholic "Coventry Carol" was created
for the Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors, two guilds in the City of
Coventry which produced an elaborate ,'mystery play" for the early summer
feastday of Corpus Christi each year. Although the words date from the
15th century, the familiar tune was not published until 159 1. An example
of the 'lullaby' type of carol, it is also among the few carol texts which
address that gruesome sidebar of the Christmas story, the slaughter of
the innocent children of Bethlehem by King Herod's soldiers. Our arrangement
was prepared in 1962 by Dale Warland, founder and director of the Minneapolis-based
Dale Warland Singers, one of America's top vocal ensembles.
Tomas Luis de Victoria (1548-1611) was the most important
Spanish composer of the Renaissance, and was second only to Palestrina
(with whom he may have studied) in shaping the musical climate of the
Roman Catholic Church after the Council of heritage of Lutheran church
music through his studies at the Leipzig Conservatory where Protestant
chorales and Reformation polyphony were emphasized, Distler went on to
hold important church and teaching posts in Lubeck, Stuttgart, and eventually
Berlin. Tragically, he proved unable to withstand the psychological and
artistic pressures of the Nazi capital, and committed suicide in November
1942. Distler modelled his compositional style on the declamatory Baroque
style of Heinrich Schatz, modernized with a palette of bold rhythms and
pungent harmonies within a basically tonal framework. In "Lo How a Rose
E'er Blooming" Distler shows his engagement with past musical traditions:
the old Reformation Christmas carol, so familiar to us in its harmonization
by Praetorius, is here clothed in austere counterpoint that helps strip
away the layers of sentimentality which too often obscure its simple truths.
(In the larger work from which this selection is taken, 1933's The Christmas
Story Op. 10, seven choral variations on the carol frame a quasi-chanted
account of the Nativity.)
Franz Biebl (b. 1906) was a noted figure in mid-twentieth-century
German choral life, serving most importantly as director of choral programming
at the Bavarian Radio Broadcasting Company studios in Munich during the
1960's and '70's where he exercised great influence over choral music
in Germany. A graduate of the Munich Conservatory, he was teaching at
the Mozarteum in Salzburg when the vicissitudes of World War 11 led to
his internment as a prisoner-of-war in Battle Creek, Michigan. After 1945
he returned to Munich, where he worked in church music and choir schools
until he accepted the directorship at Bavarian Radio. Although now retired
from the airwaves, he continues to compose, adding to his catalogue of
cantatas, folksong and Negro spiritual arrangements, Singspiels and children's
operas. The "Ave Maria" (written in 1964) showcases his characteristic
tenderness, clarity, and simplicity of form while employing a somewhat
more conservative harmony than his other works; it has become a favorite
of American choruses, including the Harvard Glee Club and Trent. A twenty-year
career in the city of Rome embraced many musical posts, including maestro
di cappella at the Roman and German Colleges and working with St. Philip
Neri at the latter's Church of the Oratory, the birthplace of the oratorio.
He spent a busy retirement in Madrid as choirmaster and organist at the
Royal Descalzas convent. Victoria's music was widely known and influential,
not only throughout Catholic Europe but also in the up-and-coming cathedrals
of New Spain (such as Lima, Bogota, and Mexico City) in Latin America.
His works balance technical breadth and expressive control with a passion
and mysticism which have invited comparisons with another Spanish artist
of the Counter-Reformation, El Greco. But although his later reputation
has rested on his most intensely expressive motets, the pieces heard here
show his joyful side, the side by which he was best known to his contemporaries
(according to Portugal's King John IV, "his disposition being naturally
sunny, he never stays downcast for long"). The three motets ("0 quam gloriosum"
for the Feast of All Saints, "Quem vidistis pastores" for Christmas, and
"0 magnum mysterium" for the Feast of the Circumcision) all appeared in
Victoria's first publication (Venice, 1572), a book of motets written
while Victoria was organist at the Aragonese church in Rome; the mass
(based on material from his own motet) appeared in his second book of
masses (Rome, 1583). Victoria's greatness lies in his overall artistry,
not in any one technique; as Nicholas Slonimsky has written, "in its dramatic
intensity, its rhythmic variety, its tragic grandeur and spiritual fervor,
his music is thoroughly personal and thoroughly Spanish."
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976), perhaps the greatest British
composer of this century after Vaughan Williams, composed his Christmastide
"variations for unaccompanied choir" A Boy Was Born (Op. 3) in 1933 when
he was nineteen. It was his first published choral work. The six-movement
cycle begins with the theme which we have recorded here, a chorale-like
treatment of 16th-century German words set to a simple motive profiled
in the soprano part. Already in this youthful work we hear many of the
qualities by which Britten distinguished himself as a composer: a mastery
of variation techniques, a distinctive harmonic style which blends major
and minor and modal scales, an interest in drawing together disparate
literary inspirations, and a seemingly effortless directness and simplicity
of expression.
The first Spanish composer to achieve an international
reputation, Cristóbal Morales (c. 1500-1553) enjoyed a successful ten-year
singing and composing career in Rome. When the attractions of the Eternal
City dimmed, he returned to Spain and held a series of posts at the cathedrals
of Seville, Toledo, and Malaga. The popularity of his compositions (such
as the Magnificat octavi toni) continued to grow after his death, and
by the end of the 16th century his works were being sung not only in Italy
and Spain but in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Mexico City, Guatemala
City, Lima, Bogota, and La Paz. The somber richness and melodic fluidity
of his writing exercised a defining influence over the development of
sacred music in Latin America.
Originally, a 'carol' was a song which alternated a refrain
(or "burden," often in three parts) with verses (in two parts); carols
frequently served as music for circle dances. The burden and verses in
the medieval English carol "There is No Rose" liken the Virgin Mary to
an unblemished, incomparable rose. In its dulcet harmonies, this carol
exemplifies the sweet-soundingness that so captivated continental European
ears which began to filter across the Channel at the beginning of the
15th century. The ensuing imitation of this English triadic euphony by
early Renaissance composers such as Du Fay and Binchois signaled the dawning
of a new musical era in Europe.
Germany between the wars was the stage for many new and
competing styles of composition: from avant-garde efforts that would eventually
draw the Nazis' disapproving label "degenerate," to neo-classicism, to
a neo-Baroque approach which found a strong exponent in Hugo Distler (1908-1942).
Steeped in the North German Chanticleer.
Although Samuel Barber (1910-198 1) was one of the deans
of American classical music (his opera Antony and Cleopatra was commissioned
for the opening of the new Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center
in 1966), he never composed specifically or intentionally 'American' music,
as did many of his contemporaries, Copland, Bernstein, Piston and Harris
among them. Barber's compositions which garnered many awards including
the American Prix de Rome, two Pulitzer Prizes and a Guggenheim Fellowship
are lyrical and lush, elegant, conservative and post-Brahmsian. At the
age of 14 he enrolled as a charter student at the fledgling Curtis Institute
of Music in Philadelphia (to which he would later return as a faculty
member); in his fourth year he met and formed a lifelong friendship with
fellow composer Gian Carlo Menotti. Barber's music was championed by a
remarkable range of famous figures including Vladimir Horowitz, Martha
Graham, Arturo Toscanini, and Dimitri Mitropoulos. "Agnus DO" is a 1967
arrangement of his famous Adagio for Strings (1936), one of the most recognized,
beloved, and widely used classical pieces. (The Adagio is itself an arrangement
for string orchestra of the slow movement from his String Quartet No.
1, also composed in 1936). The present recording was originally prepared
for a videogame soundtrack; in order to achieve the rich sonority called
for by the heart-on-sleeve Romanticism of the piece, we recorded three
live overdubs of the piece to transform our 20-member Quire of Voyces
into a 60-voice choral orchestra.
-Temmo Korisheli
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