Sunday, June 5, 2005 4:00 p.m.
Ford Community & Performing Arts Center
Dearborn, Michigan
Vanguard Voices & Brass
• G. Kevin Dewey, Director
Winners – Vanguard Premieres Choral Composition Contest
Choral Suite
Larry
A. Christiansen
A-nir Antonio
Gervasoni
Honorable Mention – Vanguard Premieres Choral Composition Contest
The Earth Is the Lord’s Alan
Smith
Eli, Eli! Frank
La Rocca
Olympiad John
White
Usquequo, Domine? Dan
Pinkston
When Your Song Rang Out to Me Mark
Dal Porto
Reserved Tickets: $11, $8
The first-ever Vanguard Premieres Choral Composition Contest was announced in 2003, with a contest deadline of April 2004.
Composers with a unique creative voice and clear compositional ability are invited to enter a new choral composition contest—with two $1,000 prizes. Winning compositions in the General and Emerging Composers categories will be premiered by Vanguard Voices, a 65-voice, mixed adult choir based in Dearborn, Michigan, USA
The guidelines stated that a composition could either be a cappella or include accompaniment by any combination of keyboard, brass quintet, and percussion. More than 120 entries were received from composers in nine countries and 27 states. The contest was judged by Vanguard Voices artistic director G. Kevin Dewey. The winning compositions were Choral Suite by Larry A. Christiansen (California, USA) and A-nir by Antonio Gervasoni (Lima, Peru). Due to the high quality of the compositions received, Mr. Dewey decided to offer Honorable Mention awards to ten additional compositions.
Notes by Pamela Willwerth Aue
WHEN YOUR SONG RANG OUT TO ME Mark Dal Porto is a composer, pianist, and faculty member at Eastern New Mexico University, where he is the coordinator of Theory and Composition. Describing the poem at the heart of When Your Song Rang Out to Me as “an exuberant love song,” Dal Porto writes, “The text is by the German Romantic poet Clemens von Brentano (1778-1842) from his drama Aloys und Imelda written in 1812. Having a love for the genre of German Romanticism was one of my primary reasons for selecting this text. The musical ‘style’ that emerged from my setting, however, turned out to be more ‘American’ in its prominent use of syncopation and ‘tall’ harmonies (stacked 9th, 11th, and 13th chords).”
When Your Song Rang Out to Me joyously celebrates both the vastness of music’s reach—“To the moon . . . to the stars . . . to the soaring heavens, to these your song rang out!”—and its mysterious alchemy with love: “While you sang, you dipped yourself into the passion-filled stream of my life . . . As your song rang out to me!”
USQUEQUO, DOMINE? (How Long, O Lord?) Dan Pinkston is currently assistant professor of music theory and composition at Simpson University in Redding, California. Of Usquequo, Domine? he writes, “This piece was composed during a period in which virtually all of my vocal music was based on Biblical poetry. The text of Psalm 13 was particularly attractive, as it showed the transformation of a person from despair and anguish to joy and gratitude. Musically, the piano part uses a brief fragment borrowed from a Bach fugue (BWV 578) while the chorus declaims the Psalm text in pandiatonic lines and harmonies.”
Usquequo, Domine? weaves together plaintive, solo-like lines and barely restrained harmonic structures to illustrate the psalmist’s longing for both deliverance from the sorrows of his heart and the serenity that is his merciful reward for trusting in God.
OLYMPIAD John White, Fulbright-University of Vienna Distinguished Chair in Humanities (2003-2004), is Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of Florida, where he taught composition, theory and cello. He also served as Professor of Music at Kent State University and Whitman College, and he has served as Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Innsbruck, Austria. White describes Olympiad as “a tribute to the ancient Athenian games” that employs “many traditional choral techniques including imitative textures, melodic unisons, and hymn-like passages.” A prolific choral composer and experienced chorister himself, White seeks to “achieve choral lines which are both challenging and rewarding to the singers.”
Olympiad features brass, timpani, percussion, and piano and is based on two poems, “Jump” and “Discus,” written by the ancient Greek poet Pindar (518-438 B.C.) during The Age of Pericles. A peal of chimes midway through the work signals the transition from one poem to the next, while the work opens with an intense, almost hushed, instrumental fanfare passage that recurs again near the end as the chorus calls out, “Olympia! Olympia!”
ELI, ELI! Frank La Rocca is Head of Composition and Theory at California State University, Hayward. Vanguard Voices performed his O Magnum Mysterium in December, 2004. About this work, the composer writes, “Eli, Eli! was written in the summer of 2003. It is a setting of the first verse of Psalm 22, the prophetic precursor to Jesus’ cry from the cross just before he died. The piece weaves together both the original Aramaic spoken by Christ: ‘Eli, Eli lama sabachthani?’ and the English translation, ‘My God, my God why have you forsaken me?’ In this way, I hope to place the text in its historical context and to underscore for contemporary ears the power of the great spiritual anguish it expresses.”
With striking contrasts in volume, voicing, and harmony—from somber, prayerful utterances to soaring, emotion-filled pleas of doubt and despair—Eli, Eli! eloquently portrays what the composer describes as “both the outer and inner experience of Christ.”
THE EARTH IS THE LORD’S Alan Smith is a prolific composer of choral music and the Director of Music at St Andrew’s church in Burgess Hill, West Sussex, UK. His first published work was the award-winning entry in the Royal School of Church Music’s composing competition in 1990. Since then his compositions, many of which are written for specific groups or occasions, have been published in both the United States and the UK. About The Earth Is the Lord’s he writes, “The piece is a setting of Psalm 24 and I have tried to create a work that reflects the energy and excitement of this text. . . . The mood is initially set by an asymmetrical ostinato pattern on the organ, which is then taken up by the brass instruments.”
In The Earth Is the Lord’s, hymn-like passages, in which the voices sing in unison or two- or four-part harmony, alternate with imitative entry patterns in which the voice parts overlap, but enter separately, in a crescendo of repetition that ends in an emphatic unison statement. Throughout, asymmetrical rhythms accent the joyousness of the text—and dole out a healthy measure of challenge to the choristers.
Notes by composer Antonio Gervasoni
A-NIR I began composing A-nir in April of 2002, as a work for my composition workshop at the National Conservatory. After thinking of the many possible sources for the text, I finally decided I wanted an old text, preferably 1,000 years old or more. I first thought of the Bible, but since so many composers have taken texts from the Bible, I decided to look for a different source.
A friend of mine suggested that I look for Sumerian texts. I had a book about Sumerian civilization and found an interesting text in it. After searching the web I finally found the text at “The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature,” a page from the website of the Oriental Institute at the University of Oxford. The text is called “The Lament for Sumer and Urim” and is several pages long; the first three paragraphs correspond to the text I found in my book. I decided to use those three paragraphs and to my surprise I found the web page also included the phonetic text in Sumerian, which is called the “composite” text.
I found Sumerian very easy to pronounce and exchanged a few emails with the owners of the web page regarding copyright and information about the text.
My next step was to download a Sumerian-English dictionary, “The Sumerian Lexicon,” from the web. It helped me to make the correspondence between the words in the Sumerian and the English texts, which proved to be a very difficult task that took me about a week. It was after that that I began working on the piece, which was completed in two months. I called it A-nir, which in Sumerian means “lamentation.” I reviewed the piece in August of that same year, made a few changes, and gave the score its final touches.
I was very excited when I received the news of winning the Vanguard Premieres Choral Composition Contest, in the category of Emerging Composers. The idea of hearing A-nir sung by such a magnificent choir is absolutely thrilling.
I’ve always had a special interest in Sumerian civilization and studying a bit of their language has made me more and more interested in their culture. As far as I know, Sumerian is considered to be the first recorded language in history— older than Chinese—and I’m always excited when I think that the text I have used for my piece contains some of the first words recorded by mankind.
Notes by composer Larry A. Christiansen
CHORAL SUITE In selecting the texts for Choral Suite and in composing the music, I was seeking to make the composition a work rich in contrasts. These contrasts include various tempos, volumes, textures, rhythmic patterns, and melodic contours in response to the various themes, atmospheres, and inflections of the texts.
The first chorus, “Song for a Dance,” begins vigorously with a rhythm suggesting “shake off your heavy trance” and continues with melodic leaps consistent with the words “leap into a dance.” The tempo slows and the volume softens for the text’s reference to the moon and the stars. This passage can be viewed as a transition to the next chorus.
The second chorus, “A Night Song,” is in a moderately slow tempo and features a soprano soloist with a sometimes sustained, sometimes smooth flowing accompaniment in the chorus. This is consistent with the text’s references to “the young May moon” and “the drowsy world is dreaming.” The texture changes and the full chorus presents the words “Then awake, for the heavens look bright my dear.” The ending recalls the opening words and texture of soprano solo with choral accompaniment.
The third chorus, “Streets,” is based on the alternation of greatly contrasting text and music. It begins with a dance-like pattern in the lower voices while the sopranos sing “Let’s dance the jig.” This lively section closes, and a male soloist, singing over a sustained sonority in the chorus, recalls a past love. The lively dance-like music returns. It is followed by the male soloist recalling how his past love broke his heart. The lively dance-like music returns and is followed by the soloist noting that he still treasures the memory of his hours together with his past love. The lively dance-like music returns one final time.
The fourth chorus, “Echo,” is imitative throughout. The moderate tempo and soft dynamic is suggested by the words “Come to me in the silence of the night.” The range of the opening melody is quite narrow. The range broadens in the melody set to the words “Come with soft and rounded cheeks” and reaches a high point to the words “and eyes as bright as sunlight on a stream.” This chorus closes with mild dissonances pointing to the sadness of the closing words: “Come back in tears, O mem’ry, hope, love of finish’d years.”
The final chorus, “To a Skylark,” opens with a vigorous fanfare-like passage to the words, “Hail to thee, blithe spirit.” An imitative section follows. It features a melody of ascending notes reflective of the words “Higher still and higher from the earth thou springest.” The fanfare-like passage returns and leads to an imitative section featuring various combinations of the voices to words imploring the skylark to “Teach me half the gladness that thy brain must know.” This builds to the final return of the fanfare-like passage which closes this chorus.