Carols Forquire from the Old & Newworlds
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Music & Art @ Trinity presents Ross W. Duffin, Artistic Director Carols forQuire from the Old & NewWorlds Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland December 22-23, 2011 — Please hold your applause until the end of each set. — Out from lands of Orient (Orientis partibus) Anonymous French, 13th century Gabriel from heaven’s king (Angelus ad virginem) Anonymous English, 13th century There is no rose Anonymous English, 15th century Ave rex angelorum Anonymous English, 15th century Nowell sing we Anonymous English, 15th century Quid petis, o fili? Richard Pygott (ca.1485–1549) E la don don Anonymous (Cancionero de Upsala, 1556) Dadme albricias Anonymous (Cancionero de Upsala, 1556) A solis ortus cardine Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525–1594) This day Christ was born William Byrd (ca.1540–1623) — Intermission — Joseph est bien marié French 17th century, arr. R. Duffin Quelle est cette odeur agréable? French ca.1700, arr. RD Tous les bourgeois de Châtre French 17th century, arr. RD Tous les bourgeois de Châtre (noël pour orgue) Claude-Bénigne Balbastre (1727–1799) Jonathan William Moyer, organ Canite tuba in Sion Jakob Handl (1550–1591) Personent hodie Anonymous (Piae cantiones, 1582), arr. RD Puer natus in Bethlehem Anonymous (Piae cantiones, 1582), arr. RD Verbum caro factum est Anonymous (Piae cantiones, 1582), arr. RD Gaudete Anonymous (Piae cantiones, 1582), arr. RD Quiet Promise (2011) Jennifer Conner (b.1962) In the bleak midwinter Gustav Holst (1874–1934) The holly and the ivy arr. Henry Walford Davies (1869–1941) A spotless rose Herbert Howells (1892–1983) ABOUT Q UIRE Quire Cleveland is a professional choral ensemble founded in 2008 to perform the glorious choral masterpieces of the Medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque eras, and beyond. Members of the ensemble are highly-trained musicians, collectively representing nearly 500 years of choral experience. In addition to being soloists and choral leaders at many of the major churches in the Greater Cleveland area, including the Cathedral of St. John, Church of the Covenant, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, and Trinity Cathedral, among others, they have sung together in historically-informed ensembles, such as the Case Western Reserve University Early Music Singers and Apollo’s Singers of Apollo’s Fire. Quire performs nine centuries of a cappella repertoire. The ClevelandPlain Dealer has praised “the inspired voices of Quire Cleveland” and the group’s “exceptional purity of pitch” and, according to Cool Cleveland, “the joyful sounds could easily have soared to the very heavens.” Q UIRE CLEVELAND Sopranos: Donna Fagerhaug, Elena Mullins, Judith Overcash, Lisa Rainsong, Sian Ricketts, Gail West Altos: Tracy Cowart, John McElliott, Debra Nagy, Beverly Simmons Tenors: Evan Bescan, Frank Blackman, Peter Hampton, Tyler Skidmore Basses: Jonathan F. Cooper, Ian Crane, José Gotera, Nathan Longnecker, Ray Lyons, Jonathan Moyer Board of Directors: John West, esq, President; Ross W. Duffin, dma, Artistic Director; Beverly Simmons, dma, Executive Director; John McElliott, Secretary/Treasurer; Richard Rodda, ph.d. Quire Cleveland is registered with the IRS as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, nonprofit organization. Artistic Director and tenor Ross W. Duffin was born in London, Ontario, and attended the University of Western Ontario there. He received his master’s and doctoral degrees from Stanford University, where he specialized in the performance practice of early music. He came to Case Western Reserve University in 1978 to direct the nationally recognized historical performance program there. Ross has made a name for himself as a scholar in a wide range of repertoires, publishing articles on music from the 13th to the 18th centuries. His edition of DuFay chansons won the Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society for work of benefit to both scholars and performers, and his Shakespeare’s Songbook won the inaugural Claude Palisca Prize, also from the AMS. Other “vocal” publications include his edition of Josquin motets from Oxford University Press, an edition of motets from the Jacobean period, and a reconstruction of the early Tudor St. Matthew Passion by Richard Davy, both from A-R Editions. Ross’s love of vocal ensemble singing has a familial background, since his grandfather, William Nelson, was a professional countertenor in London, England, and was soloist for Harold Darke and later Herbert Murrill, and his mother conducted her church choir, making him a third-generation choral conductor. He has sung with Apollo’s Fire since its inception in 1992. He also directs the Early Music Singers at CWRU. Composer Jennifer Conner was a Regents scholar at the University of California Irvine, where she received three undergraduate degrees in music, dance, and fine arts disciplinary. She did her master’s and doctoral work at the Cleveland Institute of Music, studying under Donald Erb. She also studied with New York composer George Tsontakis and participated in the Aspen Music Festival Center for Advanced Compositional Studies under Bernard Rands. Her orchestral music has been performed by the Cleveland Orchestra, as well as the Oregon, Akron, Canton, and Grand Rapids Symphonies; she has had performances by soloists and chamber ensembles, including Panaramicos, Cleveland Chamber Collective, Myriad, and Epicyle New Music Ensemble; and several of her works appear on CD. Jennifer teaches theory and composition at the Cleveland Institute of Music and is head of the Suzuki music theory program there. She is also on the faculty at Baldwin-Wallace College Conservatory of Music. She is author of the theory curriculum, Foundations in Music. A member of ASCAP, her works are published through Imaginings Publishing. P ROGRAM NOTES by Ross W. Duffin Christmas has traditionally been a feast of music, and we hope that, after performances in 2009 and 2010, our audiences are looking forward to a third serving of Christmas fare from Quire Cleveland. Once again, we bring you a cornucopia of musical works expressing the joy and hope of the season, from chant and sophisticated solemn motets to danceable villancicos, from Medieval and Renaissance Europe all the way to Cleveland, Ohio, in 2011! Since around the middle of the nineteenth century, the medieval carol Orientis partibus has been popularly known as the “Song of the Ass.” It tells the story of the donkey on which Mary rode into Bethlehem, and was apparently sung as part of the Epiphany celebrations at Beauvais, France, from the Middle Ages to at least the seventeenth century. A manuscript with the musical setting as used in Beauvais survives in the British Library and seems to have been copied in the thirteenth century. Six stanzas survive in that manuscript, each with slight musical variants (though these are typically ignored in modern editions and performances), and another four stanzas of text in other manuscripts of the period. Our performance presents the music to the entire song as it appears in the original manuscript, but we are using the rhyming English translation by Henry Copley Greene. Greene wrote an article about the piece in 1931 and included such a delightful translation that I decided to use it for our performance as an alternative to the original Latin. Dating from around the same time as Orientis partibus but from across the Channel is Gabriel from Heven King, which also exists in Latin, as Angelus ad virginem. That title is actually named by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, as sung by Nicholas the Clerk in “The Miller’s Tale.” The song tells the story of the dialog between Mary and the Angel Gabriel at the Annunciation, and we are highlighting the dialog by having men sing Gabriel’s part and women sing Mary’s. The Middle English text is comprehensible but slightly hard to follow, so we are fortunate that the romantic poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889), made a rendering of it that has formed the basis of our singing version. The musical text is taken from two manuscripts of the fourteenth century. From the next century in England come several Christmas songs in a popular form for lyric works at the time—the carol. In fact, so common did the use of this form become for Christmas works that nowadays we use the term “carol” by itself to denote a Christmas song, although it did not originally have that connotation. The typical carol uses a refrain, or “burden,” which alternates with several verses, as can be heard in the first and third of these selections. Another feature of these delightful English carols is what is called “macaronic” text, meaning lyrics that move back and forth between Latin and another language—in this case, English. They also feature use of a fauxbourdon texture, where the outer voices are frequently in parallel at a distance of a sixth, and the middle voice is exactly a fourth below the top, making a texture of sweet, parallel first-inversion triads that we strongly associate with late-Medieval polyphony, and that seems related to what the French writer Martin le Franc referred to ca.1440 as “La contenance angloise”—the English Guise. An English carol from the early sixteenth century is Quid petis, o fili?, which survives as the most substantial musical work in a manuscript copied for the court of Henry VIII. Like the earlier Gabriel from Heven King, it uses imagined details and dialog to tell the story. Here, the long, Latin “burden” for the chorus alternates with florid soloists’ verses in English that tell the story of Mary interacting tenderly with the baby Jesus. The next set features two Spanish works from a collection of anonymous villancicos printed in Venice in 1556, which includes a special section of Christmas songs. The volume survives in only a single copy, now in the University Library in Uppsala, Sweden, so it has been dubbed the Cancionero de Upsala. One of its handful of Christmas songs is E la don don, in which monophonic verses for men alternate with a polyphonic refrain sung by the full group.