Music & Art @ Trinity presents QClevelanduire Ross W. Duffin, Artistic Director Carols forQuire from the Old & NewWorlds Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland December 21-23, 2012 — please hold your applause until the end of each set. — Gabriel from heaven’s king Dublin Troper (early 14th century) Christe redemptor Guillaume Du Fay (ca.1397–1474) There is no rose Anonymous English (15th century) Ave rex angelorum Anonymous English (ca.1430-44) Nowell sing we Anonymous English (ca.1450) Quid petis, o fili? Richard Pygott (ca.1485–1549)* Rey a quien reyes adoran Anonymous (Cancionero de Uppsala, 1556) Dadme albriçias Anonymous (Cancionero de Uppsala) Canite tuba in Sion Jakob Handl (1550–1591) A solis ortus cardine Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525–1594) —intermission— Puer natus in Bethlehem Anonymous (Piæ cantiones, 1582) Verbum caro factum est Anonymous (Piæ cantiones, 1582) Gaudete Anonymous (Piæ cantiones, 1582) Venite exultemus William Byrd (1543–1623) In dulci jubilo (a 8) Michael Praetorius (1571–1621) Quem pastores laudavere Praetorius Psallite, unigenito (Singt und klingt) Praetorius Chantons Noel Mathiew Sohier (d. ca.1560) Venès lèu vèire la pièucello Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632–1687) Tous les bourgeois de Châtre Anonymous French (17th century) Emanuel: As shepherds in Jewry William Billings (1746–1800) Unto us a child is born Joseph Stone (1758–1837) Salter’s Hall: Hark! the glad sound Thomas Smith (1832) ______ *All music edited by Ross Duffin, except Quid petis. 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, music directors, and educators at many of the major churches, synagogues, and schools in northeast Ohio, they have sung together in historically-informed ensembles, such as the Early Music Singers at Case Western Reserve University and Apollo’s Singers of Apollo’s Fire. Quire performs nine centuries of a cappella repertoire. The Cleveland Plain Dealer has praised “the inspired voices of Quire Cleveland,” ClevelandClassical. com has called their singing “ecstasy-producing” and, according to Cool Cleveland, “the joyful sounds could easily have soared to the very heavens.” Q UIRE CLEVELAND Sopranos: Donna Fagerhaug, Judith Overcash, Lisa Rainsong, Malina Rauschenfels, Sandra Simon, Gail West Altos: Tracy Cowart, John McElliott, Beverly Simmons, Jay White Tenors: Evan Bescan, Jeremiah Heilman, Bryan Munch, Tyler Skidmore Basses: Ian Crane, José Gotera, Nathan Longnecker, Ray Lyons, Brian MacGilvray, Daniel Singer Board of Directors: Richard Rodda, ph.d., President; Ross W. Duffin, dma, Artistic Director; Beverly Simmons, dma, Executive Director; John McElliott, Secretary; Gerald P. Weinstein, ph.d., cpa, Treasurer Quire Cleveland 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 na- tionally recognized historical performance program there. He is the Fynette H. Kulas Professor at CWRU, where he also directs the Early Music Singers when not serving as Music Department chair. 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 Du Fay 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 AMS inaugural Claude Palisca Prize. Many of the editions and arrangements sung by Quire Cleveland are his. Other publications include a selection of Josquin motets for Oxford University Press, a re- construction of the early Tudor St. Matthew Passion by Richard Davy, and motets from the Jacobean period (recently recorded by Quire Cleveland, thanks to a grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture). His book, How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and why you should care)—called by one reviewer “the most subversive book on a musical subject I’ve ever read”—has generated speaking invitations throughout North America and Europe. He has also sung with Apollo’s Fire since its inception in 1992. Ross’s maternal grandfather was a professional countertenor in London, England, and his mother conducted her church choir in London, Ontario—making him a third- generation choral conductor. P ROGRAM NOTES by Ross W. Duffin Quire Cleveland is pleased to bring you another wonderful selection of musical works expressing the joy and hope of the Christmas season—from chant and sophisticated solemn motets to danceable villancicos, from Medieval and Renaissance Europe all the way to 19th-century America. The 13th-century English piece,Gabriel from Heven King, 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; 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 (1844–89) made a rendering of it that has formed the basis of our singing version. The musical text is taken from two manuscripts of the 14th century. Next is a setting of the Gregorian Christmas hymn, Christe redemptor, by the great 15th-century Franco-Flemish composer Guillaume Du Fay. Du Fay alternates verses of chant with his polyphonic setting, using the chant melody in the top voice of the texture, though slightly ornamented in a way that is referred to as a “paraphrase.” This type of setting shows an early 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. The result is 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. From the same century in England come several Christmas songs in a popular form for lyric works at the time—the carol. So common did this form become for Christmas works that nowadays we use the term “carol” by itself to denote a Christmas song, though it did not originally have that connotation. The typical carol uses a refrain, or “burden,” which alternates with several verses, as in the first and third pieces in this set. Another feature of these delightful English carols is the use of “macaronic” text, that is, lyrics that move back and forth between Latin and another language—in this case, English. Whether the title is English or Latin, they all include lyrics in both languages. An English carol from the early 16th 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 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 works from Spain from a collection of anonymous villancicos printed in Venice in 1556, which includes a special section of Christmas songs. Though printed, the volume survives in only a single copy, now in the University Library in Uppsala, Sweden, so it has been dubbed the Cancionero de Uppsala. One of its handful of Christmas songs is Rey a quien, which presents Trinitarian imagery in a lively, syncopated setting, characteristic of the repertoire. Dadme albriçias features soprano solos and duets with tenor, alternating with the chorus. Jakob Handl (also known as “Gallus”) was born in Slovenia and worked mainly in Austria before spending his last few years in Prague. His Canite tuba in Sion, based on an Office antiphon for the Fourth Sunday of Advent, features an unusual scoring for low voices which interweave in close counterpoint. It was published in 1586 in the first volume of Handl’s monumental four-volume edition of his own motets, which he began to publish shortly after his arrival in Prague. Palestrina’s A solis ortus cardine sets a chant hymn for Christmas morning, at the service of Lauds. One highly unusual feature of the piece is that Palestrina sets the well-known Gregorian melody in a different mode (Dorian, rather than Phrygian), even though such a version does not survive in any period chant books. We have used a reconstruction of this apparent source melody for our chant. Like Du Fay’s hymn, Palestrina’s setting uses alternatim technique, where verses of the chant alternate with polyphonic verses variously for three, four, and ultimately five voices. Published in 1589, during which time Palestrina was maestro di cappella at St. Peter’s in Rome, it also survives in manuscripts copied by Palestrina himself, so it seems to be a work of which he was especially fond. The next three works were published in the 1582 Latin collectionPiæ Cantiones, though a Finnish version published in 1616 may reflect the origin of the collection. Puer natus in Bethlehem is a strophic hymn based on the Introit for Christmas Day; it is set in Piæ Cantiones, rather unusually, as a duo. I have expanded the texture to include a four-voice arrangement, in addition to an array of textures in the many stanzas, with solos, duos, and quartets, for women and men, and both together.