THE PITTSBURGH CAMERATA

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CONTENTS

The Program....................................................................................... 3

About the Music................................................................................. 4

About the Musicians......................................................................... 14

About the Composers...................................................................... 15

About The Pittsburgh Camerata.....................................................22

Photo courtesy of John Filippone

Mrs. Rollett gratefully acknowledges the perhaps inadvertent assistance of Wikipedia in the preparation of the program notes

and composer bios. Wikipedia is one of the blessings of the internet age, and we should all contribute to it if we are able...

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Intonation sesto tono Andrea Gabrieli (1532-1585)

Deus qui beatum Marcum a 8

Ricercare nono tono

O Jesu mi dulcissime Giovanni Gabrieli (1553-1612)

Intonation quarto tono Andrea Gabrieli

Plaudite omnis terra Giovanni Gabrieli

Congaudeant cathoici Codex Calixtinus

Kathryn Copeland Donaldson, Ann Cloutier, Joy Hess

Quam pulchra es John Dunstable (1390-1453)

Jennifer Lawyer, Guy Russo, Ben Filippone

Beata es, virgo Phillipe Verdelot (1480-1532)

Kathryn Copeland Donaldson, Yvonne Sterrett, Ann Cloutier, Benjamin Brown, Jeffrey Gross,

Brian Doherty, Paul Nicolaysen

Schaffe in mir Gott, ein rein Herz Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Hymn to the Cherubim Sergei Rakhmaninoff (1833-1897)

Fern Hill John Corigliano (b. 1938)

Jane Baumer, mezzo

I love my love arr. Gustav Holst (1874-1934)

Just as the tide was flowing arr. Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)

Shenandoah arr. James Erb (b. 1926)

Ballad of Green Broom Benjamin Britten (1913-1976)

FIELDS OF PRAISE

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s p r e s u m a b l y e v e r y o n e h a s

worked out by now, the music on this p r o g r a m w a s programmed and performed during the Gayle Kirkwood e r a o f t h e Camerata’s history. I tried to represent as many examples as I could of Gayle’s p r o g r a m m i n g p r i o r i t i e s . H e r e ’s s o m e information about what I chose.

The three pieces which start the program appeared on a program given in the spring of 1991 titled “Glories of the Venetian Renaissance.” One is by Andrea Gabrieli, the other two by his nephew Giovanni. They are typical examples of the so-called polychoral style. The first two motets were written for eight parts, the third for 12 parts.

For years I labored under the misconception that the various groups of singers would sing from the balconies in San

Marco. However, during a workshop on Renaissance choral music I attended in Rimini , I ta ly, the present director of music at San Marco disabused us of this notion. He said that for the state services in which these large-scale works would be performed a number of platforms were set up in the front of the church. The singers were divided up by ability, really, with the most difficult and elaborate parts being staffed with the most seasoned and accomplished singers. Since this would be a small subset of the choir, they would stand at the front where they could be heard the best,

and the main bulk of the choir stood at the back, singing the easier bits.

The same gentle-man told us some-t h i n g w h i c h revolutionized my view of Renaissance choral music—that everywhere except the Vatican it was accompanied, at

least by organ. Furthermore, the organist would make things more interesting and exciting ( fo r h imse l f a t leas t ) by improvising all sorts of little r u n s a n d o r n a m e n t s , particularly on the soprano part, rather than just doubling the singers. Fortunately I have our organist well in hand, as he has to go home with me, and any unauthorized activity at the organ will be swiftly and decisively dealt with.

As to the pieces themselves, they are typical of the style. Only the final piece alternates “choirs”; the other two move voices in and out as needed.

About the MusicA

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They are also typical of the era in that most of the middle parts are in an awkward range which at limes goes too low for altos and at other times goes too high for tenors. As is my usual practice with such repertoire, I h a v e re - a r r a n g e d p a r t s , changed keys, and whatever else is necessary to make it easier to sing. As I understand it, this is something Gayle never would have done. She was much more of a purist than I am. I prefer an easy life : )

The next three pieces come from two different programs. Quam pulchra es appeared in Spring 1988 on the program “Echoes from Renaissance Cathedrals in Praise of the Madonna.” The other two were performed at the first program of the 1988-89 season, “Pilgrim Way: A Musical Journey.”

Despite my grouping of them, the three pieces a r e v e r y d i f f e r e n t . The first is f r o m t h e C o d e x Cal ixt inus, dating from

the 12th century. This was an illuminated manuscript which was intended as sort of a travel guide for those making the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, one of the principal pilgrimage sites in the Middle Ages. Along with p i c tu res ( t he nex t th ree illustrations are from the Codex) i t con ta ined t rave l t ips , sermons, liturgical texts, and some remarkable polyphony.

Here is what Gayle had to say about the music back in 1988:

The polyphony of the Codex is

among the oldest known to scholars and the transcription of it for a modern performance is greatly complicated by the lack of rhythmic symbols in the notation, as well as only vague indications of how the two* voices are to sound together.

(*In the case of Congaudeant catholici there were three parts given, making it the first known composition for three voices.)

Because of the rhythmic issues she mentions, etc., I’ve chosen to assume a triple meter (always a popular choices for medieval religious music), and to br ing the voices in progressively. It probably didn’t actually sound like this, but on the other hand nobody has any idea of what it actually did sound like, so that’s okay.

And I must say, I wouldn’t mind so much paying the sometimes

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outrageous prices for music books one has to these days if they looked as nice as they did back then. Of course, a copy of the Codex probably cost more than an average person earned in a year. Or ten.

The second piece is by John Dunstable, who was working about three centuries later than the music from the Codex.

Dunstable was the best-known English composer of his era, and Quam pulchra es was his most popular work, one which was extremely influential on the Continent. Like many musicians since his time, Dunstable, who was in the service of the Duke of Bedford, served in various c a p a c i t i e s — m u s i c i a n , mathematician, and astrologer. It’s always good to be, as Mike

Tomlin would say, multiple position-capable.

T h e p i e c e i s , l i k e t h e Congaudeant, for three voices. But the differences are striking. In the earlier work the three voices don’t always seem to be from the same piece. The second and third voices are much simpler. In the Dunstable the voices move mostly in concert, and other than a few decorated words and the final a l l e l u i a , t h e t e x t i s s e t essentially one syllable per note. In the Congaudeant the text of the verse is mostly syllabic for voices two and three, but the chorus consists of four syllables spread out over about 60 notes, which

naturally gives a very different effect.

The Dunstable piece was so well-regarded it gave rise to its own name for the style—the “contenance anglois.”

This expression was not used pejoratively, but referred to what the writer (Martin le franc) felt was a particular sweetness which could well be imitated by continental composers. This may be the last time a French writer said anything good about the English, at least until much more recent times...

In case you’re wondering what the picture below has to do with the Dunstable piece, it is a

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Carraveggio painting, Rest on the Flight into Egypt. The music Joseph is holding for the angel to play and sing (surely an angel can do both at once) is Quam pulchra es, although it is a setting by a Flemish composer, Noel Baulduin, rather than Dunstable. The last piece in this group is possibly a century younger than the Dunstable, well into the high Renaissance. It is a seven-part hymn to the Virgin. Six of the parts use the “Beata es virgo Maria” text, in a heavily imitative texture. For instance, the first voice to enter is followed one beat later by the same part—a canon at the unison, although the piece isn’t strictly canonic.

But surprisingly, when voice #7 enters, after everyone else has already had a go at singing the “Beata es virgo” theme, lo and behold voice #7 is singing phrases of Josquin’s Ave Maria, which was a Top of the Pops hit tune at the time. (Voice #7 is the soprano 2 part, in case you’re wondering.)

She doesn’t get involved in any of the melismatic frenzy soon to come, but calmly sings her bits

of the Ave Maria until everyone else gives in and sings an Ave Maria as well (part II of the motet.)

A n d n o w f o r s o m e t h i n g complete ly d i f fe rent—the Brahms motet. This was first performed during the 1982-83 season, and Gayle Kirkwood also programmed it in March of 1991, on a program called “Choral Poetry : Music of Johannes Brahms.” In her program notes, Ms. Kirkwood says:

For Clara Schumann, Brahms’s motet Schaffe in mir Gott ein rein Herz was “the crown of everything.”

When we read through the

motet at our first rehearsal, I noted this was probably the best of the Brahms motets. One o f t he s i nge r s was outraged, so I asked him which was his favorite. He said “probably Warum ist das Licht gegeben.” After we sang through this motet, though, he retracted his statement and agreed that this is pretty darn beautiful.

The text is from Psalm 51: 10-12. The motet is in four sections—I wouldn’t say they are actually movements, since they flow together so naturally. The first is all lush Brahmsian harmonies, in a f ive-part texture. Both appearances of the text “give me a new right spirit” are highlighted by Brahms with a big crescendo. (The word I’ve given as “right” is the word “gewissen,” which means moral sense or faculty. It derives from the Latin word for “conscience.”) It is interesting to note Brahms emphasizes this word rather than “Geist.”

This is followed by a fugal section, and in fact Brahms began writing the piece as a counterpoint exercise, so this is presumably the original germ of the piece. The text is the bit in

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which the psalmists implores God not to turn away his face nor take away His spirit. The fugue subject is very sinuous and chromatic, which illustrates the text well. Brahms uses only four parts here instead of splitting the basses as he did in the first section, and ends with only three voices, dropping out the sopranos and ending on a low G open octave, also nicely illustrative.

But the lush first section is also a counterpo int exerc i se , actually, as there is a very clever canon in augmentation between the soprano and the bass line. The bass line is exact ly the same as the soprano line, only two octaves l o w e r a n d h a l f a s f a s t . Naturally, the basses only get to sing half of the line, since it takes twice as long, but it is an impressive feat of disguised counterpoint, worthy of Bach himself...

Next comes my favorite bit of the piece, after the f irst section, that is, in which Brahms stays with the three-voice texture, but this time uses first the three men’s parts, then repeats it exactly with three women’s parts. This is on

the text “Comfort me with your help, and give me your joyful spirit.” It is serene, beautiful, and really awkward to sing for the middle part. I couldn’t help but wonder why. Maybe it was Brahms’ idea of a little joke, as it is scarcely either comforting or fun to sing.

It turns out, though, that the awkwardness, especially for the middle voice, is because the middle voice is the mediator, if you will, between the tenor melody and the bass melody, which is the tenor melody repeated one measure later and a seventh lower.

After a couple of iterations by the men Brahms apparently decides he’s had an answer to his plea (to “take not Thy Holy Spirit from me”) in t h e a f f i r m a t i v e , because the l a s t section, which comes directly off the men’s final trio cadence, is uptempo, loud, and quite exultant. It is a l s o i m i t a t i v e i n nature, so perhaps it was more of Brahms’s c o u n t e r - p o i n t

exercise. All I can say is, I wish my counterpoint exercises had been half as successful...

N e x t , t h e H y m n o f t h e Cherubim. Its first and only per-formance until now with the Camerata was on the May 1 9 9 3 c o n c e r t “ S a c r e d Treasures: Music of Eastern Europe.”

The text is really interesting—it is from the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. It is a typically mystical Orthodox text, but the literal rendering in English (if it even can be literally rendered) doesn’t fit with the music, and the singing “translation” I

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found was a bit pedestrian. So I juggled words and possibly made it worse than before. Here is the literal translation:

[ W e ] , w h o m y s t i c a l l y representing the cherubim and singing the thrice-holy hymn to the life-creating Trinity, let us now lay aside every worldly care so that we may raise up the king of all who is invisibly borne aloft by the angelic orders. Alleluia.

Since we had a relatively brief rehearsa l per iod for th is program I decided we would sing it in English rather than Church Slavonic. Once again, I’m sure Gayle would never have done this. Heck, in the 1993 program book all of the diacritical marks were carefully w r i t t e n i n b y h a n d , a s presumably the computers of that day couldn’t make them. And by my actual count, the text for one short piece alone required 71 diacritical marks.

The group sang five pieces from the Liturgy. Here is what Gayle had to say about the work:

Along with his All-Night Vigil, sometimes known as the Vespers, Rachmaninov’s setting of the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom ranks as one of the great monuments of Russian a c a p p e l l a c h o r a l m u s i c . Composed in July 1910 at his summer estate southeast of Moscow, the composer wrote of its creation, “I have been thinking about the Liturgy for a long time and for a long time, I was striving to write it. I stated to work on it somehow by chance and then suddenly became fascinated with it. And then I finished it very quickly. Not for a long time...have I written anything with such pleasure.”

Rakhman ino f f makes l i f e difficult for small choruses, as the men divide neatly into three parts m o s t o f the t ime, b u t t h e w o m e n m o v e constantly b e t w e e n two parts, t h r e e parts, and f o u r ( o r

even more) parts. So the women singing in the middle (soprano 2 and alto 1) are kept on their toes, jumping back and forth between the various lines. It’s worth the trouble, though! Or at least I think so. Feel free to ask a second soprano or first alto whether they agree...

John Corigliano’s setting of Fern Hill was sung by the Camerata in Gayle Kirkwood’s last season. It was actually programmed not by Gayle but by John Goldsmith, who con-ducted the group for two concerts while she was on sabbatical during the 1997-98 season. This piece was on the first of the two, titled “The P o e t ’s Vo i c e : A m e r i c a n Harmonies.”

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Corigliano wrote the first version of this piece, for chorus, mezzo-soprano soloist, and chamber orchestra, in 1961. He revised it twice—in 1965 he wrote a version for full orchestra, and in 1999 he r e w o r k e d t h e c h a m b e r o rches t ra ve rs ion , wh ich premiered with a boy soprano on the solo line. Here’s what Corigliano says about the piece:

I f i rst encountered Dylan Thomas’ work in 1959, my last u n d e r g r a d u a t e y e a r a t Columbia College. It was a revelation. Both the sound and structures of Thomas’s words were astonishingly musical. Not by accident, either: “What the words meant was of secondary importance; what matters was the sound of them...these

words were as the notes of bells, the sounds of musical instruments," he wrote in his Poetic Manifesto of 1951. I was irresistibly drawn to translate his music into mine. 

One poem captivated me: Fern Hill, about the poet’s “young and easy" summers at his family’s farm of the same name. I wanted to write this work as a gift for my high-school music teacher, Mrs. Bella Tillis, who first encouraged my musical ambitions. She introduced Fern Hill with piano accompanying her (and, once, my) school choir. 

Fern Hill is a blithe poem, yet touched by darkness; time finally holds the poet “green and dying," but the poem itself, formally just an ABA song

extended into a wide arch, sings joyously of youth and its keen perceptions. I set it for mezzo-soprano solo, chorus, and orchestra, aiming to match the forthright lyricism of the text. (The direction “with simplicity" is everywhere in the printed score.)

A couple of things strike me about Corigliano’s explanation. The first is his experience of Thomas’ poetry as “musical.” I suppose this isn’t surprising, Thomas being Welsh and all, because music seems to flow naturally from most Welsh people. It is easy to see how Corigliano experienced it, because the music and the poetry seem inext r icably intertwined in this piece.

The other thing which struck

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me was that his high school chorus must have been pretty darn good. This is not an easy piece!

The pictures are from Wales—the one on page 9 is the famous boathouse in which Thomas wrote a great deal of his poetry. The picture on the previous page was taken by me in the small village in South Wales in which my daughter lives. It contains the obligatory sheep and a dingle—a little wooded valley. So now you don’t have to wonder anymore what “the night above the dingle starry” means, because of course it is the night that is starry, not the dingle. Just thought I should clear that up.

And finally we get to the group of folksongs. One of the four is not like the other three. There are two ways to look at this. You could say that Shenandoah is not like the others, because it is an American folk tune and arranger, and the other three are English. Or you could say Ballad of Green Broom is not like the others, because the other three are relatively straightforward arrangements

of the tunes, and Britten is seen at his quirkiest in this piece. F u r t h e r m o re , i t i s n ’ t a n arrangement at all. Britten wrote the music for the folk poem he found. So I think Green Broom wins the contest.

The flowering of interest in a “national” style of music composition across Europe and in Britain during the late 19th century had various interesting results. One such in Britain was a rediscovery of Elizabethan polyphony such as that written by William Byrd. One might regret the somewhat jingoistic spirit which felt the need for specifically “British” music, but the outcome justif ies the means, if you will.

The other main result was a great surge of interest in national folk music. Gustav Holst became very interested in collecting folk songs in the early 1900s, and soon recruited his fr iend Ralph Vaughan Williams to help. The way they “collected” these songs was pretty direct—they went to some small village, asked around as to who sang, and then persuaded the singers to sing the songs to them while they wrote them down. It was probably crucial that they began as early as they did, because I’m guessing a great deal of traditional tunes and texts would have already been lost had the effort been made later in the century.

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They used these tunes as a basis for their own ‘serious’ music, of course, either directly quoting tunes or using the modal harmonies upon which so many traditional tunes were based. But Vaughan Williams and Holst also arranged a n u m b e r o f t u n e s f o r performance.

The first is Holst’s I love my loveˆ, a Cornish folksong collected by G. B. Gardiner. As with many folk songs, it tells a dramatic story, in this case the story of a young woman who goes mad when her lover is sent to sea. It all ends well, you'll be happy to hear. The t u rg i d s e a s c a p e o n t h e previous page (by William Mctaggert, 1890) gives the feeling of the piece very well.

Vaughan Wil l iam’s “freely arranged” setting of Just as the tide was flowing is a more typical sea shanty. Here’s what Vaughan Williams had to say about the origin of folk tunes:

We folk-song collectors are often asked 'what is the origin' of a particular song or 'how old' is it? There is no answer to either of these questions; there

is no original version of any particular tune; any given tune has hundreds of origins. Nor can we say how old it is; in one sense any particular tune is as old as the beginnings of music, in another sense it is born afresh with the singer of today who sang it.

James Erb’s evocative arrange-ment of Shenandoah was for the University of Richmond Choir’s European tour in 1971. It has remained a staple of the repertoire ever since. It’s difficult to imagine a more lovely setting of this tune.

The tune itself is of unknown origin, but was popular with river boatmen during the 19th

century. It was first printed in 1882 in the “Harper’s New Monthly Magazine” as part of an article titled “Sailor Songs,” written by William L. Alden.

The very beautiful photograph of the Shenandoah valley below was taken by Gorden Friedrich, a Canadian who decided to ride the Valley on his motorcycle and blog about i t . H e v e r y k i n d l y g a v e permission to use the photo.

And finally, Green Broom. A l t h o u g h B r i t t e n w a s a generation younger than Holst and Vaughan Williams, he was definitely influenced by their interest in both folk music and early English music. He wrote a

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number of straight-forward folk song arrangements, although he added his own twist to the accompaniments, and also arranged various early English pieces, particularly the music of Purcell. The arrangements left the vocal line untouched, but the keyboard “realization” is not really of the period, you might say. They are, however, quite wonderful.

Ballad of Green Broom is, as noted, not an arrangement. It is also the last piece in the Five Flower Songs. It is quite different even from the other songs in the group, all of which take their texts from well-known British poets. But in this ballad Britten allows his puckish sense of fun free rein.

The story is one which gives me pause. I’ve been painting the woodwork in my dining room recently, and painting is an activity which mainly utilizes the outer man, so to speak, and leaves the mind free to roam at will. So the words to this song have been running through my head, and I’ve been trying to make sense out of them.

Folk songs, especially the “story” types, frequently have a moral, and so I tried my best to work out what the moral might be in this tale. I finally decided that the ultimate moral is, you do your children no favors by allowing them to live in your basement watching daytime television. (Although of course young Johnny lived before the

age of television. He just stayed in bed as long as possible.)

I f you’re wondering what broom is, the picture at left is of some broom, which is considered an invasive species in many regions, apparently. The small yellow flowers look a bit like pea blossoms. The stems are quite twiggy and nearly bare of foliage, which I suppose makes them suitable for binding into brooms.

I know al l about broom, because my mother planted one next to our lawn many years ago. She had acquired a small specimen via mail order, and was very pleased with it, at least until I practically killed it by running the lawn mower over it.

I have no idea why she thought I was responsible enough to run the lawn mower, and this appeared to convince her I wasn’t, because it was a long time before I was asked to cut the grass again. The plant came back better than ever, though, so there is a happy ending to this story as well.

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Jane Potter Baumeris the direc-

tor of the new Com-m u n i t y

Music School at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and just began the two-

year Masters degree in Speech Language Pathology there.

Jane has a B.A. in Music and International Studies from Emory

University, and an M.S. in Music Education from the University of Illinois. She is currently the director of

IUP's Crimson Children's Choir, for children in grades 3-8.

In addition to concertizing and recording extensively with Robert

Shaw’s choirs from the late ‘80s through the mid-‘90s, Jane has sung

with Ohio Light Opera, Santa Fe Desert Chorale, and Oregon Bach Festival, and was a voice teacher and

soloist at Berkshire Choral Festival.

She has been a soloist with the Ashev i l l e Symphony and the Pittsburgh Symphony Chamber

Orchestra, and has appeared in operas, musicals, and recitals with the

Department of Music at IUP.

Jane and husband Matt, a musico-

logist at IUP, have two school-age daughters, Haley and Hannah. 

Anthony Rollett, keyboard

A n t h o n y

R o l l e t t , ARCM, MA

( C a n t a b ) , P h D , w a s educated at

M a g d a l e n C o l l e g e

School, Oxford and then studied Metallurgy & Materials Science at Clare College, Cambridge, gradu-

ating in 1976. He began organ studies at the age of 15 with Peter

Ward-Jones and was awarded an Associate Certif icate in Organ Teaching by the Royal College of

Music in 1973.

While at Clare, he was a choral scholar in the chapel choir underthe direction first of Peter Dennison

and then John Rutter. He also studied the organ with Gillian Weir.

In 1995 he moved to Pittsburgh to become the Department Head of

Materials Science & Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. he

returned to full-time teaching and research in 2000. Since coming to Pittsburgh, he has been active as a

substitute organist in the area.

Rebecca Rollett studied organ and

composition with David N. Johnson,

accompanying with Jean Barr, and choral conducting with Douglas McEwen at Arizona State University.

She completed her degree in Organ

Per fo r mance a t Ora l Rober t s University. She holds an Associate

Certificate with the American Guild of Organists.

While resident in New Mexico, Mrs. Rollett directed the Chamber Singers

of the Chorus of Santa Fe, and was Chorus Director for the Santa Fe Symphony. She was also Artistic

Director of Coro de Cámara, a chamber vocal ensemble. During her

tenure, the ensemble earned a reputation for unusual programming and fine singing.

In 1995 Mrs. Rollett moved to

Pittsburgh, and in 1998 she earned a Masters degree in Choral Conducting under Robert Page at Carnegie

Mellon University. That same year she was chosen as the new Artistic

Director of the Pittsburgh Camerata.

Mrs. Rollett is an adjunct faculty member at Duquesne University as a

harpsichord instructor. She is also a keen Steelers fan, and is a staff writer for Behind the Steel Curtain, one of

Steeler Nation's largest fan sites.

About the Musicians

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About the ComposersAndrea Gabrieli

Gabr ie l i the elder w a s a pupil of A d r i a n W i l laer t a n d a f a m e d singer at

San Marco. As so many singers do, he cherished a secret (or perhaps not-so-secret) desire to become the the organist. After a number of unsuccessful applications he became the secondary organist and finally, in 1566, the maestro di capella.

He was a prolific composer, writing works in almost every gen re , i n c l ud ing ove r a hundred motets and madrigals. He also wrote a body of instrumental music, much of it for solemn occasions at San Marco.

He was also a well-known pedagogue in his later years. His two most prominent pupils were Hans Leo Hassler, who assisted in the cross-fertilization

of the concertato style between Germany and Italy, and his nephew, Giovanni, our next composer.

Giovanni Gabrieli

Although his uncle had an impressive hat, Giovanni had an even more impressive career. And it is thanks to this young man that we have most of Andrea’s music, because he edited and published it after Andrea’s untimely death in 1585.

The young Gabrieli spent considerable time in Munich as a court musician, and while in Germany he also studied with his uncle’s friend Orlando di Lasso.

He returned to Venice some-

time after 1579, and eventually became first the principal organist and then the official composer after Andrea’s death. By this time the music at San Marco was known all over E u r o p e , a n d G i o v a n n i cont inued in h i s unc le ’s footsteps. With the publication of Sacrae symphoniae in 1597 he became the teacher du jour, with musicians coming from all over Europe to study with him. One of the composers to do so was Heinrich Schütz,.

John Dunstable

Al though Duns tab le was English, he was unusually influential in Europe, because he spent much of his career in France with the Duke of Bedford (brother to Henry V.)

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The duke was first Regent of occupied France and then G o v e r n o r o f N o r m a n d y between 1423 and his death in 1435.

Dunstable appears to have done well out of his service to the Duke. Mind you, he gave value for money, as he also served as an astronomer, astrologer, and mathematician.

Dunstable was enormously influential on the Continent, and was considered to have o r i g i n a t e d s o m e o f t h e techniques which defined the Burgundian school of Dufay and Binchois. Many of the elements in Dunstable’s music a re charac ter i s t i c o f the dawning Renaissance style.

It is only due to Dunstable spending so much time in France that we have essentially any of his music at all, as most of his manuscripts residing in England were destroyed during t h e d i s s o l u t i o n o f t h e monasteries under Henry VIII. Almost all of his music still ex tant i s f rom European sources.

Phillipe Verdelot

W i t h a name like h i s , o n e a s s u m e s Ve r d e l o t w a s a F r e n c h -man, but you would o n l y b e

partially correct. He spent most of his life in Italy.

S i n c e t h e p i e c e w e a re performing is a sacred work, you would probably a lso assume he was working at one of the big churches, perhaps even the Vatican, and you would be partially correct this time, but as far as we know Verdelot was never at the Vatican.

But although he held important positions in Florence, even at the Duomo for a time, he was unfortunately prone to dabble in the very messy political scene, and even collaborated with Machiavelli, which was probably not a good idea. He wrote the music for Machia-velli’s infamous comedy La Mandragola, which eventually got Machievelli expelled from Florence.

The music Verdelot wrote for the play is viewed as some of the very f i r s t madr iga l s , a l though he ca l led them canzone. Verdelot, along with Constanzo Festo, is considered the father of the madrigal form, and he wrote a great many of them.

One large group of them were assembled and printed under Verdelot’s supervision as a gift to Henry VIII of England, perhaps so the king, a noted connoisseur of music, could judge whether they had sufficient “English counte-nance...”

Verdelot disappeared around 1530. He may have died of the plague, he may have died in t h e s i e g e o f F l o r e n c e , conducted by the Spanish, or he may just have made the Medicis a little bit too angry. Some sources give his death at around 1550, believing they have traced him after 1532, but there isn’t firm evidence.

Even the picture I used, the only one I could find, might or might not be of Verdelot. He is truly a man of mystery. The picture is surprisingly modern,

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somehow, although it was painted in Verdelot’s day by Lorenzo Luzzo.

Johannes Brahms

The image we usually have of Brahms is of the old guy with lots of white hair, but I like this young, intense Brahms, one who could easily star in a dayt ime te lev i s ion show. Besides, this is how he looked in 1853, much closer to the time period for the motet we are singing (it was written between 1856 and 1860.)

Brahms was inspired to study counterpoint largely through t h e e n c o u r a g e m e n t a n d influence of Robert Schumann, and he undertook to study it through writing choral music.

This motet was one of three he wrote dur ing the per iod between 1856 and 1860. (The other two are O Heiland, reiß die Himmel auf and Es ist das Heil.) In these motets, Brahms consciously looked back to the

polyphonic techniques of the Renaissance, which he had been working to acquire. (Thus the fugal material in Schaffe in mir, Gott began as a coun-terpoint exercise.)

Although Brahms wrote a great many vocal works (both solo and choral) after 1860, he only wrote one other set of motets, in 1889. But the contrapuntal techniques he developed in these motets informed his o rches t ra l works fo r the remainder of his life.

Sergei Rakhmaninoff

Rakhmaninoff wrote his setting of the Liturgy of St. John C h r y s o s t o m , t h e m o s t important Orthodox liturgy, in 1910. Unlike the All-Night Vigil of 1915, which was intended for concert performance, this was intended to be used liturgically.

Somehow or other, though, he managed to make everyone

unhappy. After the Liturgy’s p remiere in Moscow the ecclesiastical authorities were very clear that the piece’s “spirit of modernism” was unacceptable, and it was not sanctioned for use in services.

As Lee Passarella says in his introduction to a recording of the work by the Latvian Radio Choir,

It’s hard for us to understand the objections of the Church hierarchy to Rachmaninoff’s work. Its spir it is quietly reverential, it’s rhythmically s t a i d , i t ’s h a rd l y d a r i n g h a r m o n i c a l l y, a n d i t i s prevailingly lovely. If the work seems almost uneventful, that’s the upshot of Rachmaninoff’s good intentions. He wanted to create a setting that was true to the ancient traditions of the Orthodox Church, not a work that celebrated the composer as much as God,

After the communist revolution of 1914 religious music wasn’t acceptable at all, outside a highly constricted church.

So the work languished in obscurity until the 1980s, when it was necessary to recreate the score from the surviving part-

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books, something which seems much more appropriate to Renaissance and Baroque music than to something written in the 20th century. We are fortunate to have gotten it back.

John Corigliano

Excerpted from his website:

Cor ig l iano 's scores , now numbering over one hundred, have won him the Pulitzer Prize, the Grawemeyer Award, four Grammy Awards , and an Academy Award (“Oscar”) and have been performed and recorded by many of the most prominent orchestras, soloists, and chamber musicians in the world...

Corigliano’s theatricality, at once thoughtful and innate, has

vivified his eight concerti: his mos t recen t conce r to i s Conjurer (2008), for percussion a n d s t r i n g o r c h e s t r a . Commissioned by an inter-national consortium of six orchestras for Evelyn Glennie, Conjurer was introduced by the Pittsburgh Symphony in the 2007-2008 season, when the orchestra designated him its Composer of the Year.

For Joshua Bell, Corigliano composed Concerto for Violin and Orchestra: The Red Violin (2005.) Developed from the themes of the score to the François Girard’s film of the s a m e n a m e , w h i c h w o n Corigliano an Oscar in 1999, Conce r to fo r V io l i n and Orchestra was introduced by the Ba l t imore Symphony Orchestra under Marin Alsop...

While he has composed three large-scale works for voice and orchestra, Corigliano’s lone opera to date is The Ghosts of Ve r s a i l l e s ( 1 9 9 1 ) , w h i c h counterposes the fiction of Mozart and Beaumarchais with the Reign of Terror to create a richly multilayered meditation on the need for, and costs of, personal and social change. The Metropolitan Opera's first

commission in three decades, The Ghosts of Versailles suc-ceeded brilliantly with both critics and audiences: the season it opened, Corigliano was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and Musical America named him its first-ever "Composer of the Year."

Corigliano serves on the com-position faculty at the Juilliard School of Music and holds the posit ion of Dist inguished Professor of Music at Lehman College, City University of New York, which has established a scholarship in his name.

Gustav Holst

This picture from 1903 shows not the grand old man of the British music scene one usually sees but instead the eager

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young collector of folk music.

But Elizabethan madrigals and motets and English folksongs weren’t his only interests during this time. He was also very intrigued by Hindu mysticism, and composed several works between 1899 and 1914 on Sanskit texts, even going to the lengths of enrolling in a course in Sanskit at University College, London, as a “non-matriculated” student so that he could translate the texts of his last three Sanskrit works himself.

But although his interest in Hindu texts seemed to die out, his love for English folksong never did, and its influence infused his work throughout his life, and one of his late works w a s a s e t o f 1 2 W e l s h folksongs.

Holst was never a healthy man, and had been rejected for military service at the onset of World War I because of “bad eyes, bad lungs, and bad digestion.” His state of health w a s n o t i m p ro v e d b y a concussion caused by a fall from a conductor's podium, and he never fully recovered. And people wonder why I don’t

like standing on podiums. I too have bad eyes and bad lungs, and I take this as an object lesson...

Ralph Vaughan Williams

I ’ ve a l so chosen a picture of the dapper y o u n g c o l l e c t o r o f f o l k s o n g s rather than the grand

old man of British music.

Vaughan Williams composed in essentially every genre of music, and was perhaps the m o s t i n f l u e n t i a l B r i t i s h composer of the 20th century. He was also a teacher, lecturer, and conductor. As with Holst, his music throughout his life was infused with the spirit of folksong. Perhaps because of these invest igat ions into folksong and early English m u s i c , M a u r i c e R a v e l commented that of all of his pupils, Vaughan Williams was the only one who didn’t sound like Ravel. (RVW studied with Ravel in Paris for three months,

beginning at the very end of 1907.)

He wrote in essentially every genre, including 11 film scores. He neve r embraced the modernism pervading the musical scene, leading Fuller Maitland to say that in Vaughan Williams's music "one is never quite sure whether one is listening to something very old or very new."

James Erb

I found the picture above in a 2007 article about James Erb by Clarke Bustard in the Richmond Style Weekly which I found so touching I decided to include it essentially in its entirety:

One of the longest runs in Richmond music-making ends this weekend — maybe.

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The women of the Richmond Symphony Chorus will join the orchestra in "Sirènes," the final s e c t i o n o f D e b u s s y ' s Nocturnes. It's the last time the group will prepare a piece under the direction of James Erb. Then, for the first time in 53 years, Erb will be without a choir to call his own.

"I'll miss it terribly," he says. "Making music with people, to me, is everything."

Erb has been leading groups of local singers since 1954, when he joined the University of Richmond faculty and took over its choral program. In 1966, he turned an ad-hoc Chorus of Alumni and Friends of the University of Richmond into a free-standing community choir, CAFUR. He retired from the univers i ty and disbanded CAFUR in 1994. By that time, he was in his 23rd season as director of the Symphony Chorus, which he founded in 1971...

Erb dec ided to qui t the Symphony Chorus because, he says, "I'm 81 years old. My short-term memory is not as agile as it used to be. I didn't want to resign, but I wanted to

make the call before somebody else had to."...

Erb knew that music would be his life's work by the time he graduated from high school in his native Denver. He began as a boy chorister in the city's Episcopal cathedral, and as a teenager studied with Antonia Brico, a pioneering female conductor. "She taught me that conducting is basically learning how to listen to music," he says.

Erb turned to choral con-ducting in the summer of 1948. Then a sophomore at Harvard, h e j o i n e d a c h o r u s a t Tanglewood, the music festival i n t h e B e r k s h i r e s o f Massachusetts, to sing Brahms' "German Requiem" under Robert Shaw's direction.

"It was a Pentecostal expe-rience," Erb recalls. "I knew this was what I had to do with my life."

"I've spent more than 50 years trying to understand why people are drawn to music," he says. "Music is sound arranged meaningfully in time. That's a key to the attraction, I think, because time is what we humans are really made of, and

i n m u s i c w e h a v e t i m e organized in an ideal way. All kinds of ideal ways, really, because all kinds of music, from a Bach fugue to a guy playing three chords on a guitar, seems to release emotions in much the same way.

"Singing in a group, you reach for that ideal differently," he observes. "It's not the beauty of a single voice, but beauty achieved by the voices of people who listen to one another, depend upon one anothe r, l ea r n f rom one another, and understand that what they're doing amounts to something because they are creating it for others, in the group and in an audience."

Leaving the Symphony Chorus is the second big change for Erb in the past year. Last fall he and his wife, Ruth...moved out of their home of 40 years and s e t t l e d i n t o a u n i t a t Westminster-Canterbury.

"That's taking some getting used to," Erb says. He worries that he's leaving real life and entering "elder life."

But he'll ease that transition by "spending a lo t o f t ime conversing with Mr. Bach at the

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keyboard," he says, working his way through the two books of Johann Sebastian Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier."

Benjamin Britten

You can’t get more British than this picture of Britten. And yet he lived in America from 1939-1942. The residence was o f l onge r du ra t ion than expected because of the outbreak of World War II, and he and partner Peter Pears were advised to remain in the United States as “artistic ambassadors.” I don’t know whether he could get a proper cuippa or not during that time.

Possibly not, because in 1942 Britten discovered the poems of George Crabbe (who wrote the poem Marsh Flowers Britten would later set as No. 3 of the Five Flower Songs) and w a s o v e r c o m e w i t h homesickness. He left for Britain with the intention of

writing an opera based upon the Crabbe poem which tells the tale of fisherman Peter Grimes.

Britten did indeed write this opera, which almost single-handedly revived the tradition of English-language opera, a genre essentially untapped since Purcell. As Britten himself said,

One of my chief aims [in composing opera] is to try to restore to the musical setting of t he Eng l i sh Language a brilliance, freedom and vitality that have been curiously rare since the death of Purcell.

This is an interesting comment, because somewhere along the l i n e c o m p o s e r s b e c a m e convinced that English was an unsu i t ab le l anguage fo r singing, or at least for singing opera, and Handel was of course amazingly successful as an impresario by putting on productions of his Italian operas. (Thus a German was writing operas in Italian for the enjoyment of English speakers.)

This continued throughout the 19th century, when operas of most any original language were produced in Italian at the

major London opera houses. Britten apparently set out to make this right.

As Nicholas Maw said in 1977 of Britten's vocal music: "His feeling for poetry (not only English) and the inflections of language make him, I think, the greatest musical realizer of English."

In closing, I have something which I wouldn’t have expected to find—pictures of the British postage stamps honoring our

t h r e e English-men:

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About The Pittsburgh Camerata

The Pittsburgh Camerata was f o r m e d 1 9 7 4 b y l o c a l conductor and musicologist Arthur Wenk.  Thus far the group has performed almost 1200 different pieces of music, some of which are 2 minutes long and some of which are 2 hours long.

Through the many directors who have led the group during the past 40 years the type of repertoire has remained very similar.  Each director has brought a somewhat different emphasis, but there are very f e w t h i n g s o n t h i s h u g e repertoire list which would not fit right into one of our current programs. (And in fact that’s exactly what this program is!)

When Arthur Wenk moved away in the early 1980s, Robert S h a n k o v i c h a n d A l a n McCullough in turn conducted the group for the next few years. After that, the group

went through what Susan Barclay, a singer who joined the group in 1982, refers to as the revolving-door years, when various people conducted, some for quite a short time. 

In 1986 Gayle Kirkwood was hired as Artistic Director.  She galvanized the group and put it on a much more formal and stable footing.  Under her t e n u r e T h e P i t t s b u r g h Camerata recorded the 1995 CD A Christmas Mosaic.  It was, rather unexpectedly, a local hit, and really put the organizat ion on the map. Gayle was Artistic Director until the end of the 1997-98 season, and that’s when I come into the picture.

I moved to Pittsburgh in 1995, and completed a M a s t e r s d e g r e e i n Choral Conducting at C a r n e g i e M e l l o n

University in 1998.  Near the end of my final semester at CMU I discovered Gayle Kirkwood was leaving, applied for the position, and now, 16 years later, here we are.

Many things about the group have changed through the years, but one thing never has, nor, I suspect, ever will—the desire to do the very best choral music in a way which will both honor the music and win n e w a d h e r e n t s t o t h e repertoire.

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SOUNDING AS MANY, SPEAKING AS ONE

PITTSBURGH CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY