Time, Space, Peace, Music, God

Program Notes

by John W. Ehrlich

 Several years ago, when I informed The Spectrum Singers’ Board of Directors that the chorus’s May concert of 2024 would, after 44 years, likely be my last as Music Director, tonight’s concert seemed very far off. Now that it’s here, the attendant emotions have caught up and I admit to a powerful sense of occasion, realizing that I will be saying good-bye to a group of dedicated musicians with whom it has been my singular privilege to make music for so long a time.

In planning the music for this program, I knew long ago that I wanted the Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music to be my final farewell, as it seemed to philosophically and musically contain, with its superbly appropriate text from Shakespeare, much of what has been important to my love of music and subsequent music-making. Not coincidently, this work was first brought to my attention by a childhood friend, who only this month I learned had passed away. I will have his memory in mind as this music flows forth tonight.

The other three works tonight are also personal favorites, two of which the chorus have sung before. Schoenberg’s thorny, conflicted yet cautiously optimistic plea for peace seems now all-too appropriate for our presently fraught times, and Charles Ives’s truly cosmic setting of Psalm 90, with its extraordinary exposition of music and text oscillating between conflict and resolution, has always haunted me since I first learned it many years ago. New to the chorus tonight is Vaughan Williams’s splendid Toward the Unknown Region, though its text is familiar, as is its author. Many times over the past 44 years the chorus and I have presented choral works set to Walt Whitman’s powerful poetry. And, indeed, Ralph Vaughan Williams was strongly attracted to Whitman as well. Beginning as early as 1902, he composed twelve works set to Whitman texts, culminating in his monumental Dona Nobis Pacem in 1936.

With a profound sense of respect and gratitude, then, The Spectrum Singers and I bring you this program tonight.

Schoenberg wrote Friede auf Erden in 1907, shortly after his op. 12 Ballades and just before the premiere of his watershed Second String Quartet. He was beginning to eschew traditional romantic harmony and had begun his quest toward a new form of musical expression ultimately to be dictated by serialism. Friede auf Erden, with its abundant chromaticism and its daring and challenging harmonic structure, can be heard as teetering on the cusp of the new harmonic language Schoenberg would soon embrace and promote. There are clear echoes of Brahms and Richard Strauss, but one can sense a yearning to break free of this musical vocabulary of the past. Scored as an a cappella work when first written, both Schoenberg (in 1911) and later Anton Webern supplied supportive orchestrations, presumably to encourage more frequent performances of this very rich score.

The unusual (and, frankly, confusing) verse for Friede auf Erden is that of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, a noted Swiss poet who lived from 1825 to 1898, and was plagued by mental unrest. While the sentiments of the poem are laudable, the means the verse employs to present its case are curious. How a new order of youths forging danger-free flaming swords for the cause of right can assure peace on Earth is puzzling. And just what was the message the shepherds bore to the Holy Family, and once received, what outcome ensued? These questions are left for one to ponder, and fortunately did not adversely impact Schoenberg’s quest to create a beautiful work of musical art. Yet, one wonders what attracted the composer to this very strange poem—and poet.

(Thanks to Bernard Greenberg, who first raised these questions with me, and whose elegant translation of Friede auf Erden graces this program book.)

A poignant postscript to this work occurred in 1923. In that year, Schoenberg wrote to the conductor Hermann Scherchen, thanking him for a performance of Friede auf Erden. But in the letter Schoenberg wrote that he no longer thought worldly peace possible (after the horrors of World War I?), and that the concept now seemed to him to have been merely part of an illusion. Schoenberg’s own difficulties in being accepted by the musical establishment surely also played a role in this pessimism. Fortunately, the radiant D-major conclusion—a cadence reached after a two-measure preparation of extraordinary harmonic genius—gives listeners and performers reason to be cautiously optimistic.

Because it so eloquently presents pertinent information about Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Toward the Unknown Region, and because I could not hope to improve upon it, I’m sharing Christopher Palmer’s program note on this extraordinary music.

A hundred years on, now that Whitman ’s ideals of democracy and individualism have become so integral a part of modern thought, it is hard for us to appreciate how enormously liberating was the impact of Leaves of Grass on the free-thinking young of the late Victorian generation—notably Delius, Holst and of course Vaughan Williams. Shortly before he died RVW told Michael Kennedy, “I’ve never got over [Whitman], I ’m glad to say...”, and he had good reason not to have, since two of the most outstanding successes of his early career as a composer were Whitman settings—Toward the Unknown Region (probably completed in 1906, first performed at the Leeds Festival of 1907, the composer conducting) and the mighty Sea Symphony of 1909.

Toward the Unknown Region was RVW’s first major choral piece (he calls it a “Song” for chorus and orchestra) and despite its intermittent Wagnerian echoes (Wagner was an influence that he did want to get over, and it took him quite a time to do so) its obvious inspirational qualities—not to mention its technical savoir faire in terms of the handling of massed voices—made it a success from the first. Stanford (who conducted the first London performance in 1907) and Elgar are important models, but most of all the Parry of Blest Pair of Sirens - Parry, who urged RVW to write choral music “as befits an Englishman and democrat.” The spirit of adventure is always keen in Vaughan Williams; but after the great outburst at “Nor any bounds bounding us” the words seem buoyed up on, bowled on by, wave after wave of musical excitement and elation. The great choreographer Agnes de Mille, describing an altogether different medium, nonetheless invoked an emotion which distills the spirit of Toward the Unknown Region to perfection: “To take the air. To challenge space. To move into space with patterns of shining splendor. To be at once stronger and freer than at any other time in life. To lift up the heart...”

Toward the Unknown Region was the work of a comparatively young man. But the music, no less than the text, has a transcendent timelessness that relates to any, and every, period in life.

© Christopher Palmer, 1993, reprinted with permission of Hyperion Records, Limited.

Charles Ives (1874-1954) was among the great visionaries of the twentieth century, and his profound and moving setting of Psalm 90 is a true landmark of twentieth century choral music. Psalm 90, finished in 1924 after first being sketched c. 1894, was, as Ives noted to his aptly-named wife Harmony, among his many extraordinary compositions, the only work to fully satisfy him. Scored for chorus, soloists, organ, and bells, Psalm 90 is truly one of the most moving works ever written for chorus. Its first half presents a number of unusual effects—tone clusters, unison chant, strong dissonances, general agitation - all reflective of the text which refers to “destruction, floods, anger, and wrath.” Its second half resolves these conflicts with an utterly calm and unique tonal palette of organ, chorus, and four sets of bells, suggesting distant church bells. Time seems to stand still, and the work ends in great peace.

I’ve placed Serenade to Music, Vaughan Williams’ gorgeous settings of texts from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice last, as, when I was contemplating what music would be the last I would conduct with The Spectrum Singers, this particular work seemed most appropriate, for both its texts and music. Here we find a composer who synthesizes both solo and choral musical expression of Shakespeare’s words within in one elegant package. Vaughan Williams originally wrote this music for a specific group of sixteen British solo singers prominent in his day. He also suggests at the beginning of his musical score that the Serenade could just as well be performed by any mixture of solo voices, or in fact, totally as a choral work. Tonight’s performance will have four superb vocal soloists singing the solo roles. Once heard, I think you’ll agree that this particular work will remain in your memory as an ideal combination of choral and Shakespearian eloquence.

~ Program Notes © 2024 by John W. Ehrlich