THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY College of Music presents
University Chamber Choir
Michael Hanawalt, Conductor
Jeremy Moore, Graduate Associate Conductor
Harold Wright, Graduate Associate Conductor
Friday, November 15, 2024
7:30 p.m. | Opperman Music Hall
To Ensure An Enjoyable Concert Experience For All…
Please refrain from talking, entering, or exiting during performances. Food and drink are prohibited in all concert halls. Recording or broadcasting of the concert by any means, including the use of digital cameras, cell phones, or other devices is expressly forbidden. Please deactivate all portable electronic devices including watches, cell phones, pagers, hand-held gaming devices or other electronic equipment that may distract the audience or performers.
Recording Notice: This performance may be recorded. Please note that members of the audience may at times be included in this process. By attending this performance you consent to have your image or likeness appear in any live or recorded video or other transmission or reproduction made in conjunction to the performance.
Florida State University provides accommodations for persons with disabilities. Please notify the College of Music at (850) 644-3424 at least five working days prior to a musical event to request accommodation for disability or alternative program format.
Halcyon Days
Fern Hill
“Innocence”
Madeline Schneider, soprano
Melissa Dunphy (b. 1980)
John Corigliano (b. 1938)
Dawson Franzino, mezzo-soprano
Solo Quartet: Madeline Schneider, soprano; Sarita Olsen-Gustely, alto
Harold Wright, tenor; Ethan Murphy, bass
Keat Zhen Cheong and Anna Kirkland, violin; Jeremy Hill, viola
Turner Sperry, cello; Alex Lunday, bass; Ava Crook, harp; Judy Arthur, piano
Christ lag in Todes Banden, BWV 4
— Brief Intermission —
“Immortality”
Johann Sebastian Bach
1. Sinfonia (1685–1750)
2. Chorus
3. Duet
4. Aria
5. Chorus
6. Aria
7. Duet
8. Chorale
Anna Low, soprano; Annika Stucky, alto
Colby White, tenor
Sebastian Quintero, baritone
Lizzie Robertson, soprano; Steven Olson, tenor
Keat Zhen Cheong and Anna Kirkland, violin; Jeremy Hill and Abby Felde, viola
Turner Sperry, cello; Alex Lunday, bass; Judy Arthur, organ
Hark, I Hear the Harps Eternal
Alice Parker (1925–2023)
Halcyon Days
Sacred days draw near, traditions hallowed and wan, Well-worn prayers embrace their heirs when love returns as embers. Dreams delayed, hopes frayed in the blue nights of winter, Daybreak dreams of reunions lost.
Rise up, tattered and torn! Rise up, barren and reborn! Go forth in peace, bring joy to the dawn, and grace, turn your face upon us.
– Text by Jacqueline Goldfinger, 2020
Fern Hill
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green, The night above the dingle starry, Time let me hail and climb Golden in the heydays of his eyes, And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home, In the sun that is young once only, Time let me play and be Golden in the mercy of his means, And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold, And the sabbath rang slowly In the pebbles of the holy streams.
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away, All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long, In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand, In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
- Dylan Thomas
Christ lag in Todes Banden
2. Chorus
Christ lay in death’s bonds, Given for our sin; He is risen again And has brought us [eternal] life. Of this we should be joyful, Praise God and be thankful to him And sing hallelujah. Hallelujah.
3. Duet
Nobody could restrain death, Among all the children of humankind; Our sin made all that so; No innocence was to be found. As a result, death came immediately And seized power over us, Held us imprisoned in its realm. Hallelujah.
4. Aria
Jesus Christ, God’s son, Has come in our stead And did away with our sin, Thereby taking from death All its privilege and its power. There remains nothing but death’s shape; [Death] has lost its sting.
5. Chorus
It was a wondrous battle [on the cross], Where death [Satan] and life [Jesus] wrestled; Life got the victory (there); It has swallowed up death. Scripture has proclaimed this: How one death [Jesus’s] devoured the other [death] [And] a mockery was made of death. Hallelujah.
6. Aria
Here is the proper paschal/Easter lamb— God has commanded of it— Which is, up on the cross’s trunk, Roasted in ardent love. The blood [of the lamb, Jesus] marks our door, [Blood] with which faith rebukes death; The Destroyer Angel can no longer harm us. Hallelujah.
7. Duet
Thus we celebrate the high feast [Easter] With joy of heart and gladness, [The feast] that the Lord lets shine upon us; He himself is the sun, Who through his luster of grace Illumines our hearts entirely; The night of sin has vanished. Hallelujah.
8. Chorale
We eat and live well In [Christ, the] proper paschal/Easter flatbread; The old sourdough shall not Be with the word of grace. Christ will be the nourishment And alone feed the soul; Faith will live by none other [than Christ]. Hallelujah.
Dunphy: Halcyon Days
We all have good years and bad years, but few years have been as stormy for so many people as 2020. It’s hard to think of the upcoming winter holidays without acknowledging the effects of current events, as millions of people sacrifice precious time with their loved ones for the safety of their communities. Along with poet Jacqueline Goldfinger, my hope for this December is that we each can create our own Halcyon Days – a period of calm during winter storms – where we can reflect on what we have lost but rise up to face the new year with joy and grace.
– Melissa Dunphy, October 2020
Corigliano: Fern Hill
I first encountered Dylan Thomas’ work in 1959, my last undergraduate year at 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.)
– John Corigliano
Bach: Christ lag in Todes Banden
The style of this famous cantata clearly places it in the early part of Bach’s career; it was probably composed for the Easter celebration in Mühlhausen in either 1707 or 1708, when Bach was in his early twenties. During Bach’s early years as cantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, he presented the church with nearly five complete cycles of music for the weekly Sunday worship service, and the cantata, based on Martin Luther’s Easter hymn “Christ lag in Todesbanden,” was recopied and revived for this Leipzig repertory. Despite what would have been a decidedly oldfashioned style by the time of Bach’s arrival in Leipzig, the composer seems to have surmised that it would make the same powerful impression at that time as it still does in ours.
Christ lag in Todesbanden shows no signs of the simplifying reforms and stylistic internationalization (as advanced by Erdmann Neumeister) so prevalent in this genre of Lutheran church music around the beginning of the eighteenth century. Nor is there evidence of Italianate operatic recitatives and arias. Rather, the successive movements stolidly expound the successive strophes of Luther’s chorale.
Luther’s 1524 melody (with echoes of the Gregorian hymn “Pange lingua gloriosi”) permeates the musical substance of each movement. In the Lutheran service, the cantata would have been performed immediately following the weekly Gospel text, understood as an element of the worship immediately pertinent to its theological content, and perhaps even commenting upon it like the sermon that followed.
After an opening sinfonia (which contains strong motivic echoes of the chorale), Bach sets the first verse of text in the form of an extended chorale prelude, with passages of imitation crowned by the chorale melody sung as a cantus firmus in the highest voice. Though this austere, even archaic, structure produces a somber tone, the movement closes (as does each verse) with an exuberant Allelujah. The second verse, which describes the ancient power of death, adopts an appropriately forceful tone derived from octave leaps in the melody. The third chorale verse, sung as a cantus firmus by a tenor solo, has an accompaniment for obbligato violin.
The structure of the cantata is based on a symmetrical layout, Chorale--Duet--Solo--Chorale--Solo--Duet--Chorale, and the central fourth movement becomes the focal point of the whole work. This vibrant contrapuntal movement depicts the “wondrous battle” between life and death which Luther’s text asserts was won by Christ’s death. There follows a bass aria replete with rhetorical gestures, such as a famous melodic leap down a diminished twelfth when the vanquishing of Death occurs. Verse six invites all present in the worship service to celebrate the holy festival of this victory; the phrases of this duet dance above a festive dotted-rhythm in the accompaniment. The final verse is set homophonically, in hymn style, appropriate for congregational participation.
– Timothy Dickey
Parker: Hark, I Hear the Harps Eternal
Hark! I hear the harps eternal ringing on the farther shore, As I near those swollen waters, with their deep and solemn roar.
The speaker is approaching death, which is often symbolized by a river. The idea of crossing a river at death is very common, with the Greeks perhaps starting the whole thing with the River Styx. Christians kind of picked up on that idea but merged it with the crossing of the River Jordan into the Promised Land in the Old Testament. John Bunyan, for example, has this scene in Pilgrim’s Progress before his two pilgrims can enter the Celestial City, or heaven:
Now, I further saw, that between them and the gate was a river, but there was no bridge to go over: the river was very deep. At the sight, therefore, of this river, the Pilgrims were much stunned; but the men that went in with them said, You must go through, or you cannot come at the gate.
Note the wording in the song: “with their deep and solemn roar.” Death isn’t treated lightly. And why does the person nearing death hear harps? Well, the Christian New Testament mentions harps in heaven several times. Here’s one that combines the roar of the water with harps:
And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder: and I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps. (Rev. 14:2 KJV)
Note my use of an exclamation point after “Hark.” This isn’t typically used in the title but should be, as it’s actually a one-word command: “Listen!”
The chorus switches us to those who are already there in heaven, singing before God’s throne: Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, praise the Lamb, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, Glory to the great I AM.
This language is all over the Book of Revelation, sung by saved souls, angels, and other beings.
Let’s go on to the next verse:
And my soul though stained with sorrow, fading as the light of day, Passes swiftly o’er those waters to the city far away.
Death is swift, after all. And here’s my favorite verse, the last one:
Souls have crossed before me, saintly, to that land of perfect rest; And I hear them singing faintly in the mansions of the blest.
Somehow that image of the newly-passed soul being able to hear the saints only “faintly” (because he isn’t quite there yet) has always seemed particularly striking to me. You can then take the repeated final choruses as the soul’s being able to join in now that he’s finally arrived. That’s one way to see it, anyway. How I love this song!
– Debi Simons, Behind the Music
University Chamber Choir Personnel
Michael Hanawalt, Conductor
Jeremy Moore and Harold Wright, Graduate Associate Conductors
Soprano
Angellina Fedullo
Caitlin Gerding
Anna Low
Jennifer Perez-Aguilar
Madison Riley
Lizzie Robertson
Mariangely Rodriguez
Maddie Schneider
Annika Stucky
Zoey Xiao
Alto
Yuliia Billa
Morgan Cerra
Aritza Reyes Drullard
Theasamantha Figueras
Dawson Franzino
Crystal Berner Geisler
Maclain Hardin-Kurza
Yuko Hori
Katherine Anne Ledbetter
Sarita Olsen-Gustely
Ruth Springer
Tenor
Tiger Davis
Michael Haves
Robert Lovins
Jeremy Moore
Steven Olson
Brandon Scribner
Sam Varnon
Colby White
Harold Wright
Timothy Yu
Bass
Seaira Anderson
Ethan Bixby
Jordan Evans
Augusto Girotto
Owen Hillman
Alexei Kovalev
Christopher Martinez
Isiah Maxey
Ethan Murphy
Sebastian Quintero
Adam Ravain
Kristopher Stam