ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Dana Kacyon, conductor
Dana Kacyon is a music educator, composer, and conductor. He is a graduate of West Chester University with a BM in Music Education and Music Composition. He taught at Snow Hill Middle School in Snow Hill, Maryland from 2018-2022 and brought his choirs and Glee Club to the Eastern Shore Choral Directors Association Festival and Music in the Parks. Dana writes for ensembles ranging from wind band to choir, having won the Chester County Band Composition Competition in 2016. Currently, Dana is the Music Director and organist at United Church of Christ East Goshen in West Chester, PA. Dana teaches piano and voice lessons at Valotta Studios in Exton and continues to play piano for the Rocket Lawn Chairs, West Chester Children’s Chorus, Valotta Voices, and the Mainline Ecumenical Choir.
TRANSLATIONS
SALVE REGINA (II)
Queen, mother of mercy: our life, sweetness, and hope, hail. To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve. To you we sigh, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.
Turn then, our advocate, those merciful eyes toward us. And Jesus, the blessed fruit of thy womb, after our exile, show us.
O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary.
GLORIA
Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of good will. We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you, we give you thanks for your great glory, Lord God, heavenly King, O God almighty Father.
Lord Jesus Christ, Only Begotten Son, Lord God, Lamb of God, Son of the Father.
VERLEIH’ UNS FRIEDEN
Mercifully grant us peace, Lord God,
In our times.
For there is no other
Who could fight for us
But you alone, our God.
THE GROUND
Heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Blessed is he who comes. Hosanna in the highest. Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, grant us peace.
YourVoicesTune, GeorgeFridericHandel(1685-1759)
George Frideric Handel is known for his wide breadth of compositions such as operas, motets, cantatas, oratorios, and occasional odes. Originally from Halle, Germany, Handel frequently traveled across Europe including several trips to London where he eventually stayed for the remainder of his life. “Your Voices Tune” is a choral excerpt from Handel’s Alexander’s Feast, an ode to St. Cecilia. The themes are playfully interchanged between the piano and chorus, representing the crowd or audience joining in the music, praise, and celebration of harmony and the patron saint of musicians.
SalveRegina(II), EstebanSalas (1725-1803)
Esteban Salas y Castro was a Cuban musician, composer, and priest who worked at Parroquia Mayor in Havana and La Catedral de Santiago where he served as chapel master for forty years. He has composed thirty-one villancicos; a type of popular song in Latin America; eighteen cantatas, forty-one motets, seven masses, and four Passions. While not much is known about his life, his music is noted for its lyrical simplicity and carefully constructed harmony. “Salve Regina” is one of his eight settings of the same text, praising Mary as the “Mother of Mercy.” The music playfully dances back and forth from a quartet of singers to the full choir in a stile concertato Despite living in the 18th century, his music was written in a baroque style. New trends in culture and art tended to reach Latin America late due to the harsh travel conditions of sailing across the Atlantic. As a result, musical styles and tastes stayed relatively stagnant in the colonial New World.
Gloria,fromPaukenmesse,JosephHaydn(1732-1809)
The late masses of Joseph Haydn are often described as symphonic works, where the orchestra plays a large part in the development and presentation of musical themes. The Paukenmesse, named after the famous use of timpani and its German word “Pauken” in the Agnus dei movement, is no exception. This piece comes from the first section of the Gloria, in between the Kyrie and Credo. While the choir’s material is usually exclamatory, “Laudamus te; benedicimus te; adoramus te; glorificamus te” or, “We praise you; we bless you; we adore you; we glorify you.” the orchestra contains many of the key motives of the work, repeated throughout. It’s not until the end of this section where the sopranos mimic the jovial sixteenth note figure before the orchestra leads us into an exciting final cadence. While the orchestral part is reduced to piano, the Vivace sixteenth note passages are no less exciting. Another name for the work is Missa in tempore belli, or “Mass in time of war.” Haydn, who worked for the Esterházy family who owned estates in Austria and Hungary, wrote this piece in a time when Napolean’s army threatened Vienna.
Verleigh’unsFrieden, FelixMendelssohn-Bartholdy(1809-1847)
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was born in Hamburg and was a musical child prodigy. From a young age, he was interested in the choral works of Bach, Handel, and Palestrina. He continued this passion for early music through the rest of his life. In 1827 he helped bring together a group of friends to rehearse Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and was able to convince the Berlin Singakademie to perform the work for the first time since Bach’s death. Coming from Jewish descent, Mendelssohn thought it was interesting that an “actor and a jew... restored this great Christian work to the (German) people.” “Verleih’ uns Frieden” showcases Mendelssohn’s mastery at composing long lyrical phrases. The basses introduce the main melody that is then repeated throughout the piece. The pitch Db is prevalent throughout despite the piece being in Eb major, which gives the work a melancholic character. The text is from Martin Luther’s translation of the Latin prayer for peace “Dona nobis pacem.”
TheDarkEyedSailor, RalphVaughanWilliams(1872-1958)
Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in Down Apney, Gloucestershire, and grew up outside London. He studied at the Royal College of Music and Trinity College in Cambridge. Like his contemporaries Belá Bartók and Zoltán Kodály from Hungary, he was interested in folk music, collecting and transcribing more than eight hundred English folk melodies. He is also known for his work on selecting tunes for The New English Hymnal in 1906. “The Dark Eyed Sailor” is an arrangement of an English folk song, about a woman waiting for her lover who has left for the sea and who has never returned. The piece is told from an outside listener’s point of view, observing a sailor named William asking why the lady wanders the beach alone. She explains that she has waited two years for her dark-eyed sailor who, before he left, took her gold ring, broke it in half, and kept it as a promise to return. She explains that she still has hers, but the other “lies rolling at the bottom of the sea.” The piece is ripe with text painting, including the hush of the listener observing the scene unfold while the choir sings “So I paid attention” and the sixteenth notes in the lower voices during “rolling at the bottom of the sea.” Then suddenly, while the tempo slows, William shows his half of the ring, revealing his identity as her long-lost lover having finally returned. The choir then concludes with the moral of the tale singing “For a cloudy morning brings forth a shining day.”
EightofSwords,MelissaDunphy(b. 1980)
A graduate of West Chester University of Pennsylvania and University of Pennsylvania, Melissa Dunphy is an Australian-American composer who resides in Philadelphia. She currently is a faculty member and lecturer at Rutgers University. Dunphy’s compositions specialize in vocal, choral, and theatrical music with a focus on politics. “Eight of Swords” is set to a text by poet Anthony Sylvestri and was commissioned by National Concerts as well as the SJSU Choraleers and the Kirby Chamber Singers. The piece is dedicated to the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States. The text centers around freedom, power in the self, and breaking apart the “bonds that bind.” This piece often contains modal harmony, saving stronger dominant-tonic cadences for important moments in the text such as “strength enough for any journey” or the fortissimo climax at “You are clothed in fire!” This piece aims to remind the listener of the difficult fight for equal rights and to inspire future generations to be strong in difficult times.
TheGround, OlaGjeilo(b. 1978)
Being a part of a larger work called Sunrise Mass, composer Ola Gjeilo considers its final movement, titled “The Ground” to be a culmination of the entire work, creating a sense of peace and serenity upon the arrival of its conclusion. Gjeilo was born in Norway and moved to the United States in 2001 to study composition at The Julliard School in New York. His major works include Dreamweaver for string orchestra, mixed chorus, and piano, and The River for choir, piano, and string quartet. He also performs a variety of his piano compositions on albums released by Decca records such as “Night” in 2020 and “Dawn” in 2022. In Sunrise Mass, each section is based on the ordinary of the Roman Catholic mass: The Spheres (Kyrie), Sunrise (Gloria), The City (Credo), Identity (Sanctus), and The Ground (Pleni sent caeli/ Agnus dei). Agnus dei, the text of this piece, is based on John 1:29, when St. John the Baptist proclaims Jesus as the “Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world!”
LetUsCheertheWearyTraveler, RobertNathanielDett(1882-1943)
Robert Nathaniel Dett was born in Drummondville, Ontario, Canada. He was an accomplished composer, pianist, conductor, and educator. He studied as an undergraduate at Oberlin College and was the first African American to receive a Bachelor of Music degree. He taught at various institutions such as Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee; Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri; Hampton Institute in Hampton, Virginia; and Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina. In a time when many middle-class African Americans felt ashamed of spirituals because of its connections to slavery, Dett was interested in interweaving black folk music with the blossoming American classical music scene as a way of preserving African American music and culture. Dett published over 100 compositions, mostly vocal and piano works. “Let Us Cheer the Weary Traveler” is a motet written in 1926 and is based on the spiritual of the same name. The text is an allegory for the traveler making it to heaven, or in the context of the African American experience, the double meaning of escaped slaves fleeing toward the north and freedom. The repetition is typical of a spiritual, which comes from workers singing to pass the time while working in the fields. Text painting is employed throughout, with overlapping melodies representing the crowd celebrating a loved one making it to heaven or escaping to freedom, while wishing that the same will one day happen to them.