Going deeper…notes on our music for today’s Choral Evensong for the Presentation of our Lord.
Prelude
Our voluntaries today include three settings of the Nunc Dimittis which capture different emotional aspects of this regular Evensong text. The last piece, Hózhó, by Native American composer, Connor Chee, reflects on beauty and balance and that which binds all things together.
Nunc Dimittis by Frederick Frahm
Frederick Frahm (b. 1964) was born in Hemet, California and was educated at Pacific Lutheran University. As a professional church musician for more than 35 years, he served parishes across the country, including more than 10 years as Director of Music at St. Luke Lutheran Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As a composer, Frahm has written numerous works in many genres, including chamber opera and cantatas. His work appears in the catalog of more than dozen publishers. As a performer, he has appeared in organ recitals across the country and as organist and harpsichordist for the New Mexico Philharmonic and Santa Fe Symphony Orchestra. Frahm has been active as a teaching composer-artist for the Santa Fe Opera company, working with elementary and middle school age children to write their own chamber operas for public performance.
Nunc Dimittis was written in memory of those who have died from Covid 19. It is based on the tune Le Cantique de Siméon (hymn 36 in our Hymnal 1982). It is played on the facade prinicpal 8’ stops of the organ.
Nunc Dimittis by Karen Beaumont
American organist and composer Karen Beaumont (b. 1965) received her degree in Music History from the University of Wisconsin and studied organ with Gerre Hancock, John Behnke, Jeffrey Peterson, and Carol Haakenson. Beaumont has performed as a recitalist in numerous venues throughout the USA and the UK. From 1988 to 2011 she provided the organ and choral music for St. James Episcopal Church in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her album of classic French noëls was released on the Pro Organo label in 2020. Her musical compositions have been published by Lorenz, Leupold Editions, Fagus-Music, and SMP Press.
Karen’s setting of the Nunc Dimittis is played on the 8’ Gedeckt, a flute stop, on the Swell division, and the 16’ Bourdon on the Great division.
Nunc Dimittis by Franklin Ashdown
Franklin D. Ashdown is a composer and medical doctor, who has pursued dual careers for the past 3 decades. Born in 1942, he studied piano for 12 years, and was “recruited” at age 13 to play the organ for a local congregation. He later studied organ with Judson Maynard and James Drake, was was privately coached by Fred Tulan of San Francisco and Leonard Raver of New York's Juilliard School.
A widely-published composer of organ and choral music, Ashdown has had his works performed in venues ranging from Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City to St. Paul's Cathedral in London and the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. His compositions have been featured on American Public Radio's “Pipedreams,” National Public Radio's “All Things Considered,” and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir's CBS broadcast, “Music and the Spoken Word.” Leonard Raver and Stephen Burns recorded his “Requiem for the 'Challenger'” for trumpet and organ on the Classic Masters label, and James Welch has included some of his solo organ music in his series of CD recordings for various labels. A resident of Alamogordo, New Mexico, Ashdown enjoys a full life as an internist, composer, and organist-choir director for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Franklin’s setting of the Nunc Dimittis is played on the foundation stops of the organ at 8’ pitch.
Hózhó by Connor Chee
Navajo pianist and composer Connor Chee (b. 1987) is known for combining his classical piano training with his Native American heritage. Chee made his Carnegie Hall debut at the age of 12 after winning a gold medal in the World Piano Competition. A graduate of the Eastman School of Music and the University of Cincinnati’s College-Conservatory of Music, Chee’s solo piano music is inspired by traditional Navajo chants and songs.
A NOTE FROM THE COMPOSER:
“This piece was inspired by the traditional Diné (Navajo) concept of Hózhó, often translated as ‘balance and beauty.’ This concept permeates Diné life and culture, and reflects the state of harmony that binds all things together in the universe. When elements of the universe fall out of balance, nature will ultimately strive to achieve homeostasis and balance once again. In the same way, the Diné seek to achieve harmony and beauty in life each day, despite the inevitable times of imbalance.
As a child, my grandmother taught me that keeping balance and harmony in my life started with the simplest things. I was taught to always keep my necklaces hung neatly so they would not tangle, to keep my belongings in order, and even to make sure my shoes were untied when I took them off. The idea was that if I could keep balance in those fundamental things, it would permeate my spirit and inspire my life as a whole. Although I still struggle to keep the space where I live and work in perfect order, I know that when I feel overwhelmed or out of sorts, I can start by organizing the simple things to welcome balance back into my life.
‘Hózhó’ for Organ Solo presents a musical search for balance and beauty. At times, the music is unbalanced in form and meter, but seeks to return to a more harmonious state. The melodic content that opens the piece is presented again at the end, but in retrograde. This symbolizes a balanced idea that surrounds the rest of the (sometimes unbalanced) musical content. It returns the listener to the beginning of the piece with a melody that is in essence the same, but transformed during the experience.”
-Connor Chee
The Anthem:
O Nata Lux by Morten Lauridsen
Morten Johannes Lauridsen (born February 27, 1943) is an American composer. A National Medal of Arts recipient (2007), he was composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Master Chorale (1994–2001) and has been a professor of composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music for more than 40 years.
A native of the Pacific Northwest, Lauridsen worked as a Forest Service firefighter and lookout (on an isolated tower near Mt. St. Helens) and attended Whitman College before traveling south to study composition at the University of Southern California with Ingolf Dahl, Halsey Stevens, Robert Linn, and Harold Owen. He began teaching at USC in 1967 and has been on their faculty ever since.
In 2006, Lauridsen was named an 'American Choral Master' by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2007 he received the National Medal of Arts from the President in a White House ceremony, "for his composition of radiant choral works combining musical beauty, power and spiritual depth that have thrilled audiences worldwide."
A Note from the Composer:
Each of the five connected movements in this choral cycle contains references to “Light,” assembled from various sacred Latin texts. I composed Lux Aeterna in response to my mother’s final illness and found great personal comfort and solace in setting to music these timeless and wondrous words about Light, a universal symbol of illumination at all levels - spiritual, artistic, and intellectual.
The work opens and closes with the beginning and ending of the Requiem Mass, with the central three movements drawn respectively from the Te Deum, O Nata Lux, and Veni, Sancte Spiritus. O Nata Lux is an a cappella motet at the center of the work . - — Morten Lauridsen
O Light born of Light,
Jesus, redeemer of the world,
with kindness deign to receive
the praise and prayer of suppliants.
You who once deigned to be clothed in flesh
for the sake of the lost,
grant us to be made member
O nata lux de lumine,
Jesu redemptor saeculi,
dignare clemens supplicum
laudes precesque sumere.
Qui carne quondam contegi
dignatus es pro perditis,
nos membra confer effici
tui beati corporis.
Choral Director Tim Sharp writes:
In my conversations with Mr. Lauridsen he recently expressed his approach to his art: “My passion second to music is poetry. I read and study it constantly–every day. It is a fundamental part of my life. I have profound admiration for poets who seek deeper meanings and truths and are able to express themselves elegantly through the written word. Consequently, it has been a natural development for me as a composer to wed these two passions and to set texts to music.”
Lauridsen has not only set a variety of poems and poets to music, but he has also set poems from several historical eras in a variety of languages. Lauridsen is particularly attracted to the idea of the choral cycle, which through his craft becomes a multi-movement piece unified by both a central poetic theme by one or more authors tied together by recurring musical elements. He finds inspiration and historical precedents for his work in the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms. Contemporary musical influences include Rorem, Copland, Barber, and the jazz stylings of Miles Davis. The poets he has chosen for his cycles include Graves, Rilke, Moss, and Lorca, as well as historical liturgical Latin texts.
The central movement of the cycle, “O Nata Lux”, is an unaccompanied motet. Lauridsen inserts a pure vocal sound without orchestral accompaniment as the centerpiece of this choral cycle, underscoring the historical place held by centuries-old unaccompanied sacred motet. The ongoing homophonic texture of “O Nata Lux” tends to disguise the constant emergence of gentle but stunningly beautiful melodic fragments offered by various vocal parts. If the essence of water can be captured on canvas, surely Claude Monet approached this conceptual impossibility in his painting. Similarly, if light could be set to music, Lauridsen’s choral centerpiece “O Nata Lux” has given us this deeply felt impression and expression.
Postlude
Chorale-Prelude on ‘Te Lucis’ by Healy Willian
James Healey Willan was born on October 12, 1880, in Balham, Surrey, England. He had a wide experience as a composer of a full-length opera, a symphonic work, countless organ and choral works, as a music educator, a choral director, and a church musician. He played his first service at the age of eleven in 1891 and his last service on Christmas Eve, 1967, just two months before he died on February 16, 1968.
Having served churches in England, Willan left for Canada in 1913 to serve as organist and choirmaster at St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Toronto as well as head of the Theory Department at the Toronto Conservatory of Music. In 1921, he accepted the position of organist-choirmaster at St. Mary Magdalene Church, an Anglo-Catholic parish in Toronto, where he was to remain for the rest of his life. During his tenure there, Willan also accepted in 1938 the position of Professor in the Music Faculty at the University of Toronto.
Most of his hymn-based motets and organ preludes came into existence after his retirement from the University of Toronto in 1950, the most prolific compositional period of his life. Willan is probably best known for his sacred and liturgical music, especially that written for St. Mary Magdalene Church. His anthems, hymns, motets, mass settings, and carol settings—all contributed to his reputation as the “dean of Canadian composers.”
His setting of the hymn tune Te Lucis, hymn 44 in our Hymnal 1982, is one of his many settings of hymn tunes. You will hear the chorale tune in the tenor range on the principal stop. Willian slows down the melody’s tempo and overlaps it between the left hand and feet surrounding this with a delicate, yet interesting "accompaniment"