Holiday Brass & Choral Concerts
Thursday, December 13, 8:00 PM
Grace Lutheran Church, River Forest
Ticket Prices: $60, $48, $38
Concert is SOLD OUT, but call 312.551.1414 about $25
partially obstructed view seats.
Friday, December 14, 8:00 PM
St. Michael's Church, Chicago
(Old Town)
Ticket Prices: $60, $48, $38
Seats going fast--reserve yours today!
Saturday, December 22, 3:00 PM
Saturday, December 22, 8:00 PM
Sunday, December 23, 3:00 Pm
Divine Word Chapel, Techny/Northbrook
Ticket Prices: $65, $50, $40
Best available seats are for Saturday night!
HEAR MUSIC FROM
PAST PROGRAMS
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"Es ist ein Ros entsprungen" |
Gabrieli
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"Canzon Septimi Toni No. 2" |
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"Angelus ad pastores ait" |
Anonymous
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"Cum ortus fuerit" |
Music of the Baroque
Chorus and Brass Ensemble
Joyful carols, solemn chant and vibrant works for brass create a pageant of sound as voices rise to the rafters and bells ring out in the night. Celebrate the season with inspiring music in soaring spaces.
Program Notes
Rich in emotion and detail, the Christmas story has inspired centuries of beautiful music. In the medieval era, liturgical texts provided the basis for plainchant and traditional tunes poignant in their simplicity. During the Renaissance, composers marshaled additional musical resources in the quest to create musical drama, and took these techniques to even greater extremes in the early baroque. In both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, brass choirs served as brilliant musical decoration, and helped to celebrate the season through the sensual art of dance.
The works on this program represent each of these points in history, highlighting the differences that make each time period unique. While they may differ in terms of style, they are united in subject. The intensely personal emotions of the Virgin Mary, the heartwarming image of a baby lying in a manger, the archetypal story of the Magi guided by a star—each narrative provides a unique perspective on the musical retelling of the Christmas story.
The earliest music associated with Christmas is plainchant, the tradition of liturgical singing that flourished in the medieval era and survives to this day. This program’s closing Te Deum laudamus, an early Christian hymn of praise, was performed on many important days in the liturgical calendar. Dominus dixit ad me, on the other hand, was specific to the Christmas service, and served as the introit for the first of three Christmas Day Masses. Likewise, the hymn Jesu, redemptor omnium was sung during the Christmas Vespers service.
In addition to plainchant, which was part of the church service, other vocal genres that were religious in nature were not part of the liturgy. With its lively rhythms, Latin text and refrain-verse structure, Personet hodie is a medieval cantio, a non-liturgical song often used for religious instruction. Guillaume Costeley’s sixteenth-century work Allon, gay bergeres represents the more complex tradition of the French noël, a type of song sung in the streets on Christmas Eve. Echoes of the noël can also be heard in Jan Pietersoon Sweelinck’s lively 1619 composition Hodie Christus natus est, with its exclamation “noé, noé.”
Chant remained an integral part of the church service for centuries as polyphonic music (music employing multiple vocal lines) gradually ascended in importance. Sixteenth-century Italian composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina’s Videntes stellam represents the tradition of the motet, a sacred polyphonic vocal work that usually featured a Latin text. Although they are not part of the Mass, motets were most likely still performed in the context of a church service, and often provided musical commentary that tailored the generic service to the day in the liturgical calendar on which it took place. Palestrina depicts the story of the Magi with smoothly interwoven vocal lines, occasionally interrupting the texture to emphasize particular phrases. In Dixit Maria, Hans Leo Hasler portrays Mary’s response to the angel in a similarly restrained, relatively seamless style.
Around the turn of the seventeenth century, particularly in Venice, composers increasingly turned from music for voices alone to concertato style, placing greater value on the dramatic effect of contrasting timbres and textures than on the more homogeneous a cappella sound. The difference is illustrated marvelously in the massive sound of In ecclesiis by the Venetian Giovanni Gabrieli, who mixes solo, choral and instrumental textures to great effect. Gabrieli uses the same style to create a markedly different mood in Nunc dimittis, Simeon’s song of praise when the baby Jesus was presented in the temple. Forced to live abroad because of his Catholic beliefs, English composer Richard Dering uses a similar Italianate style in his early seventeenth-century motet Quem vidistis, pastores? Taking the technique to a greater extreme, Claudio Monteverdi’s jubilant 1641 setting of Psalm 112, Beatus vir, unifies lengthy contrasting passages for voice and instruments with a walking bass line, creating an extended reverie on the power of belief.
The concertato style was not limited to Italy, however. In his setting of Psalm 100, “Jauchzet dem Herrn,” Heinrich Schütz uses a more restrained version of the technique to depict the glory of God. In his setting of the German Lutheran hymn Ach, mein herzliebes Jesulein, Samuel Scheidt takes full advantage of the contrast between solo and ensemble, in addition to the different timbres of male and female voices. Although the desire to dramatize text fueled this new style of composition, it was not always the primary reason behind compositional choice. English composer Henry Purcell’s late seventeenth-century anthem Rejoice in the Lord Alway, dubbed the Bell Anthem because its opening imitates the pealing of bells, is an example of a “symphony anthem,” which substituted instruments for the traditional organ accompaniment at the request of King Charles II.
Just as vocal music helped to tell the story of Christmas, so did brass choirs add a particular voice to the celebration. Associated with high social stature, brass instruments were frequently used in both churches and courts as musical “decoration” on special occasions like Christmas. Gabrieli’s famous brass canzonas, with their alternating masses of sound, would have showed off the cavernous architecture of St. Marks in Venice to great advantage.
In Germany, the trumpet had such an exalted status that players were required to become members of an exclusive guild in order to play the instrument, and received many special privileges and higher salaries as a result. Johann Vierdanck’s Capriccio for 3 cornetti showcases the brilliance that was expected from the instrument. In spite of their lofty reputation, however, brass instruments were still used for earthly pursuits such as dancing, as sixteenth century composer Tylman Susato’s collection Danserye illustrates. A member of Antwerp’s town band, Susato was well acquainted with the repertoire a civic musician would have been expected to know. The straightforward arrangements of well-known dance tunes that Danserye contains may well have served as a useful resource.
Program Notes © Jennifer More Glagov 2007