We are
woefully short of white Christmases.
We
do have rain and low clouds and long winter nights, but that’s hardly a mark of holiday distinction (although
I think most of us are secretly proud of our toughness in bearing up under a
Northwest winter)!
Perhaps
what really makes a Northwest Christmas stand out is our wealth of music,
especially choral music. The Northwest,
and Seattle in particular, enjoys a richness of choirs and composers that is
the envy of cities across the country, and it is our pleasure to celebrate some
of those composers in our just-around-the-corner concerts, as well as the carols, new and old,
that grace this holiday season.
Our musical
program flows in a kind of story
line, beginning with calls to rejoice: first, a call to celebrate the birth of
Christ in my own arrangement of Personent
Hodie, which piles ostinato upon ostinato in spellbinding fashion; then a
call invoking the presence of God in Seattle composer John Muehleisen’s
mystically luminous Invocation. He drapes the ancient Scottish text with
luscious tone clusters and dissonances, freely shifting meters and soaring
melodies to create a sense of ecstasy and wonder. Next, with halls decked and the festivities
prepared, like minstrels of old we unfold the ageless Christmas story in the
spirited French carol, Masters in This
Hall.
The focus
narrows to the Virgin and Child in Seattle composer Bern Herbolsheimer’s superb
setting of the much loved carol Silent
Night. Bern was my composition teacher
at Cornish College of the Arts, so I am particularly fond of this work, a masterpiece of expressivity, tenderness, harmonic depth, and delicacy
of treatment. Breathless contemplation
of that silent, light-filled night merges into childlike images inspired by the
Christ Child in Children’s Song of the
Nativity with its ingenuous journey to the manger scene, and memories of childhood Christmases in Away in a Manger. And in childlike innocence the lovely,
graceful In dulci jubilo sings out in
heartfelt longing “oh that we were there” with the angels singing “Glory to God
in the highest!” Children, Go Where I Send Thee! sends us on our way “there” in a
merry counting game reminiscent of childhood that always leads back to the
little bitty baby born in Bethlehem.
We continue
with an emphasis on the immediacy of the birth: first, Sweelinck’s Hodie Christus natus est (Christ is born
today), one of the great works of Renaissance choral literature; then Novum gaudia, (Good news! Christ is come
today), by Central Washington University professor and composer Vijay Singh. This is a vigorous medieval processional for
men’s voices that begins simply but unfurls in increasingly joyful
complexity. Woodinville composer Chris Fraley takes up a
sturdy Revolutionary War-era American tune, Let
Us Be Merry, and reworks it in imaginative ways. William Billings’ original is
straightforward, unadorned, but Chris creatively “paints” the text: for
example, a minor key setting as Joseph and heavily pregnant Mary head to
Bethlehem to be taxed, and somber music and a slower meter to depict the
humility of verse 3. The “virgin
unspotted” of the first verse inspired the next grouping, There is No Rose by Oregon composer Clyde Thompson, and Ave Maria by University of Washington
choral professor Giselle Wyers. Both are
modern settings of venerable texts, both are stunningly beautiful, and both
adore Mary as the mother of Christ.
Clyde skillfully weaves sudden, shimmering harmonic transitions together
to mark each new textual thought in There
is No Rose, while Giselle’s setting of the age-old prayer to Mary, Ave Maria, layers melodic cells in
tide-like ascents that climax in a rapturous outburst of devotion and praise.
We come
back to earth with Il est né, le divine
Enfant!, a French country stomp that turns the birth of Christ into a
village celebration. And finally we
close with a modern Christmas classic, Have
Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, so memorably sung by Judy Garland in the
movie Meet Me in St. Louis. The movie version is sad and poignant, but
this arrangement recalls the warmth of dearly loved friends and hangs a star of
hope on the highest bough of the evergreen Christmas tree. And in that lovely moment, our celebration
over, we send all out with
holiday wishes into their
own individual Christmas in the Northwest.
Dr. Linda Gingrich
Artistic Director and conductor
Master Chorus Eastside
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