JOHANN KUHNAU (1660-1722)

JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH (1685-1750)

2010 marks the 350^th anniversary of Kuhnau’s birth, and yesterday marked the 288^th anniversary of his death. Johann Kuhnau was highly celebrated in his time, having served as Bach’s immediate predecessor at St. Thomas’s Church in Leipzig. He was as much a scholar as a musician, studying myriad foreign languages and law at the University of Leipzig. He became so well known during his university years in the 1680s that when the prestigious post of organist at the Thomaskirche became vacant in 1684, he was appointed that October. In 1701 he succeeded Johann Schelle as the Kantor of the Thomaskirche, assuming added responsibilities of teaching choristers at the Thomasschule and directing music at all four of Leipzig’s major churches.

Kuhnau was a remarkably prolific composer in most genres of his time, but only his published keyboard works, unpublished sacred cantatas, and a small handful of unpublished vocal works survive. Tristis est anima mea survives in an octavo manuscript formerly owned by Thomaskantor Schucht (1753-1823) and which now resides at the State library in Berlin. Suggestions that this work may not be Kuhnau’s are presently unfounded, and it remains one of the composer’s most expressive pieces. The foreshadowing of Jesus’s death on the cross is present in chromatic suspensions, and text painting is especially vibrant on the words circumdabit (“will surround”) and fugam (“flight”).

Johann Sebastian Bach was in competition with at least four other musicians for the post of Thomaskantor that was vacated upon Kuhnau’s death in 1722. Unlike Kuhnau, Bach and his competing colleagues were scholars who did not wish to teach the foreign language requirement. Apparently the Leipzig town councilors were perturbed at their inability to find a suitable musician/scholar, and one was known to have said that “if the best man could not be got, they must make do with the mediocre.” With that the “mediocre” Bach was hired in April of 1723. Despite a troubled start, Bach eventually conducted a successful tenure in Leipzig and spent the rest of his career there.

Unlike cantatas, which were composed and performed on a regular basis in the Lutheran church at the time, motets were composed for special occasions. The circumstances behind the composition and original performance of Komm, Jesu, komm are not known. The text is a funeral text, composed by Leipzig native Paul Thymich for the 1684 funeral of Jakob Thomasius, rector of the Thomasschule. Thus, it is assumed that Bach composed this motet for a funeral, likely before 1730. Like many of his other motets, Komm, Jesu, komm was written for SATB double chorus, linking it to the central German tradition in which he was raised. The texture of the motet is noteworthy in that each line of text is given its own highly individual musical interpretation, but seemingly without any sense of balance. Thus the first stanza of the poem makes up almost the entirety of the motet, set to an intricate web of eight individual voices moving in an elaborate contrapuntal scheme. In contrast, the second stanza is set as a four-part, homophonic hymn. It is not, however, a simple chorale: it is, like the first movement, a complex chorale setting, complete with rhythmic ornamentation and ornate text painting.

 

JOHN CLEMENTS (1910-1986)

CIPRIANO DE RORE (1515/16-1565)

John Clements was a British composer known primarily for his part-songs. Clements was active in the 1950s as one of many composers writing secular music for amateur choirs. Critics of his music were at best generic in their descriptions of his music: “…good vocal writing…”; “…pleasantly singable…”; and “…straightforward and effective, if a little sugary.” Flower of Beauty was published in 1960, presumably after much of his music had already hit mainstream England. Despite our lack of knowledge about Clements, one need only hear the sumptuous harmonization of the lyrical melody to absorb this tender, intimate love song. The poet’s comparison of his beauty to a flower is an ancient image, as popular in the sixteenth century as in the twentieth. Indeed, one need only look to the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament, a book whose subject matter contains erotic, nature-laden poetry that has been interpreted allegorically in Judaism and Christianity, and which is the subject of our next piece.

The Flemish Renaissance composer Cipriano de Rore composed his setting of Descendi in hortum meum as the first motet in an elaborate manuscript presented to Duke Albrecht V of Bavaria. The poetry is one of the most intimate passages in the Song of Solomon. De Rore reflected the text through extremely tender melodies and gentle harmonic undulation, rendering this motet one of his most personal and emotional works. What is not obvious to the listener is the fact that the seven voices weave an intricate structure based on a strict three-voice canon. This canon is introduced by the first alto and echoed at various pitch points by the second alto and baritone. (In the original manuscript the first alto part is humorously accompanied by the image of a beast with seven heads!) Peter Philips, director of the Tallis Scholars, in his foreword to this new edition by Francis Steele and Sally Dunkley, describes the overall structure:

The first half [of the motet] perfectly puts the listener in mind of the lush, complex, perfumed reality of a garden in bloom; giving way in the second to a sense of longing for the return of the beloved Shulamite, who is now associated with the fruitfulness of the garden. Artlessly de Rore captures these evanescent moods in multi-layered strands of counterpoint, which join and leave the overall texture seemingly at will. So easy does this seem that for several performances I failed to notice the present of the canon altogether, yet there it is, providing just the necessary amount of backbone to the will-o’-the-wisp polyphony. And although de Rore ends with some gentle chords, the piece had always seemed to me to end in the middle of the phrase—difficult to sing with just the right degree of control—as if the garden was there long before we noticed it, and will continue to be there long after we’ve moved away.

 

YSAYE M. BARNWELL (b. 1946)

MORTEN LAURIDSEN (b. 1943)

Ysaye Barnwell is best known as a long-time member of the female African-American ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock. Barnwell calls herself the “perfect blend” of a mother, who was a registered nurse, and a father, who was a classical violinist. She is, in fact, named after the famed Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. Like her father, Barnwell studied violin as a child but went on to train as a speech pathologist. She is a prolific composer and has written and produced numerous artistic projects for Sesame Street, Dance Alloy of Pittsburgh, and the King’s Singers, among many others. She has established a workshop entitled “Building a Vocal Community: Singing in the African American Tradition,” and was responsible for leading Sweet Honey in the Rock to make their concerts accessible to the Deaf through American Sign Language interpretation. Her piece We Are… is part of a larger collection entitled lessons and features a “lead” accompanied by a choral palette of instrumental sounds. We Are… speaks to the beginning of life and inspired her to write a children’s book, published in 2008, entitled We Are One.

Morten Lauridsen is one of America’s most-performed living composers of choral music. He was born in Colfax, Washington to a family of Danish immigrants and was raised in Portland, Oregon, where his father served in the United States Forest Service. Lauridsen studied music at the University of Southern California in the 1960s and went on to teach composition there for over 30 years. He has received awards in recent years from the National Endowment for the Arts and was presented the National Medal of Arts for his “radiant choral works combining musical power, beauty, and spiritual depth.” Lauridsen’s music contains a very distinct musical language based on lyrical melodies and harmonic sonorities that contain adjacent seconds and unresolved suspensions. His piece, Sure On This Shining Night, is based on the famous poem by American poet James Agee. It is part of Agee’s larger work, Permit Me Voyage, from the section that describes a mythical part of the Greek underworld--Elysium-- reserved by Zeus for those who were heroic and virtuous in life as a place to reside in death.

 

FRANK TICHELI (b. 1958)

CLÉMENT JANEQUIN (c.1485-1558)

Frank Ticheli is primarily known in musical circles as a composer of music for symphonic band. He studied at the University of Michigan and now serves, coincidentally, as a professor of composition alongside Morten Lauridsen at the University of Southern California. Earth Song is one of only a handful of pieces Ticheli has written for chorus. Ticheli authored the text upon which Earth Song is based, a kind of requiem in which music provides the salve to heal us from the effects of war.

It might make more sense that peace should follow war, but it is difficult to deny the force and drama presented by Clément Janequin and his narrative chanson, La guerre, as a suitable end to our concert this afternoon. Janequin was a French composer of the Renaissance and, along with his contemporary Claudin de Sermisy, was hugely influential in popularizing and disseminating the new chanson form. He was well regarded in his life, but was unique among his European peers in that he never held a major musical post. This may account for the fact that Janequin’s meager output of sacred music is unremarkable compared to his 250+ surviving chansons, many of which were printed for years after his death. La guerre is one of several lengthy “narrative” chansons in which Janequin employed natural and man-made sounds. La guerre was written to commemorate the battle of Marignano, in which the newly-crowned King Francis I led his French troops to victory against the Swiss over the region of Milan in 1515. Although the piece is harmonically static it contains so many of Janequin’s onomatopoeic effects as to create a “mosaic of superimposed fragments.” Among the sounds that are represented are trumpet calls, cannon fire, and the cries of the wounded. The victor’s chant of “Victoire” emerges from the cacophony at the end.

 

Anne Lyman

June 2010