Risca Male Choir Blog #17
We’ve had a good month of work here at Risca Male Choir. We had our last outdoor rehearsal at Crosskeys RFC and have since relocated indoors to All Saint’s Church in Newport. We are very pleased to be able to practise in an acoustic that allows us to listen to the choir’s sound in full swing, and we are making good progress with it.
Martin has stepped up with a couple of his own arrangements that he is rehearsing while I take some time away every now and again, and I am very grateful that he is willing to do so.
I have brought in some of our more difficult and new pieces, and the guys are facing new challenges with a positive mindset, and I can’t ask for much more from them – even if I am a pushy conductor!!
We also got to present some awards for those who have achieved a certain amount of years with the choir. They are:
Mike Sullivan - Awarded Full Life Membership
Cliff James - 45 years continuous membership.
Gary Harris - 45 years continuous membership.
Cliff Edwards - 30 years continuous membership.
Steve Wiltshire - 45 years combined membership over several periods.
Congratulations to you all on your fantastic achievement – your commitment to the choir does not go unnoticed, and I hope you enjoy the rest of your years to come!
The awards were presented by Stephen Tom, our President. We are most grateful to him for visiting our rehearsal to carry out this very pleasant ceremony.
From left to right: Stephen Tom (President), Mike Sullivan, Gary Harris, Cliff James, Cliff Edwards, Steve Wiltshire.
Composers of the Month
Arvo Pärt (11th September, 1935)
The Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt was born in Paide, Estonia, a small town near Tallinn, the country's capital. In 1944, Estonia saw the occupation of the Soviet Union, which would last for over 50 years, and would have a profound effect on his life and music.
His musical studies began in 1954 at the Tallinn Music Secondary School, interrupted less than a year later while he fulfilled his National Service obligation as oboist and side-drummer in an army band. He returned to Middle School for a year before joining the Tallinn Conservatory in 1957, where his composition teacher was Professor Heino Eller.
Pärt started work as a recording engineer with Estonian Radio, wrote music for the stage and received numerous commissions for film scores so that, by the time he graduated from the Conservatory in 1963, he could already be considered a professional composer. A year before leaving, he won first prize in the All-Union Young Composers' Competition for a children's cantata,
Our Garden, and an oratorio, Stride of the World.
Living in the old Soviet Union, Arvo Pärt had little access to what was happening in contemporary Western music but, despite such isolation, the early 1960s in Estonia saw many new methods of composition being brought into use and Pärt was at the fore front. His Nekrolog was the first Estonian composition to employ serial technique (using all notes of the chromatic scale in a predetermined pattern). He continued with serialism through to the mid 60s in pieces such as the Symphony No. 1, Symphony No. 2 and Perpetuum Mobile, but ultimately tired of its rigours and moved on to experiment, in works such as Collage über BACH, with collage techniques.
Having had his music banned a couple of times, Pärt re-emerged in 1976 after a transformation so radical as to make his previous music almost unrecognisable as that of the same composer. The technique he invented, or discovered, and to which he has remained loyal, practically without exception, he calls "tintinnabuli" (from the Latin, little bells), which he describes thus: "I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements —with one voice, two voices. I build with primitive materials —with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells and that is why I call it tintinnabulation."
The basic guiding principle behind tintinnabulation of composing two simultaneous voices as one line - one voice moving stepwise from and to a central pitch, first up then down, and the other sounding the notes of the triad - made its first public appearance in the short piano piece, Für Alina.
Having found his voice, there was a subsequent rush of new works and three of the 1977 pieces - Fratres, Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten and Tabula Rasa - are still amongst his most highly regarded. As Pärt's music began to be performed in the west and he continued to struggle against Soviet officialdom, his frustration ultimately forced him, his wife Nora and their two sons, to emigrate in 1980. They never made it to their intended destination of Israel but, with the assistance of his publisher in the West, settled firstly in Vienna, where he took Austrian citizenship. One year later, with a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange, he moved to West Berlin where he still lives.
Since leaving Estonia, Arvo Pärt has concentrated on setting religious texts, which have proved popular with choirs and ensembles around the world. Among his champions in the West have been Manfred Eicher's ECM Records who released the first recordings of Pärt's music outside the Soviet bloc, Paul Hillierr's Hilliard Ensemble who have premiered several of the vocal works and Neeme Järvi, a long time collaborator of Pärt who conducted the premiere of Credo in Tallinn in 1968 and has, as well as recording the tintinnabuli pieces, introduced Pärt's earlier compositions through performances and recordings.
Pärt's achievements were honoured in his 61st year by his election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was nominated as 14th International Composer for the year 2000 by the Royal Academy of Music in London. In May 2003, he also received the "Contemporary Music Award" at the Classical Brit Awards ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
Here is Voces8 singing his recent composition The Deer’s Cry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ir3htl3UlBk
Nadia Boulanger (16th September, 1887 – 22nd October, 1979)
As we had her sister Lili last month, I think it’s only fair we include Nadia Boulanger too!
Nadia was a conductor, organist, and one of the most influential teachers of musical composition of the 20th century. Boulanger’s family had been associated for two generations with the Paris Conservatory, where her father and first instructor, Ernest Boulanger, was a teacher of voice. She received her formal training there in 1897–1904, tudying composition with Gabriel Fauré and organ with Charles-Marie Widor. She later taught composition at the conservatory and privately. She also published a few short works and in 1908 won second place in the Prix de Rome competition with her cantata La Sirène. She ceased composing, rating her works “useless,” after the death in 1918 of her talented sister Lili Boulanger, also a composer.
In 1921 Boulanger began her long association with the American Conservatory, founded after World War I at Fontainebleau by the conductor Walter Damrosch for American musicians. She was organist for the premiere (1925) of the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra by Aaron Copland, her first American pupil, and appeared as the first woman conductor of the Boston, New York Philharmonic, and Philadelphia orchestras in 1938. She had already become (1937) the first woman to conduct an entire program of the Royal Philharmonic in London.
In the late 1930s Boulanger recorded little-known works of Claudio Monteverdi, championed rarely performed works by Heinrich Schütz and Fauré, and promoted early French music. She spent the period of World War II in the United States, mainly as a teacher at the Washington (D.C.) College of Music and the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, Md. Returning to France, she taught again at the Paris and American conservatories, becoming director of the latter in 1949.
In addition to Copland, Boulanger’s pupils included the composers Lennox Berkeley, Easley Blackwood, Marc Blitzstein, Elliott Carter, Jean Françaix, Roy Harris, Walter Piston, and Virgil Thomson. Her influence as a teacher was always personal rather than pedantic: she refused to write a textbook of theory. Her aim was to enlarge the student’s aesthetic comprehensions while developing individual gifts.
Here is her piece Soir d’hiver performed by mezzo-soprano Melinda Paulsen and pianist Angela Gassenhuber.
George Gershwin (September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937)
George Gershwin, born in Brooklyn, New York on September 26, 1898, was the second son of Russian immigrants. As a boy, George was anything but studious, and it came as a wonderful surprise to his family that he had secretly been learning to play the piano. In 1914, Gershwin left high school to work as a Tin Pan Alley song plugger and within three years, “When You Want ‘Em, You Can’t Get ‘Em; When You Have ‘Em, You Don’t Want ‘Em,” was published. Though this initial effort created little interest, “Swanee” (lyrics by Irving Caesar) — turned into a smash hit by Al Jolson in 1919 — brought Gershwin his first real fame.
In 1924, when George teamed up with his older brother Ira, “the Gershwins” became the dominant Broadway songwriters, creating infectious rhythm numbers and poignant ballads, fashioning the words to fit the melodies with a “glove-like” fidelity. This extraordinary combination created a succession of musical comedies, including LADY, BE GOOD! (1924), OH, KAY! (1926), FUNNY FACE (1927), STRIKE UP THE BAND (1927 and 1930), GIRL CRAZY (1930), and OF THEE I SING (1931), the first musical comedy to win a Pulitzer Prize. Over the years, Gershwin songs have also been used in numerous films, including SHALL WE DANCE (1937), A DAMSEL IN DISTRESS (1937), and AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1951). Later years produced the award-winning “new” stage musicals MY ONE AND ONLY (1983) and CRAZY FOR YOU (1992), which ran for four years on Broadway.
Starting with his early days as a song composer, Gershwin had ambitions to compose serious music. Asked by Paul Whiteman to write an original work for a concert of modern music to be presented at Aeolian Hall in New York on February 12, 1924, George, who was hard at work on a musical comedy, SWEET LITTLE DEVIL, barely completed his composition in time. Commencing with the first low trill of the solo clarinet and its spine-tingling run up the scale, RHAPSODY IN BLUE caught the public’s fancy and opened a new era in American music. In 1925, conductor Walter Damrosch commissioned Gershwin to compose a piano concerto for the New York Symphony Society. Many feel that the CONCERTO IN F is Gershwin’s finest orchestral work. Others opt for his AN AMERICAN IN PARIS (1928) or his SECOND RHAPSODY for piano and orchestra, which he introduced with himself as pianist with the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitzsky in 1932.
In 1926 Gershwin read PORGY, DuBose Heyward’s novel of the South Carolina Gullah culture, and immediately recognized it as a perfect vehicle for a “folk opera” using blues and jazz idioms. PORGY AND BESS (co-written with Heyward and Ira) was Gershwin’s most ambitious undertaking, integrating unforgettable songs with dramatic incident. PORGY AND BESS previewed in Boston on September 30, 1935 and opened its Broadway run on October 10. The opera had major revivals in 1942, 1952, 1976, and 1983 and has toured the world. It was made into a major motion picture by Samuel Goldwyn in 1959, while Trevor Nunn’s landmark Glyndebourne Opera production was taped for television in 1993.
George Gershwin was at the height of his career in 1937. His symphonic works and three PRELUDES for piano were becoming part of the standard repertoire for concerts and recitals, and his show songs had brought him increasing fame and fortune. It was in Hollywood, while working on the score of THE GOLDWYN FOLLIES, that George Gershwin died of a brain tumour; he was not quite 39 years old. Countless people throughout the world, who knew Gershwin only through his work, were stunned by the news as if they had suffered a personal loss. Some years later, the writer John O’Hara summed up their feelings: “George Gershwin died July 11, 1937, but I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.”
Gershwin’s works are performed today with greater frequency than they were during his brief lifetime. His songs and concert pieces continue to fill the pages of discographies and orchestra calendars. The Trustees of Columbia University recognized Gershwin’s influence — and made up for his not receiving a Pulitzer for OF THEE I SING in 1932 — when they awarded him a special posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1998, the centennial of his birth.
Here, we have his composition Summertime from his large work Porgy and Bess performed by Harolyn Blackwell, The London Philharmonic conducted by Sir Simon Rattle and The Glyndebourne Chorus.
I hope you enjoy the three pieces I have chosen for this month – some real gems in there for you to listen to! We will let you know about any concerts coming up for you to come and watch as soon as possible.