Choral Music Reviews
There will come soft rains Music: Ivo Antognini (b. 1963) Text: Sara Teasdale (1884-1933) SSAATTBB, unaccompanied Publisher: Alliance Music Publications, Inc. Approximate performance time: 5’25” (approximately) Sample performance: Atlanta Master Chorale (Dr. Eric Nelson, Conductor);
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4xHYtCM- bQQ
“There Will Come Soft Rains” is a twelve-line poem by Sara Teasdale (published in 1920) that imagines nature reclaiming its ground after a war. Antognini beautifully sets themes of war, extinction, and rebirth with thick, lush jazz-inspired harmonies and non-vocal effects, such as choral whispering and whistling. In the span of a few measures, Antognini can quickly build from a unison to a full 8-part choral divisi and back again, as he is driven to programmatically set the following text:
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pool singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white; Robins will wear their feathery fire, Whistling their whims on a low-fence wire; And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, If mankind perished utterly; And Spring herself when she woke at dawn Would scarcely know that we were gone.
This piece won the 2012 Boston Contemporary Americana Festival and was dedicated to the Santa Fe Desert (Joshua Habermann, Conductor). The Choral Journal (September 2013) review referred to this piece as a “poignant, reflective, and virtuosic piece that stands as a hallmark of Antognini’s output”. I recently contacted Antognini and asked him to share a few thoughts about this piece: “There Will Come Soft Rains is a haunting text, that’s for sure! I read it for the first time many years ago; I was fifteen and was reading Martian Chronicles, in Italian, of course, and this poem appeared at a certain point in the book. Then, a few years ago, I was looking for a new poem to set to music and I found this marvelous one and yes, my mind went back more than thirty years and I remembered…I got in love again with it and I could not resist to do a piece with it! By setting the lyrics to music, I really tried to apply the so-called “word painting” as much as possible.
the soundtrack for a poem and among my choral pieces, it is one of my favorites!” (email correspondence, April 11, 2017).
28
Dr. Diane Orlofsky
Confessions Music: Eric William Barnum (b. 1979) Text: St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Book X (354-386) SATB divisi, unaccompanied Publisher: Graphite Publishing (
graphitepublishing.com) Approximate performance time: 5 minutes
“Confessions” was commissioned in 2010 for the Troy University Concert Chorale and premiered in the Spring of 2011. The text is taken from Book X of St. Augustine’s Confessions and begins with an intoned and repeated “You” in the alto voice. Other voice parts immediately explore the tonal landscape around this note and expand the neo-medieval treatment of this evocative text. While searching for a text, I was captivated by one provocative and profound line in the Augustinian tome – “I must pass beyond memory to find Thee”.
Barnum expertly explores
the ancient and eternal themes in the text through the use of parallelism, chant like rhythmic flow, open harmonies, and the piece ends as it begins – breathing life and mystery into the pronoun “You” with an evocative, aleatory ending. The piece is challenging but would be appropriate for a more advanced high school choir.
You. I must pass beyond memory to find You. I shall look for You so that my soul may live. When my soul is bathed in light that is not bound by space, When it listens to the sound that never dies away. When it breathes a fragrance that is not borne away, I will look for You. But we, O Lord, are your little flock, but we, O Lord, keep us as Your own. Spread your wings. And let us shelter beneath them. You. To rejoice in the truth is to rejoice in You. It is not as though I do not suffer wounds, but I feel rather that You heal them over and over. You.
It has been like composing
Kaleidoscope Heart/Bluebird Words and Music: Sara Bareilles (b. 1979) Arranged by Kerry Marsh Publisher:
kerrymarshvocaljazz.com Sample performance:
http://www.kerrymarshvocaljazz.com/media/scoreflipper/Score Flipper.html?sfParam=kaleidoscopeheartbluebird (can also pre- view the score here) SSSAATBaB (Level 3), soprano solo A cappella
Continued on page 31 May/June 2017
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44
