"Come Away to the Skies: A High Lonesome Mass"

In September of 2011 I was in the Portland area for Chor Anno's yearly brilliant concert since it included the premiere of my double choir reworking of William Billings' When Jesus Wept. Howard Meharg is the very fine conductor, founder, and musical director of Chor Anno, but my friend Reg Unterseher was the conductor for my piece, which takes the Billings canonical tune into very new and interesting harmonic and rhythmic territory. After the wonderful Chor Anno performance, Patrick Dill, a DMA student at University of North Texas studying with Richard Sparks, also performed the piece quite successfully with a UNT choir. Anyone interested in a perusal score please let me know either here or at paulcarey440@yahoo.com.

The title for the Chor Anno concert was "Come Away to the Skies: Sacred Music of Early America" basically utilizing part of the title of a new piece by ACDA executive director Tim Sharp and Wes Ramsay- Come Away to the Skies: A High Lonesome Mass. I have been meaning to blog about Tim and Wes' wonderfully creative piece for a long time- and now finally here it is!

Composers John Muhleisen, yours truly, Tim Sharp, and Wes Ramsay
(sorry it's not hi-resolution)

Come Away to the Skies is intended for concert presentation or within a liturgical service. Most of the performances so far have been in the concert mode, and recently added special slide shows and lighting designed by Tim and Wes have made the work an even greater success with audiences. The piece is not meant as a tongue in cheek novelty item with a fake feel to the bluegrass music- the music and texts have substance and creativity and truly represent the melding of traditions in the best possible sense. With that said, don't expect anything stuffy and academic- at the Chor Anno performance little grannies in the audience around me were tappin' their toes, especially to the Credo! The piece, which embraces both simplicity and also sublime matters of faith as well as musical folk tradition in this country, was a major highlight of the Chor Anno concerts.



 You can find very tasty  performances of all the movements of the piece on youtube, as performed by the Southern Nazarene University Choir, nicely directed by Jim Graves. That's Tim on the banjo in the video of the Credo!

FACTOIDS:

Inquiries about the piece and arrangements to perform it should be made by contacting Wes Ramsay at  augustpr@bellsouth.net. Wes sends a list of the choral movements and information on the rental of the instrumental parts. He then sends the material to a download site after a director determines a performance.

 

The piece is for mixed choir and double bass, guitar, mandolin, fiddle, and banjo. The instrumental parts can be modified and enhanced by players with improv skills (especially the fiddle part). There is no keyboard reduction. To me, the choral parts are very well-written and not difficult. I felt the Agnus, which incorporates the beautiful tune, What Wondrous Love is This,  was the epitome of grace and well worth performing either as part of the whole piece or by itself; thus I asked Tim right away whether they would allow excerpting of movements.There are plans to allow the Credo and Agnus Dei to be excerpted, with possibly other movements to follow. And just to clarify- although the titles of each movement are in Latin, the lyrics are in English.

  


2012 performances of the work were held at Seattle’s First Baptist Church, Berry College in Rome, GA, the Idaho ACDA Fall conference in Sun Valley, Tulsa, OK, and Ashville,NC.  2013 performances already set to take place will be in Gainesville, GA; Portland, OR; Columbia, MO, and Wichita, TX.

Tim will also be in London/Dublin in late December 2013 into Jan 2014 conducting both the Messiah by some dead guy named Handel AND Come Away to the Skies. You can read about it here.

NOTES  (© Goliard Music Group) by TIM SHARP [abridged for this blog by PC] 

Come Away to the Skies: A High, Lonesome Mass

This collection of music is a winsome set of folk-hymn arrangements originating in the mid-nineteenth century collections of the Sacred Harp and Southern Harmony, and organized around a significant liturgy of the church. The hymnbooks from which this music is found were unique to the southern region of the United States.

Tim Sharp

As Come Away to the Skies: A High, Lonesome Mass invites you into the hearing and singing of these timeless hymns, place yourself musically into a time when a singing experience paid little attention to the length of time of a service, but rather, invited you to enjoy community and extended gathering time through the learning of songs in singing schools, through shaped notes, and occasionally through days and even weeks of religious services. There is nothing nostalgic, however, about the poignancy and integrity of text and tune on which this collection is based.

The service known as a High Mass comes from the ordering of the Christian church liturgy into a standardized theological and dramatic liturgical flow. Many faith communities share this liturgy, in one form or another. Certainly, the Roman Catholic Church is known historically for the service of the mass, but Protestant groups such as Lutherans and Episcopalians also share the service. The adjective “high” before the word “mass” partially indicates a service that is chanted and sung, as differentiated from a service that is mainly spoken. The historic texts, usually known by their Latin name, form the various sections of the traditional mass: Introit, Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei.

The working title for this collection plays on the word “High Mass”, by inserting a term unique to the history of the bluegrass musical style, which is the word “lonesome.” This description, coined by Bill Monroe, the so-called “Father of Bluegrass Music”, is the idea of bluegrass music as a “high, lonesome sound.” Monroe is referring to his own vocal quality and range, as well as a modal melodic contour, a quality shared by bluegrass vocalists such as Ralph Stanley, Del McCoury, Ricky Skaggs, and also heard in female musicians such as Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, and Dolly Parton. The subtitle, A High, Lonesome Mass plays on this combination of both service and sound.

The folk-hymns used to carry forward the ideas of the individual sections of the mass—“Kyrie”- “Lord, Have Mercy”; “Gloria”- “Glory to God in the Highest”; “Sanctus”-“Holy, Holy, Holy”-“Benedictus”-“Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord”; “Agnus Dei”-“Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world”—possess the same theological themes as these historic sections. These folk-hymns used come primarily from the Scotch-Irish theological and musical traditions, found uniquely in the American South, and published in the hymn collections mentioned above. Such hymn collections flourished throughout the American South in the mid-nineteenth century, and are repositories of some of the greatest hymns of that era.

The ballad and song tradition that migrated with early Irish, Scotch-Irish, Welsh, and English settlers into the southern Appalachian areas of Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee, was as natural as the transposition of their verbal languages and customs. The thousands of songs that flooded into the valleys of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers came from the lips of generations of folk performers of Southern Appalachia, and found their way into the culture and ways of the American South.

At first, cultural isolation kept music contained in the hills or in wilderness settings. But over time, population patterns caused a convergence of the various pods of population and cultures. Religion took a powerful hold on the settlers of these areas and in 1801, great revivals became popular in rural parts of the South. These gatherings resulted in a body of wilderness spirituals and folk hymns such as “Jesus Walked that Lonesome Valley”, “I Found My Lord in the Wilderness”, “Do Lord, Oh Do Remember Me”, “Down to the River to Pray”, and many, many more.

In the mid-nineteenth century, differences found in the American North and South were not limited to politics. There were differences in matters related to music and music instruction, as well. These differences were particularly distinct in matters related to hymn and gospel song publication and practice.

In the North, the European traditional practice of round-note notation prevailed, as well as a hymn tradition based on slow harmonic rhythms, parallel thirds and sixths and the use of common major keys. This tradition, known as the Reformed or Progressive Movement, promoted musical instruction through public schools, choral societies, music normal institutes, and the publication of sacred, educational, and popular music.

The South was more conservative and maintained the folk traditions and customs taught by the old 18^th century singing schools popular throughout the southern regions. This tradition was characterized by rapid harmonic movement, parallel fourths and fifths, and minor and modal keys. Hymn notation in the South was characterized by the Character Notation Group, or as it is commonly called today, shaped-notes. This method of music education and music reading was based on such pedagogical methods as letter and numerical notation, as well as four and seven shape-note tune books. Nashville, TN, maintained these traditions in both singing schools and hymnal publication. In the North, hymnbook publications were rectangular, but in the South, the distinctive hymn and gospel book publications were oblong in shape, and captured the nickname of “long-boys.”

Folk-hymns used for this collection as statements for the traditional mass texts are Come Away to the Skies (MIDDLEBURY), Brethren, We Have Met to Worship (HOLY MANNA), Brightest and Best of the Stars of the Morning (STAR IN THE EAST), What Wondrous Love is This (WONDROUS LOVE), and Do Lord, Oh Do Remember Me. Additional tunes and stylings are inspired by this tradition, and settings are based upon bluegrass stacked harmony, bluegrass rhythms, and other unique stylistic qualities, including “high, lonesome” modal vocals. Instrumentation requires the classic bluegrass combination of acoustic guitar, mandolin, fiddle, banjo, and double bass. Spoons, washboard. Bones, or snare may be added as desired.

Texts and tunes forming the basis of Southern Appalachian folk-hymns and the bluegrass music that came from the Appalachian areas of western Virginia, and eastern and middle Kentucky and Tennessee, share common features. These include the elegant simplicity of the poetry and theology of the hymns; the modal, folk-song quality of the tunes; and even the interval of the rising fourth at the beginning of many of the tunes, theorized to be not so much a compositional idea, but rather, as a “gathering tone” for the group to find their starting pitch. And, there is the underlying theme and tone of hope, and optimism for a better place and a happier day.

Richard Sparks on the beauty of earlier tuning systems

Yes dear friends, we need more people blogging about classical music and especially our art of choral music, won't you enter in? Well one brilliant fellow who has been at it quite awhile is Richard Sparks, a most awesome musician with an amazing amount of musical experience all across the globe. Richard's blog is titled "Richard Sparks- Music, Conducting, Choirs". Well that's straight and to the point, no mention of Saint Olaf lutefisk dinners, wookies, or retrograde hemiolas- I say keep it that way, don't distract the readers, eh? You can read Richard's wonderful posts here:

http://richardsparks1.blogspot.com/

What made me want to reference this currently is that Richard blogged a few days ago about the NCCO conference (which my blog dissected completely via 3,122 posts and which I am still recuperating from via really cheap wine from Trader Joe's) and he mentioned something which I totally missed and which I now feel stupid about (especially since I studied under Ben Johnston for awhile- a master of tuning systems)--namely the tuning options in early music, including the Bach which Helmuth Rilling conducted at NCCO. Richard is not critical of Rilling, he simply points out the options available and so on and it is great reading. And just earlier tonight via email he elaborated even more to me- I am hoping he will add those elaborations to his blog soon. So keep an eye out for that as you check back on on his blog.

Richard now teaches at the University of North Texas alongside Jerry McCoy. UNT is a leader in live streaming their choral concerts. The live stream info can be found here:

http://recording.music.unt.edu/index.php/live

Also, Richard's Collegium performances, whose broadcasts are not as restricted (under copyright law), can be found on YouTube here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/untrecserv

It's amazing the amount of resources we have today that us old folks didn't have "back in the day". Hmmm...I still have my eight year old sort of believing I grew up with dinosaurs. And heck, he doesn't even really know what a videocassette tape was/is, or for that matter a vinyl LP, blah blah, blah.

Anyway, here is some of what Richard wrote about Bach and some tuning ideas (yes, my immediate thought was too many choirs rehearsing with a piano present-- with the piano's percussive, uber high major thirds overwhelming the ear!). But to read the entire Sparks blog on this subject please go here

And now excerpts from Richard:

"I was able to attend the NCCO (National Collegiate Choral Organization) conference in Colorado Springs in early November.

It was a marvelous conference with both excellent concerts/choirs and sessions.

Helmuth Rilling was the headliner, working with James Kim's excellent CSU Chamber Choir. Everyone knows Rilling's work, of course, from his Gächinger Kantorei and Bach-Collegium Stuttgart and his work since 1970 with the Oregon Bach Festival.

Certainly, his work had a big impact on me. As an undergraduate I was tremendously interested in baroque music and got to know his recordings and those of Wilhelm Ehmann, among others. In 1971 the University of Washington Chorale, under the direction of Rod Eichenberger, took part in one of the Vienna Symposiums organized by Paul Koutney..."

"Since I've done lots of work with period instruments (it's one of the reasons the job at UNT was intriguing to me, and certainly one of the reasons I got the job)--the Bach Ensemble in Seattle from 1978-80 began using period instruments--my ideas about performance have changed as well.

With that in mind, it was interesting to listen to the concert at the NCCO, which had two motets (Singet dem Herrn and Jesu, meine Freude) plus the Magnificat. I found that there were two things that struck me most strongly: some aspects of phrasing and the tuning of major thirds. As I mentioned, Rilling has certainly changed many things about the way he phrases baroque music (with the example of the Kyrie in the B Minor), but there are other aspects where my way of phrasing has changed.

In addition, I've gotten so used to different tuning systems that my ear now wants a considerably lower/pure major third, particularly at cadences. For me, the thirds I heard in Colorado were far too "jangly," the only way I can describe the difference between the "beats" of a tempered third and the beatless relative calm of a pure third (the purity refers to a major third which matches the third heard in the natural harmonic series.

Since I'd just done Jesu, meine Freude with my Collegium Singers at UNT, that was very fresh in my mind. Given what I've said, it's only fair that I provide a link to what we did, not that I'm claiming anything for it, but it represents in a more concrete way what can only be expressed poorly in writing. You can find that performance here: the Bach begins at 1:04 (that's one hour, four minutes). You'll know it's live, not only because it's on video with no possibility of editing, but also because our organist (the fabulous Christoph Hammer) played a decidedly non-picardy third at the end of one of the movements! We were using Vallotti for tuning the organ, a decent compromise for this program, which was mostly mid-baroque from northern Germany (Buxtehude, particularly). For other repertoire (Monteverdi Vespers, for example) we've used quarter-comma meantone, which has extremely pure thirds (in some keys!)."

Great Insights on Programming from Richard Sparks

One of the best blogs about the choral world is written by esteemed conductor Richard Sparks, which you can find here. Richard's blog is way different than mine, certainly more serious than some of the goofy things I post at times, and that's great.

Recently I rediscovered some of Richard's blogs on programming, which you can find grouped together by clicking here. There is some great reading for you there, and here are a few choice excerpts culled from various of the blog entries to pique your interest:

This is a reminder to always look for context when you perform a work--who was it written for? for what kind of space (church, theatre, concert hall)? what size and kind of ensemble? what purpose (liturgical, court, home)? These are always questions that can inform your performance.

With most of my programs, I start with a work or works I really want to do, then start building around it. For me, it's all about how the pieces chosen work together: they can contrast nicely, or several works can complement each other. In that sense, I want the audience to either feel the connections I've made or, in going from one set to another, to move to something that feels very fresh. For that reason, once I come up with a work or two that will "anchor" the program, then it's often a matter of figuring out what else will work well with it

All of us need to continually expand our knowledge of repertoire. This will also be shaped by the ensembles you conduct: the choral repertoire is broad and has so many sub-genres: treble, male, mixed, sacred, secular, for large ensemble, for small ensemble, etc., plus all levels from the most inexperienced choir to advanced repertoire only a professional choir could attempt

One of the glories of the choral medium is that there is such a wealth of repertoire to explore. We’ll never run out of it, and that’s one of the joys of this job. It should never be dull.

So, last time I talked about the importance of thinking of repertoire in programming from the standpoint of the needs of the chorus and individual singers to maximize their growth. But what about the needs of the audience? Or of the institution that supports you if you’re not an independent choir (or your board, if it is)? You can’t forget about those needs (or at least you shouldn’t if you want to keep your job!), but the challenge is to balance those with what the choir needs to do.

My experiences with choirs at different levels tells me that doing challenging music is more often the limitation of the conductor/teacher—I’ve heard children’s choirs doing some amazing music, for example. They don’t know that mixed meters are difficult. If it’s presented to them well and matter-of-factly, they just do it.

Richard Sparks is Professor of Music at the University of North Texas, where he conducts the Chamber Choir and Collegium Singers, and teaches a variety of academic courses. He is also Artistic Director and Conductor of Pro Coro Canada in Edmonton, Alberta--a professional chamber choir; and a free-lance conductor/clinician working in the US, Canada, and Europe. He spent considerable time working with the Swedish Radio Choir in 2007 and 2008. He is Conductor Emeritus of Choral Arts in Seattle, WA (which he founded and conducted from 1993-2006) and was Director of Choral Activities at Pacific Lutheran University from 1983-2001.