Before The Downbeat: CCS & Chanticleer - Cathedral Choral Society

Before The Downbeat is a study guide by and for the Cathedral Choral Society in preparation for its concerts. Previously distributed in print form to singers only, we are thrilled to present this content to all our audiences in digital form.

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A Time for New Beginnings

The pivotal year 1947 brings the emergence, after decades of economic depression and world wars, of a postwar rules-based world order based on the Declaration of Principles first set forth by Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt in the Atlantic Charter on August 14, 1941.

In January, President Truman appoints General George C. Marshall to be Secretary of State.
In February, Voice of America begins broadcasting into Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
In March, the Truman Doctrine is proclaimed to help stem the spread of communism.
In June, George C. Marshall, in a June 5 speech at Harvard, outlines the European Recovery Plan — ERP, or the Marshall Plan — for American reconstruction and relief aid to European nations.

On the eve of the congressional vote on the ERP in 1948, Washington National Cathedral and the Federal Council of Churches’s Commission on a Just and Durable Peace host a conference attended by more than 2,000 persons, including President Truman. “The world,” warns Secretary Marshall, “is in the midst of a great crisis inflamed by propaganda, misunderstanding, anger, and fear.” He speaks of the peoples of Europe “still struggling against grim poverty and cold, uncertainty of the future, and acute dread of tomorrow.”

In The Beginning

One month before Marshall’s historic speech, Harvard Memorial Chapel was the setting of another landmark event, a symposium described as a “fundamental reexamination of music criticism . . . brought into prominence by [new communication technology] in modern society.”

In conjunction with the Symposium on Music Criticism held over the first three days in May, Harvard commissioned new music—the fee was $500—for three concerts. On the evening of the second day, Robert Shaw led his Collegiate Chorale and brass players of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in three choral works by Italian composer Gian Francesco Malipiero, newly naturalized German exile Paul Hindemith—and Aaron Copland, the Brooklyn-born son of Russian émigrés.

Assigned to write a 15-to-20-minute composition “for a cappella chorus on a text drawn from Hebrew literature, either sacred or secular,” Copland now embarked on a “new beginning” by returning to the “familiar oft-told story” of creation recounted through the first thirty-eight verbatim verses of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible (Genesis I through II:7 in the King James Version).

Copland chose a mezzo-soprano soloist as the narrator, the Vox Dei, or voice of God: “I was striving for a gentle narrative style using the biblical phrase ‘And the next day . . .’ to round off each section.” His biographer Howard Pollack wrote, “All the music derives from the soloist’s opening unaccompanied phrase, even more specifically, from the single gesture ‘In the beginning’.” The soloist describes the work of creation; the chorus comments in a homophonic chant at the end of each Day of Creation. In the Beginning is dedicated to Nadia Boulanger, the French pedagogue with whom Copland studied from 1921 to 1924.

Seen around the world as the quintessentially American voice, Aaron Copland made several tours to Latin America between 1943 and 1963 on behalf of the U.S. State Department’s cultural diplomacy fight against European fascism. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1944 and an Academy Award in 1950. The shadow of McCarthyism forced last-minute cancellation of the long-planned performance of his Lincoln Portrait (1942) at President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1953 inaugural concert. Copland testified twice in closed session before McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Lyndon B. Johnson bestowed upon him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1964; Congress awarded him a Congressional Gold Medal in 1986.

“New Occasions Teach New Duties”

So wrote poet James Russell Lowell in support of the antislavery movement in 1845. The vocal ensemble Chanticleer continues this concert’s theme of new beginnings with music spanning eight centuries from the Middle Ages to today. Each piece gives us a bird’s-eye overview of the evolution of music for male choruses, that is, music written for, or within the vocal range, of the male voice, in genres ranging from the sacred to the secular, from masses to songs of drinking, war, seas chanties, and lovers

From the enslaved singing on plantations in the New World to the nineteenth century’s search for community amid industrialization male choruses arose in Germany, coal miners sang in Wales, and in this capital city, a few young Germans in the Concordia Church choir organized a German Singing Society: Washington Sängerbund. Founded in 1851, it is our oldest continually operating chorus.

Even before the emergence of fifteenth-and sixteenth-century Renaissance composers, such as William Byrd, music creates a sense of the eternal, above time and circumstance. The Gloria from the earliest complete setting of the Ordinary of the Mass is believed to have been written around 1634 by French composer Guillaume de Machaut, who was a canon of the Gothic cathedral at Reims—the city of French coronations and the scene of the Germany’s unconditional surrender on May 7, 1945.

In William Byrd’s setting of the Vigilate from the Cantiones Sacrae of 1589, he “engages in vivid and detailed word-painting,” observes British composer Owain Park. “listen for the ascending motif at ‘an galli cantu’ representing a cock crowing, the slowing harmonic pulse and lulling suspensions that accompany the sleeping faithful at ‘dormientes’, and the sudden coming together of the voice parts at ‘omnibus dico’ (‘I say to all’)”

A third genre in the twentieth-century repertoire of all-male collegiate choruses is arrangements of folk and ethnic works. Among the earliest unaccompanied vocal works by Texan Toby Twining is Hee-oo-oom-ha, composed in 1987 and said to “sit somewhere between rock, folk, and choral music,” explains music director Tim Keeler. He uses “vocal techniques like vocal fry, yodeling, and rhythmic panting … combin(ing) these striking sounds with polyrhythms, mixed meters, and open harmonies to create a joyful celebration of song.”

Born in Berlin, Maryland in 1851, the self-educated son of a slave and a free mother — he taught himself to read by collecting newspaper fragment from the trash — Charles Albert Tindley moved to Philadelphia after the Civil War, taking night courses in theology while working as a janitor at Calvary Methodist Episcopal Church. He would later become its pastor, increasing membership from 130 to a multiracial congregation of 10,000. As a songwriter and composer of hymns such as “Stand by Me,” Tindley is a prominent figure in the development of gospel music. His “I’ll Overcome Someday” is believed to have inspired “We Shall Overcome,” the anthem of the Civil Rights movement. Poor Pilgrim of Sorrow, one of the 46 hymns for which he composed both text and music, was first published in 1919. –Eileen M. Guenther

The traditional African American spiritual Wade in the Water is drawn from two biblical sources: John 5:4, the healing waters at Bethesda, and Exodus 14:19–31, Moses leading the Israelites to freedom from Egypt. In her seminal study of slave life and the power of spirituals, In Their Own Words, Eileen Guenther writes, “Harriet Tubman is said to have hummed this melody as a signal for escapees to move to the water, where their scent was less likely to be picked up by pursuing dogs.” In this arrangement by an alumnus of the Aeolians group, Stephen Murphy uses vocal jazz techniques and expanded harmonies to lift the text off the paper.

Ayanna Wood’s Future Ones, a hauntingly beautiful creation commissioned by Chanticleer, sets a text by author, teacher, and environmental activist Joanna Macy, a Grammy-nominated performer, composer, and bandleader from Chicago, who earned her music degree from Yale university. Woods is one of the most promising composers of her generation. Her music explores the spaces between acoustic and electronic, traditional and esoteric, wildly improvisational and mathematically rigorous.

Chanticleer recently commissioned this new arrangement of “Without a Song,” the most enduring hit song from Vincent Youmans (1898-1946) Broadway’s 1929 Great Day. Stacey V. Gibbs is one of the most in-demand arrangers of our time, having written for the King’s Singers, the United last year States Air Force Sergeants, the St. Olaf Choir, the Stellenbosch Choir of South Africa, the University of Southern California Chamber Singers, Cantus, and many colleges, universities, high schools, and professional ensembles. Chanticleer performed this song at the 2009 Presidential Inauguration Ceremony.

One of eleven children born in Bavaria, Franz Biebl was a lecturer of music theory and choral singing at the Mozarteum’s schools in Salzburg, Austria when “he was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1943 and taken captive in Italy by the American army in 1944. He spent two years as an American prisoner of war at Fort Custer in Battle Creek, Michigan,” according to Chanticleer music director emeritus Matt Oltman in his dissertation on Biebl. “While there, he became acquainted with American folksongs, African-American spirituals, and gospel music. As a POW, he was allowed to form a choir for which he composed simple arrangements of these newly discovered American musical genres.

“It was a good time,” Biebl told an interviewer. “I learned to know the Americans and a little bit of American life and ‘democracy.’ We got enough to eat. Good food, just like the American soldiers had…The Americans helped me to arrange concerts with choir, soloists, and chamber music.”

Released from Fort Custer in 1946, Biebl reunited with his wife in Salzburg and eventually found work as choirmaster at a church in the Munich suburbs. He composed Ave Maria for a German firemen’s choir to sing at a choral competition with similar choirs. A serendipitous meeting in 1970 between the all-male Cornell Glee Club on tour in Germany and Biebl in Munich resulted in its “new beginning” on American shores:

During the [recording] session a voice made repeated intelligent comments over the loudspeaker about intonation and phrasing, and according to [Thomas] Sokol ‘what he was saying was absolutely correct.’ When the session ended, the man came out of the booth to introduce himself – Franz Biebl, music director of the network.”

So wrote Michael Slon in Songs from the Hill: A History of the Cornell University Glee Club. Biebl’s Ave Maria has since become one of the best loved and most sung a cappella works. Biebl’s setting combines the “Angelus,” a Catholic devotional prayer, with the “Ave Maria.”

Tom Petty’s song Wildflowers is about finding a place where you belong; it’s about finding a place where you feel free. For us in Chanticleer, we feel like we belong in a choir, singing next to our colleagues and our friends. And we feel most free when we’re on stage doing what we love. We’re lucky to have found that space, and we hope everyone who hears this song can find freedom and belonging in their own life. –Tim Keeler

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