Program Notes
This afternoon’s program opens with three motets by Anton Bruckner (1824-1896). One primary interest of the Romantic movement was the exploration of music from the past. Perhaps the most notable result of that interest was Mendelssohn’s rediscovery and performance of the St. Matthew Passion by Johann Sebastian Bach, rescuing the now-famous Bach from relative obscurity. A few years later, there arose out of the Catholic church a group of clergy, known as the Cecilians (named after St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music), who argued that the grandeur of the contemporary Mass settings—beginning with Haydn and Mozart—were well suited for the concert hall, but too bombastic for the sanctity of worship. In its stead, the music should reflect the pure a cappella style exemplified by the polyphony of Palestrina, and grounded in Gregorian chant. The composer who embraced these principles most successfully was Anton Bruckner.
Bruckner spent most of his early years in the monastic environment of St. Florian, where he sang as a choirboy and regularly attended concerts. A profoundly religious soul and consummate musician, Bruckner incorporated the basic tenets set forth by the Cecilians, using plainsong chants and church modes, with a freer 19th-century harmonic language influenced by Wagner, including unusual key changes and surprising chromaticism. A phenomenal organist as well, Bruckner produced choral compositions that employed shifting blocks and colors of sound, the way an organist might use different registers and registrations.
Today, we will perform three of Bruckner’s thirty-four motets. Bruckner composed Os justi (The mouth of the righteous utters wisdom, WAB 30, 1879) in two contrasting sections: an eight-part stately homophonic section, and a four-voice polyphonic section, with a return to the A section. With its strict use of the Lydian church-mode throughout and the simple plainsong chant ending, it is a motet worthy of the Cecilians’ aspirations. Locus iste (This place was made by God, WAB 23, 1869) was composed for the dedication of a chapel at the New Cathedral in Linz, Austria where Bruckner had been organist. It opens with the foundation stone of a simple C major homophonic phrase. The basses then lead the upper voices in a series of phrases that lay out the structure and build upon each other. Then they drop away to let the tenors lead, resulting in a more rarefied sound on the phrase irreprehensibilis est (and is impeccable). The A section returns and after a gorgeous chromatic ornament of the word Deo (God) brings the motet to a quiet close. The final motet we perform, the antiphon Ave Maria (WAB 6, 1861), was the first composed, being written to celebrate the culmination of Bruckner’s studies with composer Simon Sechter. Sechter’s strict pedagogy forbade his students from composing their own work until coursework was complete, so this motet can be read as flowering of Bruckner’s newly released creative process. This seven-voice motet is reminiscent of the polychoral motets of Gabrieli. Bruckner creates contrasting textures through the addition or subtraction of blocks of voices, with full, lush harmonies.
—David Hodgkins and Yoshi Campbell
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i see others like me by Bosba (b. 1997) was commissioned by the Terezín Music Foundation as part of the LiberArte project, and premiered by Coro Allegro at Boston Symphony Hall, October 21, 2024. Here Bosba, a western educated Cambodian composer, speaks of her work, which is based on the poem “Clouds,” by poet Fanny Howe:
“One late afternoon in April 2021, Fanny and I spoke over the phone about setting her text. She shared with me her inspiration behind her poem, about feeling trapped inside a house but looking at the reflection of clouds on Boston’s skyscrapers, inspiring her poem on the theme of liberation. Although written prior to the Covid pandemic, her poem resonated with me as I sat on the other end of the line, confined at home.
“Quite early on in the concept of writing what would become i see others like me, two images came to mind. The first image was of myself slowly falling down a building. The second image was Richard Drew’s The Falling Man.
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“I try not to overthink about the ramifications of collective trauma, though I find myself acknowledging daily the continued impact of my country’s genocide and how the trauma of other peoples influences my thinking and interactions with the past, present, and future.
“I don’t think of myself as an interpreter of maladies, as the malady I bear is not my own but passed down, yet I hold this real wound which I have tried to convince others of its severity. I see others just like me: interpreters of maladies, trying to persuade each other that the suffering that has been inflicted will always be superior to somebody else’s. Fanny’s poem warns us that our journey is a mirror of our past, a liberation: we are leaving where we are coming from.”
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“Border” by Rich Campbell
Award-winning composer Rich Campbell (b. 1958) has had works performed by leading choral ensembles from around the world, featured in film and theatre productions, and on a Grammy-nominated album.
In the words of the composer:
“Border is an artistic response to the immigration crisis around the globe (especially in the United States). From its opening cries for “border, sanctuary, asylum, bridges not walls,” the text draws from (and paraphrases) lines from several sources:contemporary media, Emma Lazarus’“The New Colossus,” the Bible’s Matthew 25:31-40, [“I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in.”], currency, and others. The changing meters of “Border” fill the work with an up-tempo, rhythmic energy that propels it forward with increasing urgency. Border is a call for justice, empathy and compassion, a summons to our collective conscience.”
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Zoltán Kodály’s radiant Missa Brevis (1944-5) was born out of the darkness and suffering of the siege of Budapest. Despite his popularity as a preeminent Hungarian composer and teacher, Kodály had fallen out of favor with the pro-Nazi regime for his refusal to divorce his wife Emma Sándor for being Jewish, and for his efforts to protect colleagues, friends, and former students. Forced to go underground, the Kodálys moved into the cellar of a Benedictine convent. There, Kodály reworked a previous solo organ mass into the Missa Brevis for choir and organ and dedicated it to “Coniugi et consorti carissimae in anniversario XXXV” (to my friend, my love and my wife on our thirty-fifth anniversary).
During the Siege of Budapest, over 38,000 civilians were killed in the fighting between the Soviet Red Army and Romanian Army encircling the city, and the German Waffen-SS and those pro-German Hungarian forces who were trapped inside it. The Kodálys fled to the basement of the Budapest Opera House. The Missa Brevis was premiered there in a makeshift auditorium in the cloakroom, accompanied only by a harmonium and the unwanted percussion of the 24-hour-a-day bombardment that was destroying their city. A subsequent version for choir and orchestra was premiered at the Three Choir Festivals in Worcester in 1948. Today, Coro Allegro performs the version for choir and organ.
Though written in darkness, Kodály’s Missa Brevis shines with his faith in the capabilities and expressive power of the human voice—a belief that fed not only his compositions but also the school of pedagogy that bears his name. Kodály had grown up in small towns in rural Hungary, surrounded by the folk music and dances of the Roma and other Hungarian törzsek (tribes or clans). “The making of my destiny [as a composer] was as natural as breathing” said Kodály, “I sang earlier than I talked, and I sang more than I talked.” Later he moved to Budapest to study at the University and the Academy of Hungarian Music where he met his lifelong friend and collaborator Béla Bártok. The two of them began collecting Hungarian folk songs, hoping to challenge the hegemony of German musical forms with a new Hungarian music, blending native folk roots with 20th-century innovations studied in Paris.
Three of Kodály’s influences are strongly in evidence in the Missa Brevis. First is the vocal contrapuntal style of Palestrina, second, the Impressionistic harmonies of Debussy who Kodály adored, and third, the pentatonic lines and modal Hungarian “folk-melos.” All of these influences combine to give the sound of the Missa Brevis a unique combination of clarity, expressivity, and unusual brilliance. As David Hodgkins points out: “Kodály sets up musical keys that are all of a sudden a half step higher than you expect them to be. And there’s a brilliance about his transitions into these chords that is breathtaking.”
Beyond the unexpected modulations, the Missa Brevis challenges the singer with a four-octave span: from the high tessitura demanded of the sopranos to the resonance required of the lowest bass lines. The piece brackets the six usual movements of the Ordinary (Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus Dei) with an Introitus and a closing ‘Missa Ite est’ for solo organ (not performed today). In the inner movements, the organist works in close partnership with the choir, often doubling the vocal lines. The Introitus opens in a series of beautiful stacked chords, then introduces the rising and falling motive that is the principle building block of the mass. The Kyrie begins with the same arcing phrase, sung by the alto, tenor, and bass lines. This is contrasted by the sudden radiance of the “Christe eleison,” sung by a trio of soprano soloists. The Gloria combines choral fanfares with the moving sonorities of the solo “Qui tollis peccata mundi.”
The influence of folk song is most apparent in the beautifully humane Credo, where Kodály sets each small section of text with an expressivity that borders on storytelling. We hear the dancing of the visible world and the mystery of the invisible one. We witness the excruciating crucifixion and hear the halting steps of the funeral procession leading to the burial. The Sanctus begins with ethereal arcing lines of polyphony and lilting imitation that gives way to the homophonic brilliance of the hosannas. The simple and beautifully comforting melody of the Benedictus is followed by long chains of yearning suspensions. The darker Agnus Dei reprises both the “Qui tollis” from the Gloria, and the “Christe eleison" from the Kyrie,although the prayers for mercy are now transmuted to prayers for peace.
As David Hodgkins points out, “At the end of the Agnus Dei, the chorus repeats the word “pacem” (peace) on beat 1 of each measure using shifting, chromatically-inflected chords, as if peace were an elusive entity, while the organ answers on beat 2 with a pedal low D insistently tethering the chords, and finally settling them into their rightful home. It’s very simple, but very effective.”
—Yoshi Campbell
Program notes @Yoshi Campbell, Coro Allegro Programming, Community Outreach and Equity Consultant, except where indicated. For permission to reprint, please contact yoshic@coroallegro.org and consider a donation to Coro Allegro.