Sunday, December 8 & Monday, December 9, 2024
Bel Canto Company & Gate City Voices
Welborn E. Young, Artistic Director and Conductor
Christ United Methodist Church, Greensboro, NC

Digital Program Order, Texts & Translations
(PDF – Zoomable for Low Vision)

Conductor’s Ruminations

To be perfectly honest, I usually take the task of providing program notes, or any writing about choral music, much too seriously. And so it was in preparing the notes for the forty-second holiday season concert series. After about fifteen pages of research based history, composer historical context, compositional development studies, etc., etc. etc. I realized I may have gone “off the rails” just a tad.  Jeff Carlson, Executive Director of the Choral Arts Collective, who has been anxiously awaiting my “program notes” reminded me at our dress rehearsal last night [yes, you read correctly Friday night December 6th!] that what the audience wanted was just an insight into the conductor’s thinking about how the conductor [that would be me] came up with this program. Well Rats! I again over complicated the task causing  more than a bit of stress for Jeff on this day before the Christ United Methodist Church performance on Saturday.  Over my nearly twenty year tenure with Bel Canto Company and, more recently, Gate City Voices there have been so very many works that appear to have a bit of holiday magic living within them. These works begged to have the dust brushed off and to once again be dressed in their holiday finery. So, that was the beginning step, started over a year ago when researching repertoire for this concert. Selecting holiday music is a wonderful and terrifying task because of two primary reasons, expectations and the relatively limited and somewhat confining body of music that we hold dear at this time of year. All anxiety aside, I hope that with each performance we at Bel Canto Company and Gate City Voices warm your heart, bring you joy, and kick off your holiday celebrations with Tidings.

The primary sources of the holiday music we hold dear are Carols, Folk music, Spirituals, select works from the Classical canon, and of course, “choralized” Pop or Contemporary music. This concert covers all of these genres over a period that begins in the mid-fifteenth-century up to music from the twenty-first-century.

Although written centuries apart, the concert begins with three works that explore more austere compositional practices albeit not necessarily perceived in that way. The compositional traits of the first and third works, Nova! Nova! and Riu, Riu Chiu, heavily rely on mid-fifteenth-century compositional techniques: fluctuating meter, abundant use of the intervals of a  fourth and or fifth often leaving out the quality defining third of a chord, fluid harmonic modal mixture, and plenty of unison singing. The second piece, Poulenc’s O magnum mysterium, is, in fact, a twentieth-century adaptation of these early compositional traits: free use of metric shifts, frequent melodic phrases that are abrupt and conclude on strong beats thus obscuring the power of the bar line, and  twentieth-century harmonic language. Finally, these three works when compared to what follows are a bit more stark and austere.

Most of the next titles preceding the Intermission are more contemporary arrangements of Carols which populate the holiday soundtrack in stores, in movies [Thank you Hallmark], and across the airwaves. O Holy Night is an epic Gary Fry arrangement. Fry, an Emmy-winning composer and arranger, is also artistic consultant to the Dallas Symphony Orchestra for their annual Christmas Celebration concerts.  The Neo Romantic shifts of dynamics, climatic shifts of key, and an ability to build dramatic phrasing, has taken this mid-nineteenth-century carol to new dramatic heights. In contrast to Fry’s arrangement, Abbie Betinis creates a quiet, stark atmosphere with her In the Bleak Midwinter. You can imagine that you see and hear “bleak” and “frosty” images in the upper registers of the harp writing. The single unison melody is sung so as not to disturb or disrupt the scene, the sleeping child. Betinis uses a melodic and rhythmic ostinato in the altos that eventually builds to a duet and finally a full choral statement before a return to the quiet scene.  The seven eight (7/8) meter in Steven Landau’s  Hark! (in 7/8) along with the upbeat tempo creates, dare I say, a romping good time. Built in a rounded form, the middle section is indicative of the original hymn. The outer sections, well, let’s just say that they’re upbeat and potentially raucous.

I am always honored to premiere a new work and especially when that work was composed by one of Bel Canto’s own, Bill Snedden. How Far Is It To Bethlehem (2016) is one of Bill’s compositions that we have had the pleasure of premiering. Bill takes full advantage of Bel Canto’s musical strengths: the beauty of the voices, the flexibility of the singers, and the “Bel Canto Sound.” This work was picked-up by Hinshaw (now Brock) music. It is a new classic! 

There is not much to say that hasn’t already been said about G. F Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. The unusual fact about this chorus is that it does not appear in the “Christmas” portion of the oratorio, The Messiah, from which it originates. And yet its association with the holidays is as strong as any in the work!

The Carol genre returns following the Intermission. The first four works are from the Carol tradition. A favored composer of music for the holidays is Dan Forrest. O Come, All Ye Faithful for four-hand piano and chorus with divisi is, much like the Gary Fry O Holy Night, in its cinematic effect. Forrest’s style is on full display: long sustained melodic lines, harmonic progressions that are interesting and pleasing to the ear, melodic rhythmic cells that unite all sections, and of course dynamic variation which Forrest exploits to the fullest. Infant Holy, Infant Lowly by Paul Christiansen is close to our expectations of a cappella carol writing with succinct, efficient use of all the compositional traits. The absence of expanded elements such as dynamics and expanded vocal ranges only serves to enrich the warm harmonic palette and intensify the tenderness of the text. The composer Nathaniel Berle Garris and his works were virtually unknown to me. Rise Up, Shepherd, And Follow is in the style of a  restrained gospel song. Elegant but true to several gospel elements such lowered notes outside the key, crisp piano punctuations, and a call refrain structure make full use of a solo voice in the call and the chorus in the refrain. The folk setting of Brightest and Best by Shawn Kirchner is another of the many Americana influenced settings by Kirchner. His arrangements not only demonstrate an understanding of the style but often augments that style with dynamic variety, a strong unvarying pulse, and a more upbeat tempo sure to make you smile.

The last section of the program is an amalgamation of Contemporary, Spiritual, and Carol genres. Both The Christmas Song and Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas were a product of the mid-1940s. Influenced by American sentiment toward the end of World War II, both works have a melancholy quality. The Christmas Song by Robert Wells and Mel Tormé came out in 1945 and was recorded by the Nat King Cole Trio. And, Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane was a late addition to the movie Meet Me In Saint Louis. The heartfelt singing of Judy Garland brought an intensity and ethos to this work that is still felt today. Although differing in genre sources, In Dulci Jubilo is a Carol and Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy is a vocal setting of Tchaikovsky’s iconic ballet. I mention them together because of a similar approach to the bass vocal writing. In both, the basses are not just foundational but also ostinatos or ostinato-like. Both are entertaining and exciting because they are outside the genre from which they were taken. Donald McCullough’s Go Tell It On The Mountain is a title for which Bel Canto provided the publisher’s demonstration recording. McCullough brings a unique perspective to the traditional Spiritual elements. 

There are centuries of writings about music in general and even about most of the works on this program. In preparing this concert and distilling some of this research down for these notes I feel that I have received an early holiday gift. I hope you find these conductor’s “Ruminations” at least somewhat informative, perhaps a little entertaining, and succinct enough not to deflate your holiday spirit. And above all, I hope they add to your enjoyment of Tidings. 

Happy Holidays!
Bill