Program Notes
Have Ye Not Known? / Ye Shall Have a Song
Randall Thompson (1899–1984)
These two movements conclude Randall Thompson's The Peaceable Kingdom (1936), an eight-movement a cappella work inspired by Edward Hicks's painting of the same name. Drawing on passages from the Book of Isaiah, Thompson constructs a dramatic journey from the conflict between good and evil, through judgment and suffering, to the promise of peace and rejoicing.
Have Ye Not Known? takes its brief text from Isaiah 40, a chapter of consolation addressed to a people facing exile and displacement. Its direct, declamatory opening invokes the enduring power of the Creator.
Ye Shall Have a Song takes its text from Isaiah 30:29, which pictures joyful worship following deliverance. Quiet, procession-like phrases pass antiphonally between upper and lower voices. Repetitions of “and gladness of heart” gather energy before the lively, contrapuntal outbursts on “as when one goeth with a pipe.” Thompson writes for double choir in this concluding movement.
Vier Quartette, Op. 92
Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)
Published in 1884, Brahms’s Vier Quartette, Op. 92, were written for four voices and piano, a combination closely associated with nineteenth-century music-making at home. The first quartet originated in 1877 and was revised for publication with the others. We perform Nos. 1, 2, and 4; each sets the text of a different German poet and links the night sky or changing landscape to human feeling.
O Schöne Nacht (O Beautiful Night), a setting of poetry by Georg Friedrich Daumer, evokes the enchantment of a moonlit evening. Brahms distributes the poetic imagery among the four voice parts: the basses and then the tenors describe the moon and stars, the altos portray the dew glistening on the grass, and the sopranos become the singing nightingales. Finally, a young man steals quietly away to meet his sweetheart, completing this charming nocturnal scene.
Spätherbst (Late Autumn), setting poetry by Hermann Allmers, turns from romance to a landscape emptied of life: mist descends, flowers fade away, and birds fall silent. Brahms begins in E minor, with detached piano figures suggesting the falling mist. In the voices, recurring triplet figures first descend and then rise, adding a sense of restless motion to the bleak landscape. Strikingly, the piece ends in E major, an unexpected shift in harmonic color that does little to dispel the melancholy.
Warum? (Why?), setting poetry by Goethe, asks why songs rise toward heaven. The poet imagines that music might draw the stars, the moon's loving embrace, and the blissful world of the ancient gods down to earth. Brahms opens with a majestic, ascending piano figure followed by an emphatic choral outburst posing the question, “Why do songs resound heavenward?” The voices enter in imitation, reaching upward as if toward the heavens themselves. A contrasting, lilting section in 6/8 accompanies the poet's fanciful answer, suggesting that music has the power to bring heavenly beauty into the human world.
Come to Me
Ivo Antognini (b. 1963)
Swiss composer Ivo Antognini sets Echo, a poem by Christina Rossetti (1830–1894), which he describes as “heartrending and romantic.” Rossetti addresses a beloved who has died, pleading for a return in dreams, if only for a moment. Her words capture the painful contradiction of grief: the longing to experience a loved one's presence again, even while knowing that such a reunion is impossible in this life.
Antognini sets the poetry with voices moving largely together, but in free, speech-like rhythms that seem to follow the natural unfolding of memories and thoughts. The music reaches its emotional climax on the words “Paradise, where souls brimful of love abide and meet”—a vision of reunion beyond death that stands in poignant contrast to the speaker's present loneliness. The final repeated pleas of “Come to me” leave us with the ache of a love that endures even in absence.
Come to me in the silence of the night;
Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft-rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
As sunlight on a stream;
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.
O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet
Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimfull of love abide and meet;
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.
Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
My very life again tho’ cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
Speak low, lean low.
As long ago, my love, how long ago.
Proud Music of the Storm
Jake Runestad (b. 1986)
In Proud Music of the Storm, Walt Whitman hears music in the sounds of nature, human voices, and the songs of memory. Jake Runestad composed this exuberant setting in 2017 for the Dallas Symphony Chorus's fortieth-anniversary season, with Joshua Habermann conducting its premiere that October.
The work opens with a powerful choral declaration and turbulent piano writing, evoking the wind, rivers, and storms of Whitman's imagination. At the words “Blending, with Nature's rhythmus, all the tongues of nations,” the piano shifts to a gentle, repeating pattern while the choir builds energy through increasingly animated, dance-like rhythms.
The music then turns inward, as a tender unison passage recalling the poet's childhood leads into an extended lullaby. With its gently rocking piano accompaniment and simple, lyrical vocal lines, this section pays homage to the intimate world of Brahms's familiar Wiegenlied—a fitting connection to the Brahms heard earlier in the concert.
As Whitman remembers his mother's voice, sacred music, songs of lost love, and the vast sounds of the natural world, he longs to gather them all into a single, all-encompassing experience. But the dream eventually gives way to waking, portrayed through a more intimate, speech-like setting of the text. The poet realizes that the music he has heard is not merely the sound of nature, but the inspiration for poetry yet to be written.
For the final section, Runestad returns to the musical material of the opening, now transformed into a triumphant call to creative action. The work concludes with Whitman's stirring declaration: “Let us go forth in the bold day, and write!”
Proud music of the storm!
Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies!
Strong hum of forest tree-tops!
Wind of the mountains!
Blending, with Nature's rhythmus, all the tongues of nations;
You undertone of rivers, roar of pouring cataracts;
Trooping tumultuous, filling the midnight late, bending me powerless,
Entering my lonesome slumber-chamber—Why have you seiz'd me?
Ah, from a little child,
Thou knowest, Soul, how to me all sounds became music;
My mother's voice, in lullaby;
The solemn hymns and masses, rousing adoration,
All passionate heart-chants, sorrowful appeals,
Song of lost love--the torch of youth and life quench'd in despair,
The measureless sweet vocalists of ages,
Of winds and woods and mighty ocean waves;
Give me to hold all sounds,
Fill me with all the voices of the universe,
The tempests, waters, winds—operas and chants—marches and dances,
pour in—for I would take them all.
Then I woke softly,
And pausing, questioning the music of my dream,
I said to my silent, curious Soul,
Go forth,
Cheerfully tallying life, walking the world, the real,
What thou hast heard, O Soul, was not the sound of winds,
Nor dream of raging storm,
But, to a new rhythmus fitted for thee,
Poems, bridging the way from Life to Death,
vaguely wafted in night air, uncaught, unwritten,
Which, let us go forth in the bold day, and write.
Scotia Songs
Till MacIvor Meyn (b. 1971)
In Scotia Songs, Till MacIvor Meyn draws on Scottish folk poetry and melodies to tell a story of love, separation, and longing for home. Throughout the cycle, familiar songs seem to emerge from a distance, colored by memory and nostalgia. Meyn's imaginative writing for choir, vibraphone, marimba, and percussion gives each song a distinctive character.
The Lily and the Rose intertwines two love poems, The Lily of the Vale by Alexander Bald and Robert Burns's A Red, Red Rose. Meyn introduces their traditional melodies separately before bringing them together in a passionate musical conversation. The movement opens with gentle swells of wordless choral singing against the shimmering sounds of vibraphone and marimba, as though a window were opening onto a cherished memory. The same music returns at the close, allowing that memory to fade gently from view.
Loch Lomond brings a striking change of energy. Propulsive percussion rhythms accompany the familiar melody, introduced first by the men and then by the women. The music gathers momentum toward a dramatic acceleration and key change for the final verse, “The wee birdies sing,” where the full choir joins in a powerful, richly harmonized declaration. Beneath the song's vitality lies its enduring theme of separation and loss.
My Heart's in the Highlands, on poetry by Robert Burns, is an original composition by Meyn rather than an arrangement of a traditional Scottish melody. It begins with the delicate sound of sleigh bells and quiet, wordless voices, as though the music were emerging from the mist. Meyn weaves Gaelic words throughout the movement, while constantly shifting rhythms suggest the restless energy of the poet's remembered Highland landscape, including the pursuit of deer through the countryside. A hymnlike passage in Gaelic offers a moment of reflection before the music accelerates and swells into an exhilarating rhythmic conclusion. What begins as a distant memory ends in an impassioned affirmation of the homeland that remains forever in the poet's heart.
Shenandoah
Traditional American folk song, arranged by James Erb (1926–2014)
The origins of the traditional American folk song Shenandoah remain uncertain. Associated with the Missouri River and nineteenth-century river travel, it later became part of sailors' singing traditions. Its changing verses tell of love, separation, and longing across great distances.
James Erb created his eight-part a cappella arrangement in 1970 for the University of Richmond Choir's 1971 European tour. Published in 1975, it quickly became one of the most beloved choral settings of this American folk song, a distinction it retains more than fifty years later. Erb allows the familiar melody to unfold with remarkable simplicity, then surrounds it with increasingly rich harmonies and overlapping vocal lines. Particularly memorable are the echoing exchanges between voices, creating a sense of distance and spaciousness that seems to mirror the river itself. The arrangement's enduring appeal lies in its ability to make a familiar song sound both intimate and expansive.
Music in the Air
Traditional African American spiritual
Arranged by Ryan Murphy
The traditional African American spiritual Music in the Air expresses an unwavering faith in God's presence, even in moments of loneliness, fear, darkness, and weariness. Ryan Murphy, associate music director of the renowned Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, gives the song an exuberant setting driven throughout by a lively, syncopated piano accompaniment. Beginning with relatively few vocal parts, the arrangement gradually builds in richness and intensity, culminating in a jubilant full-chorus declaration.