Choralicious!

“Annunciata”
Music by Paul Crabtree
Words by Emmeline Stuart-Wortley/Ave Maria
SATB
© Yelton Rhodes Music YR2C14
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Bio

Before graduating from the Music Faculty at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and the Musikhochschule in Cologne, Germany, Paul Crabtree was the keyboard player in a catastrophically unsuccessful garage band called Goats’ Opera. He grew up with an equal interest in rock culture and classical music, but was disappointed that his academic training never acknowledged the world of rock and pop, and transplanted to California in his early 20s.

Exposure to the musically permissive culture in the Bay Area led him to integrate the various strands of his personal history, to embrace and intermingle ideas as diverse as Latin poetry and 1960s girl groups;

* Glenn Miller is Missing sets Emma Lazarus’ poetry (about the ecstasies of music) as a jitterbug.
* Five Romantic Miniatures (from The Simpsons) bring cartoon sentiments into the concert hall.
* Annunciata combines the wiltingly love-lorn Victorian poetry of Emmeline Stuart-Wortley with Gabriel’s message to the Virgin.

Crabtree also uses objets trouves both alone and alongside standard texts;

* Three Letters to My Father use the texts of enigmatic hand-written notes which he found among family papers.
* Pax et Bonum is a response to the sudden death of a young tenor friend, whose last letter is quoted ironically alongside a Shakespeare sonnet on immortality.
* When Are We Leaving? intermingles a similar sonnet with some of Iris Murdoch’s final ramblings as she was falling victim to Alzheimer’s disease.

His most ambitious work is The Museum Guard, a one-hour chamber opera for performance in art museums, based on the novel by Howard Norman.

For our first post of 2008, we’d like to welcome Jerry Ulrich to our roster of incredible choral composers!

Jerry is an ASCAP award-winning arranger/composer, originally from Illinois. He’s currently Associate Professor of Music and Director of Choral Activities at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he directs two mixed choirs and the all-male Georgia Tech Glee Club. His numerous compositions and arrangements in the catalogs of several publishers in the US and abroad have sold over 80,000 copies. His music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, throughout New York City and on national radio and television, as well as throughout Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Yelton Rhodes is pleased to offer three of Jerry’s choral compositions: I Know a Garden (text by Robert William Service), Music, when Soft Voices die (text by Percy Bysshe Shelley) and When You Are Old and Gray (text by William Butler Yeats). All three pieces are deeply romantic, with a twinge of melancholy. Ulrich’s choral writing is robust and colorful, featuring elegant melodic exchange between the parts, and a lush tonal harmonic language. His music has a very madrigal-esque quality.

The composer himself offers the following insights to his compositions (click on the titles to download and view partial score PDFs):

I Know a Garden (SATB and piano)

Robert William Service was born on January 16, 1874 to a Scottish bank clerk and the daughter of an English factory owner. At the age of 15 he followed his father into the banking business, but in 1896 he immigrated to Canada. He spent several years in the Yukon, and the austere landscape is infused into many of his poems. During his life, he traveled extensively in North America and Europe and died in 1958. This setting was composed in October 2002 for the Southeast Alaska Music Festival Honors Chorus.

Music, when Soft Voices die (SSAA and violoncello)

[This] is a setting of the familiar Percy Bysshe Shelley poem. Its somewhat haunting and incomplete melodic character is intended to reflect the melancholy nature of the text. It was composed in April 2004, and is dedicated to the composer’s Hofstra University Music Department colleagues with appreciation.

When You Are Old And Gray (SAB and piano)

[This] is a setting of a pensive poem written from the perspective of an older person reflecting on a missed opportunity for love at an earlier age. The Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) was one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. Yeats’ years of unrequited love to Maud Gonne (including four unsuccessful marriage proposals) is reflected in the poem. The composition is dedicated to the composer’s mother and in honor of his father, who were married for 57 years.

Five years ago composer Dennis Rosenbaum was browsing through his published titles at YRM, and realized he hadn’t written any Hanukkah music. He decided to rectify the situation and Flames So Bright at Chanukah is the end result. Yelton Rhodes Music is pleased to bring this piece out this year!

Dennis wrote us about the process of composing this work:

I wanted to write something original, and realized that I needed to write my own text for it. Since I do write poetry, I was pretty sure that I could come up with suitable lyrics. I had the melody in mind, and came up with words to fit it that told the Hanukkah story. The end result is a piece with a Jewish flavor to the melody that tells the Hanukkah story in a very concise manner. It is short enough to allow for great versatility in programming for a wide variety of performances.

This piece is a straight-forward, melodic work intended to be sung a cappella. It is available for men’s chorus, mixed chorus and women’s chorus (just click on the links to view a partial score PDF of each voicing).

Flames So Bright at Chanukah (as performed by Madrigalia, Rochester’s Chamber Singers)

A year ago I spent 10 days in Maui and Kauai working on the third installment of settings of poetry of Francisco X Alarcón. The first set was commissioned by Vance Wolverton and the Cal State Women’s Fullerton Women’s Chorus. Books 2 and 3 were commissioned by Iris Levine and Vox Femina/Los Angeles. (All are available from Yelton Rhodes Music.)

[RB]

ALARCON MADRIGALS, Book 3 (2006)

Music by Roger Bourland
Poetry by Francisco X Alarcón
Performed by Vox Femina/LA, Iris Levine, conductor (May 2007)

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1. Body in Flames

I want to abandon
words

go and awaken
the senses

I want
no memory

rather to embrace
every instant
to a frenzy

I want to think
with my feet

I want to cry
with my shoulders

I want to set
my body on fire

•

2. Lamentario

es triste ser vaso y nunca llenarse
ser puerta y siempre quedarse trancada
ser cama sentirse mortaja no lecho
es triste ser uno y nunca sumar dos
ser ave sin nido ser santo sin vela
ser solo y vivir soñando abrazos

•

3. Like a crazed flower

there has never been sunlight for this love,
like a crazed flower it buds in the dark,
is at once a crown of thorns and
a spring garland around the temples

a fire, a wound, the bitterest fruit,
but a breeze as well, a source of water,
your breath –– a bite to the soul,
your chest––a tree trunk in the current

make me walk on the turbid waters,
be the ax that breaks this lock,
the dew that weeps from trees

If I become mute kissing your thighs,
it’s that my heart eagerly
searches your flesh for a new dawn

•

4. Face and Heart

may our ears hear what nobody wants to hear
may our eyes see what everyone wants to hide
may our mouths speak our true faces and hearts
may our arms be branches that give shade and joy

let us be a drizzle, a sudden storm
let us get wet in the rain
let us be the key, the hand, the door, the kick, the ball, the road
let us arrive as children to this huge playground ––
the universe

•

5. Guardian Angel

When I felt so sad and all alone
Wanting to cry in the classroom
The girl sitting next to me
Suddenly held my hand
And with the darkest and most tender eyes
I’ve ever seen
Told me without a word
“Don’t worry, you are not alone.”

Poetry © Francisco X. Alarcón

Deep in the heart of late December,

Softly the snow begins to fall.

Slowly the night turns into darkness,

As we begin the longest night of all.

Watching, waiting

Light is fading,

On the longest night of all.

Thus begins Diane Benjamin’s Solstice Carol, a straightforward and tuneful work celebrating winter solstice. Its beauty is in the simplicity of line and message, devoted to the subject of darkness, light and renewal.

A newly engraved edition of the original version for women’s chorus and piano was made available just last year, and Diane recently arranged the piece for mixed chorus and piano as well. Click on the links to view a partial scores as downloadable PDFs.

Search, three movements for unaccompanied SATB chorus, was composed by Paul Des Marais in 2002. It’s a beautiful and reflective work set to poetry by W.S. Merwin, Theodore Roethke and Mark Doty, revolving around the journey of mortality. The composer describes this journey as being…

…full of feeling: full of fear, full of anger, full of sadness, and - sometimes - resolved by a quiet acceptance of the inevitable.

The movements are 1. the birds on the morning of going (with words by W. S. Merwin), 2. The Waking (with words by Theodore Roethke), and 3. The Retrieve (dream fragment), with words by Mark Doty. Click on the links to view partial score as downloadable PDFs.

Regarding the last movement, Des Marais writes the following:

In the poem by Mark Doty, revolving around the last days of his partner, the feeling of refusal is very powerfully described. Wally, Doty’s partner, hears madrigal-like, beautiful voices inviting him to come, to dance with them. And his reply: “I’m not ready yet; I’m not ready yet.” But it was a dream, and he did go.

Search was first performed by the Los Angeles Chamber Singers under the direction of Peter Rutenberg on June 9, 2002.