Choose Something Like a Star program - February 2023
Celestial Illuminations
According to the cosmogony recounted in Genesis, God’s first act of creation was to call forth light an act Haydn so unforgettably set to music at the start of his own Creation. The stars, also called “the lights in the sky,” became differentiated a few days later to further mark the separation of day from night. But along with this more literal aspect of acting as guiding lights, stars and other celestial phenomena have an inexhaustible symbolic power that choral music is particularly well suited to express.
The image of stars radiating from beyond the earth evokes a wide spectrum of associations in addition to religious and philosophical ones from night’s promise of intimacy for lovers to the most technologically advanced scientific investigations. Our program explores this variety, but there is a unifying musical thread, as Kiki & David Gindler Artistic Director Grant Gershon remarks, insofar as these tend to be pieces featuring “light-filled and luminous” soundscapes and sharing a certain sense of flowing movement and buoyancy.”
The first four selections alternate between Romantic and contemporary as well as between secular and sacred musical responses to the “starry canopy,” to borrow the word from Schiller’s Ode to Joy, the poem that inspired Beethoven to break new ground with the first choral symphony. Johannes Brahms wrote O schöne Nacht (O Beautiful Night) in 1877 to a text by a poet he set more often than any other, Georg Friedrich Daumer. The first of his Four Quartets, it interweaves a rich pianistic tapestry with the chorus’s transportive harmonies.
If stars and their nocturnal setting provide a picturesque backdrop for the union of lovers in Brahms, Arvo Pärt’s Morning Star from 2007 heralds the Christian promise of light and life everlasting as a new dawn
following “the night of this world with a sublimely timed harmonic turn at the end from minor to major.
Robert Schumann was less involved in choral music than his protege Brahms would be, but during his Dresden years in the 1840s he founded a community chorus to which he devoted time as both conductor and composer. An die Sterne (“To the Stars”), the first of a set of four part songs for double chorus dating from 1849, is thought to have been written for this purpose. Friedrich Rückert’s quintessentially Romantic reflections find their echo in this affecting setting, which Schumann skillfully adapts to the divided-choir format.
The Ukrainian composer, singer, pianist, and teacher Iryna Aleksiychuk grew up as the daughter of a choirmaster and is particularly acclaimed for her fresh and vibrant choral compositions. Свят, Свят, Свят Господь Саваоф (“Holy Is the Lord of Hosts”), composed in 2010, sets the liturgical prayer familiar in Roman Catholic tradition as the Sanctus. Aleksiychuk explains that the text combines human and celestial visions of praise “the world of angels and humans” and in the Ukrainian Orthodox Church is especially associated with the celebration of Easter.
Stars are archetypal symbols for the longing to travel, serving not only as guides for adventurous seafarers but even as goals that lure us to overcome unfathomable distances. ATLAS, Meredith Monk’s one-of-akind opera from 1991, revolves around a fictional counterpart to the explorer Alexandra David-Néel. Near the end of the opera, which was so imaginatively staged here in Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2019 by Yuval Sharon, Monk suggests a kind of musical out-of-body experience in the section Earth Seen from Above (from the final part, titled Invisible Light).
Monk, who also authored the almost entirely wordless text, has the singers gently alternate between vocal modules (“doh” and “nn”) while executing the score’s instructions for bodily movements. Radiating a
sense of Buddhist enlightenment, the voices blend and hover and then fade, like “bells ringing in different places simultaneously.”
A longtime tenor with the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Matthew Brown found inspiration for his brand-new commission VOYAGER completed on New Year’s Eve from one of the most ambitious odysseys undertaken by our species, the interstellar Voyager mission launched in 1977. The singers, who are accompanied by an electronic track and divided into four choirs to achieve spatial effects, articulate various vowel sounds, overtones, breath effects, tongue clicks, vocal fry, and other extended techniques throughout. Brown also uses excerpts from the messages and greetings contained on the famous Golden Record carried by each of the two spacecraft associated with the mission.
Lasting around 12 minutes, VOYAGER acquires the dimensions of a miniature vocal symphony. The extraordinary soundscape that results, according to the composer, “is also about the voyage we are all on, together and individually” and “puts challenging, thought-provoking, and inspiring cosmic perspective on how we treat each other and this planet we call home.”
Beginning the second half of our program is another world premiere. Born in 1984 in Mexico City, the composer and vocal artist Diana Syrse enchanted Los Angeles Master Chorale audiences on a program five years ago exploring the Día de los Muertos theme. A poem by the composer’s mother, Susana Rosado, who was detected to have cancer in 2022, inspired Alas de noche (“Nightwings”). Rosado notes that “the text is written by a mother to her daughter at the moment when she leaves the empty house. The mother feels satisfied with what she has made of her.”
Syrse composed the work in Venice and Mexico, drawing on her impressions of “the noise of water, boats, and bells” in the Italian city and the sounds of a hospital in Mexico City. Alas de noche calls for the singers, who are accompanied by percussion, themselves to also play glass bottles of various sizes, crystal wine glasses, and fluorescent whirly tubes. “It is a tender, profound work, full of love and hope,” writes Syrse. “The music tries to reflect the love that the mother has for a daughter who is leaving to fulfill her dreams and the mixture of pain and satisfaction that she has to see her far away but fulfilled.”
Robert Frost published the poem from which our program takes its name in 1943 (during the middle of the Second World War). In 1959, to commemorate the bicentennial of Amherst, Massachusetts, Randall Thompson introduced his iconic setting of Choose Something Like a Star, which became the culmination of Frostiana: Seven Country Songs, a suite for chorus and piano. The ascending piano line and steadfast D’s sung by first sopranos are among the devices Thompson uses to mirror Frost’s deceptively simple text.
My Heart Be Brave had a transcendent effect on the audience when the Los Angeles Master Chorale performed it on a special concert marking its return to live performance in September 2021. The composer, conductor, and singer, the Virginia-born Marques L.A. Garrett wrote it in 2018 for a program by the vocal ensemble Seraphic Fire addressing the theme of social justice. Setting the poem Sonnet by the African American writer and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson (18711938), Garrett crafts a beautifully proportioned choral part song of inspiring, resonant power.
Georgia Stitt’s The Promise of Light for mixed chorus and piano (2007) also encouraged listeners during the pandemic, when Gershon led an account streamed as part of the Virtual High School Choir Festival in 2020. Stitt, a sought-after composer/lyricist who is prolifically involved in music theater, revisited an earlier song with lyricist Len Schiff that both had abandoned to find the right combination to encapsulate “the
winter and the warmth of spirit and the lights” associated with the endof-year holidays.
The piano accompaniment “should tingle with the excitement of a crackling fire or sparkle with the image of sunlight glistening off unbroken snow,” Stitt advises, while "the voices should be filled with expectation. Despite some dark imagery, she adds, the piece is about “light and promise and hope, and the underlying sentiment should always be celebratory.”
Commissioned and premiered last season by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, Michael Abels’s The Open Hand is a lyrical, folk-like setting of a wise saying by Bridget “Biddy” Mason (1818-1891) inscribed in the downtown park named after her. The legendary African American nurse and entrepreneur relocated to Los Angeles after gaining her freedom in 1856, amassing a fortune in real estate that she used for a wide range of philanthropic initiatives to benefit the community.
Ricky Ian Gordon’s Genius Child, a cycle of 10 songs to the poetry of Langston Hughes, was originally written for a solo high voice and piano in 1993. Joy is the cycle’s exuberant, irresistible culmination and provides a lighthearted respite.
I Am Here with You Always offers another reflection on the theme of mothers and their enduring inspiration. Several months after his own mother, Regina, passed away in 2021, the Los Angeles-based Nilo Alcala took up a poem she had written to be shared at her wake and set it to stirring music. “I hope this somehow gives even just a little bit of comfort to anyone who has lost a loved one,” he notes. “They may not be with us physically but they remain in our hearts.”
With Hildegard von Bingen’s Latin “antiphon for the angels” from the 12th century (O gloriosissimi lux vivens), we return to the theme of humanity (a “mud-bound spirit”) aspiring toward illumination symbolized by the heavens. The Minneapolis-based composer and
conductor Jake Runestad’s Spirited Light (2014) sets Barbara Newman’s English translation, deftly using melodic direction, harmonic color, and choral texture to echo Hildegard’s translucent mysticism.
Thomas May is the program annotator for the Los Angeles Master Chorale.