Choral Reviews

Nathan Reiff, editor

Talaa Min Bayt Abuha Nazem Naim (1925–2020), arr. Shireen Abu-Khader SATB, unaccompanied (c. 3:30)

Text: Arabic (Nazem Naim)

Score available from Dozan World

Recording: Vancouver Youth Choir, Carrie Tennant, June 4, 2022: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=M0w7DxNBSx4

Shireen Abu-Khader has become an increasingly familiar name in North American choral music over the last decade and a half. A Palestinian-Jordanian-Canadian artist, composer, and educator with degrees from USC, Oberlin, and University of Toronto, Shireen serves as Composer-in-Residence with the storied Toronto Mendelssohn Choir. She is also founder and director of Dozan World Inc., an organization centered around the creation, promotion, and preservation of Arabic music, both of the folkloric and the contemporary choral varieties.

Talaa Min Bayt Abuha (Leaving Her Father’s House) falls squarely within the category of music from the Levant, “an Eastern Mediterranean region encompassing Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and a multiplicity of faiths, languages and music.” (Dozan World) Originally written by Iraqi composer Nazem Naim (1925–2020), this version is arranged by Abu-Khader and edited by William Culverhouse, Director of Choral Activities at Binghamton University and specialist in musics of the Arab world. As someone who has “completed several research tours of Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and Palestine, exploring traditional and contemporary vocal and instrumental music of the Middle East,” (William Culverhouse bio) Culverhouse seems particularly well-suited to helping Abu-Khader translate Arabic folk music for the Western ear—and, indeed, both the score’s precise pronunciation guide (which uses IPA transcription adapted by Abu-Khader and Culverhouse) as well as its useful story and performance notes help transform this “light, energetic piece” into a glimpse of a multi-faceted, vibrant culture.

The arrangement opens with hushed lower voices setting the scene, basses singing drumlike vocables and tenors riffing on a formulaic phrase which serves as “a famous opening to many Arabic songs, [where] the melody is usually improved by the singer.” This quasiimprovisational tenor line alternates between C-sharps and C-naturals, offering a Mixolydian flavor to the predominantly D-major landscape. The treble voices join in, telling the story of a pretty young woman exchanging a flirtatious moment with the narrator, presumably a young man. The mixed-meter feel of this arrangement, which breaks down the original 4/4 time signature into a combination of triple and duple meters, creates a dance-like effect which underscores the lighthearted character of the text.

The opening transitions into an accretive repeating middle section, where lower voices take on the text, altos hocket above, and sopranos provide a lush harmonization. A modulation into A major takes us to the rowdy conclusion, which goes into a straight-forward, vivace triple meter and accelerates all the way to the end. This loud, fun finale builds energy and allows the choir to experiment with folkier vocal production if desired. Ultimately, Talaa Min Bayt Abuha is quite accessible in a musical sense; any barrier to entry will likely come from the Arabic language, although the arranger and editor do what they can to mitigate that challenge.

A fun, whirlwind tour through a song “commonly sung at family gatherings and celebrations,” this edition’s notes leave us with some foodfor-thought re: gender identity as expressed in spoken language. As the score explains, “it is interesting to note that the subject of this piece, the ‘pretty one’, is referred to using the feminine form in some parts of the song, and the masculine form in others. While it is very common for Arabic songs to address female subjects using masculine pronouns, the mix of both masculine and feminine pronouns in this piece makes the linguistic aspect of it quite intriguing.” This element of expressing other cultures and worldviews through choral music could ostensibly be explored in a productive way during rehearsal with ensembles of any age and provenance.

Performance video: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=M0w7DxNBSx4

Shireen Abu-Khader’s profile on the Dozan World website: https://dozanworld.com/pages/shireen-abukhader-founder

— Alexandra Grabarchuk

Dr. Alexandra Grabarchuck serves as the Director of Choral Activities at Whittier College.

Salve Regina (from The Harvard/Ashmont Evening Service)

Dan Locklair (b. 1949)

TTBB, unaccompanied (c. 3:45)

Text: Latin (Marian antiphon)

Scrolling score video available via composer’s account on YouTube

Recording: Harvard Glee Club, Andrew Clark, March 23, 2023: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=aEnGwvGIYW4

The ancient Marian antiphon Salve Regina, sung in the Catholic tradition during the period between Pentecost and Advent, is both an intimate greeting to the Virgin Mary and a plaintive cry. The rich history of this text includes choral settings by a host of composers from the Renaissance to the present day, with particularly well-known adaptations by Tomás Luis de Victoria, Francis Poulenc, and Arvo Pärt, among many others.

Link to partial perusal score: https://dozanworld.com/products/talaa-minbayt-abuha

North Carolina-based composer Dan Locklair is among the latest composers to contribute to the multi-century choral tradition of the Salve Regina antiphon. Locklair’s Salve Regina is a motet from the larger The Harvard/Ashmont Evening Service , written in 2022 for a collaboration between the Harvard Glee Club (TTBB) and the Choir of Men and Boys of the Parish of All Saints, Ashmont (SATB) in Dorchester, Massachusetts. These two ensembles have a history of partnership extending back more than a century and regularly premiere joint works capitalizing on a unique aspect of different church spaces at both Harvard and All Saints: they each have organs in both the front and the rear of the building.

While the full Service is thus for the uncommon scoring of combined SATB and TTBB choirs with two organs, Locklair’s Salve Regina is a more intimate setting for unaccompanied TTBB ensemble alone. The work remains largely homophonic throughout with the voices consistently spaced fairly close together, save for a dramatic apex late in the piece. Locklair deftly creates idiomatic, singable lines across all voice parts while remaining sensitive to the tuning challenges frequently created by close voicing in the tenor-bass range. Though the broader effect for the listener is often of a shared text declamation, the individual voice parts are typically always in motion, with rhythmicized neighbor and passing tones appearing throughout. This helps to facilitate dynamic changes and consistently engaged singing throughout long, legato phrases.

Locklair’s musical style in Salve Regina is expansive and broad, which the composer reinforces through notation by giving the half note the beat and with frequent meter changes to align downbeats with stressed syllables. Notated without a key signature, the piece begins and ends in G Major, with departures to B-Flat Major, A Lydian (the Lydian mode and whole tone scales feature prominently throughout the rest of the Service ), and D Major, most notably. Locklair’s harmonic language is largely diatonic with occasional non-triadic tones such as sevenths and ninths. The piece is mostly throughcomposed, though the music at the text “Eia, ergo” echoes the opening material.

This Salve Regina setting maintains its intimate quality even as it builds to an effective climax at the text “Et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui, nobis post hoc exsilium ostende” (“and Jesus, the blessed fruit of your womb, show us at the end of this our exile”). Here, a sudden harmonic shift from a G minor seventh chord to a G Major chord which requires a high B (an outlier and the highest note of the piece) from the first tenors signals the most forceful dynamic of the work. The remaining two pages of music comprise a gradual diminuendo and sense of relaxation back into the warm, rich sonorities of the opening of the piece. The work ends in quiet tranquility.

Dan Locklair’s biography: https://www.locklair.com/about

— Nathan Reiff

Dr. Nathan Reiff serves as the Director of Choirs at Swarthmore College.