The essence of lament and longing for home can be found in the music of oppressed peoples. This arrangement, created specifically for this concert, starts with a motif inspired by the lament tradition known as moanin’.  The melody and words of Wayfarin’ Stranger, whose creator is unknown to us, speak with insight and authority.  

One of the most time-honored reasons for someone to be separated from their home is to be called up and sent off to war. Those of us who grew up in this country and are younger than a certain age can easily forget that for most people in most places and at most times, conscription was the rule, not an exception.  As Canada’s easternmost contiguous province, and one of the oldest, the province of Nova Scotia has sent away no small number of troop ships, bound for wars across the sea.  This folksong, well-known today in eastern Canada, was originally a reworking of the late 19th century Scottish lament A soldier’s adieu.  

As both a song of exile and a song about the difficulty of singing, this ancient text has drawn composers across the centuries.  Irony is rare in choral music, but it can be found here, amplifying pathos.   

For many, the sounds of this work, irrespective of the title or translation, have become representative of the larger tradition of sacred choral music written in the Old Church Slavonic language.   

Chesnokov experienced tremendous success as a choral musician.  He was choirmaster at the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow, and founded a choral conducting program at the Moscow Conservatory which he led for over twenty years. 

Despite his remarkable talent and contributions, in the course of his life Chesnokov was successively “evicted” from his various artistic homes. After the communist revolution, sacred art was entirely banned, meaning that this piece, among others, was silenced only a few years after it was written.  The Cathedral in which he had worked, which had taken 40 years to build, was demolished in 1931 to make way for the House of Soviets, a skyscraper designed to promote the Soviet regime, complete with a 100-meter high aluminum statue of Lenin (fittingly, technical challenges prevented this hubristic edifice from ever being constructed). The Cathedral’s destruction so demoralized Chesnokov that he stopped writing music entirely.  He died in 1944, of a heart attack caused by malnutrition while waiting in a Moscow bread line.  

It is often said that it takes a village to raise a child.  Less acknowledged is the fact that it takes a village to lament. This text, adapted from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, alludes to the significance of the community response, or lack of response, to an individual’s suffering and loss.

A winner of our first-ever HerVoice competition and mentorship program in 2021, Sarai Hillman’s remarkable entry Refuge and Safety faced the topic of anxiety and insecurity head on.  We were delighted to commission a new work from this “prodigious talent” (that’s the Chicago Tribune talking, not me) last season, and today we re-present her original work in this new programmatic context.  Hillman’s work is multi-layered and Sarai herself says of Refuge and Safety:

This is the third movement from a collection of pieces based on the text from the Christian Bible that reads:

“But as for me, I will sing about your power.  Each morning I will sing with joy about your unfailing love.  For you have been my refuge, a place of safety when I am in distress.”  (Psalm 59:16 [NLT])

This text was chosen because of the vitality and ambiguity of the Power, Unfailing Love, Refuge, and Safety mentioned in this verse. The importance of singing in the text also greatly influenced the choice to use it.

In this text, David is writing about the time Saul sent soldiers to watch his house to kill him, and this verse is comparing how David’s enemies conduct themselves to how he conducts himself. He states that his enemies prowl the street at night like vicious dogs, scavenging for food and leaving unsatisfied. David, then, switches to a complete contrast in the verse above to describe himself, even using directly opposite language like “night” for his enemies and “morning” for himself. The juxtaposition of imagery is what drives the importance of this text and these pieces.

Although it speaks of safety, this movement is the most vocally vulnerable due to the added open space between the sounds made. The neutral vowel sounds used in this movement also intensify the level of discomfort as it calls for a very high level of precision and unity from the performers. This movement is meant to feel removed from reality and overtly introspective. What makes this idea stick out is the layering of textures throughout the piece, until the end when all the voices finally find “refuge” in their unity. Unlike the other two movements of this work, the main ideas of this movement, refuge and safety, are not musically expressed for majority of the piece, but rather, they are intensified by the expression of the complete opposite, instability and vulnerability.

For you have been my refuge,

a place of safety when I am in distress

—Psalm 59:16

The original Colossus was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, a statue over 100 feet high, erected in 280 BC at the entrance to the harbor at Rhodes, Greece, to celebrate the end of a year-long siege.  The text of the dedication reads in part “Not only over the seas but also on land did they kindle the lovely torch of freedom and independence.”

After an earthquake toppled the statue in 226 BC, the remains lay on the ground for over 800 years.  Remarkably, even in their broken state, the ruins were so impressive that many travelled to see them.

The New Colossus sets the poem by Emma Lazarus, which imports all the weight of the ancient allusion while deliberately (from very the first word) setting up the Statue of Liberty as a departure, and an improvement, from the patterns of the old world:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

—Emma Lazarus

The New Colossus (1883)

Composer Saunder Choi has set the declaration (noted in bold above) for choir.

Thomas Tallis was a master composer of the English Renaissance. He served several consecutive monarchs, adapting his compositional style to suit the tastes of each, all the while surviving the religious controversies and conflicts which made life dangerous for so many at the time, including composers.

The Lamentations of Jeremiah is an extended acrostic poem, each verse beginning with a successive letter in the Hebrew alphabet (Aleph, Beth, Gimel, Daleth, He). The poem is a comprehensive catalogue of a reversal of fortune on every scale: personal, social, religious, economic, and political.

This brief and humble text is luminously set, in a combination of simplicity and mastery.