Blog #8, First Amendment

I expected this blog to be about Round Five of the Ives Vocal Marathon, acronym IVM. However, Johana Arnold got sick the day of the projected concert at Hartwick College and we’ve had to postpone the concert. Bummer. The previous concert was postponed from February 12 to February 19 because of a near-blizzard snowfall. And the very first pair of these concerts, in January of 2005, had to be postponed a couple of days because of show. Sometimes I think the weatherman confuses Chares Ives with Currier and Ives and thinks we at the IVM really WANT all this snow! The elements (and now the germs) are clearly not being cooperative. So my report on Rounds Four and Five of the IVM is delayed until Johana’s concert is rescheduled. (A nightmare, by the way—juggling two college professors’ schedules is bad enough, but add that of Paul Woodiel, Broadway fiddler [The Color Purple at the moment], and Kim Patterson, professor who’s musical director of a college musical about to start production [Urinetown] and it’s very hard to come up with a date.)

But there is real news on the First Amendment front. The Associated Press has just released information from the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum about our woeful ignorance of our rights. 22% of Americans can name all five Simpson family members, but only one in a thousand (that’s .1%!!) can name the five freedoms guaranteed in the First Amendment. To this we’ve come. And the margin of error of their poll is 3%, so it’s possible a whopping one-quarter of us can name Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa and… (What’s the baby’s name?) I don’t know off the top of my head how to reduce .1% by three percentage points and I’m not going to try (this is a blog, after all). But any way you slice it, the spread is appalling.

At least this woeful state of affairs is inspiring me to get cracking on the details of the spring tour of “The Bill of Rights,” my plan to have a download in all the states (way behind schedule), and other business pertaining to my most recent choral composition. The Unitarian Church in New Haven is going to do the whole piece in the spring. And other performances are talked about here and there across the country—more on this subject very soon. Grading midterm exams be damned! Ives performances move over! Let’s educate at least a handful of folks about their rights in this great democracy.

For more about the Freedom Museum, the poll, and the First Amendment, check out:

http://www.freedommuseum.us/
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/

In case you’ve noticed that I only produced one blog in February, I’m counting today as a mythical “February 29, 2006,” In such a short month I need a couple of extra days—at least one—to fulfill my obligations. I’ll catch up with two new blogs later in March.

Blog #7, Ives

Since opening this web site last summer I have concentrated on my setting of the Bill of Rights and its performances. There is some news about that topic, and a blog on the updates (future performances and related matters) will be forthcoming in a few weeks. The two blogs about my Introduction and Grand March were timely, of course, and the whole episode fresh in my mind. For the month of February, however, I would like to concentrate on another project, the Ives Vocal Marathon. Here’s something I wrote in the fall of 2005 for one of my Ives recitals in this series.

The IVES VOCAL MARATHON
Neely Bruce first encountered the vocal music of Charles Ives as a freshman at the Eastman School of Music, when he accompanied Sylvia Anderson in “Evening.” He played a few more songs in undergraduate school at the University of Alabama. In 1966 he entered graduate school at the University of Illinois, and in the late sixties began to work on Ives with his office mate, baritone David Barron. They began to present all-Ives programs and other recitals featuring this extraordinary repertory of song, and in July of 1969 they presented the earliest documented performance of “August.” In 1972, as part of the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, they presented the first major performance of Ives songs in Poland—the second half of a concert which opened with John Ogden playing the “Concord” Sonata.

Over the years Neely continued to perform the vocal music of Ives—with his wife Phyllis Bruce, the American Music/Theatre Group (AM/TG presented an all-Ives and Foster program at the Bushnell in 1982 and participated in “Wall-to-Wall Ives” at Symphony Space, NYC, in 1984), and other soloists and ensembles. His paper comparing 114 Songs of Ives and the collection of Stephen Foster songs known as the “Morrison Foster Songbook” was published in the proceedings of the 1974 Ives Festival-Conference, An Ives Celebration.

In the summer of 2004 the long-awaited critical edition of the bulk of Ives’ vocal output, 129 Songs, was published by MUSA (Music of the United States of America). Master-fully edited by H. Wiley Hitchcock, and exhaustive in its detailed treatment of Ives’s many eccentricities, this volume, with the critical editions of early and miscellaneous songs by John Kirkpatrick and James Sinclair (Forty Early Songs, Eleven Songs and Two Harmonizations), makes it possible for Bruce to produce a complete Charles Ives song series, up-to-date, full of surprises, and drawing on forty-five years of experience with this repertory—the Ives Vocal Marathon.

Neely Bruce is joined by soprano Johana Arnold, mezzo Elizabeth Saunders, tenor Gary Harger, his old friend David Barron, other soloists, members of AM/TG, flutist Peter Standaart, violinist Paul Woodiel, and two other pianists (“On the Antipodes” and “Vote for Names” require more than one) to present all 183 Ives songs over a three-year period. This project will culminate in a festival of Ives vocal music at Wesleyan University (and other locations in Connecticut and New York) in the fall of 2007: five song concerts, with lectures, panel discussions, and other special events.

* * * * *

The first concerts in this series took place in January of 2005. Saunders, Harger and I performed two blockbuster concerts, with the assistance of my wife Phyllis, flutist Peter Standaart, members of the South Church Choir, and old buddies Toby Twining and Martha Smith (formerly Hanen) from the glory days of AM/TG. That summer Gary Harger and I did a chunk of the tenor songs at Wesleyan, and called it “Round Two.” On Saturday 24 September 2005, we did two more concerts (“Round Three”), the shorter one in the afternoon and the bigger one in the evening. To introduce the first concert there was a panel discussion—Ives scholar and conductor Jim Sinclair, my colleague Yonatan Malin who studies art song, and myself. There have been spinoffs: a recital with Harger at the Hartt School, a couple of previews at South Congregational Church at Middletown, and other previews planned for local educational venues. The Connecticut Humanities Council has given us a handsome grant to do Ives songs about religion at the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, in conjunction with the current exhibit of American paintings (1780-1920) entitled “Finding Religion”—check out the details at their web site, www.flogris.org.

In future blogs I will have a lot to say about this project—what Ives means to me at this time in my life, how the songs are typical (and atypical) of his output, what I think “the Ives method” of songwriting is, grouping these songs into topics (not just Ives/religion, but Ives/nature, Ives/peace/war, Ives/politics, etc.), the special challenges and rewards of this venture, and many other things. For now, suffice it to say that this is turning into the most meaningful performing project of my life. I’ll explain later.

Notices about future Ives performances (and there are lots of them in the works) will be listed on the web site.

For Ives aficionados and those who may be curious, here is a list of the 121 songs (out of 183) we will have performed by the end of February 2006, in alphabetical order. For details about the way we have grouped this material into concerts and other points of information about the Ives Vocal Maraton, please feel free to contact me directly.

Afterglow
Allegro
The All-Enduring
Ann Street
At Parting
At Sea
At the River
August
Autumn
Because Thou Art
Berceuse
The Cage
Canon (first version)
Chanson de Florian
Charlie Rutlage
The Children's Hour
A Christmas Carol (the one in 114 Songs)
The Circus Band
The Collection
December
Disclosure
Down East
Dreams
Ein Ton
Élégie
Evening
Evidence
Far in the wood
Feldeinsamkeit
Flag Song
Friendship
General William Booth Enters Into Heaven
Grace
Grantchester
The Greatest Man
Her Eyes
Her Gown Was of Vermilion Silk
Hymn
I travelled among unknown men
Ich grolle nicht
Ilmenau
Immortality
In Autumn
In My Beloved's Eyes
In the Alley
In the Mornin'
The "Incantation"
The Indians
The Innate
Kären (Little Kären)
The Last Reader
The Light That Is Felt
Like a Sick Eagle
Luck and Work
Die Lotosblume
Maple Leaves
Marie
Memories: a. Very Pleasant; b. Rather Sad
Minnelied
Mists [II] (second version)
My Lou Jennine
My Native Land
Night of Frost in May
A Night Song
Nov. 2, 1920 (An Election)
Old Home Day
The Old Mother (the version with Ives’s text)
Omens and Oracles
On Judges' Walk
On the Counter
"1, 2, 3"
The One Way
The Only Son
Pictures
Premonitions
Qu'il m'irait bien
The Rainbow (So May It Be!)
Religion
Remembrance
Resolution
Rock of Ages
Romanzo (di Central Park) [five different versions!]
Rosamunde (first setting)
Rough Wind
The See'r
September
Serenity
The Side Show
Slugging a Vampire
Soliloquy
A Son of a Gambolier
Song
A Song–For Anything
Song for Harvest Season
Song without words [I] (world premiere)
Song without words [II] (world premiere)
The South Wind
Sunrise
Tarrant Moss
There is a lane
The Things our Fathers Loved
Thoreau
Those Evening Bells
Through Night and Day
To Edith
Tolerance
Two Little Flowers
Two Slants (Christian and Pagan): Duty/Vita
The Waiting Soul
Walking
Walt Whitman
Waltz
Watchman!
Weil' auf mir
West London
When stars are in the quiet skies
Where the eagle cannot see
Widmung
Wie Melodien zieht es mir
William Will
Yellow Leaves

PLUS: The following piano pieces as change-of-pace items:
Three Protests
Some Southpaw Pitching
From the Concord Sonata: “Hawthorne,” “The Alcotts” and “Thoreau”
(performed on different programs, in relation to different songs)

AND: The following songs by German composers (Ives set the same texts):
Romanze, aus dem Schauspiel Rosamunde, by Schubert
Widmung, by Robert Franz
Wie Melodien zieht es mir, by Brahms
Wanderers Nachtlied, by Schubert
Ein Ton, by Peter Cornelius
Die Lotosblume, by Schumann

AND: The following miscellaneous items:
The first “Song Without Words” as a violin and piano piece
The arrangement of “A Christmas Carol” by Paul Echols for voices SATB

Whew! What a workout.

Blog #6, 1st Performance of Introduction and Grand March

I’m back from Columbia, South Carolina and the premiere of my “Introduction and Grand March.” It was a very full and eventful trip. I arrived at the Columbia airport late Tuesday night, January 17 and was duly ensconced at the home of Peter and Mary Hoyt. Wednesday morning I picked up a rental car and drove to Durham, North Carolina (four hours there, four hours back!) to see my teacher and mentor Lara Hoggard, his wife, his daughter and his grandson. (On the way I stopped at South of the Border for a quick couple of tamales.) The Hoggards were in fine shape, all things considered. Dr. Hoggard will be 91 in March, and hasn’t been in the best of health. But he is as lively as ever, and we had a wonderful visit, filled with music and reminiscing about Indian Springs School. I improvised for a while, and played the Chopin B minor sonata for him. Then we listened to almost half of the recently released 2-CD set of the ISS Glee Club under his direction in the late ‘50s (gorgeous stuff). Then there was more improvising, a little Mozart, a bit more Chopin, and a performance of my new harpsichord piece for the Physics Department at Wesleyan, albeit on the piano—“Albert’s Chaconne,” in honor of Einstein and the 100th anniversary of the theory of special relativity. I left about 7:30 and drove back to the Columbia airport where I picked up Phyllis about 11:30.

Thursday I finished the “translation” of the text that the chorus sings at the end of the Grand March—see below. The German is the result of pseudo-random operations on selected pages of The Abduction from the Seraglio. The English version was begun by Peter and Mary Hoyt, with assistance from their niece Lizzie. I had a good time finishing it, although the finished product makes rather too much sense, considering the almost totally arbitrary nature of the original. It can be read aloud so that it makes even more sense, if that effect is desired.

From 11:30 to shortly after 1:00 I rehearsed with the chamber choir of Dutch Fork High School. They are a fine group, and their director, Marjorie Turner, did a fine job of preparing them to sing my piece. I worked mostly with the text, hoping to get them to enjoy nonsense in German as keenly as they might enjoy it in English. We also listened to part of the Overture to Abduction, the Vaudeville that precedes the final chorus, and the brilliant little hymn of praise to Pasha Selem itself. They got the point, and sang with gusto and real pleasure. Just before I left I was treated to a performance of the “Dies Irae” from the Mozart Requiem. They sang it very well indeed. I told them to get some of the hell and brimstone of that piece into their part of the Grand March and all would be well.

Thursday evening was spent en famille with the Hoyts. Their little girls danced a bit around the piano, and we made a plan to have more dancing later in the trip. I spent the morning on Friday preparing for the talk I was to give for the composers’ seminar in the afternoon and the first rehearsal that evening. Specifically, I went through the score and the various photocopies I had used as source material, matching the results with the sources. (Not surprisingly, I had forgotten the details and my notes on this matter were incomplete. I was able to identify thirty-seven quotations, and the source of all but seven of them—not bad, but sooner or later I have to complete this little bookkeeping task.) I was also able to practice “Hawthorne” by Charles Ives a bit. USC composer John Fitz Rogers, Peter Hoyt and my buddy Ellen Schlaefer from the Connecticut Opera (now the opera director at U of SC) had lunch together. Reginald Bain joined us later. Then final thoughts about the talk, the talk itself (with good questions by the U of SC composition students) and a beer with my friend Tayloe Harding, now the dean of the School of Music there, whom I hadn’t seen in years, a quick supper (Mexican again) with Peter, and a brisk walk to the stage of the Koger Center, where at last I was to hear the orchestra start working on my piece. Whew!

The first person I saw backstage was Dr. Benjamin Woodruff, a.k.a “Woody,” whom I knew both from my teenage years at the Brevard Music Center in the late 1950s and also from graduate school at the University of Illinois. For several years Woody has been the librarian for the South Carolina Philharmonic, and though we were in communication about the score and parts for the Grand March it was the first time we had seen each other in about forty years. We caught up on several decades of news in several minutes, and then I went into the hall to sit with Peter and await the downbeat!

The rehearsal itself was not without the normal problems of working through a new piece for the first time. Most of the orchestra was reading, and the style that was needed was not completely clear to everyone. The entrance of the chorus, three-quarters through the piece, injected some much-needed energy into the proceedings. Some singing with gusto triggered some playing with panache. After checking out a few cues with the Turkish percussion and a few notes from the podium the rehearsal was over.

I felt the orchestra needed to know more about the ideas behind this piece. Later that evening I re-formatted Blog No. 5 (elsewhere on this web site) and printed it out on Saturday morning. Peter photocopied it in the School of Music offices and I left copies backstage for the orchestra. I was also able to quietly circulate and tell some of the players a few details—a bit louder here, a bit softer there, not too many things but crucial ones. Somehow it all worked. The second rehearsal (actually a run-through, dress rehearsal sort of thing) was about 400% better. I had high hopes for the performance, and indeed it was quite good. Here’s what Gregory Barnes, the reviewer, had to say in Tuesday’s The State (Columbia’s daily newspaper).

Careful examination of Columbia’s Mozart Festival schedule reveals an abundance of delightfully creative musical ideas.
Take Saturday night at the sold-out Koger Center: The Philharmonic paired Mozart’s first and last symphonies, the Palmetto Opera sang enchanting arias, the perfect composer for the job premiered a new musical homage to the master, and a Philharmonic principal performed a work by a Mozart contemporary.
…Neely Bruce’s Introduction and Grand March…” proved a great, if under-rehearsed, festival opener. Disguised quotes from Mozart operas marched in strict rhythm to Ivesian bi-tonality and juicy dissonance, but the musical result was clearly the-one-and-only Neely Bruce.
Eau Claire and Dutch Fork high schools contributed percussion and chorus, the latter unfavorably positioned, singings words unfortunately not reproduced in the program.

Actually, from where I was sitting, I could hear the hot-shot singers from Dutch Fork quite well, and they sounded wonderful. As for the words, here they are (as I said earlier, the result of pseudo-random operations on the text of various pages of The Abduction) with a “translation” by me and Peter and Mary and Lizzie. Would it really help if this material had been reproduced? It would have been fun, of course, but helpful? I doubt it.

abgetan geschlagen

abgetan geschlagen Schlag
die Bastonade Himmels Charlie sei
belehne Aufschub Himmels drein

Treue Segen meiner Streite
Selim Ränke Lagerstroh
frisch zum gute Leopold

lange Freud und Jubel marsch
Wir gehn hinein, ich mögen dich gefragt!
mag Hurtig muss fliegende sein

zeihe trefflich Eifer Mozart
Weibern Scheitel fache George
Welche anderen Gefahr

Teufel Brust fort großen Tropf
Ich schlage dran entschlossen Flut gewagt
ein Mann zuletzt doch Jubelklang

Freuden wegen Könnte teuer
prange zitten Göttertrank
willig Singen herlich Lust

wieder Huld mein Dank der ganz
Erdross sein Wolfgang Scheitel marsch bekannt
und prophezeihn in Eigentum

Tücken kampfe Liebe gaffen
lebe mit Verachtung Platz
Bacchus schenken es sei Ives

du bist unverdrossen ganzes Türe Scherzen Eigentum
schändlich Winde Blonden schwachen Aufschub Amadeus Wort
früh aufstehen wahrhaft dummen Wagen feiger umzugehn
Mädchen passen wonne Stärke Arten gehn hinein Gesang

disposed of beaten

disposed of beaten whipped cream
heaven’s cudgel is Charlie
invest with postponement heaven therein
true blessing of my quarrel
the schemer Selim is a batch of straw
long march Joy and Jubilation
we’re going inside I have to question you!
get moving must be flying
accuse the excellent eagerness Mozart
the apex of women fans George
such a different danger
devil breast be gone big moron
thereby I beat the resolute, risky flood
finally a man a jubilant noise nevertheless
joy because of expensive possibility
the drink of the gods glitters and trembles
voluntarily we sing magnificent pleasure
again kindness my thanks for the whole
strangulation his Wolfgang the top of his head is famous for marching
and prophesies in possessions
malicious pranks struggle to stare love
live with contempt place
Baccus presents it is Ives
you are unflagging the whole door jokes possessions
shameful winds feeble Blondie postponement of Amadeus word
rises up early true dumb carts cowardly going around
maiden is suitable delightful strength the species going inside to sing

A SOCIABLE FOOTNOTE: Saturday afternoon we went on a successful hunt for the house in Columbia where Phyllis lived in 1958 and ’59. The landmark was the Colonial Heights Baptist Church, no longer in the phone book but clearly recognizable now at the renamed Family Worship Center. Saturday night My sister Linda and her husband the painter/sculptor Jerry Luke of Savanna met us at the concert. We had a couple of meals together and a very good time. After breakfast with Linda and Jerry on Sunday Phyllis and I played hooky from church and drove to Rocky Mount, North Carolina to visit Ben and Betty Johnston. (Another eight hours on the road, round trip! On the way we stopped at South of the Border for ice cream.) It was a wonderful visit, though a short one. The highlight of the trip was hearing the new recording of Ben’s Ninth, Third and Fourth string quartets in new performances by the Kepler Quartet. (The Second Quartet is on the same CD, but we ran out of time.) Recently released by New World Records, these amazing pieces, in cleaner, brighter-than-ever performances with ferocious attention to detail, are a must-buy for serious collectors of twentieth-century music, string quartets, or even different versions of “Amazing grace.”

For an excellent descriptive review of this CD, and an informative interview with one of the members of the Kepler Quartet, see http://dram.nyu.edu/dram/_html/news.html. Ben is the featured composer and the date is January 12, 2006.

Blog #5, Introduction and Grand March

My new orchestra piece is entitled “Introduction and Grand March: An Orchestral Homage to the late W. A. Mozart of Salzburg and the late C. E. Ives of Danbury.” It is a collage of dozens and dozens of tunes, fragments, and stretches of recitative from seven operas of Mozart: Idomeneo, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutte, The Magic Flute, La Clemenza di Tito, and especially The Abduction from the Seraglio. It was commissioned by the South Carolina Philharmonic, Nicholas Smith, conductor, with funds from the School of Music from the University of South Carolina. It will be premiered in Columbia on January 21, 2006—details of the performance can be found elsewhere on this web site.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have conceived of such a work. While I am quite pleased with the result, in no way can I take credit for the idea. That goes to my good friend Peter Hoyt, Mozart (and Haydn) scholar extraordinaire. Peter and I first discussed “Ives Meets Mozart” last July, over margaritas and dinner at Rosa Mexicali. This fine restaurant is right across the street from Lincoln Center, where he had just given an excellent talk on Mozart and travel (which quickly broadened itself into “travel in the eighteenth century throughout the continent of Europe”). Peter has heard a great deal of my music over the years, and is completely aware of my love for the music of Ives and the impact Ives has had on my compositional career. But more to the point, as a Mozart scholar and new music enthusiast he was quick to speculate about appropriate ways to commemorate Mozart’s 250th birthday (January 27, 2006)—he argues that we, the musical public, should look at the influence of Mozart on composers from his time to ours, and we should get lots of composers writing new Mozart-influenced works. Ergo, specifically, I should write a piece in which “Ives Meets Mozart,” and it should be a march.

The idea appealed to me from the start. In August (2005) Phyllis and I visited Henry Brant and his wife Kathy in Santa Barbara. Henry and I went for long walks and talked about lots of things musical and political. I asked him to help me brainstorm about what to do with the Mozart orchestra that wouldn’t sound like Mozart orchestration. We came up with lots of ways to do this. I continued to think about appropriate Mozart source material. Though Ives’s works contain literally hundreds of musical citations, in all his compositional output he never used a Mozart tune or fragment or even a suggestion of a Mozart texture. Actually Ives did not like Mozart very much. In this respect Charlie was very much a man of his time—the late nineteenth and early twentieth century musical world had little use for Mozart, with the predictable exception of Don Giovanni, (especially when the statue drags the vile-seducer-as-hero off to Hell).

I began to think about what Ives and Mozart had in common, which is more than one might think. Both composers had a keen sense of musical humor, and composed elaborate musical jokes. Both wrote small experimental pieces that informed their larger ones. Both boldly escaped from ecclesiastical patronage, though in totally different circumstances with totally different results. Both liked games. Both had a keen sense of orchestral color. And both were very idealistic about the power of music to ennoble and transform human life. Maybe Ives would have had a different opinion of Mozart if he had seen The Magic Flute a few more times. Or known about Mozart’s dirty jokes.

So I decided to write a giant musical collage of fragments from the seven Mozart operas mentioned above. The first step was to go through the vocal score of Abduction and make photocopies of pages that could easily be transformed into march music. This turned out to be a lot of music, far more than I actually used in the composition. Then I faced the problem of making a random selection from the other six operas. I wanted a system that would give equal probability to any page coming up in six volumes with a wide spread of page numbers (Figaro has over twice as many pages as Flute). The method I came up with had two stages. First, I drew three digits from zero to nine out of a plastic container. This allowed numbers smaller than ten (007 for example) to turn up with equal probability as much higher ones. Then, rolling a single die, I assigned an opera to each resulting page number. In this manner I came up with sixty number+score combinations. Predictably, some of these did not exist, though I was surprised at how many phantom pages there were on the list. I ended up with thirty-nine real pages of music, which I shuffled and divided into three piles of thirteen pages each.

I made an outline:

Introduction
A1 (a la marcia, based on Abduction)
B1 (first collage based on the other six operas)
A2 (a second passage based on Abduction)
B2 (second collage)
A1 with variations
B3 (third collage)
A2 with variations
Coda

I was ready to start serious work on the piece.

The first step was to play through all of the material at the piano and improvise connections from one thing to another, see what might be superimposed on what, how to reharmonize this or that, and so on. This was an exciting process, one that took several days. I was struck by several properties of this music. First, it was very easy to combine passages with each other, in a most natural manner—a comment on the homogeneity of the Mozart œuvre, perhaps. But there were some surprisingly quirky passages, especially in The Abduction—the Lydian-sounding first chorus of the Janissaries (implying an oscillation of triads a whole step apart, C major and D major) proved particularly useful as my march developed, and some distinctive lines of Osmin morphed into the double-reed solos of my introduction. I also rediscovered some repetitive figures, used almost obsessively, which give certain Mozart passages a proto-minimalist quality. Two of these—the main motive of the overture to Cosi Fan Tutte and the string figurations at the end of the finale to Act Two of Abduction—were to figure prominently in the final moments of my piece.

But the biggest surprise was the amount of recitative that turned up in the thirty-nine pages. This was a possibility I did not foresee, and one that gave me pause. Statistically, of course, this should have been no surprise at all. A great deal of Mozart opera is recitative. But how to deal with nine out of thirty-nine pages—23%—of brutal formulaic material of no thematic interest? (By the time the piece was complete, an even larger percentage of the total—123 measures out of 373, a whopping 32.9%—was based on this stuff!) I decided this was a golden opportunity to exploit hitherto ignored properties of such passages. I would concentrate on the rhythm. Played in time, as march music, it turns out that recitative rhythms are quite distinctive. Also, I harmonized these passages with tight, dissonant chords based on the pitch content of each recit. Finally, a constant texture dominates these passages. The two French horns in unison play the speech-based melodies, the two trumpets play close harmonies below the horns, and the clarinets and bassoons double on a narrow-range bass line. So the B passages are held together by characteristic rhythms and a unique orchestral texture, although the melodic material is never repeated.

All this intellectual gamesmanship had to be turned into music, of course. It had to become the ebb and flow of phrases, it had to build to some rhetorical high points, it had to have a climax and a denouement, it had to work as orchestration, it had to engage the audience (and the performers) on a deep enough level that it became fun, even exciting. I hope I have succeeded, and I hope some of you get a chance to hear it for yourselves.

A NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION: I will be writing at least two blogs a month in 2006. Eventually I’ll be able to write one a week. There is certainly enough to write about.

Blog #4, Happy New Year

It’s January 7, 2006, and I am WAY behind on these blogs! I have a good excuse—a commission for a new orchestra piece from the South Carolina Philharmonic. But the score is bound and in the hands of the conductor, and the parts are safely in the hands of the orchestra librarian, so I can catch up on the rest of my life. The piece is entitled “Introduction and Grand March: An Orchestral Homage to the late W. A. Mozart of Salzburg and the late C. E. Ives of Danbury.” I’ll write about it in Blog Number Five, but let me finish up Number Four first. It was eight weeks ago (!!!),

WHAT I WROTE THEN:

I wrote to Lila Ferrar, who intended to perform the First Amendment at her church last Sunday (November 6, 2005). She wrote back right away:

“Yes indeed! We did sing the First Amendment in church, yesterday, and I was very pleased and proud of how it went.

I just finished putting a copy of the order of service along with our November church Newsletter, in the mail to you.

I read the First Amendment aloud to the congregation before we sang it.

I am very happy to hear you are making progress with singing the whole thing in DC and elsewhere. I have had at least one choir member (besides Rob Adams who came with me and sang with you at Wesleyan) express interest in doing the whole thing. I don't know about logistics, but am eager to hear more. Thanks for keeping me posted.

Best to you

~Lila”

And here’s a follow-up comment from her a few days later:

Neely,

when I met with the minister today, she said that at least a dozen different people came up to her after the service Sunday and said, what a wonderful service (the whole thing) She herself was blown away by the First Amendment.

CONTINUING AND FINISHING UP, JANUARY 7, 2006:

There have been some other performances of the First Amendment since that time, but I don’t know anything about them. There are also plans in the works for a tour of the Bill of Rights, under my direction, in June 2006. It’s premature to talk about the details, but soon I hope to share more information.

I didn’t achieve my goal of a download in every state by Thanksgiving 2005. However, there was a December download (and possible performance) in Georgia, and a second one in Pennsylvania. The New England states still lead in the number of downloads. It’s time to seriously get to work on the other twenty-nine states where my setting of the First Amendment has not seen the light of day! That’s one of my New Year’s resolutions, and one which I should be able to meet, with a little help from my friends.

A CD of the performance at Wesleyan last September of the entire Bill of Rights is just about edited and ready for limited release. More on this subject in the next blog.

HAPPY NEW YEAR everyone!

Blog #3, First Public Performances of Bill of Rights

In the middle of August I was interviewed extensively by New York Times writer Brian Wise, in preparation for a feature article for the Sunday Times Connecticut section. The article appeared yesterday (September 4, 2005). For obvious copyright reasons I can’t reproduce Brian’s fine summary of my most recent choral composition (and the career of its composer) here, or link readers to it. However, I can tell you about it, and you can look it up on your own.

The same goes for the excellent piece which Matt Erikson wrote for the Hartford Courant about “The Bill of Rights.” Check it out—it appeared on July 4, 2005.

I have been invited to talk about this piece to a sixth-grade social studies class in West Hartford. I’m more than happy to visit other classes, far and wide. Contact me directly at:

neelybrucemusic@comcast.net

As many of you will know, Congress, late in 2004, passed a bill which establishes September 17 as Constitution Day. On this date in 1787 the final signatures were added to the Constitution (including of course the Bill of Rights) and copies were sent to the States for ratification. If the 17th falls on a Saturday (as it does this year) the holiday is to be celebrated on the 16th. Wesleyan has planned various events to celebrate Constitution Day on Thursday and Friday (15 and 16), including a lecture by Paul Finkleman, professor of law at the University of Tulsa, who will speak on the separation of church and state at 4:00 p.m. on Thursday in Olin Library.

Featured will be the FIRST PUBLIC PERFORMANCES of my setting of the Bill of Rights. (The event at South Church on July 10 was a public reading, not really a performance.) I have assembled a group of area singers (professional, semi-professional and amateur), including students and colleagues at Wesleyan, to sing under my direction. For those of you reading this blog who are in the area and want to come, here’s more information:

What: The first complete performances of "The Bill of Rights"
When: Thursday September 15 at 1:10 p.m.
Where: The Lobby of OLIN LIBRARY on the Wesleyan University campus

AND...
When: Friday September 16 at 12:10 p.m.
Where: Wesleyan Memorial Chapel

The performance on Thursday in the library is in honor of the founding of the new Wesleyan Pre-Law Society. (I expect it will be sung by a smaller group of voices—many people can’t be around the Wesleyan campus in the middle of the day two days in a row, though some have told me that they are clever about masking their absence from work and wouldn’t miss it for love nor money.) The Friday performance is the opening event in the new Wesleyan Music Department/Center for the Arts series of informal Friday noon concerts in the Chapel. Area residents take note!

News of the Friday performance has attracted singers who will be coming from as far away as Washington DC and Albany NY, and others from Massachusetts and Vermont are planning to participate. If you would like to join in this historic event there are rehearsals on Sunday night the 11th from 7:00 to 9:30, Thursday at noon for an hour, and Friday morning at 10:30, these rehearsals just before the two performances. Contact me directly at the Email address above for details of location, getting the music, or any questions you may have.

On other matters pertaining to this setting of this text: people all over the United States and the territories continue to download the music for the First Amendment. However, there are no new states represented. I need to get working on that aspect of this project. In my second blog I expressed a desire to have at least one download in all of the fifty states before Thanksgiving. That is still quite possible, of course, but I have to get the word out more efficiently and much more broadly. Help and suggestions are more than welcome.

Blog #2, Bill of Rights - Performance Options

Many people all over the United States have downloaded my setting of the First Amendment. I am delighted with the widespread interest in this composition. There were downloads first from Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine and Vermont: i.e. the readership of the Hartford Courant and the New England network of Sacred Harp singers. But word has spread about this project, and there have been downloads from California, Florida, Hawaii, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Wisconsin, and even the US Virgin Islands. That’s twenty of the “fifty nifty United States” plus one of our territories. Downloads in 40% of the states and the web site has only been up for a month! Help spread the word about this site and the FREE SHEET MUSIC on it—let’s aim for at least one download in the other thirty states before Thanksgiving.

Some of you have been asking about performance options for this piece, so I am writing about that in this, my second blog. First of all, it’s a piece in the Sacred Harp tradition and I suggest that it be performed that way (if you are unacquainted with this style of music check out http://fasola.org). However, if you would like to sing it in a more refined manner, like mainstream American choral singing, or in another style altogether (gospel for example) that is fine too. Singing the Bill of Rights is more important than stylistic nicety—i.e., in the endless controversy “which is more important, the words or the music?” in this case it’s the words.

Second, this First Amendment setting is written in imitation of the music of the United States at approximately the time of the Bill of Rights itself, so certain conventions apply. Specifically, directors should remember that the melody is in the tenor—bring that part out, loud and clear. Also, it is in the style of this music to double the soprano and tenor parts at the octave, so feel free to do that if it’s appropriate to your ensemble and if you like the sound. (This is also a good way to achieve the proper balance if you don’t have enough tenors.) And in the late eighteenth century voice parts in such compositions were routinely doubled by instruments, if instruments were available. (Sacred Harp singers no longer do this—the music, as heard today is 99.44% a cappella.) I suggest the following doublings, all of them completely stylistic:

• Soprano: doubled at the same pitch by a flute
• Alto: doubled an octave higher by a clarinet (believe it or not, an authentic practice of the time)
• Tenor: doubled an octave higher by an oboeBass: doubled at pitch or an octave lower by bassoon, cello or contrabassTenor and
• Bass: played at pitch (or the tenor an octave higher) on the organAnd ANY combination of the above.

Not quite as stylistic as these suggestions, but effective musically, would be doubling the parts with a string quartet. I’m not sure brass instruments would work as well, but if the players are available go ahead and experiment. I don’t think the piano sounds good with this kind of music, but organ sounds wonderful (harpsichord too).

Third, many of you have written asking about the suitability of this composition for different choral situations. This warrants more extensive discussion. When I wrote the First Amendment my “sonic image” was a moderately large chorus, SATB with balanced parts. I attempted to “write easy” so that amateur choruses could sing the piece without an enormous effort, though clearly some rehearsal would be required. In all this I feel I was successful. The First Amendment is a piece of cake for professional singers, a bit more work for a good community chorus, and well within the capabilities of a fine high school choir (willing to do some woodsheding, of course). As the set of motets progressed I became a bit more adventuresome—there are some hard spots, but nothing which is substantially more difficult than I have described, just a bit more work to make it happen.

That leaves a lot of choral situations which are common, for which the First Amendment is not specifically designed—treble choirs, church choirs without any tenors, male choruses, etc. But my goal is to have the whole country, the whole world singing the Bill of Rights! So all of these choral situations need to be accommodated. Consider some of the possibilities, case by case.

Treble choirs: It’s hard to imagine this work sung by young children. However, preteen treble voices can do it with some work, and singers high school age and above certainly can perform it. Unison treble singers should sing the tenor line, up an octave. Instruments can play the other parts or not, depending on availability—if there are none, leave out the rests in the fuguing sections. Two-part treble choirs can sing the tenor an octave higher (you always need the melody) and the soprano. Three-part choirs add the alto, four-part choirs add the bass.

Church choirs without any tenors should have women’s voices sing that part an octave higher. The organ doubling the tenor and bass parts (or more, if your organist can manage it) sounds fine. Other instruments doubling the appropriate parts (see above) will also be a fine effect.

Certain choirs have no basses, i.e. they are SAT ensembles. I have encountered these forces in a number of situations—choirs of teenage boys, black gospel choruses, and certain Latin American ensembles. In these cases I strongly urge the use of at least one bass instrument, but even if that is not possible sing the upper parts without it! Remember, it is better to sing the Bill of Rights than not to sing it.

Male choruses should put the highest available voices on the alto part (baritones singing in falsetto are great for this purpose) and sing the soprano down an octave. It can be a good idea, depending on the size of the chorus and the number of mature male voices, to transpose the music down a step or even a minor third.

There are probably more situations to be considered—if your kind of choir is not covered in these comments feel free to experiment. I know from personal experience (years of work in church music, and especially adapting the choral music in my piece CONVERGENCE to a multiplicity of circumstances) that all of these suggestions work and can be very effective. Contact me directly if you have questions or comments.

Blog #1: First Singing of Bill of Rights

On this beautiful Bastille Day in Connecticut I would like to take stock of the Bill of Rights composition project. Last Sunday—July 10—a group of some fifty singers joined me at South Church to sing through "The Bill of Rights" for the first time in public. (Six of us met earlier at my house for a bit of a rehearsal, and several people had the music in advance to look it over.) There were another fifty to sixty people who just came to listen—most of them I did not know. Among the singers were Martha Smith, Toby Twining, Paul Anderson and of course Phyllis Bruce, all members of the late great American Music/Theatre Group (AM/TG) which some of you who read this will remember. Many members of the Connecticut Opera Chorus showed up (one of the hats I wear is chorus master for Conn Op), and most of our regular once-a-month Sacred Harp singers as well. The rest of the singers and most of the listeners read about the event in the paper or on the web.

As promised, a video cameraman and a sound engineer from Brave New Films, sent by the ACLU, were on hand to videotape the proceedings and interview me and some of the singers. I will keep you posted on the broadcast of some of this material by the ACLU, which is supposed to take place in September 2005. I also arranged for an audio recording of the singing—excerpts will be available soon on this website for listening.

We rehearsed from 2:30 p.m. to 3:00. My strategy was to go through what I thought were the hardest parts, leaving most of the easier stuff for real sight reading. From the earlier six-person rehearsal it had been determined emphatically that the setting of the Tenth Amendment is the hardest motet of the bunch. This amendment is the "states rights" amendment (see the text elsewhere on this site). I decided that an appropriate musical image for delegating whatever to the individual states "or to the people" would be to delegate a specific musical idea to each section of the chorus. So there are four fugue subjects, and four expositions—the first begins with the tenor subject, the second with the bass, the third with the soprano and the last one with the alto. The fugal treatment is not like Bach or Beethoven (my favorite fugue composers) but rather like the fuguing sections of fuguing tunes. As I write in the score: “If William Billings had written a quadruple fugue it might sound something like this."

After we had gone over the parts and practiced the four expositions we worked through the setting of "cruel and unusual punishment" (completely diatonic but relentlessly dissonant) and a few other tricky spots. Almost exactly at 3:00 p.m. we began with the First Amendment and sang straight through. There was one and only one breakdown. We repeated that place, got through it, and plowed ahead. The end of the reading was greeted with prolonged, enthusiastic applause. Many of the singers indicated a desire to sing the piece again, and many have volunteered for a public performance. Watch this web site for information about such events in the future.

[Sidebar Comment: There are almost 100 downloads of the First Amendment score to date! At least four choral groups in four different states want to do the whole piece.]

After a much-needed break for water, lozenges and general vocal rest, we resumed singing with "Liberty" from The Sacred Harp—a great little piece by Connecticut’s own Stephen Jenks (originally from New Canaan). The text, written just after the American Revolution, seemed especially relevant that afternoon:

No more beneath th’oppresive hand
Of tyranny we groan.
Behold the smiling happy land
That freedom calls her own.

From 4:00 to 5:00 we did some of the best versions ever heard in Central Connecticut of various Sacred Harp favorites, including most of the patriotic pieces (it was the singing closest to the Fourth of July, remember). If any of you would like to join us—our REGULAR SINGINGS from The Sacred Harp and other shaped note collections, old and new, take place on the SECOND SUNDAY of the month from 2:30 to 5:00, usually in the Wesleyan Chapel. Send me an Email to neelybrucemusic@comcast.net for details and updates.