From the Director’s Desk:
Rhythm of Time: Music for Choir & Piano
“Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change.” —Thomas Hardy
Time, poetically depicted as a relentless thief, scientifically explained as the fourth dimension, and practically seen as a valuable and limited resource, is one of the biggest riddles of the universe. Funny how something so intangible is so fundamental to our experience of the world: from organizing our days to connecting us to the cycles of life, the passing of time governs our lives, colors our musical language, and inspires our imaginations, including our upcoming performance Rhythm of Time: Music for Choir & Piano March 12–13, 2022.
A note from Artistic Director Rebecca P.N. Seeman:
Dear Friend of Sacred and Profane,
In all my years directing S&P (I can’t believe it’s been 18 years! Someone, please, tell me where the time goes!), we have performed only one piece with piano – Shawn Crouch’s lovely Light of the Common Day with the wonderful Jonathan Dimmock in December 2018. With piano being the primary single collaborative instrument for the choral craft, I felt that we were overlooking a critical area of the repertoire and set out to build a concert for choir and piano. When I began thinking about this program, I was still in the clouds from hearing Dale Trumbore’s In the Middle brilliantly performed by the Aeolians of Oakwood University with Dale on the piano at the 2019 American Choral Directors’ Association Conference in Kansas City. This performance had an audience of over 2000 choral conductors give a standing ovation that lasted at least ten minutes, and I couldn’t wait to get my hands on that piece! That work sets a text by Barbara Cooker about struggling to find balance and time for our loved ones in our hectic day-to-day lives. I suspect that many of you resonate with that experience – I know I do! I decided to go digging for works that also look at the topic of “time” from a variety of angles.
Composer connection: Artistic Director Rebecca Seeman got the chance to meet with several composers whose works we're performing at last week's American Choral Director's Association (ACDA) conference! Clockwise from top left: Dale Trumbore, Rosephanye Powell, Jocelyn Hagen, and Zanaida Robles.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
I remembered singing Benjamin Britten’s “Time” from his delightful choral suite Choral Dances from his opera Gloriana when I was in college at UCSC and loving it, as I do all of Britten’s music (if you forced me to choose a favorite composer, I think Britten would have to be it). So that was a given for the concert, despite the fact that it doesn’t include piano. Another a cappella must-have for the concert is Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Summer is Gone – a masterpiece of expressive and complex part-song writing by an English composer who is far too poorly remembered, perhaps because of his Sierra Leonean heritage. I was happy to find a cycle of miniatures by one of Sweden’s finest composers of choral complexity – Eskil Hemberg. These short pieces are delightful for many reasons and I love that they are dedicated to Americans who were committed, like I am, to the Swedish choral tradition. While the pieces were composed at different times, the publisher Norman Luboff assembled them as a group of three, connected by their shared theme of “Time.” After much discussion and research to which several singers in the group contributed, we all decided to eliminate the third piece in the cycle – “Give Me a Little More Time.” The piece was subtitled “A White Spiritual,” a label that doesn’t really exist as a genre and that we came to feel was too disrespectful to the African American Spiritual, a genre of music that was specifically intended to allow its singers to resist White oppression and brutality, to warrant inclusion in our concert. So we’ll be singing the first two pieces – both really harmonically interesting works. The first, “The Day You Were Born,” is a setting of a text by the Swedish diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld, the second Secretary-General of the United Nations and a dedicated promotor of world peace. The second, “Life,” is a setting of an English translation of a lovely haiku.
Above: We were so inspired by our online rehearsal with Dr. Rosephanye Powell in March 2021 we decided to revisit her beautiful setting of Langston Hughes' poem To Sit and Dream.
All of the other pieces on the program feature piano. Save Schubert’s romp Der Tanz and a gorgeous setting of a James Joyce poem by Conrad Susa, the prior director of the composition program at the San Francisco Conservatory, the other composers are also all women. We will return to Rosephanye Powell’s setting of Langston Hughes poem To Sit and Dream, which we presented as a virtual choir film in our March 2021 concert – back when we were unable to present our concerts in person. It’s been like coming home to sing that fabulous piece together in the same room after singing our parts into microphones in our homes. We’ll also present a new work by Stacy Garrop, who has become among the most sought-after composers in the United States across genres, not least in choral music. Jocelyn Hagen has become a go-to composer for me – her To See the Sky is the third work by this gifted composer that we’ve presented in the past few years. And I’m thrilled to have discovered the composer Zanaida Robles, a champion of equity and social justice in choral music. I interviewed Dr. Robles for a study I recently completed focused on Access, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the choral arts. Her insights were critical to my work and the sensitivity and warmth she displayed in our discussion can be heard in She Lingers On, her thoughtful piece about a woman’s struggles with depression.
Most importantly, however, we will present a beautiful work by our own Edna Yeh! Edna is all things fabulous at S&P central – she is the assistant conductor, alto section leader, resident perfect pitch singer, logistics coordinator (she helps figure out how we move about during concerts), program book designer, and all-around hero. And she composes too! The moving work Remember is the first of two pieces by Edna that we’ll sing this season – more to come in our May 2022 concert of music by Bay Area composers.
Edna Yeh with composer Stacy Garrop talk choral composition for Chicago a capella's HerVoice competition.
I couldn’t be more delighted to be sharing this concert with Paul McCurdy. Paul and I first met several years ago as part of a San Francisco choral collaboration. I remembered what a fine musician he was and was thrilled when he expressed interest in working with S&P on this program. It has been a sheer joy to work with Paul – his musicality is remarkably heartfelt and expressive and I know you’ll all love hearing what he adds to S&P in our concert.
All together, this concert has something for everyone – exciting complex contemporary music to soothingly lovely works, texts that ask you to consider our world and social condition to poems that are funny or nurturing. I’m so happy that we’re continuing to bring you in-person concerts this season and I know you’ll love hearing this beautiful and thought-provoking music!
Artistic Director Rebecca Petra Naomi Seeman (and honorary S&P member Laila)
Warmly,
Rebecca
Rhythm of Time: Music for Choir and Piano
We measure both our experience of time and our experience of music. From organizing our days to connecting us to the cycles of life, the passing of time governs our lives, colors our musical language, and inspires our imaginations. Join us as we explore these temporal relationships through works for choir and piano by composers across the centuries—from the German Romanticism of Franz Schubert’s Der Tanz to Cyndi Lauper’s pop hit Time after Time (arranged for us by “the godfather of a cappella” Deke Sharon), and everything in between. The program features Swedish composer Eskil Hemberg’s Of Time and Life, English composers Benjamin Britten and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor—whose beautiful Summer is Gone depicts the turning of the seasons with musical anticipation—and San Francisco’s Conrad Susa. We are delighted to present several innovative pieces by women composers, including works by Zanaida Robles, Jocelyn Hagen, Dale Trumbore, Stacy Garrop, Rosephanye Powell, and our own assistant conductor, Edna Yeh.
Featuring collaborative pianist Paul G. McCurdy.
SUNDAY, MARCH 13TH AT 4 PM
St Mark’s Lutheran Church,
1111 O’Farrell Ave, San Francisco
SATURDAY, MARCH 12TH AT 8 PM
St John’s Presbyterian Church
2727 College Ave, Berkeley
*Limited-capacity seating! We recommend purchasing tickets in advance to reserve your spot*