Fern Hill, Contemporary American Choral Music, and the Legacy of American Choral Tradition

​This is long overdue, but then again, I do like to share this stuff in rehearsals when we aren’t so deep in the weeds of learning notes…

First, let me share a brief background on John Corigliano: Born in 1938 and based in NYC, he has won multiple awards, including 5 Grammys, a Pulitzer Prize, and an Oscar. Most well-known for his film score for The Red Violin in 1997, many of his symphonic works and concerti have been performed across the world. They include the opera The Ghost of Versailles (1991), Symphony No. 1 (a response to the AIDS epidemic in 1988), and his Clarinet Concerto (1977), the first to enter that instrument’s standard repertoire by an American composer since Aaron Copland’s in 1949.   
 
I was first introduced to Corigliano’s “Fern Hill” as a college freshman. I had been an apprentice with Albany Pro Musica as a high school senior, then continued singing in the group as a full member. Our concert was at Cathedral of All Saints in Albany, and the piece was paired with the Duruflé Requiem. It was a stirring program.
 
Even at that age, I had been listening to enough classical music to hear the clear delineation from older traditions of an “American” sound, such as that of Copland (and, to a lesser extent, even the scores of Korngold and Rogers and Hammerstein). There is a kind of spatial element to the music, often attributed to the vastness of America itself, a “taking of one’s time,” like the unfolding of Copland’s Appalachian Spring or Quiet City. They are tuneful and they tell familiar narratives. They give us a feeling of relatability and comfort. Like the pastoralism of Vaughan Williams or Holst in England, this music harkens to the past, of days gone by, and of a yearning to return to them.
 
But does Fern Hill give us a different feeling?
 
By the end of the work, I am not sure Corigliano has asked us to return to an earlier time. Each verse starts in a similar fashion, with the melody in the soprano, and continuing until things fall apart. The narrators—the chorus—become emotional, melancholy, or, in the case of the final verse, bitter. I won’t give too much away, but clearly, there are a lot of complicated feelings in this work. I look forward to discussing them in the rest of our rehearsals.
 
Now for the rest of our Fall concert repertoire--
 
A bit about William Billings (1746-1800): Born in Boston, he is considered the first American choral composer, and was a leading member of the First New England School. He was involved in teaching at singing schools throughout his life and his music was considered very popular during his time. A it fell out of fashion completely after his death, there has been some effort to revive his music in concert repertoire, but for the most part, it resides in the canon of sacred harp and shape note singing, both of whose traditions come directly from this period.
 
Billings wrote a staggering amount of hymn tunes and anthems, compiled in six book-length collections. Our selection, “As the Hart Panteth,” is from his first, 1770’s The New-England Psalm-Singer, and is one of the larger anthems in his entire collection. It follows a solo-response form similar to the traditional method of reading Psalms as a congregation and draws clear lines from older choral motet styles of the early classical, baroque, and renaissance periods. In fact, part of the reason the choral responses in it sound so “old” is the same reason older hymns sound that way in general—they are following some of the oldest rules of choral voice-leading and harmonization in history. This is also the reason why hymns like “Praise to the Lord the Almighty” and “Come Thou Fount” are not that far away stylistically from any Bach chorale.
 
Contrast this with the hymns Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) set in his Southern Hymns anthem collection, and you get a sense of the difference in attitude and emotional charge of the music. Thomson’s arrangements of “When Gabriel’s Awful Trump Shall Sound” and “The Death of General Washington” show an emotional distress that their original harmonizations may not have had, but that their text certainly did. Like many of the folk-to-classical composers and arrangers of the 20th century (again, I am referring to Vaughan Williams, Holst, Grainger, Britten, and many others), Thomson sought to take these tunes and texts and generate a more vivid musical language with his arrangement than their turn-of-the-19th-century origins had the means to use. Ultimately, while Thomson's compositional style is still relatively traditional compared with others of the 20th century, it still makes for a dramatic setting to this dramatic text.
 
Lastly, we have the notion of the modern concert hymn anthem, in that of Mack Wilberg’s arrangements of “Down to the River” and “Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” Director and composer for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Wilberg takes these arrangements in a direction that is clear and striking—to elevate the hymn to a concert work for chorus and orchestra, befitting the size and scope of the ensemble he leads. And these two are some of the finest examples of that effort. They represent the current point on the timeline of American choral tradition and hymn and folk tune arrangement from Billings to modern day. Now our job as choristers is to carry that point forward, with our own voices and our own vision.
 
I hope you have been enjoying this music.