President’s Welcome!
Welcome to the opening concert of the Cantata Singers’ 2022-2023 season! We are delighted to have you here to celebrate the holidays and to enjoy our musical offerings.
We extend our heartfelt thanks to all of our contributors. Without your donations and support, we would be unable to provide these classical music experiences for the residents of the Twin Tiers.
You can support us in many ways, with the most critical being your participation as an audience member at this and all of our concerts. You can spread the word to others… we welcome and seek new audience members. You are truly the backbone of our organization. We also encourage your ongoing support in funding the Cantata Singers so we can continue to provide another season of outstanding music. Please go to our website, www.cantatasingers.com for more information about contributing, joining, and upcoming performances. If you would like to be on our mailing list, please write to us at cantatasingers@ymail.com and we will add your name. Lastly, be sure to “like” us on Facebook.
We look forward to having you as part of our many concerts in the future. This afternoon, during the hectic holiday season, we hope you can take a few moments to relax and enjoy the music of holiday cheer and peace.
Joy S. Perry, President, Cantata Singers
Cantata Singers Covid Protocol
Due to the nature of the Covid virus and how it spreads through breathed aerosols, the Cantata Singers continue the use of masks in rehearsal as well as this performance. While masks are not required for audience members, we strongly encourage the use of high quality procedural, KN95, or N95 masks here today as well as anytime you are in public. With a jump in positive Covid tests following the Thanksgiving holiday and with RSV (Respiratory Syncytial Virus), Influenza, and other respiratory viruses spreading rampantly, it is more important than ever to maintain good health for your sake, for your family, and for the entire community.
About the Composer-in-Residence Story Music Project
Composer’s Note — What an honor and incredible opportunity the Cantata Singers and I have been given by Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY). Thanks to an initiative of the Tides Center that brought together $135 million from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, over the next two seasons we, and you, will benefit from new music that seeks to tell the stories that make our region of New York State unique.
What are the stories? Each one of us, who we ARE, is determined by stories we tell ourselves. What our childhood was like. Where we went to school, who our friends are, and even why we might like a particular type of mac and cheese. Combine these stories, the stories of dozens or even hundreds or thousands of people living in close proximity and you get a community.
Or do you? Picture the city of Elmira or, to focus in much more closely, picture the ‘community’ that we have become here this afternoon. Who are we? Apparently we all like choral music! Beyond that, do you think our stories are similar? In some ways, probably! Most of us likely have paid sales tax in Chemung County over the past few months. We might even share a dislike of the coming snow. Does that make us a community? Sure, sort of! But at the same time it would be a big surprise if there is anyone else in this room who celebrates the December Holiday season in exactly the same way you do! Beyond the question of whether you celebrate with a kinara, a menorah, or with a light-filled tree the details are likely much more diverse! Do you celebrate your holiday with the menorah in the window or on a wall? Is a St. Lucia Day bonfire in your plans this year or will a Yule log suffice? Is your stuffing cooked in or out of the holiday turkey or goose? Or is your feast vegetarian or based on seafood? All different community and family traditions, all being celebrated somewhere in our small corner of the world!
This diversity is what creates an interesting community. The world wouldn’t be as much fun if we didn’t have friends, family, and social media connections with differing tastes and traditions offering us new and different viewpoints, recipes, books, movies, music, and so on! Also within easy reach are communities with traditions far different than our own. It is this diversity we seek to celebrate through the Story Music Project. Over the next two years, along with the Cantata Singers, I will be creating and sharing music telling the stories of as many diverse individuals, communities, and even history within the Southern Finger Lakes region as possible.
With a starting point of the one thing we have in common, our location, my goal is to gather and share many stories. The stories can be anything. Tales of family and community traditions, tales of love, tales of loss, of triumph, and tragedy. No story is too big or too small. If you have a story to share please reach out to me at cantatasingers@ymail.com. I would love to talk to you, to hear the story from you directly and to celebrate that story with you! Whatever else is true, your story is uniquely yours and you are a part of ‘us’!
The most important thing we hope you take away from this project is first to know that none of us are on this journey of life alone. Hopefully, by listening in at these concerts you will hear stories with which you can identify, stories that touch you and teach you. Stories that illustrate our diversity and our similarties. Beyond that, our hope is that through the stories and diverse voices of this project we can all become more aware of the diverse communities within this small corner of mother earth, highlighting not only how we are different from each other, but even more, how we are the same. - - will wickham
TODAY’S PROGRAM!
Christmas Bells Ring (A Spritely Choral Round) • words and music by Will Wickham
The first of 3 new story-songs written specifically for this occaision, let this tune and words be a happy welcome into our choral holiday!
The Rose • music of Ola Gjeilo, poem by Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
Close your eyes and allow the combination of Rossetti’s simple poetry and Gjeilo’s soaring music create a gloriously beautiful experience of imagination and sound.
Christmas in Elmira, 1864 • words and music by Will Wickham
Christmas Letter Home (Hellmira, 1864) • music of Will Wickham, poetry of Edward Dougherty • Randy Cornell, baritone solo
These two new works offer a glimpse into the human condition associated with the Civil War Prison Camp that was located between Water Street and the Chemung River near Hoffman Street. Christmas in Elmira, 1864 explores the concerns felt by Elmira residents about the southern men imprisoned during the exceedingly cold and snowy winter of 1864-1865. The text was derived from the contemporanius writings of both prisoners and Elmirans. Also based on actual letters written by prisoners during that winter, Edward Dougherty’s poem imagines how it must have felt for a young father to be held there over that snowy Christmas Holiday.
Ave Generosa • Ola Gjeilo, poem by Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179)
For 17 centuries Latin was the language of the Catholic Church. No one used that language to better honor the Virgin Mary than Hildegard von Bingen. Gjeilo’s soaring melodies and austere harmonies beautifuly evoke the music for which Hildegard is equally famous.
Tomorrow shall be my dancing day • John Gardner (traditional text)
Gardner’s nontraditional setting of this very old, possibly medieval, text tells the Christmas portion of Jesus’s story in this very playful setting
Shalom • music of Dan Forrest, text John 14:27 • violin Margaret Matthews
This tender, comforting work is a “passing of peace” as the simple, elegant melody washes over the listener, gently unfolding its text with increasing texture.
Christmas Day • Gustav Holst, traditional texts
Christmas Day is a set of variations on In Dulci Jubilo (Good Christian Men, Rejoice) with interwoven portions of God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen, The First Nowell, and Come Ye Lofty, Come Ye Lowly that was composed in 1910 when Holst was Music Director at Morley College. The piece is dedicated “To the music students of Morley College,” and was premiered at Morley College in January, 1911.
Silent Night • Dan Forrest, text Joseph Mohr, tr. John Freeman Young
There is no musical gesture that inspires hope and promise quite like a rising scale-wise passage. Dan’s inspirational setting of Silent Night is built entirely on rising passages that give the work a soaring strength well beyond any other setting of the simple, beautiful tune.
