A Nuanced Semiquincentennial

By Richard Knox

Happy Birthday, America!

Two hundred and fifty years is an impressive landmark, although the U.S. of A. is still a youngster among nations. Compare our 1776 Declaration with the 1215 Magna Carta, which limited the powers of the English king (ahem!). Or the Roman Empire, which lasted 503 years. Not to mention India, Egypt or China, whose history is dated in the thousands of years.

Chorale is known for concerts that speak to the Zeitgeist, I wondered how Dan Perkins approached the task of choosing the program for these semiquincentennial concerts.

“I wanted to honor the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence,” he told me, “not necessarily with a sense of patriotism for how things are today, but acknowledging the hope of how things could and should be.”

The starting point is Song of Democracy, a 1957 piece by Howard Hanson that’s a cornerstone of mid-century American choral music. Composing in a rhapsodic American Romantic style, Hanson sets text drawn from two 19th-century poems by Walt Whitman that, Perkins says, “remind us of America’s founding ideals – egalitarianism, optimism and shared humanity.”

Song of Democracy was commissioned for the centennial of the National Education Association, so the piece begins with “An Old Man’s Thought of School,” Whitman’s musings on his long-ago classroom days and the foundational importance of education as democracy’s cornerstone. The poet sees education as equipping young minds “like a fleet of ships – immortal ships!/Soon to sail out over the measureless seas/On the Soul’s voyage.” Hanson’s piece builds to a vision of America, taken from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, as a glorious sailing ship that carries the hopes of past and future generations.

Next on the program is Earth Song, a piece composed in 2006 by Frank Ticheli that has become a frequently performed anthem for our war-torn and environmentally fraught times. Ticheli says he wrote it, setting lyrics of his own, during the Iraq War “when everyone – regardless of what political side they were on – was tired of that war….It was a cry and a prayer for peace.”

But Earth Song is not only an anti-war statement or a call to environmental stewardship; it asserts the healing power of music. “The scorched earth cries out in vain,” the lyrics say, “but music and singing have been my refuge.”

Earth Song is followed by a palate cleanser of an organ solo, Variations on ‘America’ by Charles Ives, performed by Rob St. Cyr. Ives was America’s first musical experimentalist, anticipating avant-gardists such as Stravinsky or Schoenberg. Ives’ music captures the sonic environment of a rapidly changing America, mashing up diverse sounds, from congregational singing to marching bands, from hymns, folk tunes and ragtime to patriotic ditties such as Yankee Doodle.

Ives was only 17 when he wrote Variations on ‘America’ for an 1892 Fourth of July commemoration in a small-town church. It begins with a traditional rendering of the familiar “My Country ‘tis of Thee” tune but it soon morphs into radical, witty variations on the theme. His father was an unusually broad-minded bandmaster, but he forbade young Charles from performing sections where one hand played in one key while the other hand and organ pedals played in a completely different tonality. Ives later recalled his father’s admonition that the offending sections would “upset the elderly ladies and make the little boys laugh and get noisy.”

The chorus returns with Randall Thompson’s beloved Alleluia, one of the most often-performed pieces of a cappella choral music ever written. It begins in the softest pianissimo and builds in layered passages to a fervent fortissimo prayer before fading to a reverent Amen. Thompson once explained why the piece is not a “jubilant shout of joy” typical of other alleluias.

Maestro Serge Koussevitzky of the Boston Symphony Orchestra had ordered up a fanfare to open the BSO’s new summer venue at Tanglewood, but Thompson didn’t feel like providing a celebratory piece. At the time he wrote it in 1940 (in only five days), France had just fallen to the Nazis. “It looked as if France, that great civilized nation, was going to be destroyed and perhaps all the civilized world as we know it,” he said.

In response, Thompson composed “a slow, sad piece” in the resigned spirit of the somber passage from the Book of Job often quoted in funeral services: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” He called this Alleluia “an attempt to put into music something of what all who were growing up in that time were feeling.”

In our time, as war rages in the Mideast and Ukraine and much in the world seems out of control, contemporary listeners may hear the 86-year-old composition in the same way. Perkins says he had this in mind when he chose the piece: “Thompson’s Alleluia feels especially poignant now because its serenity is inseparable from the uncertainty and grief surrounding its creation. It’s not triumphant but searching, patient, and deeply human.”

The American promise of a better life is the theme of Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Irving Berlin’s iconic setting of the famous Emma Lazarus poem engraved on the base of the Statue of Liberty. The familiar words take on ironic meaning against the backdrop of the nation’s current agony over the place of immigrants in our society. Perkins says his aim is to “invite reflection rather than nostalgia, encouraging listeners to consider how those ideals still challenge us today.”

Homage is next paid to the nation’s perennial tradition of protest. When Thunder Comes is a celebration of civil rights activists by Mari Esabel Valverde, a transgender Chicana from North Texas known for music centered on social justice. In this piece Valverde sets the poetry of J. Patrick Lewis that calls attention to, as she puts it, “our history’s systemic erasure of the stories of marginalized human beings in the United States.”

When Thunder Comes gives a shout-out to four civil rights icons: Sylvia Mendez, a California schoolgirl at the center of a desegregation suit that paved the way for the Supreme Court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education decision in 1954; Harvey Milk, a pioneering gay rights activist and San Francisco City Supervisor assassinated in his City Hall office along with Mayor George Moscone by a resentful (straight, white male) former City Supervisor; Helen Zia, a founder of the modern Asian American civil rights movement and advocate for women’s rights and LGBTQ+ equality; and the Summer of Freedom activists who risked their lives challenging southern desegregation in the early 1960s.

After intermission, the program takes a totally different turn to acknowledge the 25th anniversary of contemporary America’s darkest day -- 9/11/01.

Rather than dwelling on the horror, this set of songs in the Celtic-rock and folk modes by Irene Sankoff and David Hein portray the heartwarming, true story of how residents of the remote community of Gander, Newfoundland, united to feed, clothe and house nearly 7,000 bewildered airplane passengers from around the globe who descended on the town when the 9/11 attacks closed American airspace.

“Although the story takes place in Canada,” Perkins says, “it’s inseparable from the aftermath of 9/11 and from the universal questions the disaster raised about fear, community and humans’ care for one another.”

Richard Knox is a Master Chorale baritone who has written the group’s program notes since 2016.