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Wisconsin Chamber Choir

Wisconsin Chamber Choir
Preview for our "Ceremony of Carols" concert on December 14th. Tickets available online or at the door.
Lullay, My Liking by Gustav Holst
Trouble Don't Last Always arr. Leotha Stanley I'm so glad Trouble don't last always. May not come when you want Him But He's on time In times of trouble, I found Him to be A friend of mine When storm clouds rise in your life He'll be there, All your burdens I know the Lord will help you to bear. Weeping may endure for a night Keep the faith it will be alright. Excerpt from our program notes by Dr. Robert Gehrenbeck: “In 1977, gospel pianist Thomas Whitfield (1954-1992) founded The Thomas Whitfield Company in Detroit, one of the most influential gospel ensembles in the history of the genre. The Whitfield company pioneered a new style of gospel music with its “inventive blending of gospel, jazz, and classical harmonies, progressions, and forms,” according to composer, conductor, and Whitfield scholar, Brandon Christian Waddles. The Whitfield Company’s choral sound was praised for its warmth, precision, nuance, and dramatic power, making it the perfect vehicle to realize Whitfield’s new focus on emotional connection in gospel lyrics. Waddles continues, “Whitfield’s art-song-like interpretation of lyricism unveiled the intimacy of gospel music, setting the stage for [the] Black praise and worship [movement].” As an arranger and producer, Whitfield introduced elaborate, orchestral textures into the gospel genre. Besides his own recordings, he arranged and produced early recordings by Vanessa Bell Armstrong and Yolanda Adams, effectively launching the careers of these contemporary gospel superstars. His arrangements for Aretha Franklin resulted in multiple Grammy awards, in addition to those he won with his own ensemble.”
Trouble Don't Last Always arr. Leotha Stanley presented by the Wisconsin Chamber Choir & Friends
Praise the Lord, Everybody arranged by Leotha Stanley Excerpt from our program notes by Dr. Robert Gehrenbeck: “Gospel singer and composer O’Landa Draper (1963-1998) was born in Memphis, where he founded the Associates, one of the leading gospel ensembles of the 1990s. The choir performed with a wide range of artists including Billy Joel and B. B. King, and was nominated for five Grammy Awards. Draper’s final album with the Associates, Reflections, recorded shortly before his death, won a Grammy in 1999.”
Praise the Lord, Everybody arr. by Leotha Stanley presented by Leotha and Tamera Stanley & Friends
Worship the Lord arranged by Leotha Stanley Excerpt from our concert program: “Leotha (Lee) Stanley is a retired firefighter / paramedic for the city of Madison and worked as an Employment Specialist for the Urban League of Greater Madison. He is currently the Director of Operations for UMOJA Magazine. Tamera Stanley currently serves as the Liaison for Family, Staff & Community Engagement at the Verona Area School District. Lee & Tamera are very engaged in community activities where they may be seen conducting choirs or providing music as a dynamic duo. (he plays / she sings). The Stanleys have written or arranged music for the Madison Symphony Orchestra and perform their charts each year at the MSO Christmas Concert. They conduct an 80-voiced choir for the MLK Commemoration program each year. Since the pandemic, they have learned the art of video editing releasing a variety of music videos where concert goers could not attend. They also produce a Gospel Carols Concert each year, giving traditional carols a Stanley twist. (www.gospelcarols.com) You can also find the Stanley’s each Sunday evening at the Stanley Gospel Café, a live broadcast featuring guests from Madison and the surrounding communities. Since 1990, Lee has worked with countless schools in Madison and throughout the Midwest as an artist in residence teaching many different genres of music to children. He has written two books of music for children, has composed scores of songs and has been the music director for the Mt. Zion Church in Madison for the last 47 years.”
Worship the Lord arranged by Leotha Stanley presented by Leotha and Tamera Stanley & Friends
1. Gospel by Alvin Singleton Swing low so I can step inside - a humming ship of voices big with all the wrongs done done them. No sound this generous could fail: ride joy until it cracks like an egg, make sorrow seethe and whisper. From a fortress of animal misery soars the chill voice of the tenor, enraptured with sacrifice. What do I see, he complains, notes brightly rising towards a sky blank with promise. Yet how healthy the single contralto settling deeper into her watery furs! Carry me home, she cajoles, bearing down. Candelabras brim. But he slips through God’s net and swims heavenward, warbling. 2. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot - African American Spiritual arranged by Alice Parker Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home. Swing low, sweet chariot, Coming for to carry me home. I looked over Jordan, and what did I see, A band of angels coming after me. I'm sometimes up and sometimes down, Sometimes I’m almost to the ground. Excerpt from our program notes by Dr. Robert Gehrenbeck: “The poem “Gospel” is from the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Thomas and Beulah by US Poet Laureate, Rita Dove (b. 1956). Written as a tribute to the poet’s grandparents, the two halves of the collection are each devoted to one grandparent. In the opening poem, “The Event,” we learn that, as a young man, Dove’s grandfather Thomas migrated north from Tennessee to Ohio on a riverboat with his best friend, Lem. A night of singing and drinking ended in tragedy when Lem jumped overboard to try to swim to a nearby island and drowned. Lem’s absence haunted the remainder of Thomas’s life, and many of the ensuing poems in his section of the book refer to Lem’s tragic death in some way. The poem “Gospel” meditates on middle-aged Thomas’s experience singing tenor in the gospel choir of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Akron, Ohio. Dove employs water imagery—beginning with the “humming ship of voices” and ending with the tenor “swimming heavenward, warbling” as painful reminders of the lives of Thomas’s ancestors and the death of his friend. Composer Alvin Singleton (b. 1940) has set many of Dove’s poems to music, including in Gospel, commissioned by Minneapolis-based Vocalessence in 1988. This work exhibits features common to Singleton’s music across many genres, including his flexible approach to rhythm, textures featuring interlocking ostinatos, and an unabashedly expressive harmonic language. Born in Brooklyn, Singleton lived and worked in Europe for 14 years before returning to the US, where he has worked closely with several American orchestras and numerous other ensembles. His choral ballet Truth, based on the life of nineteenth-century abolitionist, Sojourner Truth, premiered in 2006. Rita Dove is also a trained musician, and much of her poetry alludes to music and musicians in various ways. In “Gospel,” the “single contralto / settling deeper / into her watery furs” evokes opera singer Marian Anderson’s legendary 1939 performance (in a fur coat) in front of the Lincoln Memorial, after the Daughters of the American Revolution barred the world-famous opera star from performing in Washington’s Constitution Hall. Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the D.A.R. in protest, and the Roosevelt administration arranged the concert on the Mall. In front of an outdoor crowd of seventy-five thousand people, Anderson performed a set of patriotic songs, opera arias, and spirituals. A spiritual underlies Rita Dove’s “Gospel” as well: Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, which we present as a coda to Singleton’s Gospel. Although there are many moving, affecting, and even virtuoso choral settings of Swing Low to choose from, a simple version seemed to be called for. The most straightforward choral version to be found was a 1958 arrangement by Alice Parker (1925-2023), one of the most respected white scholars and arrangers of spirituals.”
Gospel by Alvin Singleton & Swing Low, Sweet Chariot presented by the Wisconsin Chamber Choir
1.Summer is Gone by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Summer is gone with all its roses, Its sun and perfumes and sweet flowers, Its warm air and refreshing showers: And even Autumn closes. Yea, Autumn's chilly self is going, And winter comes which is yet colder; Each day the hoar-frost waxes bolder And the last buds cease blowing. 2. The Lee Shore by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Sleet! and hail! and thunder! And ye winds that rave, Till the sands there under Tinge the sullen wave. Winds, that like a demon Howl with horrid note Round the toiling seaman, In his tossing boat. From his humble dwelling On the shingly shore, Where the billows swelling Keep such hollow roar. From that weeping woman, Seeking with her cries Succor superhuman From the frowning skies. From the urchin pining For his father's knee, From the lattice shining, Drive him out to sea! Let broad leagues dissever Him from yonder foam; O, God! to think man ever Comes too near his home! Excerpt from our program notes by Dr. Robert Gehrenbeck: “Summer Is Gone and The Lee Shore by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) exemplify the high point of the English Romantic partsong around the turn of the twentieth century. Like similar works by his friend, Edward Elgar, as well as those by his teacher, Charles Villiers Stanford, Coleridge-Taylor’s partsongs distill the emotional substance of their lyrics down to one or two overarching moods, while painting the individual words in broad brush strokes. The sweep of a phrase, an unexpected change of direction of the harmony, and the dramatic use of musical dynamics (crescendos, diminuendos, and sudden shifts between soft and loud) are the favored means of musical expression in this repertoire. The literary sources are major nineteenth-century British authors. Christina Rossetti’s poem, Bitter for Sweet, despairs of winter’s onset in eight compact lines whose emotional intensity is matched by Coleridge-Taylor’s sighing melodies and heart-wrenching harmonies in Summer is Gone. In The Lee Shore, a popular poem by Thomas Hood, the dangers of sailing too close to the shore during a storm become a metaphor for the precariousness of human existence. Coleridge-Taylor responded with stormy, rhythmic music in the first half of his setting, with a sudden shift to deathly still blocks of minor triads in the second half. Coleridge-Taylor’s father was a black, London-educated medical doctor from Sierra Leone, and his mother, an Englishwoman from Croydon, near London. After his father returned to West Africa to work as a surgeon, Samuel was raised by his mother’s extended family. His grandfather, a blacksmith, gave him his first lessons on violin, after which Samuel received further music lessons from local professionals. He entered the Royal College of Music at age 15 and studied composition with Stanford. His first published work, a church anthem, appeared in print in 1891, testifying to the 16-year-old composer’s precocity. A steady stream of works in a variety of genres followed, leading up to the large-scale cantata, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast of 1898. This work, based on an epic poem by Longfellow, rapidly became the most popular English oratorio of its time, and the composer soon expanded it into a trilogy known as Scenes from the Song of Hiawatha. The complete trilogy received hundreds of performances during the next few years, earning Coleridge-Taylor widespread acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Prestigious conducting and teaching positions followed, including as permanent conductor of the London Handel Society from 1904 until Coleridge-Taylor’s death. Between 1904 and 1910, Coleridge-Taylor accepted three separate invitations to tour the US as a conductor, where he became known as the “black Mahler.” His 1904 performance of Hiawatha in Washington, D.C. featured the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society, an all-Black chorus, accompanied by the United States Marine Band, performing to an audience of 3000. Several members of President Theodore Roosevelt’s cabinet attended, and the President himself met with Coleridge-Taylor at the White House several days later. On subsequent US tours, the composer traveled as far west as Chicago, St. Louis, and Milwaukee.
Songs by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor presented by the Wisconsin Chamber Choir
Poem of Praise by Florence Price Swift things are beautiful: swallows and deer, and lightning that falls bright-veined and clear, rivers and meteors, wind in the wheat, the strong-withered horse, the runner's sure feet. And slow things are beautiful: the closing of day, the pause of the wave that curves downward to spray, the ember that crumbles, the opening flower, and the ox that moves on in the quiet of power. Excerpt from our program notes by Dr. Robert Gehrenbeck: “Our concert’s second half begins with three pieces by classical composers from the first half of the twentieth century. The choral miniature, Poem of Praise, by Florence Price (1888-1953) displays salient characteristics of her late Romantic style: a lyrical approach to melody, harmonic shifts that are striking but never jarring, and a naturalistic, rhythmically nuanced declamation of the text. The poem is by Elizabeth Coatsworth (1893-1986), a white New England poet. Price’s life exemplifies both the achievements and challenges that African American composers experienced in the mid-twentieth century within the US classical music establishment. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, she studied music first with her mother and then at New England Conservatory in Boston. The Conservatory was one of the few music schools that admitted Black students at that time, but she nevertheless experienced racial prejudice to such an extent that she self-identified as Mexican during her later years there, to avoid further harassment. After graduating with degrees in organ and piano, she returned to Little Rock to teach music, and, soon thereafter, became head of the music department at Clark University in Atlanta, where she married Thomas Price, a lawyer. Back in Little Rock, the couple had two daughters, but in 1927, the family decided to move to Chicago to escape escalating racial violence in the South. Price studied composition and orchestration with leading teachers in the city, and she took on her own students, including Margaret Bonds, who became a life-long friend and a successful composer in her own right. In the early 1930s, Price achieved resounding success when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra premiered her Symphony in E minor at the 1933 World’s Fair, making Price the first Black woman to have an orchestral work performed by a major American orchestra. However, this milestone did not lead to ongoing widespread acclaim for Price. Ten years later, she was still struggling to get her orchestral works performed. In a 1943 letter to Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Serge Koussevitsky, Price wrote, “I have an unwavering and compelling faith that a national music very beautiful and very American can come from the melting pot just as the nation itself has done.” Maddeningly, Koussevitsky never replied to Price about the scores she sent him to examine. She continued to compose and was especially prolific in the field of art songs and choral works. After her death, Price’s music fell into obscurity, and many of her works were nearly lost before being accidentally discovered in 2009 in a dilapidated house south of Chicago that had served as Price’s summer home. Much of the current interest in Price’s music stems from the work of musicologist Rae Linda Brown, who edited many of Price’s works for publication, and who wrote a ground-breaking biography of the composer. In 2018, G. Schirmer purchased the rights to Price’s entire catalogue of works, but the publisher has only released a small portion of her unpublished music to date, leaving two thirds of her works unavailable for performance. Fortunately, Price’s music entered in the public domain on January 1, 2024, so Price enthusiasts can expect many new editions and performances to begin appearing.”
Poem of Praise by Florence Price presented by the Wisconsin Chamber Choir
Hold Fast To Dreams by Joel Thompson What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die Life is a broken-winged bird That cannot fly. Hold fast to dreams for when dreams go Life is a barren field Frozen with snow. Excerpt from our program notes by Dr. Robert Gehrenbeck: “The most famous poem from Hughes’ Montage is called, simply, “Harlem.” In addition to many musical versions, the lines “Does it dry up / like a raisin in the sun?” inspired the award-winning 1959 play by Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun. One of the most recent settings of “Harlem” is by Joel Thompson (b. 1988), a composer, pianist, and conductor based in Atlanta. He is best known for his 2015 work for chorus and orchestra, Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, whose libretto is loosely modeled on Joseph Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ. The text for each movement of Thompson’s work consists of the last words of an unarmed Black man before he was killed: Kenneth Chamberlain, Trayvon Martin, Amadou Diallo, Michael Brown, Oscar Grant, John Crawford, and Eric Garner. One year later, in 2016, in response to a commission for a piece about Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Thompson paired Hughes’ “Harlem” with “Dreams,” a poem from The Dream Keeper, a 1932 collection by Hughes. The result was a powerful choral anthem, Hold Fast to Dreams, which Thompson dedicated to the memory of three new Black victims of gun violence killed in 2016: MarShawn McCarrell II, a Black Lives Matter activist who committed suicide in Columbus, Ohio; and Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, who were shot by police one day apart in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. The composer elaborates: These words of Langston Hughes have proven their immortality this year in American history, and not in the way one would hope. The 1951 poem, Harlem, still captures the essence of disillusionment in a deceptively simple series of vivid questions. Dreams, a lesser-known poem, charges the reader to “hold fast to dreams” while making plain the misery of a life without them. One poem summarizes the pain of broken promises and the other encourages faith that things will get better because the alternative is absolute despair. Today’s rampant cynicism casts Hughes’ words in a tired light—these sentiments seem to be the stuff of childhood and naiveté—but my hope is that all who experience this piece will put aside our jaded lenses of fear and choose to be vulnerable and continue to dream.”
Hold Fast To Dreams by Joel Thompson presented by the Wisconsin Chamber Choir
Love Song by H. Leslie Adams I could take the Harlem night And wrap it round you, Take the neon lights and make a crown, Take the Lenox Avenue busses, Taxis, subways, And for your love song tone their rumble down. Take Harlem's heartbeat, Make a drumbeat, Put it on a record, let it whirl, And while we listen to it play, Dance with you till day – Dance with you, my sweet brown Harlem girl. Excerpt from our program notes by Dr. Robert Gehrenbeck: “Composer H. Leslie Adams (b. 1932) is best known for art songs, choral music, and solo piano works, reflecting his own training as a singer, choral conductor, and pianist. His 1969 setting of the poem Juke Box Love Song from Hughes’s Montage is typical of Adams’s style, featuring soaring, lyrical melodies and jazz-inflected harmonies. At the words “Put it on a record / let it whirl” Adams spins a web of counterpoint that seems almost improvisational, but which is, in fact, carefully planned out. The overall impression is one of tender beauty in the midst of a bustling urban landscape—“passages sometimes in the manner of a jam session, sometimes the popular song,” to quote Hughes’s prologue once again. A Cleveland native, Adams earned degrees from Oberlin Conservatory (where he studied voice with Robert Fountain, who later directed the choral program at UW-Madison); Cal State Long Beach; and Ohio State. In addition to the intimate vocal works which are his trademark, he has also composed large-scale instrumental works and an opera.”
Love Song by H. Leslie Adams presented by the Wisconsin Chamber Choir
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