A note from Morten Lauridsen:

Both O Magnum Mysterium and Lux Aeterna, composed during my tenure as Composer-in-Residence, have become signature pieces for the Master Chorale. The Chorale’s stunning, ethereal recording of these works and others on Lauridsen – Lux Aeterna, under the baton of Paul Salamunovich, brought the Chorale international acclaim and was richly deserving of the Grammy nomination it received in 1998. I’m so pleased that the Master Chorale has included both of these pieces on its upcoming season conducted by Maestro Gershon.

Morten Lauridsen
Recipient, 2007 National Medal of Arts

A note from Thomas Jennefelt in Sweden upon learning Grant had programmed his work:

Dear LA Master Chorale,

What wonderful news you bring me this dark and dull January-morning! Your performance will be the US premiere. I have not heard of any other, though the piece is more than 20 years old. So this will be the official U.S. premiere. I am honored! This piece was somehow the beginning of my "quasi-minimalistic" writing for choir. If you have any questions about the piece, don't hesitate to contact me!

Yours sincerely,
Thomas Jennefelt

A note from Shawn Kirchner:

Basic thoughts on choral arranging:

For me, choral arranging is about taking great source material – in this case, three 19th century religious songs that have stood the test of time – and treating them as diamonds in the rough, which, with some polishing, will (hopefully) reveal a whole lot of beauty and light that people won’t have suspected was in there.

At the same time, I like to treat the arrangement as a spontaneous creation by a group of singers skilled in improvisation – who know how to “play” with musical material and are always ready to respond to the next new idea that arises among the group, such that an organic creation results that is much more than the sum of its parts.

Finally, as a singer myself, I like to write lines that the singers will enjoy. One thing this means is: no one-note alto lines. ☺ I always try to “share the wealth” and keep all the singers invested and involved in a vibrantly embroidered texture. It also means writing lines that “work” for the voice. This necessitates trying out the parts as I write, singing the lines, and asking, does this work for the voice? Very often I make small or large adjustments based on the physical feedback my throat gives me as I consider various options.

Sound world:

I have always been someone who enjoys the beautiful, sonorous ring of old-fashioned harmony, and I would truthfully be happy to sit around singing in three-part harmony all day long, every day (which is why I like bluegrass music so much.) One of the revelatory musical experiences of my life was hearing the Muungano National Choir of Kenya. Their whole program seemed to be sung in one major key, but I found that I was never bored. (Maybe it was their non-piano-based tuning that fascinated my ear, with natural thirds slightly lower.) Anyway, at a time (grad school) when my ear was filled with new music festivals and outside-the-box harmonic thinking, I found this moment to be a compelling juxtaposition. I thought, if they can do it – make music in this fresh, pure tonal language – why can’t we, why don’t we?

Obviously source material like these American songs that have mostly pentatonic melodies are very “at home” in a diatonic tonal world. For me, the fun is to see, within the constraints of that traditional harmonic world, how much new life can be wrung out of these old songs.

The specific songs:

“Unclouded Day” intrigues me as a song; it’s almost too simple to have achieved its status as an enduring gospel favorite. But most songs that arrive in a jolt of inspiration have a way of sticking around. The itinerant preacher J.K. Alwood woke with the song in his mind on an August morning in 1879. He had ridden home late in the evening following a religious debate, and was inspired by the beautiful sight of a rainbow on a dark band of clouds in an otherwise crystal-clear midnight sky. What to listen for in “Unclouded Day”: Verse 1 is about acquainting the listener with the song’s melody, so that it can be successfully tracked throughout the rest of the arrangement. So, it is introduced simply by the sopranos, with minimal, non-distracting harmonic support. By the first chorus, all voices have entered in the six-part divisi that is the basic disposition of vocal forces used in this set of arrangements. In Verse 2, while the women sing in bluegrass-style 3-part harmony (the instruction is to “think Dolly”), the men weave a 3-part contrapuntal ostinato based on the rhythmic pattern of the song’s opening phrase. Verse 3 goes all out in a bluegrass fugue, as basses, tenors, altos, and sopranos take up the melody in succession, peaking in a rich 8-part chord at the end of the verse’s final phrase “in the city that is made of gold.” There follow the final choruses, with phrases sung back and forth between four-part women and four-part men.

I learned “Angel Band” at a folk festival some years back, and have always loved its arching phrases and beautiful words. The Haiti earthquake happened just as I was beginning to work on these pieces, and I have to say that I felt this song to be one of the most timely of any I heard at that painful time. Very few songs articulate the actual moments of “crossing over”, but “Angel Band” does, and in a very beautiful way: “I’ve almost reached my heavenly home; my spirit loudly sings. The Holy Ones, behold they come, I hear the noise of wings…” (from verse 3). The hope of angelic comfort was the most one could extend to so many of those whose lives were slipping away, trapped beyond the reach of help. As I worked on the piece, a plaintive, downward circling melody suggested itself, and it became the accompanying material to provide contrast to the basic song, and to provide rest between the verses. As a listener, I always enjoy the distinct textures of women’s and men’s choirs, and decided to divide the first two verses between the women and men. For me, the special moment comes in verse 3, when the choir has finally united its forces in a very full harmonic texture. Individual parts rise in expressive lines that adorn the basic melody, and at the chorus’s climactic phrase, the basses rise all the way to a high C, having begun nearly two octaves below that at the opening of the chorus. They soon circle all the way back down to a low C on the chorus’ final line, the highest sopranos having just lightly brushed a high B nearly four octaves above them. When you write for the LA Master Chorale there is the great freedom of knowing that the four-octave span of the human voice is completely available to you, and beautifully so.

“Hallelujah” was a song I first sang at a Sacred Harp convention in Chicago in the late 1990’s. What was special about that convention was that several busloads of singers came up from the deep South, where the Sacred Harp singing tradition has been unbroken for more than 150 years. It is incredible to hear several hundred singers raising the rafters hour after hour in the rich, six-part harmony of Sacred Harp singing. And “Hallelujah” is one of the classics, with its chorus instantly imprinted in the memory: “And I’ll sing Hallelujah, and you’ll sing Hallelujah – and we’ll all sing Hallelujah when we arrive at home.”

Normally I like to carefully introduce the subject of an arrangement so the listener can internalize the melody before it’s subjected to transformation throughout an arrangement. But in “Hallelujah” I decided to veil the melody in countermelodies derived from the theme – as I might imagine entering into the heavenly spheres, bewildered by swirling angels, and only gradually getting my bearings in this new realm. The original, austere Sacred Harp harmonization is used with only slight modifications in each chorus, allowing for a homophonic contrast to the mostly polyphonic verses. Extensive composed material is used as interludes throughout the piece, with “hallelujah’s” leaping, plunging, and circling. The basic song appears in its simplest incarnation only in the final verse, as the whole choir quietly sings together the text that carries the song’s essence: “Give joy or grief, give ease or pain, take life or friends away…but let me find them all again in that eternal day.” ~Shawn Kirchner