Music: Ēriks Ešenvalds (b. 1977)
Text: Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

Composer Ēriks Ešenvalds was born and educated in Latvia, obtaining his Master’s degree in 2004 from the Latvian Academy of Music where he now teaches. One of the most popular contemporary composers with choirs and audiences alike, he was Fellow Commoner in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, 2011-2013.

Commissioned by the Salt Lake City Vocal Artists in 2011, Stars is a setting of a poem by Pulitzer Prize winning American poet, Sara Teasdale, which rejoices in the wonders of the natural world, particularly the stars in the heavens. Stars, one of three Ešenvalds settings of Teasdale’s poetry, features the use of wine glasses playing different pitches which evoke an other-worldly effect. The text is uncluttered and evocative, as is the music.

——-

Alone in the night
On a dark hill
With pines around me
Spicy and still,

And a heaven full of stars
Over my head
White and topaz
And misty red;

Myriads with beating
Hearts of fire
The aeons
Cannot vex or tire;

The dome of heaven
Like a great hill
Myriads with beating
Hearts of fire
Heaven full of stars

I know I
Am honored to be
Witness
Of so much majesty.

Music: Paul Stanhope (b. 1969)
Text: Steve Hawke

This movement for a cappella choir is drawn from the dramatic cantata “Jandamarra – Sing for the Country,” a piece which retells a moment of triumph for the Bunuba people of the south-west Kimberley. Jandamarra singing the Snake Spirit Yilimbirri Unggud back to his spring is a sign of the country being healed through the power of song. The tone of the song is both celebratory and reflective, underlining the themes of the power of song, respect for culture, and the healing of the land.

——-

Ban.garay!*
Women in tears and men in chains
A time of deepest, deepest woe
Like a spear across the sky, a spirit cloud
Omen of triumph, beacon of hope
Ban.garay, the land is healed
The raii* now dance their joy
Yilimbirri’s home again, ban.garay.

No-one had sung a snake before
The Unggud* home, the land restored
Jalgangurru*, Jandamarra *
Magic man, man of power
You sang Yilimbirri to his spring
Ban.garay, the land is healed
The raii now dance their joy
Yilimbirri’s home again, ban.garay.

In times of woe our hearts are eased
The balance of the land restored
The water once more is sweet
This land of ours is singing
Ban.garay, the land is healed,
The raii now dance their joy
Yilimbirri’s home again, ban.garay.

Ban.garay! He is back!
Raii Spirit beings who live around water
Unggud Creator spirit

Jalgangurru Magic man

Jandamarra Man of power

Ola Gjeilo (b. 1978)
Text: Trad.

Norwegian-born Gjeilo is one of the worlds’ most performed choral composers having been commissioned a variety of ensembles including King’s College, Cambridge, Voces8, and Tenebrae. This monumental 12-16 part setting of the Kyrie eleison is from his Sunrise mass setting. Its title, The Spheres, suggests an even more cosmic intention. The first section consists of slowly overlapping soft chords. The second becomes more dramatic, piling up 16 note clusters in crescendo, giving way to a passage with much faster harmonic rhythm of parallel chords.

——-

Kyrie Eleison
Christe Eleison
Kyrie Eleison

Lord have mercy
Christ have mercy
Lord have mercy

Juliana Kay (b. 1990)
Text: Maria Wallace

Peat Brown Hours was joint winner of the National Youth Choir of Australia 2020 Ralph Morton Memorial Composition Award. The text is a poem by Maria Wallace, a prize-winning Irish poet born in Catalonia and raised in Chile. The poem, “The Meenybradden Bog Woman,” deals with a body buried in the late Medieval period and uncovered in County Donegal, Ireland, 1978. Kay’s setting uses aleatoric techniques and improvisory passages evoking wind sounds and bird song, and effectively captures the cosmic nature of the text. The composer writes:

Most of us decay after we die, returning to the soil, the water and the sky. But every now and then, some of us slip through the cracks and remain trapped, preserved in intact bodies for centuries. Peat Brown Hours dwells on the space between life and death, where the buzz of life is tantalisingly close but ultimately unreachable. I love Wallace's text for the curiosity it shows to questions of history, geography and philosophy, with music as the beating heart that connects it all. I am honoured to work with Wallace's words and release the Meenybradden Bog Woman back into the world of music.

——-

Peat brown hours
turned to centuries,
toughened
your skin with the soft touch
of nature’s forgatherings.
A lullaby the drip and squelch
of wet leavings,
the gossip of grasses,
the winnowing wind
and occasional bird song
rippling over you
like the deepest, final note
of a cello.
And you listening
to all that muted music,
stilled in the hold of roots,
under the brown-veined roof
of your dark sky,

hating the silent tongue
of time.

Music and text: Stephen Leek (b. 1959)

Kondalilla is the name of a waterfall in a small remaining pocket of rainforest in the Sunshine Coast hinterland, Queensland. In the Indigenous Dreamtime stories of the area, Kondalilla is the spirit of the waterfall and Ouyen is the spirit of the still water. The piece is largely improvisational in character, as singers mimic native birdsong and weather effects to evoke the Australian bushland.

—-

Kondalilla.
Ouyen watches the whispers of time,
passing over the black water in the breeze.
Ouyen listens, hidden in the shadows,
counting the splashes and tracing the dream.
Kondalilla

Music: Joseph Twist (b. 1982)
Text: Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal, and Psalm 137:4

Joe Twist, composer and arranger, is one of Australia’s most in demand music creators, both at home and abroad, straddling film music and concert music arenas. Twist has significant experience in choral music as singer and composer. He has received commissions and performances from such choirs as Trinity College, Cambridge, Chanticleer, Voces8, Idea of North, Sydney Chamber Choir, Adelaide Chamber Singers, L. A. Choral Lab, Gondwana Voices, The Australian Voices, and many other. Twist has worked as a professional chorister in church choirs in Australia and the United States. Commissioned in 2012 by Carl Crossin and the National Youth Chamber Choir of Australia, How Shall We Sing in a Strange Land combines the Latin text of Psalm 137:4 with poetry by Australian poet and political activist Oodgeroo Noonuccal (formerly known as Kath Walker). Both texts speak eloquently of alienation and displacement, and the juxtaposition of words by an Australian Indigenous poet with those of the Christian bible’s Old Testament is both ironic and particularly powerful in the light of Australia’s colonial history.

—-

Look up, my people,
The dawn is breaking
The world is waking
To a bright new day
When none defame us
No restriction tame us
Nor colour shame us
Nor sneer dismay.

Now brood no more
On the years behind you
The hope assigned you
Shall the past replace
When a juster justice
Grown wise and stronger
Points the bone no longer
At a darker race.

So long we waited
Bound and frustrated
Till hate be hated
And caste deposed
Now light shall guide us
No goal denied us
And all doors open
That long were closed.

See plain the promise
Dark freedom-lover!
Night’s nearly over
And though long the climb
New rights will greet us
New mateship meet us
And joy complete us
In our new Dream Time.
To our fathers’ fathers
The pain, the sorrow;
To our children’s children
the glad tomorrow

Quomodo cantabimus
canticum Domini in
terra aliena.

How shall we sing
the Lord’s song in a
strange land?

Music: Dan Walker (b. 1978)
Text: Michael Dransfield (1948-73)

Midwinter was commissioned by the Australian Voices in 2008. The poem was written by prolific Sydney born poet, Michael Dransfield, and speaks with great fondness of a winter scene, forest, fire, stars, drifts under trees, and the dreamtime. Walker’s sensitive setting beautifully underlines the poem in a six part texture in the choir.

——-

Winter again,
So newly cold,
Spring, summer, autumn lie in drifts under the trees,
The dreamtime has come in suspension,
A fire in a clearing in the forest with the stars.

Clouds of breath, heads are planets,
The newness of finding answers, a shelter from the rain
Firewood, kindling, they make good fuel, good flame, good ashes.
Birds who have stayed sing about the cold,
The clarity of the moon,
The scent of brewing tea.

Music: Alice Chance (b. 1994)
Text: Revd Aunty Lenore Parker (from A Prayer Book for Australia)

Alice Chance is one of Australia’s foremost young composers and currently resides in Paris. Holy Dreaming, commissioned by the Choir of Trinity College, Melbourne in 2018, has an epic quality and places considerable demands on the singers. The composer writes:

Holy Dreaming is the result of being asked to write a musical companion for Ross Edwards’ Mass of the Dreaming: Missa Alchera. Ross Edwards’ music has been hugely formative for my own Artistic voice, having provided inspiration and sanctuary for me ever since my teen years. Creating something worthy of companionship with the Edwards’ mass, simultaneously honouring it and bringing for the something original, has been a lofty summit to scale.

Holy Dreaming has come about through my deep meditation on the words of A Thanksgiving for Australia by Reverend Lenore Parker, examining them, turning them over, and searching for the natural dances within words and phrases. I feel I’ve composed a duet between my own music and the inherent music I’ve heard within the text.

——-

God of Holy Dreaming, Great Creator Spirit,
from the dawn of creation you have given your children
the good things of Mother Earth.
You spoke and the gum tree grew.
In the vast desert and dense forest,
and in cities at the water’s edge,
Creation sings your praise.
Your presence endures
as the rock at the heart of our Land.
When Jesus hung on the tree
you heard the cries of all your people
and became one with your wounded ones:
the convicts, the hunted, the dispossessed.
The sunrise of your Son coloured the earth anew,
and bathed it in glorious hope.
In Jesus we have been reconciled to you,
to each other and to your whole creation.
Lead us on, Great Spirit,
as we gather from the four corners of the earth;
enable us to walk together in trust
from the hurt and shame of the past
into the full day which has dawned in Jesus Christ.
Amen.

Arr. Ēriks Ešenvalds (b. 1977)
Text: John Newton (1725-1807)

This grand arrangement of Amazing Grace employs several unexpected modulations. Amongst its themes are hope, redemption, freedom from slavery, and thankfulness. Ešenvalds dedicated this setting to the Riga Youth Choir.

——-

Amazing grace! how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch; like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed!

The Lord has promised good to me,
His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be
As long as life endures.

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we first begun.

Music and Lyrics: David Bowie (1947-2016)
Arr: Kristy Biber, after the Whiffenpoofs

Space Oddity is the first track on David Bowie’s album, A Space Odyssey, released in 1969, the year of the moon landing. The song speaks, with a twinkle in the eye, of the opening of the new frontier of space, contrasting the vast loneliness of the universe with the mundane aspects of space travel and the hype surrounding it at the time. Tonight, we hear the song arranged by one of our sopranos, Kristy Biber, after the version by Yale University’s Whiffenpoofs, the oldest a cappella collegiate singing group in the USA.

——-

Ground Control to Major Tom
Ground Control to Major Tom
Take your protein pills and put your helmet on

Ground Control to Major Tom
Commencing countdown, engines on
Check ignition and may God's love be with you

Ten, Nine, Eight, Seven, Six, Five, Four, Three, Two, One, Lift off

This is Ground Control to Major Tom
You've really made the grade
And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear
Now it's time to leave the capsule if you dare

This is Major Tom to Ground Control
I'm stepping through the door
And I'm floating in a most peculiar way
And the stars look very different today

For here
Am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do

Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles
I'm feeling very still
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go
Tell my wife I love her very much she knows

Ground Control to Major Tom
Your circuit's dead, there's something wrong
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you hear me, Major Tom?
Can you...

Here am I floating round my tin can
Far above the Moon
Planet Earth is blue
And there's nothing I can do

Soprano
Kristy Biber
Hannah Hornsby
Meg Nelson
Jane Wiebusch

Alto
Elizabeth Chong
Cathy Green
Renée Heron
Juliana Kay

Tenor
Matt Bennett
Ed Chan
Max McConnell
Daniel Riley

Bass
Tom Baldwin
Lachie McDonald
Paul McDonald
Josh McLeod

Michael is a conductor, chorusmaster, and vocal coach. A graduate of the University of Queensland, Queensland Conservatorium of Music, and Guildhall School of Music and Drama (London), he studied conducting with John Curro, David Porcelijn (ABC Young Conductors Mastercourse), Robert Rosen, and with Sir Charles Mackerras and Sir Mark Elder in the UK.

Michael has conducted performances for Opera Queensland (Elixir of Love, 1998), the Guildhall School of Music and Drama (Postcard from Marocco, 2001), Victorian State Opera (Don Giovanni 1996), and the Queensland Conservatorium Opera School (Billy Budd, 1993, L’elisir d’Amore 1994, Elijah the Opera 1995, Going into Shadows 2001, Pilgrim’s Progress in the presence of Ursula Vaughan Williams, 2002). Oratorio conducted or chorusmastered includes Dream of Gerontius (Elgar), the Bach passions and B minor mass, Beethoven’s Ninth, Mozart, Haydn and Schubert masses, the requiems of Verdi, Brahms and Mozart, and, for the New Zealand International Arts Festival Parsifal (Wagner), Macmillan’s Quickening (2006), and Mahler’s Eight Symphony (2010, Ashkenazy).

Since 2013, Michael has been founding Artistic Director of Polyphonic Voices and Director of Music at Christ Church South Yarra. He is also National President of the Australian National Choral Association, director of Chapel Music at Christ Church Grammar School, and Vocal tutor at Melbourne Grammar School. Michael is currently guest chorusmaster for the MSO Chorus’ Beethoven Ninth Symphony.

The Sacred Veil
Polyphonic Voices and the Choir of Trinity College will join forces for the Australian premiere of this new major work by Eric Whitacre, conducted by the composer.

7.30pm, Wednesday 7 and Thursday 8 September
Alexander Theatre, Monash University
Tickets available now