SATB Choir & Soprano Saxophone
Music by John Muehleisen
Text from Alexander’s Feast; or the Power of Music
and A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day by John Dryden (1631–1700)
and An Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day by Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
Commissioned by Brian Gorelick and premiered by Opus 7 Vocal Ensemble,
Loren Pontén, Artistic Director
Dedicated to Dale Warland, with gratitude and affection for your teaching,
inspiration, and friendship
Duration: 11:00
Recording credit: World premiere by Opus 7 Vocal Ensemble
conducted by Loren Pontèn; Seattle, WA; May 11, 2024
TEXT
From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
This universal frame began.
When Nature underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay,
And could not heave her head,
The tuneful voice was heard from high,
Arise ye more than dead.
Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry,
In order to their stations leap,
And music’s pow’r obey.
From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in man.
What passion cannot music raise and quell!
Timotheus placed on high
Amid the tuneful quire
With flying fingers [quick as fire]
The trembling notes ascend the sky
And heavenly joys inspire.
[Or soon] could swell the soul to rage,
or kindle soft desire.
At last divine Cecilia came.
Inventress of the vocal frame;
Notes inspiring holy love,
To mend the choirs above.
But bright Cecilia rais’d the wonder high’r;
When to her [earthly choir], vocal breath was giv’n,
An angel heard, and straight appear’d
Mistaking earth for Heav’n.
Let old Timotheus yield the prize,
Or both divide the crown;
He raised a mortal to the skies
She drew an angel down!
And how the choir compleat rejoices,
The tuneful ferment rises high,
And works with mingled melody:
A thousand trills and quivering sounds
In airy circles o’er us fly.
Till wafted by a gentle breeze,
They faint and languish by degrees,
And at a distance die.
And music shall untune the sky.
from Alexander’s Feast; or the Power of Music
and A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day by John Dryden (1631–1700)
and An Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day by Joseph Addison (1672–1719)
Program Notes
And Music Shall Untune the Sky was commissioned in 2019 by choral conductor and Seattle native Brian Gorelick on the occasion of his retirement from Wake Forest University after 36 years as Director of Choral Ensembles. The work was scheduled to be premiered in April 2020, but like so many choral works, the performance was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. After several years when it was safe to sing again, Brian and John started discussing possible scenarios for finally premiering the work. Many factors contributed to the choice of Opus 7 to premiere the work: John’s long-time affiliation as Composer-in-Residence for Opus 7, Brian’s connection to Seattle as the son of Eastern European immigrants who settled there in 1932, and his long-time admiration for Opus 7 and its Artistic Director, Loren Pontén. In addition, during the several years that passed since 2020, Brian had spent a good deal of time considering what he wanted his retirement to look like. He eventually found that the choral profession contained a multitude of opportunities outside of full-time teaching and conducting, and he was moved to focus on commissioning new works for choir. This desire was inspired by his friendship with and great admiration for the esteemed American choral conductor, Dale Warland, and Dale’s history of commissioning more than 250 new works during his tenure as Artistic Director of the Dale Warland Singers (for which John had served as Composer-in-Residence during their final 2003–2004 season). As a result, And Music Shall Untune the Sky has become the first commissioned work in what Brian hopes will be an annual commissioning series with the goal of creating significant new contributions to the choral repertoire.
The libretto for And Music Shall Untune the Sky is what might be called a “poetic mashup” because it is composed of excerpts from three different poems about music and Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music. Two of the poems are by the famous 17th-century English poet, John Dryden; the third is by the lesser-known Joseph Addison. Two of Handel’s most well-known works—composed a decade apart—set both poems by Dryden: A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day aka Handel’s Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day (1687) and Alexander’s Feast, or the Power of Music (1697). If the Addison poem, An Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day, has previously been set to music, I found no evidence of it.
The work opens and closes with excerpts from Dryden’s A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day. An insightful Wikipedia article about Dryden’s poem points out: “The main theme of the text is the Pythagorean theory of harmonia mundi, that music was a central force in the Earth’s creation.” Accordingly, the opening stanza describes the creation of the Earth—one might say of the entire cosmos—as being generated by music “from Heav’nly harmony.” Likewise, the end of time and of the cosmos is also brought about by music: “And music shall untune the sky.” Thus, Dryden’s poem asserts the Pythagorean theory that all of the cosmos is harmoniously composed of order and beauty and that this concept of harmonia (of Divine Harmony) is at the core of both the cosmos (the universe) and the psyche (our soul). In short, music permeates everything in the universe from the beginning to the end of time. To represent the dark void before the onset of the “heavenly harmony,” the work opens with a textless section starting on a unison, which eventually expands into the heavenly harmony referred to in Dryden’s poem.
The opening section closes with the line, “What passion cannot music raise and quell!” which introduces the middle section of the work, the text for which is comprised of excerpts from all three poems. While the opening and closing of the work are quite expansive in the scope of influence that music has on the cosmos, the middle section focuses on Timotheus and St. Cecilia, who together represent the power of music to influence our emotions and souls. St. Cecilia—a 3rd-century Roman noblewoman and martyr—is the patron saint of music and musicians, particularly of church musicians, and is most often associated with the organ and choirs and with music that inspires holy love and spiritual unity. In contrast, Timotheus—who lived in the 4th century BC—was a renowned player of the aulos, an ancient double-reed precursor to the oboe and the bagpipe. In contrast to St. Cecilia, Timotheus’ music was known to provoke a range of emotions from “rage” to “soft desire” (i.e., from anger to lust or profane love). Timotheus served in the court of Alexander the Great (hence the inclusion of the infamous aulos player in Dryden’s poem, Alexander’s Feast). He also travelled with Alexander into battle, where it was believed that the effect of his music on Alexander contributed to his success as both a warrior and a lover.
The first four stanzas of this middle section place Timotheus and St. Cecilia at odds with one another in what turns out to be something of a contest. In the fourth of those stanzas, it is suggested that “old Timotheus yield the prize, Or both divide the crown,” at which point Timotheus and St. Cecilia indeed “divide the crown” and join forces, as St. Cecilia’s choir “works with mingled melody“ of “A thousand trills and quivering sounds” played by Timotheus on his aulos “Till wafted by a gentle breeze, They faint and languish by degrees, And at a distance die,” which slowly fades into the final line, “And music shall untune the sky.” This closing section returns to the textless music of the opening and reverses the process from the opening of the work, with the “heavn’ly harmony” eventually breaking down into a unison note and fading into infinity. The “untuning of the sky” is represented by the soprano sax as its notes become more and more dissonant with the “heavenly harmony” of the choir, and the music gradually returns to the lone unison of the formless void with which the piece began.
Throughout the work, the role of the choir is to provide narration and to represent St. Cecilia. While the role of the soprano sax in the beginning and end is to illustrate the text, in the middle section it becomes Timotheus’ aulos, with his “flying fingers” and the instrument’s “trembling notes” and “[a] thousand trills and quivering sounds”, which eventually grow “faint and languish by degrees, And at a distance die” as both the aulos and the “heavenly harmony” return to the infinite void with which the work began, a void still accompanied by music, if only by the stark beauty and purity of a single, solitary tone.
– John Muehleisen, September 2023
NOTE: Conductors should feel free to use whatever information I provided above that they think would be most meaningful to their audiences.