Boston Camerata - An American Christmas

THE BOSTON CAMERATA

Anne Azéma, soprano
Elizabeth Anker, contralto
William Hite, tenor
Daniel McCabe, baritone
Joel Frederiksen, bass-baritone

Robert Mealy, violin
Jonathan Talbott, violin
Patrick Jordan, viola
Emily Walhout, violoncello
Anne Trout, double bass
Jesse Lepkoff, flute, guitar
Joel Cohen, guitar
Michael Collver, fluegelhorn
Steven Lundahl, baritone horn

assisted by
THE SCHOLA CANTORUM OF BOSTON
Frederick Jodry, director

and
THE BROWN UNIVERSITY CHORUS
Frederick Jodry, director

Program
01 - Watchman of Zion
02 - Kingsbridge
03 - Bozrah
04 - Baptismal anthem
05 - A Christmas Hymn
06 - A Virgin Most Pure, A Virgin Unspotted
07 - Boston
08 - The Heavenly Courtier
09 - Pretty Home
10 - The Midnight Cry
11 - Wayfaring Stranger
12 - Slow traveller
13 - I wonder as I wander
14 - Lullay thou tiny little child
15 - Lovely Vine
16 - Adest Fideles
17 - Still water
18 - While shepherds watched
19 - Sherburne
20 - Shepherds rejoice
21 - Fulfillment
22 - Fulfillment
23 - Hush my babe, lie still and slumber
24 - Jesus the Light of the World
25 - Joy to the World



Notes on the Music

I. Prepare ye the way Watchman of Zion
source: The Philharmonia (Elkhart, Indiana, 1875)
Many late-Renaissance tunes survive in the corpus of American Protestant hymnody. This is the familiar Lutheran chorale Wachet auf, sung in English, from a German-American shapenote book of the Mennonite tradition.

Kingsbridge
source: The American Harmony; or Royal Melody Complete. (Newburyport, Massachusetts, 1771)
Originating in England ca. 1760, this vigorous minor-mode tune was very popular in early New England. Our choice of performance forces – male voices doubled at the higher octave by instruments –- reflects what we know about early practice in English country churches. The use of womens' voices, rather than instruments, to create the higher octave was a later approach especially favored in America, where musical instruments were presumably somewhat scarcer

Bozrah
source: The Southern Harmony, and Musical Companion (Philadelphia, 1854)
Although mixed voices are the rule in both colonial and modern-day "singing-schools," many American works, as well, are very effective in same octave voicings, and were perhaps "heard" this way in the arrangers' ears. From William Walker's great, seminal collection of Southern shape-note music comes this haunting melody and its harmonization. Each of the three parts (added succesively in our performance) has its own melodic integrity; this linear way of hearing is characteristic of the Southern shapenote style.

Baptismal anthem
source: Original Sacred Harp, Denson Revision (Bremen, Georgia, 1971) "B.F. White, 1844. alto by S.M. Denson, 1911."
The other major source of shape-note song is B.F. White's Sacred Harp, originally published in 1844 but still in print and still widely used. In keeping with twentieth-century vernacular performance practice of this repertoire, the three-part texture of the original composition is filled out with an added alto line. The quartal-quintal nature of the original harmonies thus take on a somewhat "softer" triadic aspect. Here, too, we double the tenor line at the higher octave, a common practice in America since colonial days.

II. A Virgin unspotted A Christmas Hymn
source: The American Harmony (3-part setting); The Village Harmony (Exeter, New Hampshire, 1798) (4-part setting)
The first vocal setting you will hear is a three-part piece in the English country-parish style. In the second setting, sung by a larger group, the music has been "Americanized" in the original source by the addition of a treble voice.

A Virgin Most Pure source: Carols Old and Carols New (Boston, 1916)
with
A Virgin Unspotted (3'00")
source: Wyeth's Repository of Sacred Music, Part Second (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 1820)
This well-known English carol was also, it is clear, popular in early America – and the American version of the tune, from John Wyeth's hymnbook, is one of the simplest and purest to have survived, an example of how American music contains within itself part of the European heritage as well. In this performance, "Old World" and "New World" versions of the song are heard in alternation.

Boston
source: William Billings, The Singing Master's Assistant (Boston, 1778)
Billings' jaunty setting of his own poetry is, characteristically, resonant with echoes of English folksong – yet the music is unmistakably his alone.

III.Lo, the Bridegroom The Heavenly Courtier
source: The Christian Harmony, or Songster's Companion (Exeter, New Hampshire, 1805)
A few pieces from The Christian Harmony, Jeremiah Ingall's collection of hymns and songs from Northern New England, found their way into the Southern books and are still sung today; but most of Ingalls' music is still too little known and rarely if ever heard. Evidently at work for a more countrified clientele than his Boston colleagues just a few miles down the road, Ingalls in his 1805 songbook created a priceless source of Anglo-American folklore, and the true ancestor of the Southern shape-note style. The many folktunes and their simple, rugged three-part settings have little to do with the aesthetic norms of late-baroque or classical style. They sound, therefore, "earlier" than most works in the eighteenth-century hymnbooks. The Heavenly Courtier is probably an adaptation of an English secular ballad; its melody seems to be related to La Mantovana (a.k.a. The Italian Rant), a dance tune popular in Elizabethan England. Our performance extracts the melody from Ingalls' setting, and adds a basic guitar accompaniment.

Pretty home
source: Donald W. Patterson, The Shaker Spiritual (Princeton, 1976)
The erotic yearning of Heavenly Courtier finds an echo in a number of other American spirituals. Sister Patsy Williamson, a black Shaker from Pleasant Hill, Kentucky, wrote this little song in 1849. In his excellent work on Shaker spirituals, Patterson remarks that Pretty Home "shows no trace of black song style," but in this case we beg to differ with scholarly authority.

The Midnight cry
source: Original Sacred Harp, Denson Revision (Bremen, Georgia, 1971) "Alto by S.M. Denson, 1911….None of the books we can get hold of give the name of the auther of this music. It is an old tune and has been in use for 100 years."
Another meditation on Christ the Bridegroom; this song also seems related to the Shaker ceremony of the "Midnight Cry," a community-wide exercise in spiritual renewal. Our performance, using various combinations of voices on succeeding strophes, explores the various sound possibilities inherent in the shapenote idiom: we stress the music's roots in same-octave sonorities, with possibilities for octave doublings. Clearly, the anonymous and half-tutored musician who set this tune had a superbly keen natural ear.

IV. I wonder as I wander Wayfaring Stranger
source: oral tradition, performer's family
This melody has numerous incarnations, both sacred and secular, in the American folk tradition, and seems to have a special kind of emotional signifigance for those who preserve and transmit it.

Slow traveller
source: Ingalls, The Christian Harmony
In this writer's opinion, Slow Traveller, here performed in all likelihood for the first time since the early eighteen hundreds, is one of the finest examples of American song of any period. It is also a significant music-historical "find," since, as closer inspection reveals, its tune is a variant of a carol sung in Coventry, England during the Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors, part of a cycle of mystery plays first performed during the fifteenth century.

I wonder as I wander
source: John Jacob Niles, Songs of the Hill Folk (New York, 1912)
Collected by Niles in Cherokee County, North Carolina, this song has since been adapted into the "official" canon of American Christmas music and as such is frequently heard nowadays in overly-elaborate and inappropriate arrangements. It has been fitted in our performance with a guitar accompaniment of the simplest kind.

Lullay my tiny little child (Slow traveller)
source: Ingalls, The Christian Harmony
The Christmas-related text, substantially the same in both its early English versions, and an appalachian variant collected by John Jacob Niles, is here sung to the Coventry Carol melody, as that tune was transcribed and harmonized by Ingalls under the name Slow Traveller in 1805.

V. Shepherds, rejoice Lovely Vine
source: Ingalls, The Christian Harmony
Images of nature and fertility, gardens and growth, abound in the American spiritual repertoire, serving both as a metaphor for religious feelings, and as a reminder of daily life for people who in fact lived close to a land that had not yet been paved over with shopping malls.

Adeste Fideles
source: Crawford, The Core Repertory of Early American Psalmody (Madison, 1984)
Published in England in 1782, this tune first appeared in an American songbook in 1801. Its association with the English-language text we all know ("O come, all ye faithful") seems to date from the mid-nineteenth century. Our performance relies on the earlier transmission. The flute variation is by the soloist, Jesse Lepkoff.

Still water
source: A Selection of Spiritual Songs (New York, 1878); "Thos. Hastings"
"One reason why the music on the Lord's Day often has so feeble a force," complained Charles S. Robinson, compiler of the Northern collection, Spiritual Songs, "is found in its exclusiveness as a thing of high art. It remains too far out of reach of the people." His songbook attempted to bring his presumably-citified public back in touch with a more popular religiosity. Triadic and tonal in character (and thus different from the Southern shapenote spirituals), this lovely tune is nonetheless solidly rooted in Anglo-American folksong idiom. Our instrumental accompaniments are derived from the four-part harmony provided by the original source.

While shepherds watched
source: Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs (New York, 1867)
The mostly-Victorian, mostly-respectable Northern collection which serves as our source preserves a few authentic folksongs in the "back of the book;" in fact, this version of the tune, with its modal inflection on the fourth degree of the scale, is to this musician's ears a better and perhaps more authentic one than the "smoothed-out" variant one often sees reproduced nowadays (for example, in the Oxford Book of Carols.)

Sherburne
source: Original Sacred Harp, Denson Revision (Bremen, Georgia, 1971)
Composed by the Connecticut musician Daniel Read in 1793, this vigorous fuguing-tune has never gone out of use, and is still a perennial favorite at shapenote sings. We sing it first with male voices only, and then in "dispersed harmony," with the soprano and tenor lines each doubled at the octave.

Shepherds rejoice
source (music): The New Harp of Columbia (Nashville, 1867)
The tune is, of course, Auld Lang Syne, in a lively shapenote harmonization from the Old Harp tradition; the text is by Isaac Watts.

VII. Light of the World Fulfilment
source: William Walker, The Christian Harmony (Philadelphia, 1867)
The melody is a close relative of Wayfaring Stranger.

Fulfilment
source: Walker, The Christian Harmony
Walker's note in the source reads as follows: "This beautiful old tune was set to music by E.J. King, junior author of the 'Sacred Harp,' who died a few weeks after its publication, much lamented by his Christian brethren and musical friends."

Hush my babe, lie still and slumber
source (music): The American Vocalist (Boston, 1849)
The poem by Isaac Watts is here sung to a soulful, widely-diffused folk-hymn tune, known variously as Charlestown, Deal Gently With Thy Servants, and Blind Bartimaeus.

Jesus the Light of the World
source: The Finest of the Wheat: Hymns New and Old for Missionary and Revival Meetings and Sabbath-Schools (Chicago, 1890). "Geo. D. Elderkin, arr."
As the nineteenth century waned, the revival hymns, with their simple, keyboard-derived harmonies and rollicking refrains, displaced many a genuine folksong; but the best of them have an appeal of their own. The opening phrase of this one, published in 1890, bears an uncanny resemblance to the "Going Home" theme of Dvorak's New World Symphony, composed circa 1893. It is tempting to see the similarity as more than coincidental: was Dvorak in fact familiar with this song? Could he have been reluctant to acknowledge his debt to such a lowbrow source as this?

Joy to the World
source: The New Harp of Columbia
Despite its origins in the "other" America, that world of starched collars, overstuffed furniture, and institutional art, we were reluctant to leave this very popular American carol (loosely based on a theme from Handel's Messiah) by the wayside. The Boston composer Lowell Mason (1792-1872), author of Joy to the World and director of the august Handel and Haydn Society from 1827 to 1832, spent his long career trying to "correct" the vital American folkhymn tradition and to replace it with something blander, and worse. He was rewarded for his largely successful efforts with fame, fortune, and a place in all standard music history textbooks, while true geniuses like the anonymous harmoniser of Midnight Cry lie in ummarked graves… Christmas is nonetheless an inclusive holiday and a time of reconciliation; America is a big, forgiving place; and Joy to the World has a good tune. It even turns up in a few Southern shapenote books. Performing Mason's carol in Southern-style "dispersed harmony," with both soprano and tenor lines doubled, gives an unbuttoned, homespun aspect to this morsel of official Victoriana.