Alice Parker, photo courtesy of gothic-catalogue.com |
For this post, I had to search around for a good recording. Because of its popularity, many church groups and high schools have performed it, and while their techniques are good, the quality of the recordings are not. I found this one, by the Reinhardt University College Choir. I prefer the older groups simply because I enjoy a mature choral sound as opposed to a juvenile one for this particular anthem. (Also, their diction and rhythms are very crisp and an absolute delight to listen to!)
The composer, Alice Parker, is well known throughout the choral community for being widely successful in print music. She studied choral conducting under Robert Shaw at Julliard and now has 13 recordings as well as an immense amount of accolades for her work.
I am very much a secularist in what I compose and listen to for the most part, but this piece is stunning. What is even more stunning is the simplicity of the piece. The harmonies are far from complicated. In fact, the entire piece is diatonic.
Music lesson! Diatonic means 'within the key.' (Remember, a key is a set of pitches that match a certain pattern!
This piece is also strophic, (Strophic: same music, different words; much like verses in a popular song)which means that the interest of it doesn't come from musical variety either.
What really makes this piece is texture. I am a sucker for texture. The building of different rhythmic ideas is one of the central tenets of minimalism as well, but in this anthem the climax of textures is absolutely stunning.
The first verse (Hark I hear the harps eternal, ringing on the farther shore; as I near those swollen waters, with their deep and solemn roar!) is completely homophonic. This means that even though each of the parts are singing different pitches, they are all singing the same rhythm. An entire anthem of this would just be a hymn, and pretty boring at that.
Enter in the chorus, or the refrain, at 0:28. The text is simple: "Hallelujah, praise the lamb! Halelujah, glory to the great I Am!" But listen to the textures. We have the sopranos singing the melody (of course) up above everyone else, but what is everyone else singing? Their text is fairly similar, but the rhythms are different. The other parts are singing 'Ha-le, lu-jah' for the most part. The rhythms are very complimentary of each other, not to mention very catchy!
Now for the second verse: its different than the first, but how? The melody is the same, is it not? But while the first verse was homophonic, this one is not. This one is polyphonic (more than one voicing singing different rhythms). The men are echoing the text that the women sing! On a technical note, echos are hard to write and sometimes even harder to perform, because the text can get muddled and unintelligible. Both composer and performer(s) (and conductor, of course) do a fantastic job here. Kudos.
...and back to the refrain. Its different this time! And yet, the melody remains intact - so what changed? The rhythms in the lower voices changed. Before, they were singing 'ha-le, lu-jah,' but now it is more of a 'ha-le-lu-jah.' INTERESTING.
In verse three, the sopranos don't have the melody anymore, the men do. But then, at 1:20, the soprano solo rises above the melody, and it is quoting the refrain - another example of creative use of rhythms. (I would be remiss to not acknowledge the soloist, Laura Leigh Beall, for a song well sung - its hard to keep that line so crisp and clear in that range).
Now we're into the home stretch - we have 2 more refrains back to back, each with a slightly different twist than the previous ones. The rhythms in this section are quoting all the previous rhythms,but simultaneously!
And for the closing sentiment, the final text, 'Glory to the great I Am,' is sung in the same homophonic texture that we started with. Spectacular. Parker takes us on a very short, but absolutely worthwhile journey that ends up right where we started. Its like a Quentin Tarantino film, but with considerably less gore.
Till next time, stay musical!
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