From Beethoven and Schubert to Taylor Swift, from Mozart and Puccini to Lin-Manuel Miranda, every composer sooner or later deals with love, its presence or absence, its joys and its trials. Our program today presents a range of these explorations, from classic choral works to more contemporary music and popular songs.

We open with three recent pieces that have quickly entered the choral canon. “If Music Be the Food of Love” is a 2001 piece by David Dickau, a conductor, composer, and educator who spent most of his career at Minnesota State University, Mankato. This is his best-known composition. It is based on a poem by Henry Heveningham, who took his inspiration from the opening lines of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night: “If music be the food of love, play on; / Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, / The appetite may sicken, and so die.” While Shakespeare’s character wants so much music that he’ll grow sick of it (and therefore grow sick of love), Heveningham changes “play on” to “sing on” and takes the opposite view: “If music be the food of love, / Sing on till I am fill’d with joy.” He describes love as a pleasure “that can never cloy.”

We follow this with the short motet “Set Me as a Seal” composed by Julius C. Miller III in 2014. A singer and composer, Miller hails from Detroit and earned his degrees at Indiana University in South Bend. He has sung opera roles internationally and in the United States. His compositions are widely performed, and this piece is among his best-known. The words, from the Song of Songs in the Bible, express the permanence of love.

The set concludes with Donald Gawthrop’s 1991 composition “Sing Me to Heaven,” a beloved piece and a must for any small choir. The elegant text by the composer’s wife, Jane Griner, speaks of the many ways music can move us. In addition to music for chorus, Gawthrop has written numerous works for organ. He has been composer-in-residence to the Fairfax Virginia Symphony Orchestra and Renaissance Men, a professional vocal ensemble based in New England.

The major work on our program is the Liebeslieder Walzer(Love Song Waltzes), Opus 52, composed in 1869 by Johannes Brahms. One of the great composers of the nineteenth century, Brahms is perhaps best known today for his grand works: among them, the four symphonies and the German Requiem. But there is another, more intimate side to Brahms, found in his many songs and chamber works. The Love Song Waltzes show Brahms in a somewhat uncharacteristic lighthearted mood. While some of the songs are dark (even desolate), most are playful and charming—two words we rarely associate with the often melancholic Brahms.

The texts come from the second volume of Polydora, an extensive two-volume collection of folk poetry compiled and translated into German by Georg Friedrich Daumer. From the hundreds of poems in this 1855 collection, Brahms carefully chose the eighteen in this set and arranged them in the order we know today. Even though many of the poems logically follow one another in Brahms’s composition, only two—Numbers 13 and 14—appear together in Daumer’s book.

Brahms set himself a formidable challenge when he decided to set 18 texts by Daumer as waltzes. When the set is performed complete, as it usually is, it means 18 songs in a row in the same 3/4 OOM-pah-pah meter. What’s more, dances are typically made up of two repeated sections. With every piece in the same meter and form, there’s a serious risk of monotony! But Brahms finds remarkable variety within these limitations—so much so, that we might not even notice that the pieces have much in common.

Brahms defies expectation in the very first song of the set. Instead of repeating both the words and the tune in each section, he writes out the repeat, with different words the second time. Towards the end of the second time, he changes the harmony and piano part to make a transition into the second part of the dance, where again the repeat is written out. This repeat may be easier to hear than the first one: the tenors and basses sing the music the first time, then the sopranos and altos take it up with different words. They finally sing together in a short coda.

The most elaborate structure occurs in No. 6, “Ein kleiner, hübscher Vogel,” which resembles a minuet and trio such as might occur in the third movement of a symphony: After two repeated sections, there comes another pair of repeated sections (much shorter than the first pair), after which the first section occurs again with slightly different words. What’s more, the repetitions in the opening and closing section are written out, and while the melody is the same each time, the surrounding voices, including the piano parts, are different. If we were to use letters to stand for the sections and repetitions, the basic dance form would be AABB. But in this movement, the form is AaBbCCDDAa (upper-case letters indicate an exact repetition; lower-case indicates some significant change).

And so it goes: while 13 of the 18 songs are in the conventional form, there are just enough with significant departures sprinkled throughout to keep things interesting. The most delightful might be No. 9, “Am Donaustrande” (On the banks of the Danube) It paints a fairytale picture of a young girl locked away in a house. A young man declares that the iron bars on the door are nothing but glass to him. But by returning to the opening text at the end (the original poem doesn’t do that), Brahms implies that the young man’s boasting was in vain; the house remains barred with the girl inside. Brahms follows this with a song about a sweetly flowing river (“O wie sanft,” No. 10), perhaps to underscore the joke.

The textures are remarkably wide-ranging as well. The two pianists at one keyboard (often called “piano four hands”) provide a rich, almost orchestral sound as the voices weave melodies above. While the lower part is frequently an OOM-pa-pah bass, as we might expect, Brahms is too inventive to keep it that way for long. Similarly, the top part, rather than merely playing the same melodies as the singers, dances playfully above and around them. Listen especially in No. 3, “O die Frauen,” for the way the two pianists’ parts imitate one another in the second section to reflect the playful text. Brahms also varies the way he uses the voices: there are two solo songs and four duets. The rest are for four voices.

No. 10, “O wie ist die Welle klar,” has perhaps the most interesting texture—it is certainly the most complicated, though it sounds just as melodious and charming as all the others. In this one, the soprano and tenor parts are in canon (a round, like “Three Blind Mice”). In the first part, they are an octave apart, but in the second part, they are a seventh apart (the soprano starts a step lower than the tenor each time), which partly disguises the canon. The altos and basses do the same thing in the second part. What’s more, the pianists play the same canons, but in different octaves from the singers! Within an apparently simple song, Brahms achieves a compositional tour-de-force. This might well be said of the entire cycle.

Brahms uses one of his favorite devices to break up the monotony of the 1-2-3 rhythm. Called hemiola, it is a way of extending the meter in 3/4 time. Normally, the meter is ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three, where beat ONE is stronger than the other two. Even if we’re thinking in groups of two measures, as is frequently the case in 3/4 time, the stress will come every third beat. But Brahms often introduces a hemiola at the end of a phrase. This places the stress on every second beat: ONE-two-THREE-one-TWO-three, which changes our perception of the meter. This is used most dramatically in No. 2, “Am Gesteine rauscht di Flut,” where all the melodies are based on hemiola rhythm. The device is used with great effect in No. 8, “Wenn so lind dein Auge mir,” where each phrase ends with this elegant lengthening.

Brahms also uses changes in tempo, key, and character to vary the mood of each song. No. 2 (“Am Gesteine”) and No. 11 (“Nein, es ist nicht auszukommen”) sound like Hungarian dances. No. 6 (“Ein kleiner, hübscher Vogel”) contains a stunning change of key in the middle. The tender, decidedly Viennese-sounding No. 8 (“Wenn so lind”) follows the most desolate song of the cycle, and so on.

Finally, Brahms achieves interest and variety through text-painting—music that reflects the character of the words. The rushing tide in No. 2 (“Am Gesteine”), the birdsongs in the piano in No. 6 (“Ein kleiner, hübscher Vogel”), the fluttering of birds’ wings in No. 13 (“Vögelein durchrauscht die Luft”), and the nightingale-like long-short rhythms in both the piano and the voices in No. 15 (“Nachtigal, sie singt so schön”) are excellent examples.

On the other side of the coin, Brahms provides unity in the set mainly through the texts (though some musical material recurs briefly as well). He often pairs texts to create a dialog between numbers, and four of the songs (6, 13, 15, and 18), including the last one, refer to birds. Other nature images are water (Nos. 2, 9, 10, 11, and 14), sunset (4), the moon (14), and so on.

We’re adding a further element of variety in our performance. The Liebeslieder Walzer were originally meant as salon music—a pastime for an intimate gathering of friends around a piano. They were quickly presented in larger concert settings, and they are often performed by choirs, even though Brahms most likely intended them to be sung by four soloists. In fact, he may have offered the possibility of performing them without singers at all! The title page of the first edition describes these as pieces “für das Pianoforte zu vier Händen (und Gesang ad libitum)” (for the piano, four hands, and singing ad libitum).  Whether he meant that the voices are optional or that the vocal parts could be sung by either four singers or a larger group is somewhat unclear. Noting the ambiguity, choirs frequently sing these pieces—even using a whole section to sing the movements for one part. To preserve the chamber music aspect of the original and to vary the texture, we are performing about half the movements with the full choir and the rest with smaller groups.

As is traditional, we have appended the final song from the second set of Liebeslieder Walzer, Opus 65, to the end of the set. The text for this movement is the last four lines from a long poem by Goethe, which Brahms fittingly labels “Zum Schluss” (At the End, or In Conclusion). Only five years separate these Neue Liebeslieder Walzer (New Love Song Waltzes), composed in 1874, from the first set, yet the style is noticeably different: the vocal parts are more complicated, and the overall tone is more contemplative. Still, it makes a satisfying ending to the work as a whole.

Like the Liebeslieder Walzer, Emma Lou Diemer’s Three Madrigals are based on disparate texts carefully chosen by the composer, in this case to create a story arc. Diemer, a composer and organist, spent most of her career teaching composition at University of California at Santa Barbara. From 1959 – 1961, she was composer-in-residence under a Ford Foundation Young Composers Project grant in the schools in Arlington, Virginia. It was during this period that she wrote Three Madrigals, showing her gift for writing music that is both practical and satisfying. In the first song, the speaker tells a young woman that “youth’s a stuff [that] will not endure.” Therefore, rather than running off, she should stay to be kissed. By the second song, love has already gone wrong, but the third song encourages her to “sigh no more,” since men have always been liars. “Let them go!” the text says, as if to declare, “they’re not worth it.”

Aaron Copland’s two sets of Old American Songs are an eclectic collection of everything from folk songs to campaign songs and minstrel songs to sentimental ballads like the one we’re singing today, “Long Time Ago.” Copland originally intended the songs to be performed by a solo singer with piano. Later, he orchestrated them, and eventually, several of his younger contemporaries arranged them for choirs. The setting of “Long Time Ago” is especially effective in this guise. Copland has provided a new piano accompaniment for a song originally published in 1839. The words (originally “Near the lake”) were written by the American newspaper editor and poet George P. Morris (1802 – 1864), and the music was composed by Charles E. Horn (1786 – 1849). Horn was born in England but made a successful career in the United States. Among his achievements was helping to found the New York Philharmonic in 1842.

Next, we present two songs from what is popularly known as The Great America Songbook—standards from the twentieth century that continually find new audiences. Originally from Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood, these songs remain favorites with performers of all kinds, from jazz to pop artists. “Love Walked In” by the Gershwin brothers was first heard in The Goldwyn Follies of 1938, though George Gershwin had written the melody in 1930. Berlin wrote “Blue Skies” in 1926 as a last-minute addition to the Broadway musical Betsy by Rodgers and Hart. Al Jolson sang it in the first sound film, “The Jazz Singer” (1929), and Bing Crosby sang it in the film “White Christmas” (1954).

Our concert concludes with three more current popular songs. “Somebody to Love” is a beloved Freddie Mercury song from 1976. “True Colors” was first sung by Cyndi Lauper and released in 1986. Finally, the Beatles remind us that “All You Need is Love” in their single from 1967.

We hope our performance today brings you both “present mirth” and “present laughter” and that all your “journeys end in lovers meeting” and “pleasures that can never cloy”!