In Praise of Music

Saint Cecilia, virgin martyr and the legendary inventor of the organ, was the patron saint of music. The tradition of marking her day, November 22, as a celebration of music began in London sometime in the second half of the seventeenth century. The earliest documented such occasion in Anglican England was in 1683, but there is evidence to suggest that these celebrations had already been taking place for some time before. From the beginning, the festivities were equally religious and secular. First, there was a church service. A public entertainment followed that included a specially composed ode for the occasion. The most celebrated composers and poets of the day took part in creating the odes, and many of them are still performed today. George Frideric Handel’s 1739 “Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day” on a text by John Dryden is one of the most famous, along with several works by Henry Purcell. Our concert today, In Praise of Music, honors that tradition with a program of works that celebrate the power of song.

We begin with the powerful “Fanfare for a Festival” by the late Ron Nelson. A native of Joliet, Illinois, Nelson received his musical training at the Eastman School of Music, earning bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees there. Among his teachers was the celebrated Howard Hanson. He was professor of music at Brown University until his retirement in 1993, when he moved to Scottsdale, Arizona. He died there on Christmas Eve 2023.

Schubert’s “An die Musik” (To Music) is a setting of a poem by his friend Franz von Schober that praises music’s power to soothe us. Originally a solo song, it is performed here in a thoughtful adaptation for chorus by Craig Courtney.

“Meet and Right It Is to Sing” is one of many hymn texts by Charles Wesley, the brother of the founder of Methodism, John Wesley. Alice Parker’s lively setting starts out resembling the melody that is often associated with the text, WELD, but veers off in another direction. The unusual meters (8/8, 5/8) create an animated, dancelike atmosphere. Parker, who also died in 2023, was one of America’s leading choral conductors and composers well into her 90s.

Of all the pieces on the program, Benjamin Britten’s “Hymn to St. Cecilia” is the most complex and requires the most explanation.

Britten was born on St. Cecilia’s day in 1913, so it is perhaps natural that he should eventually write a piece in her honor. For a text, he turned to his friend, W.H. Auden, with whom he was sharing a house in New York in the early 1940s. Auden’s cryptic but beautiful poetry almost defies analysis, but as poet and ASU English professor Sally Ball points out, the poem and musical composition are contemporary with a letter Auden wrote to Britten in early 1942. The letter, though probably meant affectionately, was highly critical of Britten and caused an irreparable rift in their friendship. Nevertheless, it brings out the important idea that art relies on both order and disorder. “Goodness and Beauty,” Auden writes in the letter, “are the results of a perfect balance between Order and Chaos.” Later in the letter, Auden admonishes Britten for evading “the demands of disorder.” This is the central message of Auden’s poem.

The first part of the text, “In a garden shady…,” is elaborately Baroque, with its wordplay on sounds (“shady…lady,” “subtle psalm”) and on sense: “At sounds so entrancing the angels dancing / Came out of their trance….” This section echoes the traditional story of Cecilia: she was a young Christian woman who had taken a vow of chastity but who was given in marriage to Valerian, a Roman warrior. By her singing and praying, she called down angels, who managed to get him to respect her virginity. She and Valerian were subsequently martyred; later, Cecilia’s body was disinterred (i.e., “translated”) and found not to have decayed. Britten’s setting, both mystical and dancelike, demonstrates the central qualities of his style at this time: the ability to set English words with unexpected but entirely apt rhythms, engaging melodies, and a lush, luminous harmonic palette.

The second section is usually described as the voice of Music itself, abstract and free. But it may equally be Auden chastising Britten: his friend is incapable of growth because he will not face his own suffering, his own shadows. He seems to avoid intimacy while craving to be loved; like Peter Pan, he refuses to grow up. The music of this section is playful and technical—a bit like a keyboard exercise.

The third section, with its throbbing, repeating bass line and ethereal upper parts, begins as a prayer, asking the Great Ear—fitting in a lyric celebrating music—to “re-arrange.” The text asks us to take traditional cliches and turn them on their heads: we should see Sorrow as mature and deep, rather than as adolescent angst; we can only find Hope if we acknowledge that to feel hopeful at all has become strange; and Dread, rather than a fleeting sense of fear, is normal and constant. Then, Auden urges, we must look into that fallen day and re-arrange: make music, having faced these hard, unchanging truths without fear. It is worth remembering that Auden wrote these words—and Britten set them—against the backdrop of World War II.

Next, the soprano solo (Cecilia’s angel, perhaps?) both blesses and admonishes humanity—the “impetuous child with the tremendous brain”—who without realizing the consequences of its actions does “dreadful things” for which it must atone. Then, recalling the seventeenth-century tradition of Cecilia odes, Auden invokes a series of instruments. He exhorts us to weep for our unwitting sins, to recognize that the past will never return, to celebrate freedom even when we fail to choose it, and finally to “wear … tribulation like a rose”—to treat suffering not as something to be avoided but as a badge of honor. This admonition to embrace suffering is the heart of the work.

Britten repeats Auden’s invocation of St. Cecilia (which appears only at the end of Section 1 in the published poem) at the end of each of the three musical movements. Auden calls on Cecilia to “startle composing mortals”—asserting his belief that disruption and disorder are crucial to the work of the artist. If our patron saint can help us, Britten seems to say through repeating this prayer, it will be because she takes us by surprise.

The second half of our program begins with a festive anthem by the late Lena J. McLin, a composer, pastor, and public school teacher. A native of Atlanta, she worked most of her life in Chicago. The text, with its references to psaltery, harp, and trumpet, is evocative of the more exuberant psalms, such as Psalm 150. We follow with local composer Ed Hughes’s wistful and moving adaptation of the hymn “How Can I Keep from Singing” and end this group with “Alway Something Sings,” Dan Forrest’s sweeping composition to words by Ralph Waldo Emerson: even in darkness and sorrow, Emerson reminds us, there is still something singing—something beautiful, something hopeful.

The text of “I Have Had Singing” comes from Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village. Author Ronald Blythe based this depiction of the fictional Akenfield on interviews with residents of a small village in Suffolk, England, in the 1960s. We can imagine an elderly man reminiscing about all the singing in the hamlet of his youth as Steven Sametz’s haunting setting unfolds. Next is “Music Down in My Soul” by Moses Hogan, who left us a rich body of original music and settings of spirituals. This gospel-inspired piece begins mystically and becomes joyful, upbeat, and exuberant. We conclude with an expansive piece based on the Black National Anthem, “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” James Weldon Johnson’s timeless words remind us to keep moving forward, as those in the past have done, even in times of struggle.

*I am grateful to Professor Sally Ball of the English Department at ASU for many thoughtful conversations over the years concerning Auden’s text for Britten’s “Hymn to St. Cecilia.” Much of the interpretation of the poetry comes from her. Any misinterpretation, however, is my responsibility.