THE MUSIC

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MIXED CHOIR

Sehnsucht, Op. 112, No. 1 – Johannes Brahms

Brahms is back! A perennial favorite composer of TMEA, this piece has ALL the things that make people love Brahms: super long phrases, with extended cadences that make us really work for the resolutions, juicy chromatics and diminished chords, triplets against duples, dramatic swells and ebbs… it should feel very good to sing! All of these techniques are meant to evoke the text of this piece, which translates to “yearning” or “longing” - so let your angsty teen revel in the lush beauty of this song about being sad and alone!

Composed: 1888

Period: Romantic

Language: German

Over the Rainbow (with Lo, How a Rose) – Arranged by Richard Bjella

This, children, is called a “mash-up” and was arranged thusly by your TMEA All-State Mixed Choir clinician, Richard Bjella. The soloist begins with the well-known tune “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and the choir responds with excerpts from the Christmas Hymn “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming.” The harmonies are tight and crunchy and jazzy, and will challenge your ears and intonation! Mash-ups can sometimes shed new light on the source material by offering new context or perspective: what do you think the link is here between these two songs?

Arranged: 2022

Period: Contemporary

Language: English

Unwritten — Natasha Bedingfield, arranged by Vince Peterson

This piece will teach us all to respect the hard work that A Cappella groups and Glee clubs do! As an arrangement of a pop song for only voices, we will have the challenge of reading and executing really complex rhythms: rhythms that are easier to “feel” than to read, but beware of your feelings, because we must also sing exactly as they are written, or this intricate clockwork machinery won’t lock together! Once we’ve all digested and mastered the trickiness of this piece, we’ll really be able to relax into the joyful familiarity of the song and its uplifting message. No one else can write your story!

Arranged: 2012

Period: Contemporary

Language: English

Fun Fact: There is a little Bach prelude sprinkled throughout the song. This may be a nod to the Swingle Singers, an ancestor of today’s A Cappella groups, who would sing arrangements of pop tunes as well as vocal arrangements of Bach instrumental pieces.

Lacrimosa and Amen from “Requiem” – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Mozart’s Requiem is about as famous as choral music gets! These two movements are from a larger work called a “Requiem” which is a Catholic Mass for the dead. The chilling thing about this Requiem is that Mozart died before finishing it, so we only have part of it, and there are many people who have completed the work for him. This particular completion, by pianist and musicologist Robert Levin, is NOT the most-often performed completion! It includes a long and virtuosic “Amen” movement, which the “standard” completion doesn’t, and is based on a fragment of Mozart’s that was only recently discovered. Enjoy the mourning of the first movement, with its tear-drop violin line painting the words “full of tears is that day” - this is classical period music at its most dramatic and romantic for sure!

Composed: 1791, Completion in 1993

Period: Classical

Language: Latin

Fun Fact:  The movie Amadeus has some great scenes about the composing of the Requiem. While it’s highly fictionalized, it’s still a fun and inspiring watch! Also, delving into the rabbit hole of how many people have tried to complete this work is a fun Wikipedia journey. 

The Coolin, from “Reincarnations” – Samuel Barber

Early 20th century American composer Samuel Barber returns to the TMEA list this year (he composed “Stopwatch” which the TTBB ensemble did last year) with this luscious and exquisitely gorgeous love song. The word “coolin” essentially means “sweetheart” in Irish, and the song is about a couple so in love that they no longer need words, but can hold hands and look in each other's eyes all afternoon on a meadow-covered hill. The music lilts in 12/8, the traditional meter used in “pastoral” music (pastoral meaning “countryside” - imagine the green Irish grass, dotted with white goats!). Compare to Handel’s “pastoral” from Messiah, or the last movement Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony. Similar vibes rhythmically, but with very fresh and evocative 20th century harmonies and unexpected tonal shifts that lend almost a “drunk in love” quality to the song.

Composed: 1942

Period: 20th Century

Language: English

Treble Choir

Caritas Abundat (Great and Fiery Force) – Michael John Trotta

A great and fiery piece of music for the trebles this year! Written for treble choir, percussion and violin, this extremely fast and rhythmic piece will challenge your page-turning skills! Quoting a medieval chant by Hildegard von Bingen and intertwining it with fast modern music that is sometimes reminiscent of a lively Irish jig, the piece swirls and builds to ecstatic heights to invoke the transcendence of the mystic texts. A slower middle section quotes the medieval chant more at length, but in canon, before the piece builds for its last climactic finish.

Composed: 2018

Period: Contemporary

Language: Latin and English

Fun Fact: Hildegard von Bingen, who wrote the chant this piece quotes, is a really cool historical figure: an abbess who was a polymath, mystic, visionary, spoke against corruption in the catholic church, composer of the sacred monophony, philosopher, poet, medical theorist…

Always Keep This Close – Zachary J Moore

This is a piece by choir nerds for choir nerds about the experience of being in a choir and feeling at home, larger than yourself, carried by the shared intention of the music. Colleen Carhuff wrote a poem to her Women’s Chorus at UW about how much she loved them and the special intimacy they felt, and Zachary Moore, in undergrad at the same university, set the words to music. This is a great example of young composers/poets making art out of what they know and how it can really translate into something universally relatable (at least to those who have felt this feeling!). The song alternates between homophonic and polyphonic textures to illustrate how independent lines and people can lock together and become something greater than the sum of their parts.

Composed: 2015

Period: Contemporary

Language: English

I’ll Never Study – Paul David Thomas

Get your sarcastic faces ready! This piece is a fun, funny, and smart setting of a satirical poem written by Alice Duer Miller, famous American suffragette (women’s rights advocate). In the poem, she is responding to a speech made at a convention for the National Education Association, where the speaker warned that women could lose their souls if they chose to pursue mathematics. (This was a hundred years ago, but sounds eerily close to the logic that a pro-football player might use during, say, a graduation speech in 2024.) In the satirical poem, Alice Miller promises to avoid algebra and keep her spirit pure, but in this musical setting, the composer has the choir continually get pulled into fun and jazzy recitations of the Fibonacci sequence.

Composed: 2022

Period: Contemporary

Language: English

Fun Fact: Paul David Thomas is a Texan! He teaches at Texas Womens University in Denton, TX.

Ich stand in dunklen Traumen, Op. 13, No. 1 – Clara Schumann

Clara Schumann was a child prodigy, was a touring concert pianist for over 60 years, wrote and arranged music, and was influential in changing piano recitals from being purely virtuosic bravado showcases to include more subtle and intimate music. In addition to all of this, she was married to composer Robert Schumann, and was a friend and inspiration to Johannes Brahms. Because of this and the time period, she is often introduced solely as “Schumann’s wife” or “Brahms’ crush” and we miss out on the wealth of talent and the art she produced. This piece is originally a song for solo voice, but has been arranged for SSAA chorus. The poem describes looking at a picture of someone you loved and lost, “darkly dreaming” that the face comes to life and smiles back at you with tears in its eyes. The gentle lyricism of the piece turns what could have been a wildly melodramatic and mournful song into a moment of tender beauty; a subtlety that can either soften or deepen the devastation of the poem’s words, depending on how you let yourself hear it. 

Arranged: 1840

Period: Romantic

Language: German

Fun Fact: In case you want to get mad a little, a quote from Clara: "I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose – there has never yet been one able to do it. Should I expect to be the one?”

Tenor-Bass Choir

Convidando esta la noche – Juan Garcia de Zespedes

Though you may not notice it at first glance, this is a Christmas song! This piece is from Mexico in the baroque era, which is pretty cool as most of the music we study from this time is from the European continent. In this music we can see the beautiful blending of cultures - the colonists’ religion, Christianity, is the subject matter, and the harmonies and instruments are also of European import, but the ecstatic dancing refrains and iconic alternation between 6/8 and 3/4 meter are recognizably Latin in flavor. Think of the song “I want to be in America” from West Side Story - the same rhythm occurs here, borrowed from flamenco, which was borrowed from Arab culture, and became so popular in the new world, this rhythm is largely associated with Latin America by today's audiences. The piece alternates a slow gentle “let us sing to the baby” section with a fast and furious “oh, how I burn, divine Master!” exultant dance section. 

Composed: c.1650

Period: Baroque

Language: Spanish

Fun Fact: This piece is edited and arranged to be used with modern instruments. The original would likely have been much more free - using whatever instruments were on hand: guitars, harps, tambourines, percussion… and likely the singing would have included a fair amount of freedom to improvise as well… “ay, ay, ay!”

The River – Susan LaBarr

Here’s a folksy midwestern piece about how the home where we grow up influences who we grow into. The composer and poet are both Missourans, and this piece has the flavor of that area of Americana throughout it. The line is folk-song-like and easy to sing, the rhythms and harmonies reminiscent of bluegrass, and the whole piece has a nice gentle build and then relaxes at the end, giving that feeling of coming and going, or watching a boat float down the river. 

Composed: 2021

Period: Contemporary

Lanuage: English

Kyrie – Sofia Soderberg

An atmospheric, meditative, piece that takes us out of time both by being very slow and sustained, and by seamlessly combining modern elements with an ancient chant tune. This piece was written to be performed in cathedrals, and you’ll hear the constant bed of sound (there are almost no corporate breaths) ringing throughout, meant to exploit the reverberant acoustics of French cathedrals and transport the listener. The piece won’t be too hard to learn or to sing, but it might be a hard one to audition on because of this endless sustain!

Arranged: 2017

Period: contemporary arrangement of a Gregorian chant from 9th or 10th century

Language: Latin

The Wall Breaks Asunder – Anthony J. Maglione

Get ready for some bombastic, epic, heavy and truly awe-some music. Written for percussion and Tenor/Bass choir, this sounds a bit like a movie soundtrack for some hero about to face his death in battle. The challenging writing will hopefully be very rousing and satisfying to sing. The poet Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali philosopher, writer, and artist from the early 20th century.  His works are often mystical in nature, as can be seen in this text: using images of light and dark and declaring victory over death, though in a very different way than a Christian might. 

Composed: 2016

Period: Contemporary

Langauge: English