This Shining Night: Music and poetry for a summer evening — June 2023

Morten Johannes Lauridsen (born February 27, 1943, in Colfax, WA) is a native of the Pacific Northwest, where he worked as a Forest Service firefighter and lookout (on an isolated tower near Mt. St. Helens.) He attended Whitman College before traveling south to study composition at the University of Southern California with Ingolf Dahl, Halsey Stevens, Robert Linn, and Harold Owen. He began teaching at USC in 1967 and retired after a distinguished teaching career spanning 40 years.

In 2006, Lauridsen was named an ‘American Choral Master’ by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2007 he received the National Medal of Arts from the President in a White House ceremony, “for his composition of radiant choral works combining musical beauty, power and spiritual depth that have thrilled audiences worldwide.”

Referring to Lauridsen’s sacred music, the musicologist and conductor Nick Strimple said he was “the only American composer in history who can be called a mystic, (whose) probing, serene work contains an elusive and indefinable ingredient which leaves the impression that all the questions have been answered.”

Lauridsen’s music occupies a permanent place in the standard vocal repertoire of the Twentieth Century. The “Lauridsen Effect” has long been in evidence in the United States where there can be scarcely any choir that has never sung his music. With the Nocturnes (2005) Lauridsen undertook a particularly difficult formal challenge: to compose an integrated choral cycle that was simultaneously a triptych while allowing each of the panels to be performed separately. The Nocturnes are unusual within Lauridsen’s œuvre.

Unlike his earlier choral cycles, both of which use the work of a single poet, Lauridsen has here anthologized the verses of three twentieth-century poets, each of a different nationality: the German Rainer Maria Rilke, the Chilean Pablo Neruda, and the American James Agee. To ensure unity of conception amid this poetic diversity, the composer has cannily chosen four poems in which there are shared themes: night, romantic love, and pantheistic rapture.

“Four poems sharing a common motif of ‘Night’ provide the texts for my choral cycle Nocturnes, the American Choral Directors Association’s commissioned work for its 2005 national convention. For Rilke’s atmospheric Sa nuit d’ete (Its Summer Night), several melodic themes are supported by dense, colorful harmonies in both the choral and piano parts, leading to a climactic section where all are combined and stated simultaneously. Neruda’s Soneto de la Noche (Sonnet of the Night), from his Cien Sonetos de Amor (100 Love Sonnets), speaks of an eternal love that transcends death while reaffirming life. My a cappella setting of this gorgeous poem is predominantly quiet, serene and folk-like, utilizing direct harmonies accompanying long, lyrical vocal lines. Agee’s wondrous Sure on this Shining Night is set much like a song from the American musical theater, a genre for which I have held a life-long esteem. Rilke’s poignant Voici le soir (Night Has Come) recalls the opening bell sounds and jazz-tinged chords of the first movement and serves as an epilogue, quietly concluding this cycle of night songs as darkness descends.”

— Morten Lauridsen

Through his operas, his symphonies, his compositions for his own ensemble, and his wide-ranging collaborations with artists ranging from Twyla Tharp to Allen Ginsberg, Woody Allen to David Bowie, Philip Glass has had an extraordinary and unprecedented impact upon the musical and intellectual life of his times. Glass is the first composer to win a wide, multi-generational audience in the opera house, the concert hall, the dance world, in film and in popular music — simultaneously.

Glass was born in 1937 and grew up in Baltimore. He studied at the University of Chicago, the Juilliard School and in Aspen with Darius Milhaud. Finding himself dissatisfied with much of what then passed for modern music, he moved to Europe, where he studied with the legendary pedagogue Nadia Boulanger (who also taught Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Quincy Jones) and worked closely with the sitar virtuoso and composer Ravi Shankar. He returned to New York in 1967 and formed the Philip Glass Ensemble — seven musicians playing keyboards and a variety of woodwinds, amplified and fed through a mixer.

The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops.

Commissioned and written for the Québec Festival 1934-1984, Three Songs for Chorus a Cappella presents three short pieces set to poems by three different North American poets. The first song, There are Some Men, is by singer-songwriter and poet Leonard Cohen (whose poetry was later the basis of an evening length song-cycle by Glass titled Book of Longing.) The second song, Quand les Hommes vivront d’Amour, by singer-songwriter/poet/artist Raymond Lévesque, is a wish for peace and happiness through love. The third song, Pierre de Soleil, by poet Octavio Paz, is a mediation on existential selflessness (“les autres qui me donnent l’existence.”)

Philip Glass has consistently written for choruses throughout his career including major operas (Satyagraha, The Voyage) and large orchestral works (symphonies Nos. 5 & 7, Passion of Ramakrishna). However, Three Songs is unique as the composer’s only a cappella choral work.