Program Notes
Composer Patricia Van Ness on Psalms of Luminous Rescue (commissioned for and premiered by Coro Allegro in 2018):
I composed Psalms of Luminous Rescue as a protest against our country’s current climate of intolerance against the LGBTQ+ community. I am not a political person (except voting), don’t march or campaign, but the recent violence of words and deeds against the community made me decide to protest in the only way I seemed to be able to do, which is with my music. I chose the word “luminous” because it is one of my concepts of the divine: unconditional love that permeates, like light and air, everything within and without, animate and inanimate. “Rescue” in this title refers to the ultimate, fundamental bedrock of tenderness, love and safety that is the divine to me.
I revised this piece for Coro Allegro in 2026 because when I looked over the score this past fall, I didn’t find it as beautiful and moving as I had remembered. In this revision, I wanted, as carefully and forcefully as I could, to re-emphasize the trauma many are experiencing now, or have already or are afraid they will, because of the limitations put on the humanity of so many marginalized people, especially in the LGBTQ+ community. I wanted to acknowledge and affirm their pain, and perhaps present a sense of peace and loving kindness that surrounds, whether we believe in it or not.
I am very grateful to Elizabeth Bradley, the 2018 commissioner of this extended work, for her generosity, thoughtfulness, and her blessing as I thoroughly overhauled it this year. She was gracious in agreeing to have the framework be the Psalms, and especially in bringing to my attention Psalm 12, the inspiration for Psalms of Luminous Rescue. To David and Coro Allegro I give my great thanks and affection for inspiring and supporting my music in extraordinary ways over the past 20 years. Finally, this piece is dedicated to our foremothers, who fought for our deliverance.
– Patricia Van Ness
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Charles Ives, Psalm 90
Charles Ives (1874-1954) was, in many ways, a musical visionary. His father, George Ives, a bandmaster during the Civil War and subsequently a music teacher in Danbury, Connecticut, was well versed in traditional harmony and counterpoint, but also had some unique ideas about ear-training, including the use of micro-tones and polytonality. As a child, Charles would be delegated with singing a hymn in one key while his father accompanied him in another. They liked to stand between marching bands passing each other playing different pieces to listen to the resulting clashes and waves of sound. Charles Ives’ work as a composer reflects this type of training. Dissonance in his compositions is never haphazard. His works are meticulously constructed, each pitch in place for a specific purpose. Within Ives’ mystical architectures, dissonance, polytonality, and tone clusters often serve as building blocks in ways that anticipate the techniques and sound of contemporary choral music composed a hundred years later.
It would be limiting, however, to only think of Ives’ music as dissonant and experimental, when in fact, much of it is quite beautiful, and even traditional, evoking the hymns of the Protestant churches he worked in as a young organist, or band or fiddle music or popular ballads. Ives had a gift for spinning long elegant melodies which are breathtaking in their simplicity. His setting of Psalm 90 for mixed chorus, organ, bells, and chimes, ably demonstrates all of these attributes.
Ives began writing psalm settings in his teens, finding in these hymns of praise, lament, and thanksgiving, spaces to explore theology and music beyond tonality. His experiments with Psalm 90 covered a span of thirty years (from 1894-1924). Per his editors’ notes, “the final result combines the fresh melodic directness of his early anthems, the visionary daring of his harmonic revolt, and the mature transcendence” of his unique musical voice. It was one of the last new works he wrote before he stopped composing amidst the illnesses that limited his last decades. As he told his wife Harmony, it was the only work with which he was truly satisfied.
The through note of Ives’ Psalm 90 is time. The “eternities” of God are expressed by a pedal C in alternating octaves in the organ that pulses through the piece from beginning to the end. Against this constant, Ives contrasts the transience of human life in polytonal flourishes, like “grass that growtheth up” and “is cut down and withereth.” Psalm 90 begins with a series of stacked chords in the organ, labelled by the composer, in sequence as “The Eternities,” “Creation,” “God’s wrath against sin,” “Prayer and Humility,” and “Rejoicing in Beauty and Work.” This sequence of ideas crystalizes the themes of the psalm text while the chord progression establishes what will be the architecture of the whole work, before closing with an accompanying echo of “distant” church bells. The chorus enters together in a unison chorale melody on the words “Lord thou hast been our dwelling place,” followed by a diminishing series of stacked bitonal major 7th chords on the words “from one generation to another, to another, to another” as if fading back through time. In his marginalia, Ives describes this sequence “as evolution, quiet, unseen and unheeded, but strong fundamentally.” For David Hodgkins, “the opening of Psalm 90 points to Ives’ belief that we are all connected to one another since before time.”
Ives makes that sequence of bitonal chords a fundamental building block for the piece, returning to it again and again, with variations in dynamics, speed, and harmonic transformation. He uses it to set the verses about God’s “destruction” “flood,” “anger” and “fear” and “wrath” with great dramatic effect. In contrast, Ives alternates sections of chant and simple unison prayers centered in C major, whose graceful prosody traces the vast peace of eternity: “For a thousand years in thy sight, are but as yesterday, when it is past.”
To bridge the contrasts of anger and awe, Ives uses two solo voices calling for return and reconciliation, one in the voice of God, and the other answering in the voice of the people. And to explore the complexities of time, he creates two musical palindromes. One is relatively simple, as the chorus ascends and descends again in parallel minor chords that “number our days” against the pedal C of time. The other is extraordinary, both to sing and to listen to. On the text “For all our days are passed away in thy wrath; we spend our years as a tale that is told,” the chorus begins on a unison middle C lasting 9 16th notes, then starts dividing into more and more parts, that radiate upwards and downwards in a whole-step scale ending in a half step. Each subsequent note is a 16th note shorter, as the whole pattern accelerates towards a 22-part tone cluster on the word “wrath,” before repeating the process in retrograde slowing back to unison on the word “told.”
After the inventive division and polytonality of the first half of Psalm 90, the tonal chorale with which Ives closes it is surprisingly moving. Surrounded by polyrhythmic bells, like the echoes of church bells from different congregations, the unison lines of its first half offer resolution after conflict (albeit with momentary destabilizing dissonances on words like “evil”). As its lines wind closer and closer to the pedal C of time, the chorale offers us the comfort that in coming together, our short lives may find meaning through our work and shared humanity, “let the beauty of the Lord be upon us and establish thou the work of our hands upon us.”
– David Hodgkins and Yoshi Campbell
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Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms (1965), is a work rooted as much in secular musical traditions of jazz and the theatre as it is in faith and the Synagogue. Bernstein had taken a hiatus from conducting the New York Philharmonic to concentrate on composition. A planned collaboration on a musical based on a Thornton Wilder play The Skin of Our Teeth fell apart in acrimony. Attempts to immerse himself in atonal compositional techniques left him frustrated and dissatisfied. So Bernstein was free to take a commission from Dr. Charles Hussey, Dean of the Cathedral at Chichester in Sussex. The eventual plan they settled upon was for a set of psalms in which you could “hear David dancing before the Lord.” The Dean intended “a statement of praise that was ecumenical” and added the following plea: “Many of us would be very delighted if there was a hint of West Side Story about the Music.”
In the end, there was more than a hint; music to a gang fight cut from the prelude to West Side Story appears in the second movement in a section sung by the tenors and basses to the text, “Lamah rag’shu goyim, Ul’umim yeh’gu rik?” (Why do the nations rage? And the people imagine a vain thing?). Various abandoned bits from the The Skin of our Teeth project somehow got recycled into the beautifully organic structure of the Chichester Psalms’ three movements. It is an amazing testament to Bernstein’s skills as a composer and text setter that he was able to find psalms where the Hebrew fits his preexisting music perfectly, both in theme and in prosody.
Bernstein was pleased with the result: “It has an old-fashioned sweetness along with its more violent moments. Each movement contains one complete psalm plus one or more verses from another complementary psalm, by way of contrast or amplification.”
Movement I opens with a clarion call of 7ths meant to rouse the dawn: “Urah, hanevel, v’chinor!” (Awake, psaltery and harp!) from Psalm 108, verse. 2. Then it swings into a percussive jazzy 7/4 chorus for Psalm 100, that Bernstein called “a wild and joyful dance in the Davidic spirit.”
In a moving piece of theatre, Movement II opens with a boy soprano and harp singing simply and without sentimentality (per the composer’s markings) the comforting, familiar words of Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my shepherd.”) The melody is echoed in canon by the sopranos and altos, and then interrupted ferociously and violently (per the score) by the tenors and basses. They sing music originally written for a West Side Story rumble, that is now used to set a familiar text from Messiah: “Why do the nations rage?” (Ps. 2, vs. 1-4) in a cacophony of shouts and mutters and consonants. In Bernstein’s words, “This movement ends in unresolved fashion, with both elements, faith and fear, interlocked.”
Movement III opens with an organ prelude in which that faith and fear appear to battle. Per the composer, the joyful dissonant harmonies of the opening chorale “have now turned to painful ones. There is a crisis; the tension is suddenly relieved, and the choir enters humbly and peacefully singing Ps. 131, complete” on a peacefully rocking 10/4. Bernstein ends Chichester Psalms as it begins, with return of the opening motif closing to unison on the words of Psalm 133, verse 1: "Hineh mah tov, Umah naim, Shevet aḥim Gam yaḥad.” (Behold how good, and how pleasant it is, for brothers to dwell together in unity).
– Yoshi Campbell, Programming Consultant
For permission to use the notes for Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms (© Yoshi Campbell) or Ives Psalm 90 (© Yoshi Campbell and David Hodgkins), please contact yoshic@coroallegro.org and consider a donation to Coro Allegro.