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New Amsterdam Singers
Clara Longstreth, Conductor
Dennis Delaney, Assistant Conductor
Elizabeth Rodgers, Pianist
New Amsterdam Singers is grateful to Marge and Walter Scheuer and Elaine and James D. Wolfensohn for their generous support of this recording.
We thank all of our contributors who helped make our Twenty-Fifth Anniversary a year to remember.
AMERICAN JOURNEY
The twentieth-century American composers chosen for this program of choral music represent diverse styles and span almost one hundred years; what they have in common is a sure sense for vocal writing, a preference for nontraditional but tonal harmony, and a delight in good poetry.
HALSEY STEVENS
The familiar love poem Go, Lovely Rose by the Cavalier poet Edmund Waller has attracted many composers, among them Halsey Stevens. Stevens has taught at the University of California since 1948. An expert on Bartók as well as a teacher, he has composed a wealth of vocal and instrumental music. Go, Lovely Rose is a worthy example of his lush but unhackneyed style.
CHARLES IVES
Charles Ives, New England's quirky, original insurance man/composer, began composing when he was twelve and held a job as church organist when he was only fourteen. Crossing the Bar may have been written as early as 1891 when Ives was sixteen or seventeen, probably for the local church choir. The poem was written only a few years before by the eighty-year-old Alfred Lord Tennyson after a trip across a sandbar to the Isle of Wight. Hastily scrawled on an envelope, the poem uses the sandbar as a metaphor for the threshold between life and death; the “evening bell” links the harbor bell with a death knell. Ives captures the poet's serenity contemplating death and his ecstasy at the thought of meeting his “Pilot” face to face. In this hymn, colorful harmonic touches enliven the simple C-major key.
SAMUEL BARBER
Samuel Barber's gift for melody and the unabashed romanticism of some of his best-known works (Adagio for Strings) have made him one of the most popular mid-twentieth-century composers. Reincarnations was written in 1940, when Barber was a young teacher at the Curtis Institute of Music.
The text of Reincarnations has a double history. James Stephens (1882-1950) was an Irish author writing in English whose output was dominated by nostalgia and melancholy over lost traditional Ireland. Two of these texts are “after the Irish of Raftery,” i.e., they are translated and reworked from songs in the Irish language - what we call Gaelic - by the musician/poet Antoine O Reachtabhra, transliterated as Anthony Raftery. Raftery (1784-1835) was the last of the great blind Irish harpists. Irish culture had a great bardic tradition with no meaningful distinction between song and poetry, and many of the greatest bards were blind. (The traditional self-accompaniment for the bard was the harp.) Harpists wandered from court to court, performing and improvising songs, taking maximum advantage of the elaborate aristocratic code of hospitality. Among the most common genres were songs of praise, the lament, the extended poetic insult, and the vision song. In setting these words to music, Barber restores them to their original purpose, not as poems to be read from a book but as song lyrics.
Two of the songs in the Reincarnations cycle - Mary Hynes and The Coolin - fall into the traditional category of love song or praises for a beautiful woman. Note in Mary Hynes the repeated use of visual imagery by the blind artists singing of the woman's beauty, and the concluding line “no good sight is good until by great good luck you see the blossom of branches walking toward you, airily, airily.” The irony of this line would not have been lost upon Raftery's original audience. The second piece is a tribute to Anthony Daly, a martyr hanged in 1820 for leading an agrarian terrorist organization. He was also accused of shooting at another man, a charge he vehemently denied: “If I did, though I have but one eye, I would have hit him.” Nonetheless he was convicted and sent to the gallows. Raftery, who witnessed the hanging, composed a bard's curse on those responsible for the death. Thus the mood is more one of retaliation than of mourning, and legend has it that calamity did befall those whom he cursed! Barber makes expressive use of the ancient device of pedal point, with the note E sounded below or above the melody for all but four measures of the piece. The insistence of that pitch and repetition of Anthony's name heightens the power of the whole.
The word coolin, used as the title of the third piece, refers to a lock of hair or “curleen” that grew on a young girl's neck and came to be used as a term for one's sweetheart. Stephens wrote, “I sought to represent that state which is almost entirely a condition of dream wherein the passion of love has almost overreached itself and is sinking to a motionless languor.” Barber uses a gentle siciliano rhythm for this old Irish love song, filtered through Stephens's romantic poetry.
ALAN HOVHANESS
Alan Hovhaness is an American composer of Armenian and Scottish descent. A prolific writer in a variety of forms, he is known for mystical works with an Eastern or Oriental flavor. David Wept for Slain Absalom, written in 1971, is a six-voice lament in which modal harmony, chromaticism, and dynamic extremes lend striking color to the simple text from Samuel. Massive chordal blocks alternate with sinuous chantlike melodies.
Absalom, David's third son, was a rebel who sought to replace his father as king. In the battle between their rival factions at Ephraim, Absalom was killed by one of his father's servants, despite David's strict orders for mercy to his son. From David's point of view, “victory [was] turned into mourning.” David's lament, “would God I had died for thee,” has been a favorite text for composers since the sixteenth century.
RANDALL THOMPSON
The poet Hillaire Belloc (1870-1953), of French-English background, was a versatile and prolific writer with a great love of travel. Randall Thompson was equally prolific as a composer but is best known for a single work, Alleluia. Thompson taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton, and Harvard, and was director of the Curtis Institute of Music. His biographer, Elliot Forbes (in Grove), praises the composer's “exquisite sensitivity to literary organization reflected in his musical phraseology.” Here he uses a dazzling piano accompaniment for Tarantella (a fast, whirling dance of Italian origin but popular in Spain). The poem itself incorporates percussive effects (“Hip! Hop!; Ting! Tong! Tang!”) as it evokes wild dancing at an inn in Aragon. The melancholy finale may refer to the dark side of the Spanish character or to the Spanish Civil War - the song was written in 1937.
RONALD PERERA
Ronald Perera's compositions include song cycles, theater, chamber, choral and orchestral works, and several works for instruments or voices with electronic sounds. He is perhaps best known for his settings of texts by authors as diverse as Dickinson, Joyce, Grass, Sappho, Cummings, Shakespeare, Francis of Assisi, Melville and Ferlinghetti. His 1989 opera The Yellow Wallpaper received its New York premiere in December 1992 at the Manhattan School of Music.
Perera studies with Leon Kirchner, Randall Thompson, and Mario Davidovsky. He has won awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and ASCAP, and his music has been recorded on the CRI and Opus One labels. Perera has taught since 1971 at Smith College, where he holds the Elsie Irwin Sweeney Chair in Music. He composed Earthsongs for women's chorus and orchestra in 1983 for the Smith College Glee Club, and subsequently wrote the piano arrangement heard on this program.
Perera writes:
Earthsongs is a celebration of the renewing force of spring, the instinctual, erotic side of human nature, and the hand of God in the natural world. The six poems of E.E. Cummings which form the text are drawn from Cummings' earliest published work, Tulips and Chimneys (1923), with the exception of “i thank You God,” which is from the collection Xiape (1950). The poems are by turns satirical, ambiguous, lyrical, romantic, sensuous, ecstatic. Often deceptively simple, they are never commonplace.
The musical settings are predominantly lighthearted, with diatonic, modal melodic writing, triadic harmonies and easily perceived meters, but they contain frequent twists and ambiguities which serve to make melody and harmony as elusive as some of the poet's imagery.
In “O sweet spontaneous earth,” a wry accounting of nature's stubborn refusal to knuckle under to the dogmas of academicians, the music keeps popping into A Major even when it is “supposed to be” in the E Mixolydian mode (same key signature but different tonics). The seductive balloonman of “in Just-spring” is evoked in a high sinuous figure which is out of joint with the underlying F tonality. Later, an insistent b natural further undermines the tonal stability, already shaken by bizarre, digressive chord progressions. The to and fro of tides in the exquisite love poem “as is the sea marvelous” finds a musical metaphor in the pull of opposing tonal centers of A flat Major and d minor. There follows the strophic “All in green went my love riding,” centered on the A Mixolydian mode. “When god lets my body be” closes the circle of death and renewal with gently overlapping canonic refrains cadencing in the B flat Lydian mode. The final movement, “i thank You God,” is a hymn to the Creator. A single theme which first appears in the lowest register gradually unfolds until, at the climax of the movement, it is presented in canon at several different speeds simultaneously.
The Norton Anthology of American Literature writes of Cummings: “He was the moralist with an almost pagan dedication to the free expressions of nature, both in the forms and the language of his art, and in human patterns of behavior.” The “goatfooted balloonman” of the second poem surely refers to Pan, the god of spring and thieves and crossroads. In the Greet satyr plays, the satyrs, followers of Pan and Dionysus, wore yard-long phalluses and hit each other with inflated bladders, the archaic equivalent of balloons. In the ballad-like “All in green,” Cummings plays with the repetition of sounds and the cumulative menace of near-repetition: the deer are first merry, then red, then fleet, then tense, then dead (for “heart,” read “hart,” or deer). Among his verbal tricks are the use of similar sounds, near-rhymes, in successive words: hounds crouched, fleeter be, they than, dappled dreams, swift sweet, red rare deer, cruel bugle, lean lithe, sheer peak, sleek slim, lucky hunter.
MATTHEW HARRIS
Matthew Harris, born in 1956, studies at Julliard, Harvard University, and New England Conservatory with Elliot Carter, Roger Sessions, Milton Babbitt, and Donald Martino. He has received grants or fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, Tanglewood, and the Conductor's Institute. The recipient of many prizes and commissions, he is represented on record by Opus One.
Harris writes:
My Shakespeare cycle started in late 1988 with a setting of “Hark, hark! The Lark” for my wife's a cappella group to sing at our wedding. Over the next few years I wrote ten more songs and grouped them into three Books. In this performance, the first piece is from Book I, then two songs from Book II. The following four songs are the premiere of Book III.
The texts are from lyrics to the songs in Shakespeare's plays. Some of my settings are pop-oriented. Although Shakespeare and pop music may at first seem an odd pairing, the songs in Shakespeare's plays were in popular, not classical style of the day, sung by actors, not trained singers. Shakespeare's lyrics are accordingly a lot simpler than his usual poetry and full of nonsense lines like “Hey nonny, nonny” (perhaps the Elizabethan equivalent of “doo-wop”).
IRVINE FINE
Irving Fine - teacher, conductor, respected and widely programmed composer of chamber, orchestral, and choral music - was educated at Harvard and later taught there and at Brandeis University. A contemporary of Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland, he died prematurely in 1962.
For The Choral New Yorker, written in 1944, fine chose poems that had been published in The New Yorker in the 1920s or 1930s. Hen Party is a delightful spoof in which a gossip session is likened to a coven of witches. The puritan cleric Cotton Mather, the archetypical gossip/scold Mrs. Grundy, the mythical Hecate, as well as the Pied Piper - all are invoked. Among Peggy Bacon's clever lines are those with inspired rhymes: “Old Hecate comes seldom. Each hag and Hell—beldam tells a scandal, bites a sandwich, lights a candle to the Grand Witch.” Jake Falstaff's poem to autumn, Design for October, has a different incantatory power: “Summer is gone! Summer is ended. It is done. It is gone. It is ended.” The sound of his rhymes is musical itself: “stir the fawn,” “black on the lawn,” “crying geese of the dawn.” Fine's piano writing is wonderfully effective - bristling and jazzy in Hen Party, poignant and lyrical in Design for October.
HENRY BRANT
Henry Brant, an American composer of Canadian birth, is known for inventive, experimental music, and spatial works. He has written for orchestral ensembles of all sizes and for films, and has taught at Columbia, Julliard, and Bennington College. Brant wrote both the words and music for The 3-Way Canon Blues. This combination of the ancient academic form, the canon (used in every cycle on this program), with the most purely American of forms - the blues - seems a fitting end to a concert of American music. The touches of barbershop harmony found in Charles Ives's Crossing the Bar return in Brant's canon, whose prescription for himself could apply to the whole program: “There's no room for 12-tone systems,” and “an 8-bar situation with the usual syncopation.” Above all, “polyphonic combinations” are not only the canon's but also choral music's “best sensations.”
Clara Longstreth
NEW AMSTERDAM SINGERS
New Amsterdam Singers, under Music Director Clara Longstreth, is a chorus of seventy skilled avocational singers whose concert performances in New York City and abroad have won critical acclaim. The group has long been known for the variety and interest of its repertoire, ranging from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. The chorus specializes in a cappella and double chorus repertoire, and regularly performs contemporary and commissioned works. Recent program themes from their regular subscription series include The Seasons of Life (musical settings of poetry on youth and age), Serious Folk (great composers inspired by traditional melody), and Landscapes and Reflections (a sense of place in song).
NAS has performed with the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein, at Alice Tully Hall as the guest of Clarion Converts, and with the American Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall. During 1992-93 NAS celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary season.
Clara Longstreth has been the Music Director of the New Amsterdam Singers since its formation in 1968. She studied conducting with G. Wallace Woodworth at Harvard University and trained for her master's degree form Juilliard under Richard Westenburg. Further study included work with Amy Kaiser and Semyon Bychkov at Mannes College of Music and extensive study with Helmuth Rilling at the Oregon Bach Festival.
In 1990 Ms. Longstreth conducted the New Amsterdam Singers in Washington, D.C., at the Easter Division convention of the American Choral Directors Association. She has also led the chorus on five international tours, performing at the Irakleion Festival in Greece; the Granada Festival in Spain; the International Choral Festival at Miedzyzdroie, Poland; the Festival of the Algarve sponsored by the Gulbenkian Foundation in Portugal; and the International Musical Eisteddfod at Llangollen, Wales, Ms. Longstreth is a frequent guest conductor in the New York City area.
NEW AMSTERDAM SINGERS
Sopranos
*Jennifer Beilin
Linda Bookheim
*Stela Maria Brandão
Darlene Chalberg
Carol Chin
Joanne Cossa
Dale Davidson
Ann Farbman
Janet Field
Madeline Gozzi
Pamela Haft
Robin Beckhard James
*Mary Kearney
Laura Klein
Julie Leff
Jane Mason
Vickie Miller
Carol O'Connor
*Judith Pott
*Kathy Schuman
*Janice Seymour
Annette Sheldon
*Mary Storandt
Jennifer Trahan
Mary Trigg
Barbara Zucker-Pinchoff
Altos
Maren Berthelson
Sarah Birnbaum
Martha Bonta
Suzanne Doob
Paula Franklin
*Nara Garber
Adrianne Hill
Frieda Holober
*Sally Hoskins
Jeanette Goya Johnson
Betty Kulleseid
Jennifer Melick
Ruth Nott
Adria Quiñones
Orlena Ruiz
Lee Ryder
*Marcia Siegel
*Ellen Stark
Lisa Tate
Elizabeth Thorne
Deanna von Gutfeld
Donna Zalichin
*Tatiana Zybin
Tenors
*Eric Brose
Ian Capps
John Duncan
Jonathon Gerson
Dennis Goodenough
André Guthman
Nicholas Harding
Chris Jones
*Marc Leve
Richard Levin
Paul Parsekian
*Benjamin Perez
Frayda Pitkowsky
*Scott Wilson
Basses
*Dennis Delaney
Michael DeLeon
*Timothy DeWerff
David Frederickson Charlie Gamble
Scott Gillam
Rick Hibberd
*Stephen Holtje
*Neil Jaffee
John Leuenhagen
*Uchin Kim
**Steven Osgood
Robert Palmer
Steven Widerman
Michael Zimmerman
Matthew Zuckerbraun
*Chamber Chorus
**rehearsal accompanist
POETRY IN 20 TH CENTURY AMERICAN MUSIC
Go, Lovely Rose (1942)
Halsey Stevens
Poetry by Edmund Waller
Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.
Tell her that's young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
That hadst thou sprung
In deserts, where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.
Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired;
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.
Then die! That she
The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!
Crossing the Bar (CA. 1891)
Charles Ives
Poetry by Alfred Lord Tennyson
Sunset and ev'ning star
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea.
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep,
Turns again home.
Twilight and ev'ning bell,
After that the dark!
May there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark.
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far.
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
Amen.
Reincarnations (1940)
Samuel Barber
Poetry by James Stephens
Mary Hynes
She is the sky of the sun!
She is the dart of love!
She is the love of my heart!
She is a rune,
She is above the women
Of the race of Eve,
As the sun is above the moon!
Lovely and airy
The view from the hill
That looks down on Ballylea!
But no good sight
Is good, until
By great good luck
You see
The Blossom of Branches
Walking towards you,
Airily.
Anthony O Daly
Since your limbs were laid out
The stars do not shine!
The fish leap not out
In the waves!
On our meadows the dew
Does not fall in the morn,
For O Daly is dead!
Not a flow'r can be born!
Not a word can be said!
Not a tree have a leaf!
For O Daly is dead!
After you
There is nothing to do!
After you
There is nothing but grief!
The Coolin
Come with me, under my coat
And we will drink our fill
Of the milk of the white goat,
Or wine if it be thy will.
And we will talk until
Talk is a trouble too,
Out on the side of the hill;
And nothing is left to do,
But an eye to look into an eye;
And a hand in a hand to slip;
And a sigh to answer a sigh;
And a lip to find out a lip!
What if the night be black!
And the air on the mountain chill!
Where the goat lies down in her track
and all but the fern is still!
Stay with me, under my coat!
And we will drink our fill
Of the milk of the white goat
Out on the side of the hill!
David Wept for Slain Absalom (1971)
Alan Hovhaness
Text: II Samuel 18:33
David wept for slain Absalom.
O my son, victory is turned into mourning.
O my son, David wept.
Absalom, O, Absalom my son,
would God I had died for thee.
O my son, Absalom my son.
Tarantella (1937)
Randall Thompson
Poetry by Hillaire Belloc
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the tedding and the spreading
Of the straw for a bedding,
And the fleas that tease
in the High Pyrenees,
And the wine that tasted of the tar?
And the cheers and the jeers
of the young muleteers
(Under the dark of the vine verandah)?
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
And the cheers and the jeers
of the young muleteers
Who hadn't got a penny,
And who weren't paying any,
nd the hammer at the doors
and the Din?
And the Hip! Hop! Hap!
Of the clap
Of the hands to the twirl and the swirl
Of the girl gone chancing,
Glancing,
Dancing,
Backing and advancing,
Snapping of the clapper to the spin
Out and in—
And the Ting, Tong, Tang of the guitar!
Do you remember an Inn, Miranda?
Do you remember an Inn?
Never more, Miranda,
Never more.
Only the high peaks hoar:
And Aragon a torrent at the door.
No sound
In the walls of the Halls where falls
The tread
Of the feet of the dead
to the ground.
No sound: Only the boom
Of the far Waterfall like Doom.
Earthsongs (1983)
Ronald Perera
Poetry by E.E. Cummings
O sweet spontaneous earth
O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the doting
fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked thee
has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy
beauty how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and
buffeting thee that thou mightest
conceive
gods
(but true
to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic lover
thou answerest
spring)
in Just-spring
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
when the world is puddle-
wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyand isbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope
and
it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan
whistles far and wee
as is the sea marvelous
as is the sea marvelous
from god's
hands which sent her forth
to sleep upon the world
and the earth withers
the moon crumbles
one by one
stars flutter into dust
but the sea
does not change
and she goes forth out of hands
and
she returns into hands
and is with sleep….
love,
the breaking
of your
soul
upon
my lips
All in green went my love riding
All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.
four lean hounds crouched low and
smiling
the merry deer ran before.
Fleeter be they than dappled dreams
the swift sweet deer
the red rare deer.
Four red roebuck at a white water
the cruel bugle sang before.
Horn at hip went my love riding
riding the echo down
into the silver dawn.
four lean hounds crouched
low and smiling
the level meadows ran before.
Softer be they than slippered sleep
the lean lithe deer
the fleet flown deer
Four fleet does at a gold valley
the famished arrow sang before.
Bow at belt went my love riding
riding the mountain down
into the silver dawn.
four lean hounds crouched low and
smiling
the sheer peaks ran before.
Paler be they than daunting death
the sleek slim deer
the tall tense deer.
Four tall stags at a green mountain
the lucky hunter sang before.
All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.
four lean hounds crouched
low and smiling
my heart fell dead before.
when god lets my body be
when god lets my body be
From each brave eye
shall sprout a tree
fruit that dangles therefrom
the purpled world will dance upon
Between my lips which did sing
a rose shall beget the spring
that maidens whom passion wastes
will lay between their little breasts
My strong fingers beneath the snow
Into strenuous birds shall go
my love walking in the grass
their wings will touch with her face
and all the while shall my heart be
With the bulge and
nuzzle of the sea
i thank You God
i thank You God for most this
amazing day;
for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
nd a blue true dream of sky; and
for everything
which is natural which is infinite
which is yes
(I who have died am alive
again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;
this is the birth
day of life and of love and
wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how shall tasting touching
hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake
and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
Shakespeare Songs (1988)
Matthew Harris
Poetry by William Shakespeare
Who Is Silvia?
Two Gentlemen of Verona
Who is Silvia? What is she,
That all our swains commend her?
Holy, fair and wise is she;
The heavens such grace did lend her,
That she might admired be.
Is she kind as she is fair?
For beauty lives with kindness:
Love doth to her eyes repair,
To help him of his blindness:
And, being helped, inhabits there.
Then to Silvia let us sing,
That Silvia is excelling;
She excels each mortal thing
Upon the dull earth dwelling.
To her let us garlands bring.
Take, O Take Those Lips Away
Measure for Measure
Take, O, take those lips away
That so sweetly were forsworn.
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn.
But my kisses bring again, bring again,
Seals of love, but sealed in vain,
sealed in vain.
Tell Me Where Is Fancy Bred?
The Merchant of Venice
Tell me where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart or in the head?
How begot, how nourished?
Reply, reply.
It is engendered in the eyes,
With gazing fed; and fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies.
Let us all ring fancy's knell:
I'll begin it—Ding, dong, bell.
[All] Ding, dong, bell.
It Was a Lover and His Lass
As You Like It
It was a lover and his lass,
With a hey and a ho, and a hey nonino,
That o'er the green corn field did pass
In spring time, the only pretty ring time,
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding:
Sweet lovers love the spring.
Between the acres of the rye,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
These pretty country folks would like
In spring time, &c.
This carol they began that hour,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
How that life was but a flower
In spring time, &c.
And therefore take the present time,
With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,
For love is crowned with the prime
In spring time, &c.
You Spotted Snakes
A Midsummer Night's Dream
You spotted snakes with double tongue,
Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen;
Newts and blindworms, do no wrong,
Come not near our Fairy Queen.
Philomel, with melody
Sing in our sweet lullaby;
Lulla, lulla, lullaby, lulla, lulla, lullaby:
Never harm,
Nor spell nor charm,
Come our lovely lady nigh;
So good night, with lullaby.
Weaving spiders, come not here;
Hence, you long-legg'd
Spinners, hence!
Beetles black, approach not near;
Worm nor snail, do no offence,.
Philomel, with melody, &c.
Sigh No More, Ladies
Much Ado About Nothing
Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny.
Sing no more ditties, sing no more
Of dumps so dull and heavy.
The fraud of men was ever so,
Since summer first was leavy.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny.
O Mistress Mine
Twelfth Night
O mistress mine, where are you roaming?
O, stay and hear, your true love's coming.
That can sing both high and low.
Trip no further, pretty sweeting,
Journeys end in lovers meeting,
Every wise man's son doth know.
What is love? `Tis not hereafter,
Present mirth hath present laughter,
What's to come is still unsure.
In delay there lies no plenty,
Then come and kiss me, sweet and twenty,
Youth's a stuff will not endure.
The Choral New Yorker (1944)
Irving Fine
Hen Party
Poetry by Peggy Bacon
The pack gathers
on the black Sunday
Mrs. Lathers
and Mrs. Grundy
give a party
for all the witches;
the food is hearty,
there are no hitches;
one stitches,
another chatters,
all blather
of small matters.
A-sudden enter
In aged ermine,
The Queen viper,
The Ace of vermin;
(the Pied Piper
overlooked her,
Cotton Mather
Should have cooked her);
a clacking racket,
a great stir,
in the center,
the dowager.
Old Hecate comes seldom,
each hag and hell-beldam
tells a scandal, bites a sandwich,
lights a candle
to the Grand Witch.
After the curses
and incantations,
fetch the hearses
for the reputations!
Design for October
Poetry by Jake Falstaff
Then I heard a voice saying:
Summer is gone!
Summer is ended.
It is done. It is gone. It is ended.
No more at morning
Will you stir the fawn
Or see the blackbirds
Black on the lawn
Or hear the crying Geese of the dawn.
Then in my window
Grave was I.
Gravely I watched
The summer die.
And the last of the crying
Geese go by.
The 3-way Canon Blues (1946)
Henry Brant
Poetry by Henry Brant
Here's an 8-bar situation
With the usual syncopation, and
Scored for voices, unaccomp'nied,
On the 3-way Canon Blues
In this canon tone relations
Are not abstract formulations;
There's no room for 12-tone systems
On the 3-way Canon Blues.
Polyphonic combinations
Are the canon's best sensations,
Mixed with barbershop progressions
On the 3-way Canon Blues.
A New Amsterdam Singers Twenty-Fifth Anniversary project. Produced by Clara Longstreth; Recorded in March 1993 by Malcolm Addey at the Church of Saint Jean Baptiste; Assoc. Engineer and Digital editing by William Tzouris; Design and cover photo by Rick Hibberd; Printed in USA. © 1993 New Amsterdam Singers, New York, NY, all rights reserved. Albany Records US, PO Box 5011, Albany, New York 12205, Tel. 518 453 2205. Albany Records UK, Box 12, Warton, Carnforth, Lancashire LA5 9PD, Tel 0524 736448
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