Ronald Perera: The Outermost House

TR314

Ronald Perera

The Outermost House

The Canticle of the Sun

The Chatham Chorale; Margaret Bossi, conductor; Nancy Armstrong, soprano; Robert J. Lurtsema, narrator

The Outermost House ~ (1991)(40:31)

  1. 1. East of America (1:56)

  2. 2. My Western Windows (4:44)

  3. 3. A New Sound on the Beach (1:35)

  4. 4. The Sea Has Many Voices (5:48)

  5. 5. Now Come the Sea Fowl (1:45)

  6. 6. Glorious White Birds (2:50)

  7. 7. A Year Indoors (1:37)

  8. 8. That Multiplicity of Insect Tracks (2:23)

  9. 9. The Wreck of the Montclair (7:50)

  10. 10. Night on the Great Beach (1:47)

  11. 11. It Was Still Night (2:56)

  12. 12. My Year Upon the Beach (1:04)

  13. 13. Hold Out Your Hands Over the Earth (4:11)

The Canticle Of The Sun ~ (1984)(21:01)

  1. 1. Processional: “Franciscus vir catholicus” (2:11)

  2. 2. Reading: “St. Francis said…” (0:46)

  3. 3. Chorus: “Altissimu onnipotente bon signore” (1:52)

  4. 4. Reading: “St Francis called these verses…” (1:14)

  5. 5. Chorus: “Laudatu sie, mi signore” (4:31)

  6. 6. Reading: “Now after St. Francis had composed these verses…” (1:07)

  7. 7. Chorus: “Laudato si', mi signore, per quelli che perdonano” (2:23)

  8. 8. Reading: “Now it was toward the end of his life…” (1:02)

  9. 9. Chorus: “Laudato si', mi signore, persora nostra morte corporale” (1:51)

  10. 10. Reading: “In every work of the artist…” (0:43)

  11. 11. Chorus: “Laudate et benedicite mi signore” (1:19)

  12. 12. Recessional: “Franciscus vir catholicus” (1:55)

Total Playing Time: 61:34

The Outermost House

“Nature is part of our humanity, and without some awareness and experience of that divine mystery man ceases to be man. When the Pleiades and the wind in the grass are no longer a part of the human spirit, a part of very flesh and bone, man becomes, as it were, a kind of cosmic outlaw, having neither the completeness and integrity of the animal nor the brirthright of a true humanity.”

Henry Beston, from the forward to the eleventh

Printing of The Outermost House

Composers Notes:

In 1990 I received a commission from the Chatham Chorale of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, to composed piece for its 1991-92 season in honor of its founding director, Marjorie Bennett Morley. I have a special fondness for Cape Cod, having spent summers there since childhood, and I wanted to create a work which would speak to the sense of place which I knew would be shared by the singers of the Chorale. The Chorale's commissioning committee included the writer and naturalist Robert Finch, who had written a forward to a new edition of Henry Beston's nature classic The Outermost House. The committee urged me to consider taking this as my text. As I read the book I found myself marking passages that suggested music to me.

A dilemma immediately arose. My commission was for a work of modest length. Beston's book concerns a year-long cycle of nature as experienced from Eastham beach. To capture its full sweep would require a prodigious amount of music. It struck me that by using a narrator to set the stage for each musical episode I could convey the large-scale structure of the book in the author's own prose. The narrations would be followed by movements for chorus or soprano soloist, or combinations of both, so that the pieces of the work functioned somewhat in the manner of recitative, aria and ensemble in an opera. Having narrator, soloist, and chorus at my disposal also held me to highlight some of the different “voices” which Beston adopts in his narrative: local story-teller, philosopher, naturalist, historian. Although this scheme enlarged the original fifteen-minute commission to a cantata of about forty minutes, it afforded me the opportunity to treat Beston's extraordinary text in a way that I felt did it justice.

The commission had specified that in addition to a solo singer I might use an accompanying ensemble of up to ten instrumentalists. I chose an orchestration which would convey a sense of instrumental “choirs”: a pair of oboes and a flute for the woodwind choir, a pair of horns for the brass choir, a pair of cellos and a double bass for the string choir. The absence of higher range instruments in each family gives the orchestra a darker than usual sound. I included a piano, which combines effectively with all of the instrumental sub-groupings, and relied on a large percussion battery to provide many coloristic effects. The Outermost House was first performed at Mattacheese Middle School, West Yarmouth, Massachusetts, on November 16, 1991.

The thirteen musical sections are linked by the use of a four-note motto which can be represented as C, the B below, the D above, the A below. This alternately falling and rising, continuously widening motive is manipulated throughout the piece using a variety of musical techniques, eventually growing to phrase length in the hymn-like final movement “Hold Out Your Hands Over the Earth.” Broadly speaking, the harmonic language here is tonal, or at least triadically based, though there are many expanded or altered chords, polytonal combinations, and chromatic passages. But one does not need to be a trained musician to follow the unfolding musical structure. It is my hope that my music will enable Beston's words - words which surely speak for themselves - to be appreciated in a new way.

  • Ronald Perera

The Canticle Of The Sun

Composer's Notes:

The second piece on this disc is also a meditation on nature and on the cycle of life, but from the 800-year-old religious perspective of a merchant's son and soldier turned friar from a hill town in northern Italy. Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) wrote his Canticle of Brother Sun in praise of God for all creation. He emphasized the essential unity of the world by making no distinction between its inanimate elements such as sun, wind, water, and fire and its living inhabitants. All are respectfully addresses as “brother” or “sister.” All reflect the divine in the same way that a painting reflects the hand of the artist who painted it. It is his expression of the interconnectedness of every part of creation that makes Francis seem so modern to us. We might justifiably regard him as a spiritual forefather of the environmental movement.

The canticle is cited by scholars as the first known example of Italian poetry. Francis wrote it in his native Umbrian dialect at a time when the language was still evolving from Latin into the vernacular. After considering several English translations, I concluded that the text had to be sung in its original language. I decided to cast the piece in the form of a dramatic dialogue between a narrator and a chorus. The narrator would recite portions of the canticle in English interspersed with episodes from the life of the saint, and the chorus would sing the corresponding sections fo the canticle text in Italian. I got the idea for the division of the canticle into several different sections, or movements, when I read that Francis may have composed the poem in separate stages, adding new verses in response to particular events in his life. The entire piece is framed by a plainchant antiphon composed by Julian of Speyer for the Fest of Saint Francis a decade after his death, and sung as a processional and recessional by a men's semi-chorus. As in The Outermost House, a single melodic motive - derived, in this instance, from the opening notes of the chant melody - unites all the movements of the work.

The Canticle of the Sun (as Francis' poem is usually titled today) was commissioned for the one hundredth anniversary in 1984 of Groton School, a venerable independent secondary school in Massachusetts with a religious affiliation symbolized by a splendid gothic chapel, in which he piece was premiered on April 21, 1985. I chose to use an accompaniment of digitally synthesized instruments played over loudspeakers. The original tape part is realized on a Yamaha DX-7 synthesizer in the Smith College Electronic Music Studio. The current version for CD uses both synthesizers and samplers.

Ronald Perera

Ronald Perera, born in Boston on Christmas day, 1941, is Elise Irwin Sweeney Professor at Smith College. His compositions include operas, song cycles, chamber, choral, and orchestral music, and several works that combine instruments or voices with electronic sounds. Mr. Perera has employed texts from a wide variety of authors: Sappho, Shakespeare, William Bradford, Herman Melville, and a number of American poets. He has received awards and fellowships from Harvard University, the Paderewski Fund, the Goethe Institute, the Artists Foundation of Massachusetts, the National Association of Teachers of Singing, the National Endowment for the Arts, and ASCAP. His teachers include Leon Kirchner, Randall Thompson, Gottifried Michael Koening, and Mario Davidosvsky. His music is published by E.C. Schirmer, Boosey and Hawkes, and Music Associates of New York, and is recorded on the Albany, CRI, SCI and Opus One labels.

Nancy Armstrong's luminous performances extend across the musical spectrum from early Renaissance to American musical theatre. Highlighting her career are her portrayals of many Handelian opera and oratorio heroines, numerous Messiah performance, and a historic presentation of the St. Matthew Passion at the National Cathedral commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King's death. From 1977 to 1985 Miss Armstrong toured internationally as soprano soloist with the Boston Camerata. She was acclaimed for her singing in Purcell's King Arthur at the Ojai Music Festival, has toured the Czech Republic with the Boston Museum Trio, and has assumed several principal roles at the Boston Early Music Festival. She gave world premiere performances of Libby Larson's Now I Became Myself, Benjamin Sears' Mass, and Ronald Perera's The Outermost House, all major choral works.

Miss Armstrong has recorded on the Erato, Harmonia Mundi, Nonesuch, Vetadon, Arabesque, and Denon labels. She is Lecturer of Singing Studies for the Brandeis University Theatre Arts Graduate Program and maintains a large private voice studio at her home in Charlestown, Massachusetts.

Robert J. Lurtsema's deep and resonant voice has been familiar for the past twenty-seven years to listeners of WGBH Boston's Morning Pro Musica, an innovative mixture of music, news, weather, live performers, and conversations with special guests. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Robert J. graduated from Boston University. His varied career includes acting and directing as well as serving as radio producer, director, and host. Very much in demand as an actor/narrator for musical compositions, he has performed with the Boston Symphony, the Boston Pops, the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, and many others. He has recorded hundreds of voice-overs for PBS, corporate films, and award-winning documentaries, dramas, and commercials. A man of many talents, Mr. Lurtsema has been acclaimed as a poet, author, composer, painter, and photographer. He has been an ambassador abroad for American media and has served on many boards of musical and charitable organizations. He was a founder and original participant in the Foxhollow Folk Festival, the International Artist Series, the Boston Early Music Festival, and numerous other thriving musical institutions.

The Chatham Chorale, founded in 1970 by Majorie Bennett Morley and Dr. E. Robert Harned, draws its more than one hundred auditioned singers from almost every Cape Cod town. For its first seventeen years its membership, repertoire, and reputation grew under the inspired and dedicated leadership of Ms. Morley In 1987 Margaret T. Bossi became Music Director. Her musical vision, unflagging energy, and infectious humor have created a remarkable synergy between director and performers. Noted for its diverse musical programming, the Chorale has sung many great choral works and collaborated in performances with Paul Winter Consort, the Cape Repertory Theatre, Theresa Thomasson's gospel singers, and local students pursuing a musical education. Each October the Chorale travels to New York to sing at the annual Feast of St. Francis at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. The Chamber Singers are a select group of Thirty-two voices under the direction of Ms. Bossi. They perform three formal concerts a year in addition to numerous community service appearances around the Cape.

Margaret T. Bossi has been Musical Director of the Chatham Chorale since 1987. Educated at Smith College and Brandeis University, she studied choral conducting with the legendary Iva Dee Hiatt. Under her direction the Chatham Chorale and its associated Chamber Singers have explored the choral repertory in depth, presenting music from a wide stylistic spectrum. Recent concerts have ranged from Robert Levin's new completion of Mozart's Requiem through Elgar's The Music Makers and Vaughan Williams' Sea Symphony to more intimate works by Schubert, Gershwin, and other twentieth-century composers. After more than a decade away from teaching at the high school and college level, Ms. Bossi will resume teaching at a charter school on Cape Cod in the fall of 1998 with her central goal being to develop a regional children's chorus of concert quality. A church organist as well as a conductor, Ms. Bossi lives on Cape Cod with her husband and two sons.

Recorded in Sweeney Concert Hall, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts on June20 and 21, 1998 by Jeff Harrison. James Legrand and Nate Patnode, Engineering Assistants.

The Outermost House, copyright 1991 by Ronald Perera, is published by Music Associates of New York, ASCAP. The Canticle of the Sun copyright 1989 by E.C. Schirmer Music Company ASCAP.

© 1998 by Albany Records