Welcome to the promised blog of the Christian Fellowship of Art Music Composers 25th Anniversary National Conference at Belhaven University & Mississippi College on October 17-19, 2019. While all of these blogs can now be read through www.cfamc.org, I invite you to take the trip with me here over the next several weeks. Let’s begin with a flashback…
On September 29-30, 1995, I found my way across the country from Portland, Oregon, to Buffalo, New York, where I would then rent a car and drive an hour and a half as Interstate 90 and other freeways quickly melted into frightfully busy two-lane roads through several quiet rural communities on the way to tiny Houghton, New York, and its renowned Houghton College. Yes, the town and the college were pretty much one entity, though one person told me that the college’s mailing address was actually in nearby, yet-smaller Caneadea. I was reminded of a college admissions book that quoted a local as saying “Houghton is not the end of the world, but you can see it from here.” And there, some 24 years ago, I attended the historic event that was the first national conference of the Christian Fellowship of Art Music Composers (CFAMC).
It was an intimate event as maybe 25 of us composers and wives gathered for a weekend of new music created by serious, classical music composers who dared to self-identify as Christian. I say “wives” as the program was filled with new music by male composers. I had neglected the call for scores, so I ended up attending just to experience this pioneering group that dared combine serious art music with the calling to be followers of Jesus Christ. Quite honestly, I was fearful. What if this new group of composers ended up being creators of wretched scores retrenched in old clichés from the 18th or 19th centuries? But, as things turned out, our founder and visionary leader at that time, Mark Hijleh, himself had more profound ideas and visions for that motley crew that assembled in 1995, as did many of our new colleagues who were composing music truly worthy of the concert stage, with deeper inspirations than merely glorifying itself or its human composer.
When I returned to the airport and turned in my rental car, I was a changed person filled with hope as a composer and for CFAMC as an organization worth my membership. Twenty-five years later, I am still friends with several who did the hard work of planning that conference and came together that late September among the gorgeous fall colors of southwestern New York state.
Even as the call for the 2020 conference arrives from Biola University in this new decade, this is a good time to reflect on the celebration of our 25th anniversary and the splendid conference hosted so well by Belhaven University and Mississippi College in the Jackson, Mississippi, area. The conference took place from the evening of Thursday, October 17 through the late afternoon of Saturday, October 19. It was a well-paced conference that kept us busy with encountering new music as composers, performers, and audience in an opening convocation, five concerts, four paper presentations, two dedicated times to prayer, and a peer feedback session. Yet it was not so frantically busy that we did not have adequate time for fellowship with one another or simple self-reflection. Actually, there were two memorable times of fellowship beautifully provided by our hosts. One was a group lunch on Saturday to celebrate the 25th anniversary specifically and the other was a splendid reception later that day after the final concert. This left most of us with ample time to make our way back home with the sweet memories of the gathering.
I was privileged to open the conference on Thursday evening with my complete performance of From Alpha to Omega, my own collection of 24 preludes and fugues for piano modeled after each book of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier, both of which I have performed in their entireties from memory. I presented these as an offering of worship to the One Who called Himself “the Alpha and Omega” in Revelation 22:13, but there are also some significant family and national elements that inform the creation of this work. Many of the preludes and fugues are dedicated to my wife and two daughters, and many vernacular elements of American music are celebrated in some of the movements: blues, jazz, rock, and movie music, for instance, much the way Aaron Copland celebrated these genres in Four Piano Blues and Samuel Barber in his Excursions.
On Friday at 8:00 am we gathered for our first prayer session that moved smoothly into the opening convocation at 9:00. President David Davies highlighted our Mission Statement, now on our website:
CFAMC seeks to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ and help build His kingdom by encouraging the work and witness of Christian composers of symphonic and chamber music, opera, and other concert works. We pray that believers will embrace our musical integrity because of our Christian witness, and that our commitment to musical excellence will allow us to bring our Christian witness to the wider art music world.
Davies then reminded us that we are principally a fellowship of composers, or, as member Bill Vollinger has tagged us, C-FAM-C, a family of Christ-centered composers who encourage one another in our callings to create art music, as opposed to a professional society or secular composers’ forum. He went on to describe our tasks and callings as quite different from a church musician, which is a robust point about CFAMC often misunderstood. (It reminded me of a master class I participated in at Duke University 45 years ago where Leslie Bassett wondered out loud why my Jesus of Nazareth the King of the Jews, a highly dissonant, serialistic triptych for viola and piano commemorating the Lord’s crucifixion, burial, and resurrection, wasn’t simply a Sonata da Chiesa.) No, the daunting task before us is to bring our testimony about the Lord to art music circles in the public square or, as Davies put it, to show the world what it is (the mirror) and what it could be. That mirror can be quite ugly and aggressive, but prepares the world for the beauty of salvation and right relationship in the Lord.
To quote again from the website: “Located throughout the United States and abroad, CFAMC members are professional and academic composers (faculty and students), avocational composers, church musicians interested in art music, and other individuals who support the CFAMC mission and want to be involved in our activities.” I have long been fascinated and delighted to be in the fellowship of composers with very different positions than my university appointment (from which I retire in May) and with varying systems of patronage and support which reflects the historical dynamism of patronage of composers, even as the university, once the bulwark of patronage and support for composers, wanes in that role. CFAMC may well speak into a new system of support for composers as we journey through the 21st century.
At 10:15 am, two papers were presented as we continued our meetings at Mississippi College: Hodie, by David Davies, and Mandatory Mentorship in Music, by Ian Evans Guthrie.
The first presentation was a marvelous chronological narrative on the creation of Davies’ work Hodie on a commission he received from Texas A&M University-Commerce where he serves on the music department faculty. This followed neatly on the heels of our convocation as Davies unpacked the details of composing a work uniting chorus with wind ensemble for a “holiday” concert in a public university within the Bible Belt. While some reference to the birth of Jesus was permitted and expected, this could not be a Christmas anthem, highlighting Davies’ need to bring art music to the public square, not merely being a church musician (even though he and his wife do serve as church musicians in Plano, Texas)! Davies met this commission challenge by wisely selecting an ancient Latin text (less offensive) that conveys a simple pan-Christian declaration of the birth in only six lines – all within the public domain!
Davies faced another daunting challenge in uniting choir to band. To address balance issues, the full ensemble accompanies the choir only at key climactic points, and the few instruments that do accompany the choir more routinely often double a voice part in a different octave. The short text also helps here, for the choir’s repetitions of the words help the text emerge from the thick textures.
The Latin text also seems to inspire ancient sounding music. Rather than remain with major and minor tonalities, Davies favors the older church modes, notably Lydian (major scale with a raised 4th step) and Mixolydian (major scale with lowered 7th step). Davies also achieves some welcome harmonic color effects by frequent borrowing from minor keys into their parallel major-like modes. A favorite chord is bVI (in Eb that would be a Cb major chord that really belongs to the parallel Eb minor key).
Davies also spoke of his “shameless pandering”: indulging in harmonies like those of Morten Lauridsen and Eric Whitacre in the calmer middle section of this ABA-form work and Baroque-like melismas and Handel-like homophony in the more extroverted opening and closing sections. Responding to the short rehearsal time, Davies shrewdly chose repetition and doubling of the choir to make the anthem easy to learn and perform confidently, and chose a main tonality of Eb major so the band would have easy key signatures in their parts.
Despite all his precautions, he ran into several little difficulties, all of which he solved with “the art of compromise.” This paper is an excellent compendium on the art of fulfilling commissions and gave us a few moments of good humor as we walked through the many challenges he so ably met in this work. This marvelous piece can be heard at https://www.davidhoracedavies.com/performance-footage. Scroll down to the Hodie YouTube and enjoy!
The second paper, Mandatory Mentorship in Music, by Ian Evans Guthrie, comments extensively on a buzzword topic, mentoring, that is curiously rare amongst composers, even within the CFAMC. This is a most welcome paper. In my university teaching career spanning forty years, I have heard that word used more and more, but it remains ill-defined, as Guthrie correctly observes. It is also hard to create trust between mentors and mentees, even when that relationship has been previously defined, such as in a student-advisor relationship in the university setting.
Guthrie gives two excellent reasons to promote mentoring, especially across generational lines: 1) increasing persecution of Christians, and, 2) increases in isolating activities, particularly with social media and the Internet. He also discusses many roadblocks to effective mentoring:
- Difficulty in establishing trust, especially with assigned mentors
- Mentors might be readily available, but not immediately approached by mentees (a problem I have experienced increasingly as a university advisor)
- Generational disconnects
- Mentors might be approachable, but not always reliable
- Mentor-teachers might be “too old” or can’t share their faith in Christ but only Western culture
- Not enough time is invested in the mentor/mentee relationship
Guthrie encourages, nay, commands mentors to share Jesus Christ with mentees and to be guided by the Lord to the mentees he or she should mentor. Further, mentors need to be humble, not condescending, and mentees should look up or around, but not downward for mentors. Mentees should respect older mentors and write thank-you notes! And he concludes with two excellent bits of advice: 1) Christians must invest more in students, and, 1) prospective mentors and mentees should consider their current communities rather than their ideal ones. Ask, “What can I do here?”
One excellent example of mentoring Guthrie included is Cesar Franck, who deferred to student preferences and thereby became a pillar of early modern French aesthetics, as contrasted to Gabriel Fauré, the stern president of the Paris Conservatoire who discouraged Claude Debussy and other young composers from finding their own voice and became himself a fading voice for the past. I would further cite Franz Josef Haydn, who encouraged the young Mozart and played in a string quartet with him, and who gave the headstrong Beethoven a few lessons and advice. This is a fine paper with a palpable challenge for all of us!
Peer Feedback Session
At 1:30 in the afternoon on Saturday, October 18, 2019, we continued the fine CFAMC tradition of Peer Feedback Sessions. One of the challenges of any national conference is the small number of composers that can be presented live through the concerts, so this enables our members another avenue to share their music with other CFAMC members and conference attenders. We had three superb works to enjoy and discuss this afternoon which spanned the spectrum of concert music in instrumentation and in style.
Allen Brings set the bar high with the New York Virtuoso Chorus performance, directed by Harold Rosenbaum, of his In Paradisum, a concluding reading from the Roman Catholic Mass for the Dead. Many of us would be familiar with the stunning setting of this text as the concluding part of Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem, but Brings brings a welcome, more antiquated interpretation of this lovely poem of eternal hope. Like Thomas Tallis in his Third Mode Melody (on which Ralph Vaughan Williams based his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis) and Igor Stravinsky, in his Symphony of Psalms, he invokes the E Phrygian mode (all white notes), interchanging it with E major sonorities, but then deftly leading it to G# Phrygian and ending on a half cadence on a C# major triad. With these relatively simple elements, Brings transforms the path of a soul dead to this world into the radiance of that same being, now in the glorious presence of his Creator and Father. What could be more diametrically opposed than death and eternal life? What could be more diametrically opposed than a grim E minor tonality and the brightness of C# major? To experience it yourself in a fine Naxos recording, visit https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW05C59CvO0.
Brings also challenged us all with the many encounters he has had throughout his life hearing music in brand-new ways, from being transfixed by hearing monastery singers as a fifth grader, and Gregorian chant in a French cathedral, to Gustavo Dudemel’s interpretations of the music of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. And now we hear Brings in a new way – the music of one of America’s most extensively educated composers who is able to make every historical period and style his very own through his intimate knowledge and love of all music he truly hears with ever-new ears! May that be a goal in this new decade for all of us.
No CFAMC conference would be complete without a work – or an education – by our dear Bill Vollinger. Actually, it is sometimes difficult to tell whether it’s a composition or teaching lesson, and, in the case of It Takes a Long Time to Grow Up in New Jersey, it is obviously both, delivered with humor as only Vollinger can pull it off. For narrator and full concert band, the work sets up the narrator for a disastrous drowning out by the band – unless the narrator is Vollinger himself or some other “bad boy” of New Jersey just as irritated by the jokes hurled at his state, and yet, just as much in love with his state as anyone. The musical language helps pull off this stunt well: it’s in straightforward Bb major, but, in accordance with the Second Viennese School of free atonality (Arnold Schönberg and his students), the highly dissonant pitch-class set 012 appears in all its transpositions, such as G-G#-A. I shall not spoil the marvelous story-telling of Vollinger, but counsel you to listen to the work live at the winter concerts of the Colts Neck Community Band on January 30 and February 2, 2020, with Vollinger as the narrator. For more information, visit the CNCB at https://coltsneckband.org/events.
A young, yet remarkably accomplished composer, Ian Evans Guthrie delighted us with his introductory remarks and his Costa Rica-inspired work Thunderbirds. Turns out that, included among his many composer residencies was an inspiring visit to the Mauser EcoHouse, on the central Pacific Coast in Costa Rica. His hosts fully expected him to record sounds from the local environment and incorporate them into his new work, although he had other plans. He gamely used his phone to record sounds of the local birds as well as a barking dog, crowd noises, and the surf. He also synthesized other elements sounding like rototoms, insects, and explosions. The work takes you deep into a forest seething with all kinds of life and then it evaporates into space.
A purely electronic piece like this, so cleanly produced with every sound pinpointed in its sonic space, reminds us of how far electronic media have come in the last 40 years, when I recorded my sounds very carefully on ½-inch tape on 10-inch reels and physically cut the tape to make splices. Even an average cellphone can get better recordings than the equipment I used that cost tens of thousands of 1980 dollars.
As you can see, we experienced three very different worlds of music creation in about an hour, making me so grateful for our Peer Review Sessions!