Choir, Piano
Accompaniment (SATB
Choir)
SKU:
HL.277282
SATB and
Piano Vocal Score.
Composed by Nico Muhly.
Music Sales America.
Classical. Softcover. 60
pages. St. Rose Music
#SRO10015201. Published
by St. Rose Music
(HL.277282).
UPC:
840126915006. 6.75x10.5
inches.
Program
note:
Looking Up
is a piece for large
chorus and orchestra, and
is in three sections,
played without pause. In
the 16th century, a
variety of psalters in
meter were printed in
England, with the idea of
making psalm-singing
something that could
happen easily at home,
with the rhyming meter
being an aid to
memorization. These
translations are
wonderful exercises in
brevity and sometimes
clumsy rhymemaking, and
were usually prefaced by
a lengthy explanation as
to their merits; the
title of one of the first
such volumes in English
is: The Psalter of Dauid
newely translated into
Englysh metre in such
sort that it maye the
more decently, and wyth
more delyte of the mynde,
be reade and songe of al
men. I thought it would
be appropriate to set one
of these introductions,
and the first section of
Looking Up sets the
preface to Thomas
Ravenscroft's psalter
(1621), in which he
writes: “The
singing of Psalmes (assay
the Doctors) comforteth
the sorrowfull, pacifieth
the angry, strengtheneth
the weake, humbleth the
proud, gladdeth the
humble, stirres up the
slow, reconcileth
enemies, lifteth up the
heart to heavenly things,
and uniteth the Creature
to his
Creator.”
It
begins meditatively, but
eventually grows agitated
and fervent, with a
vision of the
“quire of Angels
and Saints”
“redoubling
anddescanting” - an
ecstatic and terrifying
vision of the skies
opening up. Ravenscroft
then encourages the use
of instrumental musicfor
worship, at which point,
a long, acrobatic
orchestral interlude with
jagged edges antagonizes
the choir, who sing a
kind of private, anxious
meditation on two
pitches.
One of
the most delicious
biblical texts is an
Apocryphal prayer known
as the Benedicite or the
Prayer of the Three
Children (the same who
were rescued by an angel
after King Nebuchadnezzar
tried to have them burnt
in an oven for not bowing
to his image). The text
is repetitive, obsessive,
and a gift to composers -
each line is an
invocation of an element
of the natural world,
followed by the phrase,
“blesse ye the
Lord, praise him &
magnify him for
ever.” In Looking
Up, the setting begins
with three solo voices,
and then grows to include
the whole choir,
itemizing the whole of
creation. The idea that
these boys are spared
from the furnace and then
five minutes later are
saying, “O ye the
fire and warming heate,
blesse ye the
Lord...” has always
felt very loaded to me,
and the orchestra plays
with this conflict
between joyful praise and
a more terrible (in the
16th-century sense)
awefor the
divine.
The text
for the third, and
shortest, section is
taken from Christopher
Smart's (1722-1771) A
Song to David,
purportedly written
during his confinement in
a mental asylum. This ode
to King David points out
how David, as the author
of some of the Psalms,
observes the whole world
from the
“clustering
spheres” to the
“nosegay in the
vale.&rdquo.