About the Program

The Peace of Wild Things

December 6, 8 & 15, 2024

In fraught times, music can provide refuge. What is it about music that gives it such power over us? The Ancient Greeks were the first western society to write extensively about music and its role. They viewed music and astronomy as linked concepts. Whereas astronomy studied “observable, permanent, external objects,” music explored the “invisible, internal, hidden objects” of our inner being. Karl Paulnack, pianist and former director of the music division at Boston Conservatory, said in his “Why Music Matters” welcome address to freshman parents at Boston Conservatory: “Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us.”

Cantemus offers our program, The Peace Of Wild Things,” as an opportunity to reflect, to re-center, to consider our place in the universe, and to give particular deference to the wonderful, non-human inhabitants of our planet – the animals. All of the music on our program is inspired by the animal kingdom. Some pieces reflect on the grace and beauty of the natural world, while others involve animals being personified or used as poetic symbols. Some of the musical material is borne out of actual animal sounds. Humanity’s endless fascination with and undeniable connection to the realm of animals will be explored in an expansive program of choral music from the 15th to the 21st centuries.

Our concert prelude, “Sheep May Safely Graze,” is an instrumental arrangement of a soprano aria from a Bach cantata. The pastoral quality of the music underscores the text’s message: “Sheep may safely graze where a good shepherd watches over them.” The allusion to people as sheep is a Biblical trope that seems to have held particular fascination for Baroque composers (think of Händel’s “All We Like Sheep Have Gone Astray” from Messiah). The bookend to this concert opener is two movements from Mendelssohn’s Psalm 42, which begins by comparing the longing of humankind for God’s presence to a thirsty deer longing for water. The psalm text (presumably by King David) and the libretto for Bach’s Hunting Cantata (written by Salomon Franck) are separated by about 2,000 years, but the impulse of the poets to employ animal imagery to reveal something about human qualities is the same.

Of all the pieces on the program, “The Mi’kmaq Song” is particularly mesmerizing. Here the audience is literally enveloped by a soundscape that includes a gently undulating tone cluster, a ceremonial drum and chant, and even the human-made sounds of wind, birds and wolves. The piece’s composer, Canadian Lydia Adams, is one of five women composers whose works are featured on our program. Jennifer Higdon is one of America’s most acclaimed and performed living composers. Her masterful setting of “O Magnum Mysterium” reflects the wonder and mystery of the Nativity with unusual harmonic language and timbres, combining voices, tuned glasses, flutes and orchestral chimes. The effect is quite other-worldly.

“The Deer Song” is excerpted from Craig Hella Johnson’s moving work Considering Matthew Shepard, about a 21-year-old American university student who was beaten, tortured, and left to die near Laramie, Wyoming, on October 6, 1998. The brutal manner of Shepard’s death and the homophobic motives expressed by his murderers made the incident one of the most infamous hate-crimes of our time, bringing conversations around LGBTQ+ identities and intolerance to national attention. When police arrived on the scene of Matthew’s attack, they found him tied to a wooden fence. Inexplicably, a deer was found calmly resting next to Matthew’s dying body. Composer Craig Hella Johnson imagines an unspoken dialogue between the dying man and his deer protector.

The tenor and bass sections are featured next in a rapturous arrangement of the English folk song “The Turtle Dove” by Ralph Vaughan Williams and a lively African-American spiritual about Noah’s Ark, as performed for decades by the Yale Whiffenpoofs.

Our penultimate set explores humorous music inspired by animals, including Josquin’s famous “El Grillo” and Banchiere’s tongue-in-cheek “Capricciata and Contrappunto.” See if you can hear the sounds of Josquin’s amorous cricket as he plays a tune to attract a mate. And there is something truly delightful in hearing the onomatopoeic sounds produced by Banchiere’s musical menagerie –particularly when sung in Italian!

Before the rousing Mendelssohn finale, we turn to Joan Szymko’s stunning setting of contemporary American poet Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things.” We are reminded that in troubled times, we may seek out nature and enjoy “the peace of wild things, who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.” We may consider the beauty and simplicity of our animal brethren and rest easier in the knowledge of our place in the universe.

May our concert provide the calming presence of still water – a pool into which we can gaze and figure out the position of the “invisible, internal, hidden objects” of our hearts.

—Jason Iannuzzi, Artistic Director