10 recordings OR is this overkill?

So for the past few weeks I've been working on a new piece for The Singers. Between the other composers-in-residence and I, it was my "turn" to write a piece for the December concert series and, in terms of choral music in the Midwest, this usually means it will be a Christmas-themed affair. I've been making the joke for a while now that it's my least favorite time of the year to get commissioned to write something because, inevitably, it's expected that you write something that's either about the Nativity or, if you want to get around writing something "sacred", you can choose poetry on the subject of snow.

I've gone the precipitation route before on two pieces ("winter" and "Snow by Morning") and wrote another non-Jesus piece to a text by Charles Dickens (from, you guessed it, A Christmas Carol). These seemed to work out okay...but you can only ignore the problem that audiences expect to hear a Christian-themed work at these concerts for so long. I'm not a particularly religious person and, for some reason, it always feels a little disrespectful when I try to portray someone else's sense of spirituality through my music and I've shunned writing these things because of this.

The other way I've found to "get around" my problem with using explicitly religious texts is to take a pre-existing tune and fiddle with it a bit. In the choral world these things are often called "arrangements" although, to toot my own horn a bit, mine are quite a bit more involved to be grouped in there with all those Hal Leonard pieces that just take Top 40 things and write extra voice parts for them. These are what we usually consider to be "arrangements." I tend to take more of the route that Stravinsky did with all that Pergolesi stuff in Pulcinella.

On a side note, I got into a discussion about this with Drew Collins a few years ago and he holds the contention that something with that level of difficulty should be called a "fantasia" because it's so much more than just some simple arrangement. I remember him being pretty damn adamant about this but, frankly, that could have been the good beer we always seem to drink whenever we talk about choral nerdery.

But, to be honest, I'm of the mind that he has a legit point. Take Vaughn Williams's's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, for instance. That glorious monstrosity is most definitely not an arrangement, right?

That brings me back to my "arrangementasias" on pre-existing tunes. I wrote one a year for the first two seasons I was Composer-In-Residence with The Singers; "Go, Tell It on the Mountain" and "Gabriel's Message," respectively.

This year I went in a similar route but, in the spirit of challenging myself with something beyond verses and refrains, I decided to do a "deconstruction" of the "Rejoice, greatly!" aria from Handel's Messiah. That piece has a deep connection with the Christmas season and the fact that there is way more musical material than text will stretch my ability to interpret it.

I've got a bit of a connection with this piece (like many, many people do) as the place I went to get my undergraduate degree, Luther College, was mildly famous for putting on a massive production of said oratorio every year (there was also a dust-up about naked soccer as well as Dave Matthews recording a live album there). The Symphony Orchestra accompanied the proceedings, there were cutthroat auditions for the solos amongst the vocal performance majors, any student could sing in the massed choir regardless of experience and alumni were invited back to perform along side them. It ended up resulting in a choir of about 1,000 howling away in the bleachers of the Field House (the only venue on campus that could hold that many musicians and audience members) in a huge spectacle helmed by Weston Noble that really had to be experienced to be believed.

In 2001 I sang in the final choir that was this big and, a year later, was the bass section leader for the much smaller 100-member, auditioned choir that put on the oratorio with the much smaller Chamber Orchestra. I sang that piece for four straight years just for the hell of it (c'mon...it's a blast!) so when I went looking for material to work with for this new piece it was kind of natural for me to stop at Messiah and investigate the possibilities.

I recently blew a bunch of money on iTunes so I could hear some different performances of it and I've currently got 10 versions and 44 straight minutes of this one aria. And let me tell you, Dear Reader (hi, Dad!), they span the effin' gamut of variation.

• The shortest (4'04") is by the Scholars Baroque Ensemble and the longest (5'26") is with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Both of these versions, coincidentally, are the ones where no soloist is listed for some reason.
  
  
• The majority are in the notated key of B-flat major but, predictably, the ones by conductors that are all up in some period performance practice (Christopher Hogwood and John Eliot Gardiner, for example) are in what we would consider A major instead.
  
  
• Then--and here's where I need some help from my musicologist friends--there are some wildly different variations with regards to simple and compound time. The only version I've ever laid eyes on is in simple time where the runs are made up of 16th notes but there are more than a few in my new cache that are in compound triplets for the duration. I'm aware that Handel made a kajillion different versions (read: arrangements!) of Messiah as a whole but it's amazing to me to think that he would've changed the music in such a seemingly profound way.

Anyways...as I've said before my version will be sort of a "deconstruction" of the aria (or at least that's what I'm calling it...think Pulcinella). It helps that the Artistic Director of The Singers, Matthew Culloton, is making me stay rigidly in the a cappella vein of things...even after I begged him to let me add a piano. This has forced me to be pretty creative with how I'm treating the solo parts and, to be honest, it was a good move on his part because I was all professing that I wanted to be challenged.

The text is from the Bible and, as you'd expect from a Handel aria, there isn't much:

Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; Shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy King cometh unto thee. He is the righteous Savior...And he shall speak peace unto the heathen.

I've decided to call the piece "Daughter Ecstatic" because a) it's seems to me that, at least on the poetic level, it's some sort of command from an angel or something to a girl/daughter (I'm assuming it's probably Mary, right?) and b) that's the feeling that I think Handel was after what with the brisk tempo and vocal runs: some sort of religious ecstasy.

Hopefully I'll get another chance to talk about how this piece is coming together a bit more because I've been having a ridiculously good time writing it. For some reason, I've chosen to compose in the practice rooms six floors up at the highest point of the music building (but that's just my weird need for ceremony in order to write).

Of the 10 versions I have of the aria Kathleen Battle's is probably my favorite (the ornaments at the end of the B section are break-your-heart beautiful). You can listen to the performance in question here but, for now, here she is with my girls Queen Latifah and Alicia Keys performing what I can only assume is the "Suscepit Israel" trio from the Bach Magnificat.