A Commissioning Conundrum

Well, that title is a bit misleading. I actually have quite a bit of information about how this whole process works. One big source of information has been from the experiences I’ve had with my own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale. (“My own” in the sense that I belong to it, not in the sense that I direct it.) In general terms, there can be several possible reasons for asking a composer for a piece of Music. A specific choir may want to work with a certain composer or arranger for something that fits with a theme or concert. Usually the piece comes with what are called “premier rights,” in which the commissioning group gets first crack at performance and then has its name permanently attached to the work when it’s published for general use. This has been the

case for all the music that my Chorale has commissioned, with the exception of an autumn-themed medley we first performed in 2001 which does not seem to have ever been published.

There can also be an individual who does the commissioning. We had a concert several years ago in which two of our own members had commissioned pieces. I hope that they were happy with the end results; having sung both pieces myself I can say that I enjoyed them thoroughly and also found their origin stories to be fascinating. (If you’d like to read an article about those particular commissions, here’s the link to what I wrote at the time: “How Does This Whole Commissioning Process Work?”)

But in the case of Illuminare the commission was financed by a consortium, or group, of ten choirs. Our choir was also involved with a consortium in the spring of 2021 when we participated in commissioning the piece “Choirs Won’t Be Silenced” by a Denver-based composer, singer, teacher and conductor named Chris Manu. The piece referred to the lockdowns and shutdowns that had occurred over the past year because of the COVID pandemic and how choirs had “found a way” to get through it. What a positive experience that was! Manu came to one of our dress rehearsals and conducted the piece himself at our two concerts. It was great.

With that experience in mind, it’s fair to say that a commission consortium is a classic case of a win-win situation. For the composer, he/she can offer a way for groups to share the financial cost of a commission and is also assured of a certain number of performances right off the bat. For the participating choirs, the costs are lowered without any diminution of quality. Indeed, for Illuminare, a 24-minute piece, the cost-sharing aspects surely made the commission as a whole possible, as it would have been difficult for any one choir to undertake the financial burden of such a long work. All of the commissioning choirs get to participate in the excitement of a performance premiere and (possibly) the participation of the composer. My choir has invited Ms. Hagenberg to be with us for at least one rehearsal and for the performance itself. This type of participation by the composer can be a little nerve-wracking–after all, you want to show off a little!–but in the end also very gratifying. (I’m writing this material in January 2022; our performance will be in March. I’ll probably come back to this post after the concert and update it.)

In my ongoing quest to find out origin stories I contacted all ten directors/conductors of the consortium choirs, asking how their groups had gotten involved with this project. The gracious replies I’ve received were delightful; I’m sorry that I can’t quote all of them in full. What has been clear from these responses is the importance, and the mystery, of human relationships. I’ve felt as I read the snippets of information I received about Illuminare as if I were getting mosaic tiles that I could fit together into some type of coherent whole.

Let me start out with my own choir, as it illustrates the web of relationships that can lead to concrete results. Our conductor, Brian Leatherman, had a friend in Florida who had worked with Ms. Hagenberg in connection with his own choir. He suggested that perhaps our Chorale would like to commission a piece from her. Brian followed up on this suggestion; as he says, “When I did, Elaine brought up the consortium, which I JUMPED AT!” So we were in.

Very typical comments from others in the consortium: “I had talked with Elaine . . .” “Elaine contacted us . . .” “We had worked with Elaine in the past . . .” The American Choral Directors Association was mentioned, as well as workshops with individual choirs. In other words, the composer wasn’t someone scribbling away in a garret all day, who then took the finished manuscripts and threw them out the window in the hope that someone would see them. I’m reminded of something John Rutter said in a video about his composition process: that he writes mainly commissioned pieces, as he sees no point in writing something that’s just going to sit in a drawer and never be performed.

But the question still remained: whose idea was this whole thing anyway? As I read further in the information I received it became clear that the impetus had come from the composer herself, who had been thinking for some time that she’d like to create a longer, multi-movement choral work. There was an “invitation letter” sent to some of the directors who ended up participating, probably to those who had worked directly with Ms. Hagenberg in the past. Here are some quotations from that letter, shared with me by one participant:

This work will be narrative in nature, exploring themes of distress and turmoil transforming to hope and peace. . . . Texts will be sacred Latin with possible English texts as well. . . . I’m eager and inspired to use lesser known hymn texts from centuries ago. These powerful texts are rich and descriptive–steeped in beauty and offering hope. Then my aim is to create an inspirational work relevant to our generation and current culture.

The above leads to a further question with a many-branched answer: How do text and music, especially sacred music, intertwine? There are so many ways that this combination can happen. Bach, Mozart or Verdi, for instance, sitting down to write a Roman Catholic Mass, had the texts already to hand. (Bach’s B Minor Mass is indeed Roman Catholic even though he himself was a Protestant. There’s a fascinating story behind that composition which I can’t get into now.) On the one hand those composers were relieved of the responsibility of finding texts; on the other hand they were limited by them. One very positive aspect of writing this type of music set to predetermined texts would have been that the composer had a built-in performance venue, especially if he were writing as an employee of a specific church. He might also get to direct his own composition using the church choir. All very cozy!

The situation is very different today, of course, with most composers choosing their own texts, having them written specifically for them, or writing the texts themselves. Ms. Hagenberg fits squarely within that first category, and she has obviously read widely in the “lesser known hymn texts” mentioned in her words above in order to come up with the selections that she used. And note especially her words “narrative in nature”—the texts cover an arc, moving from light to dark and back out to light.

Ms. Hagenberg isn’t a newcomer to composition; her first piece, an arrangement of the Shaker hymn “I Will Be a Child of Peace,” came out in 2013. I find her explanation of how she got started with publishing her works to be quite intriguing; she says that she developed a real interest in composition and decided to start sharing her works with conductors and sending in her work to music publishers. I’m not sure exactly how the music publishing world works, but I know that the book publishing business is known for leaving unsolicited manuscripts in the infamous “slush pile,” there to languish. However, note that Ms. Hagenberg wasn’t just blindly sending in her work; she was also “sharing her works with conductors.” While she doesn’t go into detail about this whole process, I see some clues in her career. She graduated from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, and is now a composer-in-residence for the Des Moines Choral Society under the direction of Dr. James Rodde. She’s also sung with this choir for a number of years. Not surprisingly, the Des Moines Choral Society is a member of the consortium, and Dr. Rodde had this to say about his choir’s participation:

Producing a multi-movement work had been on Elaine’s mind for a few years… we had talked about it and how/when it might be able to happen, at first with the Des Moines Choral Society.  The consortium idea grew out of those discussions.

I’d theorize that Dr. Rodde was one of those conductors with whom Ms. Hagenberg shared her early work. Not only is he the DMCS director; he also holds an endowed chair and is in charge of choral activities at Iowa State University. It would make sense that he’d have had some practical suggestions about breaking into the choral music world along with some personal connections of his own. And he must have been eager to nurture her talent, since it’s hard to imagine Hagenberg’s becoming composer-in-residence of the Des Moines choir without his own enthusiastic support.

Now she’s also composer-in-residence for Perform International’s United in Song, a big music festival being held in Talinn, Estonia, in the summer of 2022, with the European premiere of Illuminare taking place during that event. And guess what? Not only is the great state of Iowa represented with Ms. Hagenberg’s presence, but also the equally-great state of Kansas with Dr. Ryan Beeken, director of choral activities at Wichita State University. The American Midwest is alive and well in the arena of international culture!

One more point and then I’ll turn to the texts themselves: the question of artistic freedom. A question I asked all of the consortium members was, “were there any guidelines given to Ms. Hagenberg about the music itself?” And the answer without exception was that she was given complete artistic freedom. The only musical discussion turned on length, around 20-25 minutes, and the use of a chamber orchestra instead of a full symphonic one so that more groups could participate.

And with that I’ll now turn to the texts themselves. About time, you may think.

Suggestion for further reading/listening:

“How Iowa’s Elaine Hagenberg Became a Noted Composer”–Iowa Public Radio interview

“I Will Be a Child of Peace” being performed in an SSA arrangement, clearly in the time of COVID—a lovely version that’s in no way handicapped by masks and distancing. It ends a little abruptly for some reason, but the performance itself is great:

Part One–“Splendor”

Splendor paternae gloriae,	Splendor of the Father’s glory,
de luce lucem proferens,	From light, light is brought forth.
lux lucis et fons luminis,	light of light and fountain of light,
diem dies illuminans.	Day, all days, illuminates.

St. Ambrose, 340-397
literal trans. by Debi Simons

Here’s a good smoothed-out translation:

Radiance of the Father’s glory
Bringing forth light out of light,
Light of light and source of all light,
Daylight, illuminating days.¹

In this and the following sections you may assume that I’m giving my own viewpoint about the meaning and position of the texts. Any comments from the composer will be identified as such.

So let’s start where the work starts: light. Note the wording in both translations above: light is “brought forth” from the Father. The author is echoing the very beginning of the Bible, when we’re told that the first specific act of creation by God was that of light:

In the beginning, God created everything: the heavens above and the earth below. Here’s what happened: At first the earth lacked shape and was totally empty, and a dark fog draped over the deep while God’s spirit-wind hovered over the surface of the empty waters. Then there was the voice of God. God: Let there be light. And light flashed into being.²

It almost seems from the biblical wording as if God first created the universe as a formless mass and then set to work shaping and filling it as he saw fit. There have been theological debates over the centuries as to whether or not God would have created something that wasn’t perfect to begin with; hard to know and probably beside the point here.

What is very much to the point is that the author Ambrose uses the image of light several ways in his hymn (of which Hagenberg uses only the first stanza). These initial lines use the image of light to mean “glory” or “splendor.” The Christian New Testament echoes this idea many times; here’s one example: “God is light, and in him is no darkness at all.”³ Ambrose, however, is almost certainly echoing Psalm 36:9: “For with thee is the fountain of life: in thy light shall we see light.”⁴

You’ll note that there are several slightly-different Latin words that are translated “light” in English; these various Latin forms reflect the complicated nature of that language. I think for once I’ll restrain the etymological wonkery I sometimes indulge in and leave it at that. With one exception (of course): Note that there’s a difference between the word “light,” which is being used as a noun, and the word “illuminates,” which is a verb. Light exists in order to give light; does that make sense?

I do want to touch briefly on the historical figure of St. Ambrose, an early Bishop of Milan in the Roman Catholic Church who’s given credit for these words. He’s known primarily in church history as the person who played a big role in the conversion to Christianity of St. Augustine and also for his various tussles with various pagan and heretical elements batting around both in the early RC church and the late Roman Empire. The Emperor Constantine had converted to Christianity himself in the early years of Ambrose’s life, but the transition was by no means smooth. For my purposes here, though, I’ll point out that he moved that early church to a greater use of music in worship services, especially of congregational hymn singing:

Indeed, St. Ambrose was a hymnist.  And why not?  Who better to supply the people of Milan with hymns than their bishop?  Especially when we consider that they didn’t really have any Latin hymns before St. Ambrose.

What? No hymns?

It seems that congregational singing — i.e., everyone singing a hymn together — was an innovation in the West on the part of St. Ambrose.⁵

And just to show that history is connected with real people, here’s a mosaic image I ran across of the good bishop, cribbed from Wikipedia, that’s supposed to be/could be a contemporary likeness. I just couldn’t resist those ears!

¹“St. Ambrose and Hymnody”

²Genesis 1:1-3 from The Voice Bible Copyright © 2012 Thomas Nelson, Inc. The Voice translation © 2012 Ecclesia Bible Society All rights reserved.

³I John 1:5b King James Version, public domain.

⁴King James Version.

⁵“St. Ambrose and Hymnody”

Part Two: “Caritas”

Caritas abundat in omnia,	Love abounds in all,
de imis excellentissima	from the deepest underworld exalted and excelling
super sidera,	over every constellation,
atque amantissima in omnia,	and most loving toward all,
quia summo regi	because to the highest King
osculum pacis dedit.	The kiss of peace she gives.

Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179)
literal trans. by Debi Simons

I had been vaguely aware that there was someone from the Middle Ages named Hildegard who was kind of a big deal, but I had no idea of her real accomplishments and prominence until I started researching her for this material. Here’s a bare list, culled from Wikipedia:

a German Benedictine abbess and polymath
a writer, composer, philosopher, mystic, visionary
a medical writer and practitioner during the High Middle Ages
one of the best-known composers of sacred monophony
considered by many in Europe to be the founder of scientific natural history in Germany
author of the first known morality play

Whew! When did this woman ever sleep? I got so fascinated that I even rented and watched an hour-long documentary about her. There are scholars who’ve dedicated their careers to studying her works, musicians who sing her songs, and even those who try to practice her medicine. The well-known neurologist Oliver Sacks included a whole chapter in his book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat about Hildegard’s visions, classifying them as “migrainous” in nature. Sacks makes the interesting point that, while Hildegard’s migraines were undoubtedly physical in nature, to her “privileged consciousness” they were rapturous and mystical. In other words, she saw her physical infirmity’s manifestations as spiritual gifts. What if someone had been able to convince her that her visions were rooted in migraines? I’m going to say that she’d have been very interested in the diagnosis, since she was involved in medicine, but that in the end she’d have said, “I’m not going to worry about my beatific visions’ source—and neither should you!” (Nothin’ like putting words into the mouth of someone who’s been dead for almost a thousand years, I always say!)

Well, perhaps I’d better get to the text, starting with a detailed look at the initial word: “caritas,” or, as we’d tend to translate it, “charity.” It’s too bad that the term has become so watered down from its original meaning. Nowadays we conflate “charity” with “philanthropy” or with “tolerance.” But the original meaning, from the Latin “carus,” or “dear,” was something much stronger and is much better translated as “love.” Except . . . that word has gotten pretty weakened too. We “love” ice cream” and “love” music. So I guess we’ll have to dig a little deeper here, and what better place to start than with the Bible?

Hildegard would have been very familiar with I Corinthians 13, the so-called “love chapter” in the Christian New Testament, probably reading it in Latin. (Who knows, though–in addition to her other accomplishments maybe she also became proficient in the original Greek of the Christian New Testament.) Verse 3 specifically rejects the idea of “charity” meaning “charitable works”—” And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.”¹ If you think about it, there could be some very unloving motivations behind even such extravagant acts: the desire for men’s praise being the most likely, or even the desire to earn God’s favor and forgiveness.

I’m sure that Hildegard was familiar with the Greek word “agape,” or ἀγάπη, which is the word for love that’s used here and elsewhere in the New Testament to denote pure godly love. She wouldn’t have had access to C. S. Lewis’s great 1960 book The Four Loves, but I do—so here’s a helpful quotation from there in his chapter on “charity”:

We begin at the real beginning, with love as the Divine energy. This primal love is Gift-love. In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.²

Another helpful word to use for this exalted type of love is “lovingkindness,” from the Hebrew word “חֶסֶד” or “ḥesed.” This word was actually invented by Miles Coverdale, an early translator of the Bible into English; he couldn’t come up with an already-existing word that he felt was appropriate. A typical psalm says of God, “Because thy lovingkindness is better than life, my lips shall praise thee.”³ In the end, this type of love is freely given, without thought of repayment or reward.

Once we get at least a glimmer of what Hildegarde means by “caritas,” the rest of her lines start to come together. This type of love fills the universe, from the depths upward over every constellation in heaven. (Note the Latin term “sidera”—it can mean “star” or “constellation” or even the heavenly sky as a whole.)

I’ve struggled a bit with the meaning of this whole idea that love itself (or herself) has given God (the highest King) the kiss of peace. I’ve parsed a number of translations and in the end have come down to the literal one above but am still left with the question, “How does Love/Charity (personified as a woman) somehow interact with God and give him a kiss?” But I think that I’m overthinking this. The Hebrew Bible uses these personified virtues a fair bit, with this from the Psalms being a good example:

Loving-kindness and truth have met together. Peace and what is right and good have kissed each other.⁴

Love is an attribute of God, not a separate entity, as is peace. To say that love gives to the King a kiss is simply to say that love is a part of God.

As I worked on this section I was reminded of an old Gospel song that I think Hildegard would have liked—here are just the first few lines:

The love of God is greater far
Than tongue or pen can ever tell.
It goes beyond the highest star
And reaches to the lowest hell.

Since Hildegard wrote music as well as words for her hymns, there are performances of them today. She’s writing in the “plainchant” tradition, in which there is only one melodic line with no harmony or accompaniment. Here’s a lovely contemporary performance:

And I have such fond memories of the singer George Beverly Shea, who performed for many years with the Billy Graham rallies, that I couldn’t resist including this performance, well into his later years but still with his trademark powerful voice, of the old hymn mentioned above:

¹King James Version, public domain.

²from The Four Loves, C. S. Lewis, accessed via the digital database FadedPage.

³Psalm 63:3 KJV.

⁴Psalm 85:10 New Living Translation, copyright © 1969, 2003 by Barbour Publishing, Inc.

Part Three–“Nox”

Kyrie eleison; Christe eleison.	Lord have mercy; Christ have mercy.
	from the Roman Catholic Mass
Nox et tenebrae et nubila,	Night and darkness and fog,
confusa mundi et turbida.	confused world and turmoil.
Caligo terrae scinditur,	Dark gloom tears the earth,
percussa solis spiculo.	beats and stabs the sun.
	Aurelius Prudentius Clemens 348-413 Trans. from Illuminare sheet music

This movement has the only use of text from the official Mass liturgy in the piece as a whole, and it’s a plea for mercy from both the Father and the Son. (It’s also, unlike any other part of the Mass, in Greek instead of Latin; no one is quite sure why.) Its use sets up an ominous tone heading into the description of the world as being in a state of darkness and chaos.

Hagenberg has done something very interesting with this movement’s main text: she has basically repurposed/retranslated wording from a set of hymns by the ancient Roman Christian poet Clemens. The lines used here come from the beginnings of the first two stanzas of a “morning hymn,” in which the night’s darkness and gloom are being driven away by the rising of the sun. While the beginning lines do indeed portray the night that has been, then daylight breaks. Here are the original two stanzas from the most common translation, a rather jingly one by the Victorian-era translator R. Martin Pope:

Ye clouds and darkness, hosts of night
That breed confusion and affright,
Begone! o’erhead the dawn shines clear,
The light breaks in and Christ is here.

Earth’s gloom flees broken and dispersed,
By the sun’s piercing shafts coerced:
The daystar’s eyes rain influence bright
And colours glimmer back to sight.

I wonder (and this is entirely my own conjecture) if perhaps that first couple of lines so impressed themselves into the composer’s mind that she wanted to use them for this middle section of the word as a whole but understood that only those lines actually fit into the idea of night and confusion. She wasn’t ready yet to move on to the idea of light dispelling the darkness and so she played with the meaning of those other lines. By far the greater part of this section is taken up with those first two lines, with the “caligo terrae” lines emerging only on page 8 of a 10-page movement. They’re also broken up and intermingled with the initial ones. Once you realize what has been done to Clemens’ poem you can appreciate how creatively the lines have been used.

The Latin words themselves are quite striking. “Nox” has a range of meanings both literal and metaphorical: night, darkness, a dream, confusion, ignorance and death. “Tenebrae” focuses specifically on darkness and shadow itself. And “nubila” is associated specifically with clouds. The Roman author wants to give a range of descriptive words to show the negative aspects of night. He then moves on to more psychological aspects of how the night affects our mental state: “confusion” and “turmoil.” I’m particularly taken with the word “turbid,” which I had always associated with muddy water caused by the stirring of up of solids from the bottom of a pond or lake. I guess you could say that “turmoil” causes turbidity.

And look at “scinditur”—such a fascinating word! The Latin is derived from the ancient Greek σχίζω (skhízō), so, as with “turbid,” you can see both the literal and the figurative meanings in it: “tears,” “splits,” but also “schizoid” and “schizophrenia”—terms that haven’t gone out of use even though we no longer describe a victim of schizophrenia someone with a “split personality.” “Percussa” and “spiculo” should also sound familiar to modern ears: “percussion” and “spike.” Again, in the original version of these lines it’s the sun that is striking and stabbing the darkness; in its context here the meaning is reversed. I’m sorry to say that “caligo” has nothing to do with the horrible, dark, twisted Roman Emperor Caligula, but if you want to make that connection by all means do so!

With this middle section of the five we’ve reached the lowest point and are ready to start climbing up into the light as we move into the last two sections.

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