Program note: Kadosh / Sanctus /Holy (2019) for choir and violoncello by James Rolfe

When Ivars Taurins suggested I write a piece to fill one of the missing sections of Lotti’s Mass, I was stumped. I felt that the Mass texts had grown heavy and dusty over millennia of indoor use. Beyond that, I am more drawn to spirituality than to formal religion. Looking more closely, though, I was attracted to the Sanctus, which begins “Holy, holy, holy”. Its text is taken from the Kedusha, a central part of the Jewish Shabbat service, beginning “Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh”–a magical incantation, one often echoed in literature, notably in Allen Ginsberg’s poem Footnote to Howl. To me, spirituality is about seeing and praising the holiness of creation—in ourselves, in others, and in the world around us—as if that creation were new again, arousing feelings of awe, wonder, joy, gratitude, oneness. I have tried to make music which embodies this: the word kadosh is quietly savoured, caressed, and shared by all the singers in intimate close harmonies; the rest of the music flows from this word. The Hebrew text is sung first; then the Latin text is added next to it, and finally the English. Distinct languages and religions are placed next to each other, in harmony, united in praising the divine.

Program Notes: Winter Songs (2017, music by James Rolfe, words by Archibald Lampman (1861 – 1899) and Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892)

Winter Songs explores Christmas from the perspective of having grown up in an atheist home in suburban Ottawa in the 1960s. For me, Christmas was winter, new snow, skiing, presents, no school, playing all day indoors and out, eating, and singing. Some of my earliest and fondest musical memories are of Christmas carols, such as Silent Night and Away in a Manger, which can still bring tears to my eyes. Carols celebrate childhood, as well as rebirth, hope, renewal, and especially peace. They express our profound collective yearning to live in peace and harmony with ourselves and our fellow creatures. These themes connect to pre-Christian celebrations of winter solstice and the new year which have since become associated with the Christmas season—themes which I aim to evoke in this work.

This ten-minute work includes a brass band of 20 brass instruments (a mix of trumpets, cornets, horns, euphoniums, trombones, and tubas) and two percussionists, as well as a large mixed choir. The words consist of two poems (see texts below) by Ottawa poet Archibald Lampman (1861-1899) and one by American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892). The Lampman poems speak eloquently to the wonder, peace, and beauty of winter in Ottawa, while Whitman invokes the bursting life force that lies latent beneath ice and snow.

Winter Songs was commissioned by the Hannaford Street Silver Band with the assistance of the Ontario Arts Council. My thanks to them and to David Pell (Artistic Director, HSSB).

After Mist (Archibald Lampman)

Last night there was a mist. Pallid and chill
The yellow moon-blue clove the thickening sky,
And all night long a gradual wind crept by,
And froze the fog, and with minutest skill
Fringed it and forked it, adding bead to bead,
In spears, and feathery tufts, and delicate hems
Round windward trunks, and all the topmost stems,
And every bush, and every golden weed;
And now upon the meadows silvered through
And forests frosted to their farthest pines–
A last faint gleam upon the misty blue–
The magic of the morning falls and shines,
A creamy splendour on a dim white world,
Broidered with violet, crystalled and impearled.

Winter Uplands (Archibald Lampman)

The frost that stings like fire upon my cheek,
The loneliness of this forsaken ground,
The long white drift upon whose powdered peak
I sit in the great silence as one bound;
The rippled sheet of snow where the wind blew
Across the open fields for miles ahead;
The far-off city towered and roofed in blue
A tender line upon the western red;
The stars that singly, then in flocks appear,
Like jets of silver from the violet dome,
So wonderful, so many and so near,
And then the golden moon to light me home–
The crunching snowshoes and the stinging air,
And silence, frost, and beauty everywhere.

Unseen Buds (Walt Whitman)

Unseen buds, infinite, hidden well,
Under the snow and ice, under the darkness, in every square or cubic inch,
Germinal, exquisite, in delicate lace, microscopic, unborn,
Like babes in wombs, latent, folded, compact, sleeping;
Billions of billions, and trillions of trillions of them waiting,
(On earth and in the sea—the universe—the stars there in the heavens,)
Urging slowly, surely forward, forming endless,
And waiting ever more, forever more behind.

Premiered in 2016 by Da Capo Chamber Choir, conducted by Leonard Enns.

Open Road marks my fifth collaboration with the American poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892). I respond keenly to Whitman’s very personal vision, a fusion of the spiritual and the physical, and his strongly rhythmic language, echoing the cadences of the King James Bible. In Open Road, Whitman creates his own Adam, before the fall: life-embracing, open-hearted, on an epic journey, rejoicing in the earthly paradise he finds around him.

Whitman’s long lines and purple passages are a challenge to set and to sing. The soloists deliver the more personal, incantatory lines, with the choir responding, shading, interfering, echoing. The essential relationships in the poem—those between man and woman, between the individual and the collective, and between our dual masculine and feminine natures—are embodied by the male and female soloists, in combination with the ensemble. These forces, with their rich compositional possibilities, connect back to the oratorio tradition, one beloved in English Canada since Whitman’s days.

Open Road was commissioned by Soundstreams Canada (Lawrence Cherney, Artistic Director).

Song of the Open Road  by Walt Whitman, edited by James Rolfe

AFOOT and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune–I myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,
Strong and content, I travel the open road.

You air that serves me with breath to speak!
You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers!
You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides!
You flagg’d walks of the cities! you strong curbs at the edges!
You ferries! you planks and posts of wharves! you timber-lined sides! you distant ships!
You rows of houses! you window-pierc’d façades! you roofs!
You porches and entrances! you copings and iron guards!
You windows whose transparent shells might expose so much!

The earth expanding right hand and left hand,
The picture alive, every part in its best light,
I think whatever I shall meet on the road I shall like, and whoever beholds me shall like me;
I think whoever I see must be happy.

From this hour, freedom!
From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master, total and absolute,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

I inhale great draughts of space;
The east and the west are mine, and the north and the south are mine.
I am larger, better than I thought;
I did not know I held so much goodness.
All seems beautiful to me;
I can repeat over to men and women, You have done such good to me, I would do the same to you.

Whoever denies me, it shall not trouble me;
Whoever accepts me, he or she shall be blessed, and shall bless me.
Now if a thousand perfect men were to appear, it would not amaze me;
Now if a thousand beautiful forms of women appear’d, it would not astonish me.

Allons! after the GREAT COMPANIONS! and to belong to them!
Committers of crimes, committers of many beautiful virtues,
Enjoyers of calms of seas, and storms of seas,
Sailors of many a ship, walkers of many a mile of land,
Trusters of men and women, observers of cities, solitary toilers,
Pausers and contemplators of tufts, blossoms, shells of the shore,
Dancers at wedding-dances, kissers of brides, tender helpers of children, bearers of children,
Journeyers with their bearded and well-grain’d manhood,
Journeyers with their womanhood, ample, unsurpass’d, content,
Old age, flowing free with the delicious near-by freedom of death.

Allons! the road is before us!
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.

Mon enfant! I give you my hand!
I give you my love, more precious than money,
I give you myself, before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Program Note: Two Hopeful Songs (2010) music by James Rolfe; words by Dennis Lee

Two Hopeful Songs (2010) were commissioned by Toronto’s Viva Youth Singers (Carol Ratzlaff, Artistic Director), and written to poems by Dennis Lee.

Song lyrics

The Moon (from Garbage Delight, 1977)

I see the moon

And the moon sees me

And nobody sees

As secretly

Unless there’s a kid

In Kalamazoo,

Or Mexico,

Or Timbuktu,

Who looks in the sky

At the end of the day,
And she thinks of me

In a friendly way —

‘Cause we both lie still

And we watch the moon;

And we haven’t met yet,

But we might do, soon.

Dopey (from Yesno, 2007)

Squeaks from the sisyphus chorus.

Hums from the crunch.

Dopey & grumpy & doc, just

truckin’ along —

here come chorale;

mind to the

grindstone, ear to the plough.

Hi-

hoein along with a song:

What home but here? Whose grubby hands but ours?

Lullaby was commissioned and premiered in 2011 by Lady Cove Women’s Choir of St. John’s, Newfoundland (Kellie Walsh, Artistic Director), with the kind assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts.

If I had to choose desert island words, The Song of Solomon would make the list: it is evergreen, sexy, and tasty to sing. Garden takes the form of a brief dialogue between the genders. Men and women weave in and out, saucy and vivid, first wooing each other, then singing together. Garden was commissioned by Tafelmusik Choir (Ivars Taurins, artistic director) in celebration of its 30th anniversary in 2012. I dedicate this new work to a wonderful choir whose singing I have known and loved for many years.

Let us go early to the vineyards to see if the vine flourish,
if the blossoms have opened and the pomegranate bud forth. There will I give you my love.

Program note

Blind sets seven poems from Dennis Lee’s Un (2003).  This collection of short, terse poems presents a relentlessly dark and apocalyptic vision of our world, while still finding flickers of humanity and hope.  Armageddon is coupled with redemption, despair with exhiliration, pollution with purity.  Boiled-down texts burst with unorthodox phrases and neologisms.  Lee situates his words in the present, yet they also apply to the terrible war years in which the poet grew up (he was born August 31, 1939, on the very eve of World War 2).  They reflect the physical and emotional extremes of the time, something which is hard to imagine at our comfortable distance.  It’s in this way that I see this work commemorating the 60^th anniversary of the liberation of Holland from Nazi occupation, an event in which Canadian troops played a decisive role.  The ever-present word “blind” evokes both the unthinking madness of war and the physical damage to its victims.  It also suggests the phrase “God blind me”, which was supposed to have gained currency among World War I troops sickened by the sight of mass slaughter.  It’s intriguing to realize that the apocalypse always seems to be with us, past, present and future.  Is this reason for despair, or is it in fact reassuring?

Blind was commissioned with the assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts by Soundstreams (Lawrence Cherney, Artistic Director) for the Netherlands Chamber Choir.

Texts to Blind 

1 inlingo

In scraggy lingo lost,

high mean-

times petering, thickets of

lex & scrawn:

split for abysmal, hopalong

underword, head for no exit,

grapshrapnel yore spelunking.

fractal untongue.

2 if

If it walks like apocalypse.  If it

squawks like armageddon.

If it stalks the earth like anaphylactic parturition.

If the halo jams like septicemic laurels, if

species recuse recuse if mutti clearcut, if

earth remembers how & then for good forgets;

if it glows like neural plagues if it grins, if it

walks like apocalypse—

3 blind

Blind

light, blind

night, blind blinkers.

Blind of the lakelorn / of

lumpen /the scree.

In terminal ought and deny, indelible isprints.

Palping the scandalscript. Sniffing the

petrified fiat.

4 beloved

In silicon gridlock, in

quagmeat extremis – basta, on wings of success,

Still we snog through

sputum waste to

caramelize the Beloved,

riffle thru alley slop for a gob of awe

5 hope  

Hope, you illicit

imperative:  what

sump what gunge what

glimmer of sotto renewal?

What short shot

shimmer of green reprise?

6 noth

And are creatures of

nothing.

I noth you noth we

long have we nothed we

shall noth, staunch in true

nothing we

noth in extremis, noth until

habitat heartstead green galore & species

relinquish the terrene ghosthold;

crumble to alphadud; stutter to rumours of ing.

Program note: Four Anthems for Four Seasons. Music by James Rolfe, to texts from The Bible. Durations: Spring 3’30”; Summer 1’30”; Fall 2’15”; Winter 2’45.

Four Anthems for Four Seasons was commissioned by the Elora Festival, Noel Edison, artistic director, with the assistance of The Laidlaw Foundation. It was premiered on 3 August 2003, at St. Mary’s Church, Elora, Ontario.

Texts

SUMMER:  Proverbs 6:6-11

6 Go to the ant, you sluggard!

Consider her ways and be wise,

7 Which, having no captain,

Overseer or ruler,

8 Stores her provisions in the summer,

And gathers her food at harvest.

9 How long will you slumber, O sluggard?

When will you rise from your sleep?

10 Yet a little sleep, a little slumber,

A little folding of the hands to sleep–

11 So shall poverty come on you like a bandit,

And your need like an armed man.

FALL:  Deut 24:19-22

When you reap your harvest in your field, and forget a sheaf, you shall not go back

to fetch it; it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.

20 When you beat your olive trees, you shall not go over the boughs again; it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow.

21 When you gather the grapes of your vineyard, you shall not glean it afterward; it shall be for the stranger, for the fatherless, and for the widow.

22 And you shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt; therefore I command you to do this thing.

SPRING:  Song of Solomon, 2:10-13

10    My beloved spoke, and said to me:

“Rise up, my love, my fair one,

And come away.

11    Behold, the winter is past,

The rain is over and gone.

12    Flowers appear on earth;

The time of singing has come,

And the voice of the dove

Is heard in our land.

13    The fig tree puts forth her green figs,

And the vines with the tender grapes

Give forth their fragrance.

Rise up, my love, my fair one,

And come away!

WINTER:  Job 38:22, 29, 30

Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?

Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of the heaven, who hath

gendered it?

The waters are hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen.

And Psalm 147:16,17

16 He giveth snow like wool:  he scattereth the hoarfrost like ashes.

17 He casteth forth his ice like morsels: who can stand before his cold?

There is perhaps no part of the Bible which is more pessimistic and less “religious” than Ecclesiastes, a chapter whose very inclusion in the Bible was hotly debated. Yet its pessimism rings true, and its lyrical strains about the endless rounds of existence can be as comforting as they are bitter. The assertion that “there is nothing new under the sun” is also comfortingly ironic for a 21st-century composer who was schooled as a proper 20th- century avant-gardist.