Sunday
April 29, 2012, 4:00 pm
Finney Chapel
Concert No. 326
Mille regretz (de Belge)
Margoton va t’a l’iau from Huit chansons françaises
Ubi caritas (Liber Usualis)
Josquin des Prez
(c. 1450–1521)
Francis Poulenc
(1899–1963)
Maurice Duruflé from Quatre Motets sur des Thèmes Grégoriens
Requiem, Op. 48
1. Introit and Kyrie
2. Offertory
3. Sanctus
4. Pie Jesu
5. Agnus Dei
6. Libera Me
7. In Paradisum
Meryl Dominguez, soprano Andrew Groble, baritone
Rachel Iba, solo violin
(1902–1986)
Gabriel Fauré
(1845–1924)
Kyle Aungst, Samantha Chestney, Zachary Evans,
Eleanor Freed, Rachel Iba, Thomas McShane, viola
Bud Stracker, Eric Tannenbaum, cello Rachel Dickstein, bass
Katie Malone, David Miller, Ryo Kimura, Michael Sederquist, horn
Kevin Layer, harp Wesley Hall, organ Wes Raiden Ruiz, timpani
Please silence all electronic devices and refrain from the use of video cameras unless prior arrangements have been made with the performers.
The use of flash cameras is prohibited. Thank you.

Program Notes
I designed my honors project to prepare me for graduate study in choral conducting. This performance is the culmination of my project, for which I have created and directed a choir. The Oberlin Experimental College Choir is comprised of singers selected by audition from the college, conservatory, and community. We rehearse twice each week to breathe life into French choral music. The program opens with a taste of unaccompanied pieces by Josquin, Poulenc, and Duruflé. The featured work is Fauré’s tender and hopeful Requiem in D Minor, for choir, soloists, orchestra, organ, and harp. I hope you enjoy the music.
Fauré wrote his Requiem between 1886 and 1888 for one of Paris’ largest churches,
La Madeleine. The original instrumentation was modest for burial services. It was performed at La Madeleine for Fauré’s funeral service in 1924. Today’s performance uses John Rutter’s 1984 edition, which attempts to present the Requiem in a form “as close as possible to Fauré’s known intentions.”
Fauré illustrates death with tenderness and hope. His is the first Requiem to begin and end with the word “requiem” (rest), underscoring the theme of eternal rest. The journalist Louis Aguettant quoted Fauré in July of 1902: “It has been said that my
Requiem does not express the terror of death–someone called it a lullaby of death. But that is how I sense death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness in the hereafter, rather than a mournful passing.” Indeed, this Requiem seems to offer the intimate reflections of emotions of family and friends at an actual burial service.
A particularly tender moment comes at the end of the “Offertory” in a radiant rising and falling vocalise, as if sighing on the word “Amen.” Jean-Michel Nectoux, a Fauré scholar, writes that this passage “has a radiance, a poignancy, and a serenity worthy of
Josquin at his best.”
Josquin des Prez was a legend in the 15 th and 16 th centuries. His artistic genius made him the first celebrity composer, and the first to build a reputation based on publication.
Josquin’s seventy-one years of life saw a tremendous evolution in music composition away from the use of strict formal rules ( formes fixes ) toward a heightened form of rhetorical expression, with greater emphasis on expressing the meaning and emotion of the text in order to sway the hearts of listeners. Humanists believed that composers could not learn how to express in this way, but must be born with this ability, reflecting the
Renaissance conception of innate genius.
Josquin’s career began in Aix-en-Provence in the mid-1470s. Like many composers, he crossed the Alps and arrived in Italy in 1484. Here he was inspired by his contemporaries, such as his Roman colleague and fellow singer in the Sistine Chapel choir, Marbrianus de Orto.
Josquin was also influenced by his French contemporaries, whose chanson style suppressed declamation and rhythmic repetition in order to indulge a more linear elegance. While Josquin observed the formes fixes , the French poetic and musical forms with a set order of verses and a refrain, in his earlier works, he later preferred to compose with pre-existing musical material and often drew on popular music of the time.
The chanson Mille regretz is not based on pre-existing material, but it maintains
Josquin’s style characteristic of paired imitation: a duet is answered by a complementary duet as it reaches cadence. We hear this on the text “et paine douloreuse.” Mille regretz is in E Phrygian. Josquin typically used ‘mi’ modes (today know as tonal center of E) for texts of lamentation and sorrow.
Josquin took a rhetorical approach to form; he composed his music to vivify the text.
Congruent with a humanist rhetorician’s ideals of clarity and power of expression,
Josquin closely shaped his music to fit the contour of the words. In Mille regretz accented syllables in the text are on longer note values. A musical rhetorical technique
Josquin uses is repetition and imitation for emphasis, which we hear at the end on “brief mes jours definer” (“my days will soon dwindle away”), which Josquin repeats three times in a contrapuntal texture. This phrase is especially poignant as a year after Mille regretz was published, Josquin died.

Compositional philosophies shifted during the 15 th and 16 th centuries from hierarchical stratification with a foundational tenor part toward a full integration of musical space in which all parts were functionally equal. Parts function as equals in
Mille regretz , but Josquin reminds us of compositional hierarchy of the past by elevating the tenor part in several ways. The tenor is the only part to not begin the piece and is the first part to sing the ending motif (“brief mes jours definer”). It is also the only voice to break the canon on the text “Qu’on me verra” by beginning on a note other than E.
Renaissance humanists tried to recreate what they imagined music of ancient Greece was like. Twentieth century French composers also looked to the past. Maurice Duruflé, an Impressionist in his use of nonfunctional harmony, drew on Gregorian chant for much of his music. The fashionable avant-garde experimentation in France did not interest
Duruflé. In this sense, he was a traditionalist; however, his use of traditional elements, such as Gregorian chant and modality, in a contemporary context, such as polyphonic choral settings, helped Duruflé’s music to become widely accepted.
From the age of 10 to 17, Duruflé sang at the Rouen Cathedral choir school. His organ playing and exposure to liturgical chant singing here provided a foundation that would last for the duration of his compositional career. Here, he also sang compositions by Fauré. Although Fauré’s fluid writing and modal essence influenced Duruflé, he later said he was more inspired by Ravel and Debussy.
Duruflé’s lessons with Charles Tournemire in the 1920s included composing an accompaniment of an antiphon followed by a free-form, expressive improvisation on the same Gregorian theme, which had a huge impact on his setting of “Ubi caritas.” He used chords for color instead of harmonic function. The frequently changing meters facilitate the contour of the chant melody. Ubi caritas is an antiphon sung at the Solemn evening
Mass during the Washing of the Feet ceremony on Holy Thursday. In his motet Duruflé stayed true to the original chant melody on the opening line, “Ubi cáritas et ámor, Déus ibi est,” and the third line, “Exsultémus, et in ípso jucundémur.”
Like Duruflé, Francis Poulenc ignored the post-war musical avant-garde: “The greatest danger is to want to be fashionable when what is fashionable does not suit you.”
Not particularly harmonically adventurous, Poulenc discovered Gregorian melodies and old French tunes at a time when his progressive contemporaries were experimenting with atonality and twelve-tone music.
Poulenc celebrated the end of World War II in 1945 with his Huit chansons françaises , eight a cappella settings of old French folk poetry. Their playful yet poignant nature was in harmony with the patriotic ethos of post-war France. In this set, Poulenc preserves the original melodies of popular Paris café tunes and melodies from old French music editions, setting each with a unique musical character.
The text setting in Margoton va t’a l’iau , the first piece in Huit chansons françaises , is particularly witty. During a discussion in rehearsal about this poem, a singer suggested that the sighing figure in the tenors and basses on the name “Margoton” under the melody could represent Margoton’s parents calling her home. The piece has eight sections, each with slight variations in harmony and rhythm.
Shortly before his death in 1963, Francis Poulenc said, “I think I’ve put the best and most genuine part of myself into my choral music.” Music critic Roger Nichols wrote of
Poulenc, “While in the field of French music, he disputes supremacy with Messiaen, in that of the mélodie he is the most distinguished master since the death of Fauré.”
The three more recent composers on this program interacted occasionally. Duruflé played organ for a 1953 recording of Fauré’s Requiem and Duruflé was the soloist for the 1938 premiere of Poulenc’s Concerto for organ . In 1962 Poulenc wrote to Duruflé,
“You are the only one to play according to my heart.”
~Lydia Lane Stout

Mille regretz
Mille regretz de vous abandoner
Et d’eslonger vostre fache amoureuse.
Jay si grand dueil et paine douloureuse,
Qu’on me verra brief mes jours definer.
Margoton va t’a l’iau
Margoton va t’a l’iau avec-que son cruchon.
La fontaine était creuse elle est tombée au fond.
Aïe aïe aïe aïe se dit Margoton.
Par là passèrent trois jeunes et beaux garçons.
Que don’rez-vous la belle qu’on vous tir’ du fond.
Tirez d’abord dit-elle après ça nous verrons.
Quand la bell’ fut tirée commence une chanson.
Ce n’est pas ça la bell’ que nous vous demandons.
C’est votre petit cœur savoir si nous l’aurons.
Mon petit cœur messir’s n’est point pour greluchons.
Ubi caritas
Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.
Congregavit nos in unum Christi amor
Exultemus, et in ipso jucundemur.
Timeamus, et amemus Deum vivum.
Et ex corde diligamus nos sincere.
Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.
Amen. des Prez
A thousand regrets for abandoning you
And for sending away your lovely face.
I feel such sorrow and painful grief
That it seems my days will soon dwindle away. trans. Lydia Lane Stout
Poulenc
Margoton goes to get water with
her jug.
The fountain was empty; she fell to the
bottom.
“Aye, aye, aye, aye!” says Margoton.
Three handsome young boys
passed by.
“What will you give us, beauty, if we draw you from the bottom?”
“First, pull,” she says, “After that,
we’ll see.”
When the beauty is drawn, she begins
a song.
“That is not what we ask of
the beauty.
It is your little heart we want to have.”
“My little heart, gentlemen, is certainly not for gigolos.” trans. Lydia Lane Stout
Duruflé
Where charity and love are, God is there.
Christ’s love has gathered us into one.
Let us rejoice and be pleased in Him.
Let us fear, and let us love the living God.
And may we love each other with a sincere heart.
Where charity and love are, God is there.
Amen. trans. Michael Martin

Requiem
Introit
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lix perpetua luceat eis.
Te decet hymnus, Deus, in Sion, et tibi reddetur votum in Jerusalem.
Exaudi orationem meam; ad te omnis car veniet.
Kyrie
Kyrie eleison.
Christe eleison.
Kyrie eleison.
Offertory
Domine Jesu Christ, Rex gloriae, libera animas defunctorum de peonis inferni, et de profundo lacu.
Libera eas de ore leonis, ne absorbeat tartarus, ne cadant in obscurum.
Hostias et preces tibi,
Domine, laudis offeriums.
Tu siscipe pro animabus illis, quarum hodie memoriam facimus.
Face as, Domine, de morte trnasire ad vitam, quam olim Abrahae promisisti, et semini ejus.
Sanctus
Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus
Dominus Deus Sabaoth.
Pleni sunt coeli et terra
Gloria tua.
Hosanna in excelsis.
Pie Jesu
Pie Jesu Domine, dona eis requiem, requiem sempiternam
Agnus Dei
Fauré
Grant them eternal rest, Lord, and may perpetual light shine on them.
To you praise is made, God, in Zion, and to you vows are made in Jerusalem.
Listen to my prayer; unto you all flesh shall come.
Lord, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.
Lord Jesus Christ, King of glory, free the souls of the dead from punishment in the inferno, and from the deep lake.
Deliver them from the lion’s mouth, lest the abyss swallow them up, lest they fall into darkness.
Sacrifices and prayers to you,
Lord, we offer with praise.
Receive them for the souls of those whom today we commemorate.
Make them, Lord, to pass from death to life, as once you promised to Abraham and his seed.
Holy, holy, holy
Lord God of Sabaoth.
Filled are the heavens and earth with your glory.
Hosanna in the highest.
Merciful Lord Jesus, grant them rest, rest everlasting.

Agnus Dei!
Qui tollis peccata mundi, dona eis requiem, requiem sempiternam.
Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine, cum sanctis tuis in aeternum, quia pius es.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Libera me
Libera me, Domine de morte aeterna, in die illa tremenda, quando coeli movendi sunt et terra, dum veneris judicare saeculum per ignem.
Tremens factus sum ego, et timea, dum disussio venerit, atque ventura ira.
Dies illa, dies irae, calamitatis et miseriae, dies magna et amara valde.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.
In Paradisum
In Paradisum deducant te Angeli; in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam
Jerusalem.
Chorus Angelorum te suscipiat, et cum Lazaro quondam pauper aeternam habeas requiem.
Lamb of God! who removes the sins of the world, grant them rest, rest everlasting.
May eternal light shine on them, Lord, with their saints everlasting, because you are merciful.
Rest eternal grant them, Lord, and may perpetual light shine on them.
Deliver me, Lord, from eternal death, on that dreadful day, when heavens and earth shall move, when you come to judge the world
through fire.
I am made to tremble, and to fear, at the destruction that shall come, and also at your coming wrath.
That day, day of wrath, calamity and misery, great and exceedingly bitter day.
Rest eternal grant them, Lord, and may perpetual light shine on them.
May the angels lead you into paradise; at your coming, may the martyrs receive you, and conduct you into the holy city,
Jerusalem.
May the chorus of angels receive you, and with Lazarus, once a pauper, eternally may you have rest. trans. Nick Jones

Lonnie Bass
Matthew Benenson
Daniel Bloch
Molly Brand
Talia Chicherio
Katie Cross
Annie Diamond
Ronni Getz
Andrew Groble
Jaye Harden
Corey Patrick Harkins
Zac Hoyer-Leitzel
Porter James
Chelsea Katz
Aaron Keeney
Jonathan Levin
Anthony McCain
Ike McCreery
Becca McKelvy
Liz Mehok
Christina Milbourne
Seth Nachimson
Nicole Nance
Nico Osborne,
Chad Putka
Emma Randell
Caroline Rogers
Emma Schneiderman
Ari Schwartz
Bekah Schweitzer
Katherine Szocik
Beth Tallman
Joseph Trumbo
Sarah Verghese
Maggie Vrana
Jo-Han Wang
Sophie Weisskoff
Joseph Williams
Eli Zaleznik